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A Troublesome Inheritance, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, Genes and Talent, Is Intelligence inherited?, Multiculturalism, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Race and intelligence, Racism in Science, Scientific Racism, Steven Pinker
Nicholas Wade’s book ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ was always predicted to elicit hysteria. Some even knew the script of outrage word for word. In the pages of VDare and Amren, veteran columnists like John Derbyshire and Jared Taylor awaited the crackling torches and swooshing pitchforks with a bored indifference.
As it happened, the hysteria arrived like a cuckoo from a Swiss clock. From the moment the book was published, Wade has been thrown violently onto the back foot. Political insinuations have been shaded into the background of the author’s profile. Phrases like ‘scientific racism, ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘shady funding’ have been bandied about without as much as a footnote to support them. And most importantly (and shamefully) of all, the science contained in the book has been torn apart, misquoted and miscategorised without any of it being convincingly refuted.
Although predictable, this is unbefitting of established academia. From what I have read of the book, the author’s tone seems altogether gentlemanly, his reputation rather mainstream, and his arguments often very watered down.
The point of Wade’s work is best summarised by his oft-quoted statement that human evolution has been ‘recent, copious and regional’. By this he means simply that man did not stop evolving when he left Africa, that his subsequent evolution has been considerable, and that it has happened in groups isolated from one another genetically. “Recent, copious, and regional.”
Wade won’t be winning any Nobel prizes for this insight, and rightfully so, since this was already the understanding of the vast majority of evolutionists. He may however, given his background at the one of the world’s most respected newspapers, popularise the theory.
And what would that do?
What would happen if tomorrow, everyone in the world went out and bought a copy of Wade’s book, read it and agreed with it? What, in a word, would happen if the science of race was re-accepted by the popular mind?
In the estimation of political Left, there would be hell to pay. American transport would have to re-arrange itself so that populations could be divided on buses and trains. Schools would also need to be resegegrated, Africa recolonised, miscegenation re-outlawed etc…
But are they right? I’m not sure.
Liberal democracy is too well established in every Western country for explicitly racist legislation to make a reappearance. There is no way that Atlanta, Georgia or Birmingham, Alabama could conceivably return to the dictats of Jim Crow and very few balanced people would suggest this. Demographics are everywhere different from former times. The world is different. The charge in the bomb has gone dead. span>
And since – as we are routinely and correctly informed – the ideas of racism are not legitimate anyway, we can surely dispense with the abuse directed at communicators of politically neutral scientific fact. Those who cannot be reached by this elementary logic can wait for the Rwandan Einstein or the Icelandic Usain Bolt for the next thousand years if it pleases them. It doesn’t matter. The thing about truth is that it stays true whether people believe in it or not.
D, LDN.
I didn’t see much if any hysteria, but I did see a lot of legitimate, rational, levelheaded, and reasonable critics use evidence, common sense, and science to rip Wade’s pseudoscientific garbage a new one. It was funny to watch Wade point and sputter as better thinkers one after another systematically destroyed his book lol
Can you supply an argument against Mr Wade’s contention? I’ve heard plenty of insults thrown at the author, but not one convincing counter-argument.
But wasn’t Einstein part of the Untermensch Juden race?
(Sorry for playing the Nazi card, but look how the definition of race has changed in the last hundred years. A people who were considered alien and foreign to Europe are seen as an integral part of the White race by many today.
I personally view culture as more as a deciding factor in human development along with circumstances, history, economic theory prevalent etc.
Race may be important, but is not significant, in my view.
The belief that Jews were/are subhuman was part of the Nazi belief system alone. It had and has no grounding in science. Of course, the idea that any race of humans can be called ‘subhuman’ is disgusting and wrong by definition. Nevertheless, truth is truth, regardless of how it has been misused in the past.
Personally, I think a culture can integrate people of other races quite easily. All it takes is for the parent culture to be confident of itself. There is no need to obstruct science, or maintain taboos in order to make that argument.
Race is a taxonomic and arbitrary depending on what people(even scientists) want in animals who have varying populations the way Humans do. It is a Social construct.
Take mice for example, some of them are separated by the scientists depending on hair color or specific use for them, or with like dogs by regulating breeding artificially.
The amount wade wants to separate people over is about 8% OUT of 0.1% in average frequencies of the SAME variants(alleles) of the SAME genes. Whatever cluster he keeps yapping on about is just a temporary difference in frequency in those same alleles. He just decides, along with some other racists that it means race and that everyone on earth must accept it as they do. As if its a natural thing, which it isn’t. A lot of the time it isn’t even natural in some animals that humans have categorized.
Literally its a difference in more people with the same thing over here than over there temporarily which Wade and his buddies think is good enough to separate individual people over. From birth they want to tell you what and who you are in their little zoo. Thats enough to put them in prison for, its threatening peoples freedom.
It’s true that the smaller racial categories are often social constructions (‘Hispanics’ and ‘Arabs’ for example aren’t racial groups), but the larger divides – such as that between Negro and Amerindian, Mongoloid and Caucasian – are scientifically verifiable. There are predictable differences in skull shape, height and even bone marrow. This needn’t be anything political. I wouldn’t want to live in a society organised around racial principles, but then figures like Mr Wade do not suggest we live that way either.
So larger clusters are races you say? Larger or smaller clusters are scientifically verifiable, two families across the road are scientifically verifiable as clusters and they will vary in average skull shape, height and bone marrow, by very large amounts in some cases, but race at any of those points isn’t a natural thing. You can differ in bone marrow type, skull shape, height, skin tone and IQ to your own mother, by just as big margins between these groups.
Look there is no argument here. Temporary average variation in the same things making somebody part of a race is arbitrary. The average distance that makes a race is arbitrary. Its just a choice when similar animals are grouped, its thus the same in humans. It is nothing but a social construct.
The arguments of Wade are usually agreed implicitly by the non-western people like the Chinese, Japanese or the Indians.
It’s generally the western peoples, reeling from the effect of the extreme violence caused by the Nazis, associate all forms of racism to the gas chambers and mass shootings. They feel that any acceptance of Wade’s arguments are a slippery slope to explicit racism, discrimination & mass violence. This is not a wrong approach in general.
It’s the specifics, like bending-over-backwards to accomodate hateful opinions and values just because they come from brown people, and the dilution of their own culture and national identities, are wrong.
The problem is that intelligence is not well defined and there is no really reliable way of measuring it. For example IQ tests do not take into account a person’s ability to concentrate on the test – they might be worrying about an unwell relative for example. I think the science here so far is therefore questionable but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be studied. This is an important question because the politically correct assumption has since WWII been that all races are exactly equal. It just seems extremely unlikely to me that all racial groups would have exactly the same intelligence. Just about every other characteristic is different, height, eye colours, etc. etc., so why would intelligence be exactly the same? Therefore I think that positive discrimination is a totally flawed idea. Every individual should be judged purely on their own abilities and nothing else. Only that way, no matter what the truth about different races is, the best candidate will get the job or whatever.
Lets not forget though that even if one race has a higher average intelligence than another, there is always much overlap. Therefore we see many people from the race with the lower average with higher intelligence than many people from the race with the higher average. Richard Lynn’s data showed this overlap by the way. I also think if you think about individuals from both ends of the spectrum this is borne out as well. This is often overlooked by the hysteria of critics, who try to make out that Richard Lynn was suggesting that all members of one race were more intelligent than another race. I’ve not followed Wade closely but I gathered he is making similar arguments.
There are certainly exceptions to the rule. The distance in averages however is undeniable. The gap between the sub-Saharan average of 67 and the East-Asian average of 102 is too large to be coincidental or due to mitigating factors.
Indeed as IQ tests are still the only means we have of measuring intelligence then it seems very foolish to assume the opposite of what the tests indicate. If we were to draw the warped conclusions of the Nazis from these findings we should be rightly reviled, but actually I think what we’re really doing is reacting to the “politically correct” view that our own race is disposable. This is a sort of reverse racism, racism against your own kind. Birth rates are way below the sustainable 2.2 level for all the White European races. If it was just a natural event then that would be one thing, but it seems to me govt. policy has been encouraging our decline. To those who talk endlessly about the wonderful diversity of multiculturalism, I want to ask them what they think the world will be like when all these peoples who gave the world so much culture and scientific advances are gone. How diverse will the world be then? I’m not suggesting for one moment that other peoples didn’t give culture and scientific advances as well. If we can be concerned about the disappearance of animal diversity, why not have a concern about peoples as well. I do hear that birth rates are generally falling right round the world but they are still way above the 2.2 level, while ours are way below.
Britain is said to be experiencing a ‘baby-boom’. It only takes short walk around London to notice which communities are supplying the babies in question.