Nicholas Wade (1)Rezensionen

As interesting as it was I had to work really hard to keep my attention on it.

I got a bit farther in this book than I got last time, but not much. It's odd, his writing is just not that good, somehow. But I have begun to thoroughly admire this old, well-educated Englishman who is so unafraid to follow the evidence where it leads.

It should be noted that he has written two books about science at its less than ideal and he does have a bit of an axe to grind. But he grinds it with facts and knowledge, not diatribes and threats. Hopefully he's got at least one more book in him.

I preferred [b:Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict|17942053|Big Gods How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict|Ara Norenzayan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1376877965s/17942053.jpg|25154244], but this was a worthy follow up listen (I have a long, slow commute.) I almost hesitate to say too much, but like "Big Gods," I feel this listen will not leave anyone with a stake in promoting or demoting religion "happy." But it was interesting food for thought.

I'd give this 4 stars for discussing a topic that is almost completely taboo in polite company, and for understandable reasons. I've giving 3 because of some obvious issues I found (toward bottom of this.)

Basically, there is one core argument, in two parts:

Part 1.) Genes are always under selective pressure --> genes built our bodies (well... oh, right, no caveatting) --> our brains are part of our bodies --> your brain was built by genes --> your brain has been under selective pressure, continuously.

Or, simply, 'your' brain (your ancestors' brains) were under non-stop selective pressure, the same as their immune systems, bone structures, metabolisms, skin color, and so forth.

Part 2.) Since we've been under *continuous* selective pressure, and, broadly speaking, African, East Asians, and Caucasians were separate populations for several 10's of thousands of years, each major 'continental' race has had time to diverge a tiny bit. Witness skin color, facial structure, eye and ear differences, and so on. Clearly, the genetics for our brains could -in fact, given what we know of genetics and evolution, almost assuredly must have- had small changes selected for in that same time.

(And here is where people start to really freak out.)

The author does a good job of:
a.) Making the case that this general thesis is not only possible, but highly probable
b.) Pointing out some possible examples; highlighting supporting evidence
c.) Making the case that our *values* regarding possible differences are what matter,
d.) and making the case that a race simply having e.g. an average IQ a few points higher doesn't necessary determine/conclude/etc. anything in the 'real world' either (as opposed to the world of values). Think of, though not referenced in this book, semi-recent findings that 'stick-to-it-iveness' is actually a far better predictor of financial success and even happiness than IQ.
d.) Pointing out, again and again, that *individual* persons from any race or ethnic group will succeed and fail, be violent or not, etc.

There are some definite cons with this book.
1.) It gives perhaps too short shrift to cultural influences; there are too many instances of "culture can easily be copied, so the fact that people have not means that culture must have some tie to genetically determined propensities."

Well, may, maybe not. People cling e.g. to their particular religion, sometimes for thousands and thousands of years. Now, culture is not religion (or vice versa), but it seems to me that beliefs alone can survive intact despite tremendous pressures.

2.) At times the author shifts between the 3 major continental races, the 5 continental races (including Australian aborigines and N/S American aborigines --aka, 'American Indians'), and individual, example/discussion specific ethnic groups. This is problematic: is he arguing for ethnic level differences, down to sub-sub-populations, racial differences, differences within some large subset of a race, etc.? And how to 'apply up' a finding from an ethnic group to a race?

That's the end of my review, per se. However, some additional thoughts on who this book might be for, after reading some comments on this book:

If you are someone who is unable to stomach the idea that mental traits are, at least in part, genetically determined, this will be an exceedingly tough read (and I have met some people like this, at least one of who is a somewhat close friend).

If you are someone who cringes at the very though of linking race, genes, and brains, this will be a tough read.

If you're racist, you're probably also going to find this a tough read, as you're not going to get your delusions confirmed for you.

If you think of yourself as open minded, have even considered to yourself previously that if e.g. genes can make skin or hair or metabolisms different, then the brain could have been tweaked too... well, you'll probably still find this a hard read.

Which is somewhat odd. There isn't a whiff of e.g. 'racial superiority' in here -other than one or two mentions to discredit the idea, but I mean on the authors part. There's no bigotry. (There is a statement here or there I found, well, hamfisted.) It's just subject matter that is really, really uncomfortable. We can talk about e.g. lactose tolerance, racial differences in reactions to certain medicines, disease resistances, cancer/Rickets/folate protection (e.g. skin color). No one really has a problem talking about those. But we do draw a line around the brain.

Clearly this is because of (particular, here in the US) a history -and a present- of racism. But that is not a reason to run away from this kind of stuff, nor, despite some comments here, is “that's racist” an argument or disproof.

I tried to listen to this multiple times, but never really got into it. Since Wade wrote his COVID essay, though, he is a more interesting person, so I decided to give the book another go. Continued to have trouble, now I'm reading it at the same time as I'm listening to it, and it makes much more sense. Unfortunately, the writing is uninspired, so, while the subject is interesting, it ends up being a bit of a slog. The plan is to return refreshed later.

Extended essay, laying out the competing evidence for the lab leak and the zoonotic hypothesis. The lab leak hypothesis wins hands down, it seems.

Note that this first appeared as an essay in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/#post-heading), the booklet is the extended version.

High 4.

One nice thing about journalists who write science books? The books are generally well-written. (I'm looking at you, [a:Chris Stringer|103433|Chris Stringer|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-09ae6e5eb554f8a5ab0515c05488ea34.png], who's [b:The Origin of Our Species|11731574|The Origin of Our Species|Chris Stringer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333753409s/11731574.jpg|17086110] I read before this.)

Another nice thing is that, not being scientists, they have less of a horse in the race, so they tend to write more purely to inform and are willing to discuss some of the less accepted theories. Mr. Wade does a great job on both fronts.

The first half and change of this book discusses human evolution and what happened when geneticists entered the fray. The application of genetics to the field has been revolutionary to say the least. The revolution is not limited to the biological side of things either. The techniques of genetics are being applied to the origins and evolution of language as well.

In many cases the results butt up against long-held positions in the field. The results are predictable: some embrace the new, others dig their heels in and cling to the old. Wade does a good job of discussing this in both the biological realm and the linguistic. This, in particular the development of language and modernity occupy the next quarter or so of the book.

In the last quarter he moves past the dawn to address the issues of our continuing evolution and applications of techniques developed to historical situations: genetic studies of disease in isolated or insular populations - e.g. Icelanders and Jews - and the progeny of Genghis Kahn and Thomas Jefferson. This is definitely fascinating stuff, but I think would be better off in a separate book where it could be covered more fully.

Absolutely fascinating book about the dawn of man. The book traces the travels of the human race after groups of them left the great rift Valley of Africa.

7/9/22

This book had untold potential to tell the story of the evolution of religion, biologically and culturally, within human societies. Wade squandered it through chapters full of navel-gazing anecdata tortured into pretending to support his theses.

The first half of the book was slow and repetitive but interesting. The book's central hypothesis is that religion evolved through forms of kin selection, by providing advantages to societies largely in the form of greater cohesion and conformity. Keep in mind that for the first 45,000 years or so of the existence of modern humans, we lived in small tribes with no formal hierarchies, no legal systems, no penal code. Somehow, a common moral code must be not only developed but enforced, even when no one is watching. Enter gods, who can see you everywhere and are for mysterious reasons deeply interested in the minutiae of human behaviour.

The above was a throwaway reference to the biological evolution of religion I first encountered in a book primarily about the biological evolution of fiction, and I was hoping Wade would further expand on what's known and provide an overview of the science--after all, that's what he proposes in the book copy. No such luck. Instead, while he frequently repeats his assertion that religion facilitates the successful expansion of pre-state societies by bonding warriors together and providing them with reasons to sacrifice their lives for their tribe-mates, he provides no evidence whatsoever, and instead treats the reader to extensive digressions about his own prejudices.

There were small elements of science--sciencelets, let's call them--in the early chapters. He discusses recent neurological and psychological research on moral reasoning and moral intuition that were a pleasure to read, although if you're interested, you can find better accounts elsewhere with less baggage. Or here: science has pretty conclusively shown that people jump to moral conclusions via intuition and then reason their way into those conclusions after the fact. That's the short version. Now you can skip that chapter too.

Other than that, he quotes no science, instead relying on just-so cherry-picked anthropological anecdotes about different religions that support whatever point he's trying to make in that chapter. About halfway through, he careens right off course--dumping any pretense at talking about biology, evolution or neurobiology, and instead diverging weirdly into chapters about the historical accuracy of the bible and the koran, the role of christianity in modern american politics, and population control.

I would be less frustrated if the entirely speculative nature of this book were due to a lack of science or research on the biological underpinnings of religion. But the simplest google search shows that there is a ton out there on connections between certain genes and religious behaviour, or the neurological components or functions of religious beliefs, much of it available before the book's 2009 publication date. Wade does not discuss a single one. How do you write a 300 page book about the evolution of the faith instinct without once using the word "gene"?

You also get to read lovely bits like the following:

As other ethnic groups went through the WASP school system, they assimilated the same values, particularly the Protestant art of forming associations of all kinds. But the balance between individualism and community-building has shifted dramatically toward the former in the last fifty years .... Groups demanding rights for specific sections of the population have also undermined community in unintended ways. (p. 202)

Yup. It would be better, you see, if those uppity women and black people had kept subordinating their selfish desires to be seen as human beings and individuals. Then we would still have a sense of community. Our bad!

The Church felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group .... Some 95 percent of Americans are Christian or belong to no religion. Minorities--including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. (p. 267)

Yep. He went there. Let's ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with "no religion," aka atheists, would be alarmed and displeased to the extreme to be lumped in with Christians when it comes to religious education in the classroom. Those 5 per cent of Americans are real people! The whole point of rights is that they belong to everybody! You don't get to decide they don't count because it's a minority--that's the whole point of legal fucking rights! No one took away the Christians' rights to religious education; they just took away state funding for it, for god's sake. I'm pretty sure that people besides lawyers were very very happy to get bible learning out of the public education system.

Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. (p. 125)

Those days never existed, asshat. If he could distinguish scientific facts from a hole in the ground, he might be familiar enough with anthropological research to know this. And it's not just here. Unwarranted observations about the role and characteristics of men vs. women are scattered all over the book. None of them relate to his thesis, and all of them are demonstrably false. Worst is his constant insistence that religion = initiation rites for male adolescents = military training = success in warfare. Where's the evidence? Well initiation rites for boys are often painful (initiation rites for girls are not discussed, at all), and war is painful, so abracadabra, and let's just ignore every bit of archaeological evidence we have for the presence of female warriors throughout prehistory.

Oy.

Last criticism, promise:

It's too black and white.

There are some evolved characteristics that are required for survival, and these are universal. Like breathing. If you don't breathe, you don't live, so the biological and neurobiological mechanisms exist in all of us. To the extent that breathing is not universal in our day and age, it's because we have created some pretty fancy medical equipment that can take over this function and provide it for people who can't breathe on their own. Same for eating, sleeping, swallowing, etc, and some characteristics that are required for reproduction (the other component to evolution).

There are some traits that are not required for survival or reproduction, but which confer enough of a benefit to be very common. These exist on a continuum between almost-necessary and almost-optional. Personality and character traits are placed all over this continuum, and the same trait can have different outcomes depending on the environment. Not just in humans, by the way--I remember one fun study about extraversion in a minnow species, and how genes associated with extraversion were adaptive in some environments and non-adaptive in others (calm waters vs. rapids, though I can't remember which was better or worse for the outgoing fishies).

Well--isn't it really, really bloody obvious that the same would be true for religiosity?

Religiosity exists on a continuum. Some people are fanatical, other people are committed, some flexible, more-or-less half-hearted, willing to go along but not a believer, or committed non-believer. Much like extraversion, sensitivity, and intelligence, among other personality traits. And so like other personality traits--obviously what's adaptive and what's not adaptive varies depending on environment, including the culture.

There have always been some atheists and non-believers. I don't believe for a second that ancient hunter-gatherers didn't have any skeptics among them. That there were no people who were just going along because they enjoyed the dancing and the feasting and didn't really care if the gods existed or not. And it's a matter of historical record that in societies where religion was outlawed, some people risked their lives to continue practicing their faith. Cultures are not 1 or 0, yes or no, religious or not religious, and neither are individual people.

This could have been such a fascinating avenue for discussion. If religion is a means of enforcing social and moral conformity in pre-state societies, which I can accept as a plausible argument, then there are a range of possible adaptations and individual responses to that context. Adhering strictly to the culture's religion is one way of enhancing survival and reproductive success, but finding ways to exploit the religious beliefs of others becomes another adaptation. Like altruism: highly altruistic individuals are good for societies but their own survival and reproductive success can suffer if they give away too much; individuals very low in altruism (eg. sociopaths) can be very successful individually if they're not caught, but too many sociopaths and you don't have a society, certainly not one in which cooperation and mutual trust can flourish. So you have a tug of war between these two poles, with the optimal level of altruism at an individual and societal level being continually negotiated between shifting norms, resource levels, social commitment and conformity, and so on.

He hints at this in his chapter on the links between religious conformity, trust and commerce--particularly when briefly describing how charlatans can exploit religion to create undeserved trust--but this is a subject that deserves a lengthy and detailed discussion in any book that is truly going to explore and explain the evolutionary basis for religion.

Were prehistoric atheists well-adapted to exploit the religious beliefs of their more fervent neighbours for selfish ends? Would this have created evolutionary pressures for more in-the-middle folks--skeptical believers, if you will? What implications would this have had for the warfare-bonding or other cohesive functions of religion in society? Does religion still 'work' in this way if its adherents are 50% or 75% committed? (Though come to think of it, he spends the first chunk of the book talking about religion as a social bonding mechanism that works through ritual, not belief; and then the second half of the book talking about religion as requiring belief--this needs better teasing out before these discussions would have any meaning. "Belief" in the former context has no meaning--one could be an atheist and very devout, simultaneously.)

I would have loved to delve into a discussion on these topics, but it wasn't there. Practically nothing was there. I got more out of the evolution-of-fiction book and its throwaway line than I did from this entire manuscript.

Nicholas Wade discusses how the growing science of genetics expands and deepens our understanding of human evolution, our relationship to our closest relatives, and how we became the species we are--and what we might become in the future.

There's a lot of ground to cover, and this is a survey, not a textbook. It's very well-referenced, but in some cases he's relying on cutting edge research that, inevitably, will not all hold up. He also ventures into some touchy areas that not all readers will be comfortable or happy with. Nevertheless, it's an excellent, informative, and thought-provoking book that is well worth reading.
One of the topics covered here is the often-surprising path of human migration and expansion out of Africa. Just one major human lineage, L3, left Africa, and it's from that lineage that all the sub-lineages that populate the rest of the globe are descended. Human migration went eastward and along the coastlines, to India, southeast Asia, and Australia before going northward and westward. He repeatedly emphasizes that dates derived from genetic mutation rates are approximate and need to be evaluated in conjunction with archaeological evidence. That said, he gives us a fascinating picture of how archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence interact to give us a much fuller, richer, more complete picture of human evolution.

Among the conventional assumptions overturned by the growing body of evidence is the notion of early human hunter-gatherer bands as peaceful people, living in harmony with other humans they encountered, with war as an invention of sedentary societies after the invention of agriculture. In fact the evidence points the other way: hunter-gatherer bands, even today, are very violent societies, frequently raiding their neighbors and as much as 30% of the population dying by violence. Our nearest relatives, the common chimpanzees, are even more violent, not only raiding other troops and killing any member of another troop found alone, but also handling most internal disputes including leadership disputes by violence. Permanent settlements, with higher population density and less ability to move away from neighboring individuals or groups you didn't get along with, required an increase in human sociability, and willingness and ability to cooperate even with unrelated individuals, in order to work. And the archaeological evidence shows that agriculture came after that point, a result rather than a cause.

Humans have been domesticating each other, along with domesticating other species, and the typical experience of violence in settled, developed societies is much, much less and decreasing compared to "more natural" hunter-gatherer societies. The human ability to cooperate with unrelated strangers, routinely and on a large scale, is simply unknown in other species. Some readers will be disturbed by that argument. Others will be disturbed by the case that Wade makes that one of our evolved mechanisms for making this cooperation possible is religion.

I'm not going to go on, touching on every issue Wade discusses. This is an excellent, highly readable book, laying out all we've learned about our past in recent years, due to the advance of genetics. Because he does rely on research that, in 2006, was very new and cutting-edge, some of what he says will prove to be wrong--but there's still a lot to learn here, and well worth your time.

Highly recommended.

I borrowed this book from a friend.

It took me a while to get through this. Science is not my favorite reading material. That said, it was very interesting reading and worth working through it. It never made sense to me to say there are no difference between races, when the evidence is pretty plain. What differences there are will be a whole different discussion.

I don't believe in a color blind world - I don't believe its possible or practical. What is possible is to examine our own hidden prejudices and assumptions and work to get rid of them. That is only possible within the context of relationships/community. A gloriously messy proposition.

Wade may be a science reporter, but he's still a reporter. I cannot read science books that aren't written by actual scientists - reporters think in terms of presenting newsworthy information, and creating headlines. They don't think in terms of explaining clearly and consistently.

For example, when discussing the Exodus" of our ancestors from Africa to Oceania, he explains that the population grew and thus naturally spread along the coasts, as the group got larger and some members needed to expand to new territory to be able to make a living. He doesn't say 'probably,' but states this confidently. Then, a few pages later, he admires these people for their "epic migration." Huh?

And that original group was how big? Well, one genetic analysis suggests "probably fewer than 550 women of childbearing age" and another suggests "the number of modern humans... could have been as few as 160." From that info. he claims that the ancestral group was a single band of hunter-gatherers, which means (accd to studies of such bands more recently) that their numbers would be 150 ppl, or fewer if only part of a band left. Um, my arithmetic suggests that we seriously consider that there was an alliance of two bands that worked together to cross the Red Sea and escape Africa for room to grow.

Before that, Wade devotes space to explaining [a:Donald E. Brown|799664|Donald E. Brown|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s Universal People. It's a terrific concept. But is it Wade or Brown who makes odd claims about what behaviors we do all have in common? Unfortunately, sanctions against rape, for example, are *not* universal. And besides which, that text dates to 1991 - which is, in this field, *old.*

And what's up with saying that early modern humans were more violent and warlike, simply because their skull and frame were heavier than today's people? Couldn't they have just been sturdier in order to survive leopard attacks?

I'm also totally dissatisfied with the Adam's Y chart. Nothing in Wade's text or graphic explains why there wasn't more than one Adam. Yes, inevitably some lineages will die out. But at generation (?) marker 15, on this graphic of a sample of lineages, there were still three Adams....

Well anyway. The author does remember to use the words '[evidence] suggests' and 'probably' and to admit we need more information. But he almost never explains alternative theories, and often doesn't accept that there might be some. (Oh, another example - can't find the bookdart, but can paraphrase confidently: Adam's Y and Eve's mitochondria give us different dates of development. Wade says 'more work is going to need to be done to fit these together.' Not 'maybe this is not an artifact, but reveals some alternative theory is needed."

But a sprinkling of 'probablys' and notes & index does not a credible document make. I can't stomach this. Besides, it's dated 2006, which is old enough to be less than relevant, anyway. I'll look for something newer. Suggestions??"

Before the dawn. Recovering the lost history of our ancestors is a great book about the origins of humananity. Its author, Nicholas Wade is a journalist. Wade has done a great job reading and bringing together all materials to present an entirely up-to-date picture of the pre-history of human ancestry.

First published in 2007, the work is already somewhat older, especially as in recent years many new discoveries in the field of human descent have been made, but the book is still very useful. Not a scientist himself, Wade is not hindered by hobby-horses or the need to graft his own experience on a certain muster. His research is thorough and to the point. The scope of the book is remarkably wide, including a number of very interesting issues, such as the origin of language, race, and the extension of humanity to apes.

Before the dawn. Recovering the lost history of our ancestors describes the origins of humanity and its spread over the world, through the trasnsition from hunter-gatherer to the sedentary agricultural cultures. Unlike Guns, germs and steel. The fates of human societies, the book is never populist, and much more focussed, supported by much more findings. There is some over-reliance on the evidence of DNA; some reference to DNA appears on almost every page.

Before the dawn. Recovering the lost history of our ancestors is a very satisfactory book, describing humanity's pre-history not merely from a single perspective, but from a milti-faceted angle, involving biology, archaeology, and anthropology. Speculation is limited and within apparently very reasonable confines.

Before the dawn. Recovering the lost history of our ancestors is one of the best books in this field that I have read.

Interesting and educational - really glad I read it, though it went slow in places.

The perfect book for Whites to fantasize about how genetically-superior they are; while providing no evidence and while their culture slowly declines.

I felt as the book went on it got more and more speculative until I felt that I couldn't trust what I was reading. One thing that stood out was the conclusion that a large percentage of the population of central Asia is descended from Genghis Kahn because they have their Y chromosomes are the same in 15 position. While it may be that Genghis and his heirs spread their genes far and wide you cannot know that the Y chromosome assumed that form with Genghis, in fact it's likely that it assumed that form sometime before Genghis and it may have been shared by a large percentage of Mongolians at the time.

He also mistakes the idea that evolution acts by favoring those genes of those individuals who have the most surviving offspring with the idea that people therefore must have an explicit drive for having as many offspring as possible. In fact we aren't the slaves of evolution and we can choose to not have children and many do.½

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking expose that is just as relevant today as when it was published. As a scientist myself, I can attest to the truth of what the authors have written both about the idealistic representation of science in academia and the reality of how it is practised. Broad and Wade demonstrate how the actual practice of science frequently departs from the neat process taught in high school and college courses, and how the intended safeguards of peer review and replication frequently fail to catch errors or outright fraud. The examples themselves are engaging and often amazing in their egregiousness, making for a fast and entertaining read.

What is fascinating to me is that, having witnessed many of the issues inherent in the way academic success depends on publication, and having seen firsthand how rarely experimental replication of the findings of others is attempted, and how the peer review process can fail, I continued to view science as a whole through rose-colored glasses. This attitude is just what the authors describe, and while it is understandable that scientists cling to this idealized view, this book is a necessary step in facing up to the reality so that the system can be improved. For, as the authors point out, science today is not an altruistic pursuit of truth, but a career fraught with ambition, pressure, and a rigid hierarchy. Scientists working within such a system are, like any human beings, prone to err, and a better system of regulation would help prevent mistakes and deception such as described in this book.½

Good for a resource for scientific racism.

Wade presents many lines of evidence for his hypothesis that human evolution has continued in the past 10,000 years, resulting in genetic changes that can detect racial and geographical groupings reliably. He thinks this information is not well known because of a "politically correct" bias in academia that regards race as a social construct. There are studies of individual genes known to promote aggression, genes that lead to the thicker hair in Asian people, and to lactose tolerance in Northern Europeans. In most studies it appears that populations do not move far from their homes, and it is possible with comprehensive genome screens to distinguish Italians from English. Not entirely convincing, I have seen contradictory reviews about this contemporary book.

Exceptionally clear description of the history of mankind, with the emphasis on early man and biology.

I obtained this book through a book-signing in Manhattan. The book reads better than the author's presentation, as he had to step ginerly on an uncomfortable topic, that is the place of race in human diversity and evolution. He is attempting to show that many of the differences between groups of people cannot be ascribed entirely to cultural differences, but that there is a biological basis for much this, if only partial. When he looks around the world and sees so much inequality, there are no clear cut answers, and so genes must have a place, we just don't know which ones they are in a broad sense. Like the similar, "10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Acclerated Human Evolution" by Gregoryy Cochran and Henry Harepending" there is a chapter about the success of 'Jewish Adaptation" in Western Europe, resulting in considerable intellectual achievement. A good book to read on a subject that is still in process.½

This book explicitly raises a question that most social scientists have avoided for a long time: do genetic differences explain an important part of the political and economic differences between various groups of people, various races in Wade's terminology? This is indeed a troubling question. The last time racial differences were treated as a serious study, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the results of the "study" made key contributions to the ideology of Nazism. And Wade is unquestionably right in arguing two points -- that the subject has been deliberately avoided for the past half-century, and that recent advances in genetics do show some differences in genetic endowment between population groups. But having opened Pandora's box, Wade doesn't take much out of it except a series of hypotheticals, unsupported by actual genetic evidence, that leads him to conclude that much of the political/economic difference between population groups does reflect genetics. This is a very long step indeed, into dangerous territory, given the human habit of jumping on any possible justification for assuming that "my" group is better than "yours". Before assuming that cultural differences reflect different genetic endowments, it would be wise to wait until there is a shred of actual evidence that this is so.

Wade starts with the assumption that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional". In some respects, this is unquestionably so, though "copious" seems to me less certain than the other two. We do know, however, that within the last 50,000 years differences have appeared, mostly in what seem to be responses to environmental differences -- lighter skin among Europeans and Asians, lactose tolerance in dairying areas, sickle cell anaemia in malaria-ridden parts of Africa. But most of these long predate the emergence of known cultural differences; one batch of hunter gatherers probable has a similar culture to another. As Wade himself says "the signals of evolution within the past few hundred or thousand years are harder to pick up unless the force of selection has been extremely strong". In any event, he argues that since genetic change has continued since the departure from Africa of the ancestors of today's Europeans and Asians (and Australian aborigines and native Americans), genetic change has increased differences between these groups. That seems unquestionable, and is already a subject of substantial research interest, particularly in medicine.

But extending the existence of genetically-based medical differences between population groups to the existence of genetically-based cultural differences is a very long one, and Wade does not base it on any evidence. Rather, he argues that "all types of human society, from the hunter-gatherer band to the modern nation, are rooted in a suite of social behaviors. These behaviors, WHICH MOST PROBABLY HAVE A GENETIC BASIS, interact with culture to produce the insitutions that are characteristic of each society" (Caps are the reviewers) He proceeds with a long chain of "reasonable to assume", "may provide", "probably present", etc. etc. etc and eventually ends up with a penultimate chapter entitled "The Rise of the West".

This is an interesting book, which challanges accepted ideas, and is probably worth reading on that basis alone. But its conclusions rest on hypothesis, not evidence.

An interesting book. Wade argues that genetic factors are seriously undervalued and indeed repressed as an explanation for human societal diversity. He claims that different social tendencies at the race level have evolved fairly recently and explain much of today's economic world. His view is a subtle one - these tendencies are not god-given, but have evolved in response different societies' needs (-"human evolution has been recent, copious and regional"). However, I think he should have gone more deeply into the point that as in the past, whether traits are good or bad depends on the context, both today and in the future. There was an interesting discussion about the book on Andrew Gelman's blog: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/05/09/nicholas-wade-paradox-racism/.

Seldom have I encountered better writing on such a complex and baggage-laden subject - human evolution. Wade succeeds in putting before the reader a synthesis of what is known about several aspects of our development from when and where modern humans originated, when and where migrations occured in relation to changes in environment (drought, cold etc.) when and where language probably occurred, domestication of animals, the beginnings of agriculture. His main point is that study of DNA - of both matrilineal mitochondria to the male Y chromosome has made it possible to track the timing and location of many of these changes to a remarkable degree. Of course, scientific inquiry moves so swiftly now that even I, essentially a science ignoramous, know of a couple of recent discoveries that have been made and confirmed in the seven years since this book first came out - the first a definite albeit very small genetic link between Neandertals and the basic European stock of modern humans and for a second, some earlier dates for the presence of the domesticated dog in Europe and I expect there are several more in the field of paleo-linguistics, or whatever, you want to call it! I am intrigued by the idea too, that we have been gradually 'domesticating' ourselves and are likely continue to do so. The linguistic furor over language origins and the idea of an original proto language were, for me, the most fascinating chapters. In short, I can't recommend it more highly! *****