The Liberal Creationists

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Nicholas Wade, the New York Times’ chief genetics reporter, has published 1,052 articles in the newspaper of record since 1983. For most of this century, Wade has been methodically waging war in the Science section of the NYT against the liberal creationist myth that race isn’t real. He has now written a definitive book on the existence of biological differences among races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which will be published on May 6.

In his new book, Wade writes:

Ever since the first modern humans dispersed from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa . . . the populations on each continent have evolved largely independently of one another as each adapted to its regional environment. . . . Because of these divisions in the human population, anyone interested in recent human evolution is almost inevitably studying human races, whether they wish to or not.

To Wade, race isn’t just skin deep. In fact, he finds the visual differences between races less significant than the behavioral. Evolution’s strategy for adapting to radically different environments is to “keep the human body much the same but change the social behavior.”

For example, in one study, the variant of the MAO-A gene most associated with aggression and delinquency was found in 5.2 percent of a sample of black males but only 0.1 percent of Caucasian males, which may explain a lot.

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The inability of a first-rate reporter like Wade, ensconced in the seeming bully pulpit of the New York Times, to make much of an impact makes for a fascinating case study of the zeitgeist’s power to cloud the minds of men.

I first documented what Wade was saying about race in the NYT at VDARE.com in 2003, then returned to the subject in 2006 when reviewing Wade’s book on prehistory, Before the Dawn. But I scratch out a living by reading very closely, so I notice things.

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A Troublesome Inheritance is based in sizable part on the work of a rogue’s gallery of crimethinkers such as Gregory Cochran on Jewish IQ, Richard Lynn on global IQ, Ron Unz on Chinese Social Darwinism, Gregory Clark on the evolution of the bourgeois virtues among the English, and Steven Pinker on the decline in violence. {snip}

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Extrapolating from Clark’s 2007 book A Farewell to Alms, which argued for the evolutionary benefits to Eurasians of being selected for fitness to survive in densely populated or otherwise difficult regions, Wade observes:

African populations have not gone through the same Malthusian wringer that shaped the behavior of the European and East Asian populations. Between 1200 and 1800, the English, adapting to the harsh pressures of an intense agrarian economy, became less violent, more literate and more willing to save for the future. In Africa, population pressure has long been much lower than in Europe and Asia . . .

European cultures tried to keep population below the famine level by inculcating the sexual restraint and romantic choosiness conducive to relatively late marriages, while East Asian cultures cultivated grinding work ethics. In most of tropical Africa, however, the infectious disease burden was so lethal that dense populations could not be achieved due to epidemics. So the population could not form cities, nor even fully farm the countryside. The big danger in Africa was not Malthusian overpopulation, but underpopulation, which may account for how sexualized their cultures are.

Not surprisingly, each continent’s culture seems to have bred people befitting its environment, and their traits live on in their descendants in modern America.

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[Editor’s Note: See here for our review of this important book.]