New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade has written a new book about race. It’s called A Troublesome Inheritance, and it will generate lots of news and discussion. Reviews are stories, and the ones that take on this book are likely to have a big impact on the public discourse.
The Wall Street Journal made a controversial choice in assigning a review to political scientist Charles Murray. He is best known as co-author of the book The Bell Curve, which came out in the mid-1990s, arguing for the existence of IQ differences between so-called races. The late Stephen Jay Gould analyzed it in depth and wrote in detail about its scientific flaws.
That back story might not be clear to younger readers, and it matters. The fact that Charles Murray praised Wade's book says something – a positive review from him is quite a different thing from a positive review by an anthropologist or a geneticist or a journalist.
This post is not a comment on the book. I'll stick with the review and the judgment of the WSJ editors to run it. The review itself isn’t very informative. To call it effusive would be an understatement. Murray more or less compares the concepts put forward in Wade’s book to the Copernican revolution.
Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them…
But what is this profoundly important and new concept that will make the book historic? It seems to have something to do with the notion that people can be divided into races on the bases of our genes.
Human beings have surely been categorizing one another for millennia and scientists have been involved at least since the 1700s, when Carl Linnaeus divided humanity into four groups, roughly corresponding to continents of origin – America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He ascribed to each all kinds of character traits, giving the most flattering description to his own group.
It was a creationist picture – what else could it be? In the early 19th century people debated whether God created these four races separately or whether they all descended from Adam and Eve. Darwin showed the answer was neither of the above but it could be argued that the Adam-and-Eve picture was more on the right track.
As we learned to glean information from our DNA in the 20th century, science moved further from the old Linnaean view of race. We learned that we all came from Africa, and that we diverged recently – not as recently as the Biblical creationists would say, but still, a short time on an evolutionary scale.
Murray makes much of the fact that people continued to evolve after we started to spread around the globe in the last 60,000 years. Some genetic variants cluster in people whose ancestors came from different parts of the world. But we knew that. People of European extraction are more likely to make the enzymes needed to digest milk. None of this seems revolutionary.
If there is indeed anything revolutionary in the book, Murray has failed to communicate what it is.
[…] but also never outright criticizes Murray’s writings. It is also interesting to note that like Pinker, Murray in his reviews identifies himself and Wade as part of a scientific revoluti… comparable to the Copernican […]