I wonder whether Nicholas Wade
comes home and says, "My book is a best-seller, and the Nazis love me.
Life is good.".
Of course that’s not an argument against the book. That’s just data about who likes the book
very much. Now let’s recap Wade's arguments (slightly modified from my last post).
- Modern scientific views about human variation are politically correct myths produced by Marxist anthropologists, who are stifling serious discussion of human variation.
- The human species really does come naturally divisible into a fairly small number of fairly discrete kinds of people, or “races”. Human groups are fundamentally products of biological history.
- These groups have genetic distinctions that cause personality distinctions. These include “genetic adaptations” of the Chinese to obedience, Jews to capitalism, and Africans to violence.
- Economic strata and nations are also fundamentally biological entities, with their own natural proclivities.
- Global geo-political history can be understood and explained by its significant genetic component.
In Wade’s own words, he is exploring “the possibility that human behavior has a genetic basis that varies from one race to another”; “trust has a genetic basis”; and “national disparities in wealth arise from differences in intelligence”. Wade’s scholarship is poor, his arguments are
spurious, his science is cherry-picked and misrepresented, he dismisses the real science, and the ideas he promotes are
racist fictions.
I
Perhaps
the most important discovery of early anthropology was that social inequality
was inherited, but not in the same way that natural features were. You pass on your complexion to your children
and you pass on your social status to your children, but you do so by very
different modes. The first would
eventually come to be called “genetics” and the second, “culture” – and their
relationship is that, although they are often correlated, the microevolutionary
processes of genetics and the historical processes of culture are
phenomenologically distinct.
The
birth pangs of this discovery occurred in the mid-19th century, in
the works of the near-contemporaries Arthur de Gobineau and Karl Marx. Marx, of course, recognized the fact that
human misery was the result of political economy and wrote an influential
critique of it. Gobineau’s work was
easier to understand, because he posited that civilization was the result of
biology. There were better and worser
peoples, and in the ten places he thought that civilization arose, it was
brought by the better peoples (“Aryans”), who eventually interbred with the
local yokels, thus bringing forth a decline of said civilization.
Gobineau’s
idiotic theory impressed few scholars, even in an age where civilization and
race had not yet been well problematized.
It was seen as a transparent attempt to rationalize the existence of the
hereditary aristocracy in an age when all manner of traditional class distinctions
were breaking down, and people of humble origins were becoming wealthy and
powerful, and republican institutions were supplanting monarchial ones. The early physical anthropologist (and
polygenist, pro-slavery physician) Josiah Nott had it translated into English
in 1856, but it wasn’t widely read, being mooted by the Civil War. A second English edition in the UK, during
World War I, did a bit better, until it too was mooted by politics, this time
by World War II.
You can get it online,
by the way, thanks to “The Christian Identity Forum”. (Whoever they are, the folks at the
Christian Apologetics and Research Ministries don’t want to have anything to do with
them, and identify the Christian Identity movement as “centered on a
racist/anti-Semitic and white supremacy”.)
In 1969, the right-wing plant geneticist Cyril Darlington published a genetic history of the human species , called The Evolution of Man and Society. The trick, of course, is that you know a little bit of the history, but you just get to make up the racial and class genetics. So ancient Greece gets a make-believe genetic treatment, in terms of Aryan invaders subjugating local peoples and admixing with them.
It was something created and maintained by a stratified society, a society built up by the working together of many peoples, Minoan merchants, Mycenean scribes, Egyptian masons and artists, Aegean sailors, Phoenician boat builders and also priests, each caste except the slaves preserving its own genetic independence, and hence its own separate traditions, while learning, some readily, some reluctantly, to speak the common Semitic language on which the society depended for its well-being. (p. 155)
Later,
non-Aryan
[i]nvaders from the northern Balkans burst into the Mediterranean
world. They penetrated Anatolia…. Later
under the name of Dorians they invaded the centre and south of Greece….. [T] he
same invaders attacked the Egyptians who threw them back. But they were able as Philistines to settle
in and give their name to Palestine; and to set up colonies in Crete, Libya,
Sicily, and Italy. These maritime
achievements, could not, however, have been the work of the inland Aryans who
knew nothing of the sea. Rather they
represent the fragments of Anatolian and Balkan peoples already subjugated by
Aryan invaders. (p. 155).
Each city arose from the fusion of
several racial stocks speaking their own dialects and worshipping their own
gods. (p. 157).
Obviously people moved around sometimes, but the idea that
they remained genetically stable, much less had particular aptitudes that
determined their place in a stable, rigid genetic caste system is at best
non-empirical, and at worst racist bullshit.
The Homeric society… was ruled by
kings who were advised by nobles (or men with ancestors) and applauded by
ordinary freemen. This limitation of
arbitrary government by custom was derived from the racial character and social
structure of the Aryan invader of Greece.
It distinguished them from most of the ancient peoples who however
provided the genetic elements…. (p. 163)
And
to cap it off, “The result of these developments was to make the Spartan aristocracy
a pure race.” To which Darlington
appended a clarifying footnote “We are
often told by popular writers that there are no examples of pure races of men.
We shall be noting many examples and observing the predictable
similarity in their history” (p. 165).
Darlington’s work had its predecessors, like Hans F. K. Gunther’s
Rassenkunde
Europas, which was translated by Nazi assholes in 1927 as
The Racial Elements of European History
and has been digitized by modern Nazi assholes and is available
here.
And Darlington’s work has its successors as well. In particular, a newish dopey genetic history of the human species, called
The 10,000 Year Explosion, by a physicist, Gregory Cochran, and an anthropologist, Henry Harpending. The theme is pretty much the same as Darlington’s: The authors know a bit of genetics, and they’re going make that about 10% of the story they want to tell, and creatively imagine the other 90%, but not take too much trouble to distinguish them for readers. Cochran and Harpending begin with the proposition that the human gene pools have been tweaked by things like malaria resistance and lactase persistence over the last 10,000 years, from which they conclude that many aspects of our gene pool have been tweaked as well over much shorter spans of time, for psychological traits, resulting in the major outlines of history, such as the agricultural revolution, scientific revolution, and industrial revolution.
There are differences between
The Evolution of Man and Society and
The 10,000 Year Revolution, to be sure. Darlington’s work was over 750 pages of small font, erudite, tightly-spaced bullshit, while The 10,000 Year Explosion is 288 pages of ignorant, widely-spaced bullshit. Where Darlington’s bullshit about the ancient Greeks ran to scores of pages of make-believe genetics, Cochran and Harpending dispense with them in just a couple of paragraphs, noting that the ancient Greeks had colonies and that their gene pools fought off malaria. Of rather more interest to them are the Etruscans, “a somewhat mysterious people who spoke a non-Indo-European language that we have not yet deciphered.” But undeterred by such agnotological issues, they explain that the “Etruscans added a healthy dose of Middle eastern, agriculture-shaped alleles into the Roman mix. We have reason to suspect that those alleles shaped attitudes as well as affecting metabolism and disease resistance” (p. 144).
Not surprisingly, also unconstrained by relevant data, Darlington blows a bigger bag of genetic gas about the Etruscans. According to Darlington, they had a “genetic particularism [which caused] a lack of political unity” and connected them with Hittite ancestors, thus demonstrating that “the genetic continuity overrides the cultural discontinuity” (p. 238).
And there are similarities too. Darlington is very interested in the Jews. He devotes two chapters to them, and “Jews” is the longest entry in his copious index. But although he is obviously a bit too creepily interested in them, he remarks only in passing that some of them have been smart, and at least stops short of geneticizing that. The first on board that ship was actually C. P. Snow – of “The Two Cultures”, according to a
New York Times article in 1969. Unsurprisingly, it generated a
bit of
correspondence.
And that’s really what
The 10,000 Year Explosion is really all about – asserting that the idosyncracies of the Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool, which most geneticists today attribute to genetic drift, is really due to natural selection for intelligence. In the same way that some populations are genetically shielded from the worst aspects of malaria, the Ashkenazi Jews are shielded from the worst aspects of stupidity. And although the Cochran-Harpending book is not cited in Nicholas Wade’s brand-new book,
A Troublesome Inheritance, their other work is, and his arguments are heavily derivative upon theirs.
II
Nicholas Wade is one of the premier science
journalists in America, and an avid promoter of molecular genetics,
particularly as applied to anthropological questions. But his professional idiosyncrasies are
well known; the Anthropology News did a story on him in 2007, and he told them,
“Anyone who’s interested in cultural anthropology should escape as quickly as
they can from their cultural anthropology department and go and learn some
genetics, which will be the foundation of cultural anthropology in the future.”
A discussion of his new book about
genetics and anthropology, then, should probably begin
with a recollection of his last book on the subject, Before the Dawn (2007).
It was
reviewed in the journal Science by
Rebecca Cann, who did not exactly gush.
As a graduate student, I was amazed by the number of books
popularizing human paleontology that ignored human genetics, and I often wished
that there were science writers energized to follow the new insights from
geneticists as closely and rapidly as others reported interpretations of
fragmentary fossils. Well, be careful what you wish for.
It was also reviewed in Nature,
where he was deemed to be “in step with a long march of social darwinists”. And
to gauge from the new book, he still is.
The
theme of A Troublesome Inheritance is
an unusual one for a science journalist, namely that the scientists themselves
are all wrong about the things that they are experts in, and it will take a
naïf like the author, unprejudiced by experience, judgment, or actual knowledge, to straighten them
out. If this sounds like a template for
a debate with a creationist, well, yes, I suppose it does. That is because the nature of the
intellectual terrain – the authoritative story of where we came from and who we
are – lies on the contested turf of human kinship, and everybody thinks they
own a piece of it.
Wade’s
ambition, then, is not to popularize the science, but to invalidate the
science. He explains that anthropologists, who have been studying human
variation for a while, and who think they have learned something about it, have
actually been blinded by their prejudices – politically-correct prejudices,
that is. And his message to them egghead
perfessers is that he believes the science of 250 years ago was better than
that of today: There are just a few
basic kinds of people, and economic stratification is just an expression of an
underlying genetic stratification.
Lest you think the author is an
exponent of racism or social Darwinism, he is quick to tell you that he
isn’t. He’s read a book or two on each
of those subjects. He doesn’t think he
is a racist because a racist believes that natural groups of people are
universally or transcendently rankable, whereas he only believes they are
rankable intellectually. And he doesn’t
think he is a social Darwinist because that was an ideologically-driven
“perversion of science” to be laid at the feet of Herbert Spencer, and he is quite
certain that he is not an ideologue. He
is simply exploring a few propositions, such as: “the possibility that human behavior
has a genetic basis that varies from one race to another”; “trust has a genetic
basis”; and “national disparities in wealth arise from differences in
intelligence”. Eventually he even comes
around to “the adaptation of the Jews to capitalism.” And lest you think that he is using the term
adaptation in the broad sense of “fit to the environment” he explains that he
only uses the term in the narrow sense of tweaking the gene pool - “a
genetically based evolutionary response to circumstances”.
The punch
line of the book, however, is not really about anthropology at all, but about
history. Towards the end of the book,
Wade finally confronts his bête-noire, the biologist Jared Diamond, whose 1997
best-seller, Guns, Germs, and Steel,
took a self-consciously anti-racist approach to the subject of human history,
and concluded that the answers to the big questions about how the modern social-political-economic world came to be as
it is lie in the domains of geology and ecology. Wade rejects this, because he believes the
answers lie in the domain of genetics. Actually, though, they’re both wrong, for the
answers to those questions lie in the domain of history.
Guns, Germs and Steel was admired by
biologists, but generally ignored by historians. Why?
Because it wasn’t a very modern approach to history. If history is reducible to nature (ecology
and geography in one case, genetics in the other), then history doesn’t really happen. You just wait long enough, and eventually it
merely unfolds. Why? Because the
explanations for things lie outside of the relations among the things
themselves, but lie instead in nature.
The historian William McNeill pointed that out in his review of Diamond
in the New York Review of Books, judging that book to be “a clever caricature
rather than a serious effort to understand what happened across the centuries
and millennia of world history.” And
finally, McNeill lowered the boom on Diamond’s politically correct, biologized
history: “I conclude that Diamond … has
never condescended to become seriously engaged with the repeated surprises of
world history, unfolding lifetime after lifetime and turning, every so often,
upon single, deliberate acts.” When
Diamond objected that his book was profound and scientific, McNeill reiterated,
arguing that historians have “more respect for natural history than Diamond has
for the conscious level of human history. He wants simple answers to processes
far more complex than he has patience to investigate.”
For the
most part, though, historians were dazzled by Diamond’s erudition, relieved
that he wasn’t a racist, impressed by the story he told, and they treated the
book politely and deferentially. And A Troublesome Inheritance is the racist chicken
that has come home to roost. Wade
explicitly opposes his book to Diamond’s, and attempts to explain the big
picture of human history not in terms of the shapes of the continents, but in
terms of the innate qualities of the people inhabiting the continents. History is not history, you see, it is genetics.
At the
heart of A Troublesome Inheritance is
a simple dissimulation. Wade repeatedly
asserts that his interlocutors are mixing their politics with their science,
but he isn’t, for he is just promoting value-neutral, ideology-free science. And yet the primary sources for Wade’s
discussion of the history of human society are Francis Fukuyama and Samuel
Huntington. One gets the impression that
either Wade is lying, or he wouldn’t be able to recognize ideology if looked
him dead in the eye and slapped him silly.
III
Before
advancing his thesis, Wade prepares the way, explaining that – unlike what
anthropologists have concluded – first, race is biologically real; second, the
course of human history is biology; and third, this is all ideologically
neutral.
The
problem, he believes, lies with the anthropologists, who have been
ideologically corrupted, sometimes by their Marxism, sometimes by their desire
to be politically correct, sometimes by their persecuted Jewish origins. There is no indication that Wade realizes it,
but this argument was originally put forward by a segregationist activist in
the early 1960s named Carleton Putnam.
It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now. Moreover, it was political then, and it’s
political now. In fact you can download
it from the friendly folks at the
Christian Identity Forum for free, or
buy a copy for just $12.95 from Nicholas Wade’s supporters at the American Renaissance.
But that raises the question: When Wade makes the argument that the topic is so political that anthropological
science has been ideologically corrupted by anthropological politics, how do we
know that Wade’s vision is not also political?
If you have already acknowledged that you are on political terrain, we
should have some evidence that your own science is less politicized, especially
when your views are so convergent with those of certain political extremists. And when you consider that the
most genetically knowledgeable reviewers of Wade’s work have
found remarkably little value in
his ideas about the subject, it does seem that Wade is rather
more politicized than
the anthropologists, not less.
But this
raises the odd question of just how a science journalist can position himself
so self-consciously against the science he reports on. Imagine a journalist writing a book claiming
that chemists are all wrong about chemistry.
Would such a lunatic even find a publisher? But anthropology is a special science, and he does find a
publisher. Why? Because, contrary to his own misbegotten
contention, it is indeed political; it’s politics all the way down. That doesn’t mean that there is no knowledge,
of course, only that we have to be extra careful in evaluating the diverse
kinds of data and conclusions, because there are more variables at work.
Wade
quickly notes that IQs differ geographically, and doesn’t question the
assumption that this is a precise measure of small differences in innate brain
power, but does reassure his readers that “a higher IQ score doesn’t make East
Asians morally superior to other races.”
But moral ranking isn’t the issue; intellectual ranking is at
issue. And if you believe, as Wade does,
that Africans have less of this innate brain power, on the average, than
Europeans do – which implies that a randomly chosen African is likely to be constitutionally
dumber than a randomly chosen European - well, that made you a racist in 1962,
and that makes you a racist now.
Wade
lays out his ideas about race in Chapter 5, as a rhetorical exercise in
selective and mis-reporting. His
centerpiece is a 2002 paper, published in Science
by a group led by Stanford geneticist Marcus Feldman, which used a computer
program called Structure to cluster populations of the world by their DNA
similarities. When they asked the
computer to cluster peoples of the world into two groups, the computer gave
them EurAfrica and Asia-Oceania-America.
When they asked the computer for three groups, the computer gave them
Europe, Africa, and Asia-Oceania-America.
When they asked the computer for four groups, it gave them Europe,
Africa, Asia-Oceania, and America. When
they asked it for five groups, it gave them essentially the continents. And when it asked the computer for six, it
gave them the continents and the Kalash people of Pakistan. (They asked the computer for many more clusters, but only published the results up to six.)
Wade
misreported these results as validating the five races in The New York Times back in 2002.
In an important edited volume from 2008 called Revisiting Race In a Genomic Age, Deborah Bolnick explained the
misinterpretation of the results from Structure, and the senior author of that
study, Marcus Feldman, also explained those results quite differently than Wade
does. In fact, I’ve heard Feldman say
that Wade has totally misrepresented his work and misquoted him. Why, then, does Wade persist in this genetic
misreporting? Perhaps for the same
reason he persists in his anthropological misreporting. In Chapter 6, Wade casually explains that
among “the Yanomamo of Venezuela and Brazil, aggressive men are valued as
defenders in the incessant warfare between villages, and those who have killed
in battle – the unokais – have on the
average 2.5 more children than men who
have not killed, according to the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon,” citing
Chagnon’s 1988 paper that indeed made that claim. And yet, although that claim has been
definitively shown to be bunk – that is to say, not robustly derivable from the
data – Wade continues to repeat it, most recently in The New York Times last year.
There is, again, a direct parallel to arguing with creationists here:
they have their story and they will stick to it, and reality just doesn’t matter to them. (And
just between you and me, I’d be very interested to find out what Napoleon
Chagnon thinks of this book!)
IV
“History is bunk” said Henry Ford,
and Wade is not too keen to worry about getting his history right, either. He presents the reader with Linnaeus’s 1735
classification of humans into species, rather than his 1758 classification of
humans into subspecies (which is more important, since that is the work with
which biological systematics officially begins). He also says that “Linnaeus did not perceive
a hierarchy of races,” although that is hard to reconcile with Linnaeus's terse
descriptions of Europeans, Asians, Americans, and Africans for either covering
(wears tight-fitting clothes, wears loose-fitting clothes, paints himself with
fine red lines, anoints himself with grease) or governance (law, custom,
opinion, caprice). Sounds pretty
hierarchical to me.
Moreover, says Wade, the 18th
century American craniologist Samuel George Morton “did not in fact believe …
that intelligence was correlated with brain size.” Nevertheless Morton does characterize “The
Caucasian Race” in Crania Americana
(1839) as follows: “The skull is large and oval…. This race is endowed for the facility
with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.” And for “The American Race,” Morton records, “The skull is small…. In
their mental character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in
acquiring knowledge….” Sure sounds like
he thought they were correlated.
Wade’s admiration for Morton seems
to be based in large part on his uncritical reading of a bizarre 2011
article that made some unfounded claims
against the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Wade actually quotes approvingly an
especially false statement from that paper, “Morton, in the hands of Stephen
Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific
misconduct.” But that statement is
doubly false: Morton’s work is not at all presented as a paradigmatic example
of misconduct, and indeed, even Gould
explicitly said it was unconscious bias, not scientific misconduct. The paper quoted by Wade had bogus citations
in support of that statement: a book of
mine that did not cite Morton at all on the subject of scientific misconduct,
and a book by C. Loring Brace that explicitly cited it as not scientific
misconduct. I’ll let Gould speak for himself here: “Yet through all this juggling, I detect no
sign of fraud or conscious manipulation.” [S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981: 69].
When Wade gets around to Darwin, he
makes some impressive misstatements as well.
Darwin of course wrote The Origin
of Species in 1859 and avoided the topic of people (which is probably why
the book is still readable today). But
Wade keeps on: “Humans were covered in
his second volume, The Descent of Man,
which appeared 12 years later.” It’s
hard to imagine The Descent of Man being
Darwin’s “second volume” of anything, since he published two books (On the Various Contrivances by which British
and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication) in between
them. And frankly, The Descent of Man was two
volumes by itself.
Wade’s treatment of social Darwinists
is surprisingly cursory, given that he had been accused of being one of them in
the pages of the leading science journal in the world. Historians today appreciate that only in
hindsight was social Darwinism monolithic and nameable, and it was
significantly different from eugenics, at very least because the social
Darwinists wanted less government interference, and the eugenicists wanted
more. The movements are united by the
fact that they both assumed that the (visible) social hierarchy was an
expression of an underlying (invisible) natural hierarchy; the “haves” were
simply constitutionally better suited to “having” than were the
“have-nots”. As will become clear, Wade
really does fall in with them.
Perhaps the most unhistorical
aspect of Wade’s racial theory, presented at the end of Chapter 4, is that he
seems to be oblivious to its origins and antecedents. Wade claims to speak on behalf of Darwinism
to legitimize his ideas, like many of the discarded ideologies he discusses
early in the book. But when he tells us
that there are three great races associated with the continents of the Old
World, and intermediate hybrid races at their zones of overlap, he is merely
repackaging the pre-Darwinian Biblical myth of Ham, Shem and Japheth, the sons
of Noah, who went forth, became fruitful, and multiplied. The
people Wade thinks are the least pure live precisely where the oldest fossil
representatives of our species are known – East Africa and West Asia. The idea that the human populations of Lagos,
Oslo, and Seoul are primordial and pure is wrong (and creationist); those are
simply the furthest, most extreme, and most different from one another.
On p. 58, Wade names his
adversaries for the first time: “Marxist academics”. On p. 68, he goes after Ashley Montagu,
attributing his anti-racist writings significantly to his Jewish origins. (And for what it’s worth, Montagu fit
nobody’s definition of a Marxist.) On p.
119, Wade tells us that Montagu’s book, Man’s
Most Dangerous Myth, relied heavily on Richard Lewontin’s 1972 genetic
work. Perhaps the edition Wade skimmed
indeed cited Lewontin’s work, but the first edition of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth was published in 1942, so I suspect that it
was based on other data and arguments. For
a book about the engagement of race and genetics, it’s kind of odd that Wade
seems to be oblivious to all work in the area prior to Lewontin’s. And for a book that takes race as its central
subject, it’s kind of odd that Wade doesn’t seem to be familiar with the source
of Montagu’s campaign against the word “race” – which was derived from We Europeans, the 1935 book by the
British biologist Julian Huxley and anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon. Neither of them was Jewish, and not much in
the way of Marxists, either.
V
It is when Wade ventures into
evolutionary waters that his scholarly weaknesses become most evident. His presentation of the evolutionary theory
is reductive and freshman-level; it is hard to find a book on evolution today
that fails to mention epigenetics, but this is one such book. But to acknowledge the plasticity or
adaptability of the human organism would be to undermine the theme of the
independent, unforgiving external world exacting its selective toll on the
human gene pool. Flexibility and
reactivity are not in Wade’s evolutionary arsenal – he constructs evolution as
gene pools adapting to given external circumstances. That is only a few decades out of date.
Similarly, he explains that “The
words adapt and adaptation are always used here in the biological sense of a
genetically based evolutionary response to circumstances” (p. 58). Sure,
except that that defines most adaptation (which really refers to the fit between
an organism and its surroundings, of which a small subset is actually genetic)
out of existence.
Evolutionary biology perhaps takes
its biggest beating when Wade breezily tells us about ants. “In the case of ants, evolution has generated
their many different kinds of society by keeping the ant body much the same and
altering principally the behavior of each society’s members. People too live in many different types of
society, and evolution seems to have constructed these with the same strategy –
keep the human body much the same but change the social behavior.” Of course he is comparing one species of
humans with over 20,000 species of ants – that is to say, an orchard of apples
with an orange. By the next page (66),
Wade actually appreciates the idiocy of the comparison, and concedes, “With
human societies, institutions are largely cultural and based on a much smaller
genetic component.”
Wade also places a lot of emphasis
on “in-groups” and “out-groups,” repeatedly asserting that we have an innate
desire to support the ins, and to distrust, despise, or harm the outs. Some data on domestic violence might
disabuse naive readers about the validity of such a facile generalization. So might some data on the flexibility of
group membership, not to mention the constructed nature of the groups
themselves. Here’s a glib thought
from p. 50: “...an inbuilt sense of morality evolved, one that gave people an
instinctive aversion to murder and other crimes, at least against members of
their own group.” If you think there’s
an instinctive aversion to “murder and other crimes,” you need to watch “The
Godfather” again. (Sure, that was fiction, but then so is A Troublesome Inheritance, although less honestly labeled.) If you try to weasel
through with the phrase “your own group” then you need to think about the formlessness,
situation-dependence, and segmentary nature of the “group” – What is Michael
Corleone’s group? The Corleone family, the New York mob, Sicilian-Americans,
urban immigrants, Americans, or Earthlings?
Group membership is actually quite flexible and, as we now say,
constructed. And there certainly doesn’t
appear to be any inborn aversion to lying, embezzling, insider trading,
fraud, graft, or usury – so on what
basis can we reliably assert anything inborn about other particular crimes?
On p. 49, we learn that “The urge
to punish deviants from social norms is a distinctive feature of human societies.” Except that societies don’t have urges, of
course. And the people who compose
societies can rationalize, or get away with, all kinds of things. It is not
merely that human social life involves rule-governed behavior; it is that rules
are also there to be bent and circumvented, so that people can be both obedient
and pragmatic simultaneously—which is why more thoughtful and knowledgeable
writers don’t go quite so easily from the punishment of deviants to the
invention of a simple genetic/mental module for it. Moreover, if you remember first-wave
sociobiology from the 1980s, one of the things the sociobiologists used to say
was that there could be no group selection in humans since it requires coercive
mechanisms in order to be a stable evolutionary strategy. Apparently those coercive mechanisms were there
after all, and those sociobiologists were all wet. (As an ironic aside, first-wave sociobiology
also cast itself consciously against anthropology, and Wade’s only blurb on the
jacket for this awful book comes from E. O. Wilson, himself.)
Perhaps the most appalling feature
of all is that Wade hasn’t even got the guts to own his thoughts, sprinkling
the prose with disclaimers like, “Given the vast power of culture to shape
human social behavior....” Or, “a
society’s achievements … are largely cultural in essence.” And, “culture is a mighty force, and people
are not slaves to innate propensities.” If the influence of culture has been so
mighty and vast, then it stands to reason that that is what you should be
reading books about; not this one. At
best, Wade’s labor has effectively been to fabricate a small tail to wag a
mighty big dog.
Wade’s neuroendocrinology is just
as bad. His representations of hormones
and their actions and regulation are what one would expect to see in Cosmopolitan: oxytocin is the hormone of
social trust: monoamine oxidase is an aggression gene. Wade clearly wants readers to believe that
their activities are set by natural selection, in spite of disclaimers
like “It is not yet by what specific
mechanism the oxytocin levels in people are controlled” (p. 53). And he has no reluctance to invoke science
fiction where there is no science: after explaining to readers that he thinks
African-Americans have a higher frequency of a violence gene, he mollifies them
with the thought that other violence genes (that he hasn’t invented yet) may be higher in whites. “It is therefore impossible,” he intones, to
say on genetic grounds that one race is genetically more prone to violence than
another.” But in the very next
paragraph, he clarifies, "that important
aspects of human social behavior are shaped by the genes and that these
behavior traits are likely to vary from one race to another”.
It does seem to me that the focus
on the ontology of race is a red herring in this book. Wade relies a lot more on other inaccurate
invocations of genetics that are even more radical, and more importantly,
political. He overstates the isolation
of prehistoric populations. More
importantly, what scholars think are changes in ways of life, Wade thinks are
changes in genes and brains that lead to changes in ways of life. Thus, “a
deep genetic change in social behavior underlay …. the transition from an agrarian
to a modern society.... Most likely a shift in social behavior was required, a
genetic change that reduced the level of aggressivity common in hunter-gatherer
groups.”
And for all his rhetorical interest
in races as natural categories, somehow the only group that merits their own
chapter are ... the Jews! The Jews seem to
be central to the book’s meta-narrative, as
one very sympathetic blogger on "White Identity, Interests, and Culture" explained: "I can’t
think of any prominent race denial figures who are not Jewish. The backbone of
the race denial movement was a specific radical Jewish subculture that had
become entirely within the mainstream of the American Jewish community by the
early twentieth century.... There is excellent evidence for their strong Jewish
identifications, their concern with specific Jewish issues such as
anti-Semitism, and for their hostility and sense of moral and intellectual
superiority toward the traditional people and culture of America. Jonathan
Marks is a contemporary example of this long and dishonorable tradition. The
rise of the left to elite status in American society, beginning with universities,
is key to understanding the race denial movement and the stifling political
correctness that is all around us today."
Why is Wade so interested in the
Jews, anyway? His staunchest defenders
sure are, too. But the nature of their
interest is highly anachronistic. (Actually
the Jews are of some legitimate scholarly interest today in what we might call “the anthropology
of genetics” – for example, in the recent excellent work of anthropologist
Nadia Abu el-Haj, and historian
Veronika Lipphardt.)
And finally, his view of the origin
of the industrial revolution in England involves mutations in the upper
economic classes for “nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience” and their
diffusion by gene flow into the lower classes in Late Medieval times. This
is a slightly new spin on a set of old prejudices, but hardly science, much
less modern or value-free science. Wade
doubles down on this a few pages later, too: “The burden of proof is surely
shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was
miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence
it had suggested to Darwin.”
Afraid not. The burden of proof still lies with the
disseminator of outmoded, racist ideologies masquerading as science. Wade simply believes he can construct his own
reality by selective reading, misrepresentation, and continuous
repetition. This is a golem of science
journalism, a powerful monster running amok under its own impetus, burdened by
neither responsibility nor wisdom.
We write books for a reason. So, given the abysmal quality of the scholarship, misrepresentation and dismissal of the relevant science, and the embrace by the most reprehensible elements in modern politics, what do you suppose was Nicholas Wade's motivation for writing A Troublesome Inheritance? Does he really believe his own lies, or is he merely pandering?
