Humans are still evolving, genetic sequences are important, and populations of humans difffer from one another in many ways, including patterns of allelic variation. These facts are not debatable; they are true—but none of them are accurately discussed or represented in Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Wade argues that there are defijinable and genetically identifijiable groups we can describe and label as biological races in humans today. He does not provide a consistent defijinition for what he means by “race” or a specifijic number of races that we have (he indicates three, fijive, and seven as options). Wade suggests that believing in biological races (especially African, Caucasian, and East Asian) is both common sense and solid science. He asserts that evolved diffferences in these races are the key explanation for social diffferences in histories, economies, and trajectories in societies; why “Chinese society difffers profoundly from European society, and both are entirely unlike a tribal African society” (123). Wade argues that it is racial (genetic) diffferences and separate evolutionary histories that help us understand why humans are the way they are. In making these assertions, Wade ignores the majority of data and conclusions from anthropology, population genetics, human biology, and evolutionary biology (see Marks 1995, 2010). Rather than actually acknowledging the copious, and current, scientifijic research on human genetic variation that contradicts his assertions, Wade reviews, and rejects, only the protests of Jared Diamond and assertions by Richard Lewontin. Wade does make minimal reference to the offfijicial statements on race by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association; he simply disregards them by reasserting his belief that looking at genetics gives us clear racial assignment. Despite being publicly challenged by numerous biological anthropologists, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists on the specifijics of the data and his interpretations (see, e.g., Marks 2014; Fuentes 2014; Rafff 2014), Wade has been adamant in his refusal to interact with any assertions, articles, data, or analyses that in any way problematize his simplistic, and erroneous, position. His approach is particularly dangerous as his justifijication for this position is that he is a defender of truth and that a cabal of left-leaning academics are obfuscating reality with oppressive, even fascistic, denials of the truth about race. Since the publication of his book, the core of Wade’s responses to his (many) critics have been that they (1) are trying to repress the true state of knowledge about racial variation, (2) have
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