Genetic Science vs. Belief

[Geee]

National Review:

‘New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.

 

That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous.

 

For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather than Darwinian natural selection.

 

This has become dogma among certain social scientists. The American Anthropological Association states that race “is a recent human invention” and “is about culture, not biology.” The American Sociological Association calls race “a social construct” and decries “the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological.”

Unfortunately for these folks, the decoding of the human genome in 2003 has led to research showing significant genetic differences among people descended from Africans, East Asians, and Caucasians.