It bruises a host of academic shibboleths

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. In the preface to the paperback edition, Wade makes a fairly forceful argument against his opponents who cast their criticisms in terms of ideology.

A book should speak for itself. But because A Troublesome Inheritance has provoked an unusual deluge of assaults since its publication in May 2014, it may help readers who wonder what all the commotion is about to restate the book's aim and address some of the criticisms.

The occasion for the book is the voluminous new information about recent human evolution that is emerging from the genome. An ever more detailed portrait is developing of the differentiation of the modern human population since it dispersed from its ancestral Africa homeland some 50,000 years ago. This would be a purely scientific story, except that race, which is the results of this differentiation, is a subject of much political controversy.

History occurs within the framework of human evolution. The two subjects are always treated separately, as if human evolution had sputtered to a halt some decent interval before history began. But evolution cannot stop. There is no evidence that this convenient hiatus ever occurred. The new findings from the genome make ever clearer that evolution and history are intertwined, perhaps not intimately but enough to allow genetics at least some small role in the shaping of today's world.

The purpose of A Troublesome Inheritance is to explore this novel territory and, incidentally to show how evolutionary differences between human populations can be described without providing the slightest support for racism, the view that there is a hierarchy of races with some superior to others. Differences between populations undoubtedly exist but they are quite subtle. Far from being distinct, races differ merely in the quality known to geneticists as relative allele frequency. These differences exist because, once spread across the globe, the various human populations have necessarily taken different evolutionary paths.

This might seem an unexceptional view, but it bruises a host of academic shibboleths. Many people, including social scientists and much of the academic left, have long made what seems to me an unfortunate choice, that of basing their opposition to racism not on principle but on the claim that race is a social construct, not a biological reality. They are thus furiously opposed, on political grounds, to any discussion of the biological basis of race. Their ideals are honorable, their tactics less so.

By referring to anyone who explores the biological basis of race as a "scientific racist," and thus in essence demonizing them as racists, the academic left has managed to suppress almost all discussion of human differentiation. Most researchers shy away from the subject rather than risk being smeared with insinuations of racism and putting their careers and funding in jeopardy.

Critics of this book have in general ignored its central arguments and tried instead to discredit it indirectly. One tactic has been to imply that the book is racist by attributing to it assertions it does not make. In fact, far from being racist, the book is an attempt to explore how human variation can be understood from an explicitly non-racist perspective. With increasing floods of data from the genome, this is a task that has to be tackled sooner or later. How well I have succeeded in addressing it is for the reader to assess.

Another tactic has been to assert, without evidence, that the book is full of errors and misrepresentations. Such attacks, which have included a letter signed by a large number of academic geneticists, do not cite specific instances of either fault; the reader is expected to accept the critics' mere say-so as sufficient evidence. Such criticisms are politically motivated and, in my view, without merit. To the best of my belief, the book has no major errors and is as accurate as is possible for any description of a fast moving scientific field.