A Troublesome Inheritance
 |
|
| Author | Nicholas Wade |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Human evolution |
| Published | 2014 |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | |
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is a 2014 book by Nicholas Wade, a retired science reporter for The New York Times. Wade argues that "human evolution has been recent, copious and regional" and that this has important implications for the social sciences. The book has been widely denounced by scientists.
Wade writes about racial differences in economic success between whites, blacks, Asians, and others and offers the argument that racial differences come from genetic differences amplified by culture. In the first part of the book, Wade provides an account of human genetics research. In the second part of his book, Wade proposes that regional differences in evolution of social behavior explain many differences among human societies.
The book is criticized by reviewers, who state that Wade goes beyond scientific consensus. Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr wrote in his review in the New York Review of Books that "Wade’s survey of human population genomics is lively and generally serviceable. It is not, however, without error. He exaggerates, for example, the percentage of the human genome that shows evidence of recent natural selection." Orr comments that in its second part, "the book resembles a heavily biological version of Francis Fukuyama’s claims about the effect of social institutions on the fates of states in his The Origins of Political Order (2011)."
Orr further comments that "Wade also thinks that 'evolutionary differences between societies on the various continents may underlie major and otherwise imperfectly explained turning points in history such as the rise of the West and the decline of the Islamic world and China.' Here, and especially in his treatment of why the industrial revolution flourished in England, his book leans heavily on Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms (2007)." Orr criticizes Wade for failing to provide sufficient evidence for his claims, though according to Orr, Wade concedes that evidence for his thesis is "nearly nonexistent."
The book has not been well received by much of the scientific community, including many of the scientists upon whose work the book was based. On 8 August 2014, The New York Times Book Review published an open letter signed by 144 faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology. The letter read:
...
Wikipedia