Most scientists will tell you that race has no biological basis—it is, in academic-speak, a “social construct.” But a new book by distinguished journalist Nicholas Wade challenges that assumption, concluding that race is real and human social behaviour is subject to natural selection just like everything else.
As the New York Review of Books put it, in its coverage of Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, there is now a “statistical sense” in which races are real. Scientists can tell, based on genetic variance, which continent a DNA sample comes from. That might not sound revolutionary to you, but it’s only recently that we’ve had the computer processing power to do it.
Wade doesn’t shy away from the disquieting implications of his theories: our genes, he says, could explain why some countries are wealthy while others languish in penury. In fact, the more we discover about ourselves from genomics, the more it becomes apparent that science and ideology are on a collision course.
Why? Because it’s totally unacceptable to say in public these days that different races might have different behavioural characteristics, and that those characteristics might be genetically determined… even though that’s the way the science seems to be pointing.
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