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by Patrick Appel

In his new book on race and genetics, Nicholas Wade incorrectly defines race biologically. But this is far from his worst error. Robert VerBruggen summarizes some of Wade’s main arguments:

(1) Why did the Industrial Revolution occur first in England? Wade lays out evidence, collected by the economist Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, that those in England’s upper classes had been having more children than those in the lower classes — possibly affecting traits including “interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work,” and in turn transforming the population into one capable of immense economic output. An enormous population growth spurt starting around 1770 finally set the revolution off, and it quickly spread to other nations that were similarly situated.

(2) Wade says China had the right evolution but not the right institutions to take advantage of industry once it emerged, which is why its economy didn’t take off until it adopted economic reforms. Wade notes the examination system that was in place in China starting in 124 B.C., which he says created a sort of meritocracy that allowed the best scorers to rise in society and have the most children.

(3) Did violent tendencies evolve differently in different places? Wade notes that, among the Yanomamo of South America, men who have killed in battle have 2 1/2 times as many children as those who don’t. And he cites evidence that one gene that seems to contribute to violence — “MAO-A” — doesn’t show up evenly across populations, with one evidently violence-promoting variant being present in 5 percent of African-Americans but only 0.1 percent of Caucasians. The “gracilization” of the skull — the thinning that occurred as humans became less likely to try to bash each others’ brains in — shows a pattern too, but a very different one: It’s “most pronounced in sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians, with Europeans retaining considerable robustness.” Still another genetic variant, one related specifically to violence when drunk, has been found in Finns.

(4) Wade also digs into Jewish history, relaying theories that the religion’s emphasis on literacy — a skill with little practical value in a farming society — may have driven the less intelligent to join Christianity instead, and that European Jews’ being highly concentrated in intellectually demanding professions like moneylending may have further contributed to increased IQ.

In a review worth reading in full, H. Allen Orr declares that Wade “goes beyond reporting scientific facts or accepted theories and finds Wade championing bold ideas that fall outside any scientific consensus”:

Wade obviously appreciates the distinction between behavior that “could be” genetic and “is” genetic. The problem is that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in hard evidence or even in the prospects that relevant hard evidence could ever be obtained.

There is, however, another distinction that Wade doesn’t seem to appreciate at all. He’s right that political sensitivities shouldn’t distort scientific truth: the facts are the facts. But as [Steven] Pinker notes, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be particularly careful when discussing race. History has shown that this is an especially dangerous subject, one that has resulted in enormous abuses. There is nothing unscientific about recognizing this and treading carefully.

At times, Wade’s approach seems almost the opposite. Though he issues the requisite disclaimers about the dignity and moral equality of all peoples, he’s clearly tempted, under the cover of politics-shouldn’t-distort-science, to provoke. Indeed there is a species of bravado here, as though demonstrating that he, unlike others, is tough-minded enough to face unpleasant facts. But surely there is a difference between facing facts that are unpleasant and spinning tales that are improbable.

Jerry Coyne piles on:

Wade’s main thesis, and where the book goes wrong, is to insist that differences between human societies, including differences that arose in the last few centuries, are based on genetic differences—produced by natural selection— in the behavior of individuals within those societies.  In other words, societal differences largely reflect their differential evolution.

For this Wade offers virtually no evidence, because there is none. We know virtually nothing about the genetic differences (if there are any) in cognition and behavior between human populations. And to explain how natural selection can effect such rapid changes, Wade posits some kind of “multiplier effect,” whereby small differences in gene frequencies can ramify up to huge societal differences. There is virtually no evidence for that, either. It is a mountain of speculation teetering on a few pebbles.

In a later post, Coyne adds:

This is the problem with Wade’s book: it presents a sweeping hypothesis about the selective basis of human social differences ( a touchy subject), but gives virtually no evidence to support it. If you like stories, it’s fine; if you like science, it’s not so fine. Wade sometimes offers disclaimers, but the reader’s impression will be that he really is presenting scientific findings.

Tyler Cowen was disappointed:

There is much I admire about Greg Clark’s (previous) book, but Wade doesn’t seem to realize Clark has hardly any evidence in support of his “genetic origins of capitalism” thesis.

Arthur Allen pans the book:

Mr. Wade occasionally drops in broad, at times insulting assumptions about the behavior of particular groups without substantiating the existence of such behaviors, let alone their genetic basis. Writing about Africans’ economic condition, for example, Mr. Wade wonders whether “variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.”

For Mr. Wade, genetic differences help explain the failure of the United States occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “If institutions were purely cultural,” he writes, “it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another.” It’s hard to know how to begin to address such a puzzling statement.

Indeed it is. This paragraph from A Troublesome Inheritance also made my jaw hit the floor:

When North Korea adopts market-friendly institutions, a safe prediction is that it would in time become as prosperous as South Korea. It would be far less safe to predict that Equatorial Guinea or Haiti needs only better institutions to attain a modern economy; their peoples may not have yet had the opportunity to develop the ingrained behaviors of trust, nonviolence and thrift that a productive economy requires.

Andrew Gelman’s takedown of such nonsense is worth a read:

Ian Steadman joins the chorus:

Wade often strays from his taxonomy – Caucasians sometimes stand equal alongside Africans and East Asians, while at other times “the West” is treated as separate to both the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. Modern nation-states are frequently talked about as if ethnically homogenous, and what discussion there is of internal variation (say, class difference) is waved away as irrelevant. Quite why the Jews benefited from being kicked around Europe for hundreds of years while other persecuted ethnicities didn’t is unclear – the inevitable, unpleasant implication of this is that we can just as easily decide that the Roma are predisposed to petty crime, for example.

Never mind that there are plausible social, historical and economic analyses, with substantial evidence, that also explain the trends Wade has identified – his view is almost fatalistic in attributing everything to genes, based on nothing more than a correlation between the time it takes for the human genome to be shaped by environmental pressures and the time it takes for societies to undergo significant change. He does not pinpoint the genes he suspects cause social change – he merely deduces they must be there, because it fits the pattern.

And that’s so, so weird. Nobody – nobody – denies that there is genetic variation between distinct groups of people. This is visible in the colour of our skin, in our different heights and hair colours, in the higher rates of sickle cell disease among Africans and higher rates of obesity among Pacific Islanders.

What Wade is arguing for, though, is a definition of race that is at once dangerous and useless.

And Anthony Daniels’s review provides an alternative explanation for differing crime rates in Africa and the West:

The author tries to make out that the decline in the homicide rate in the western world is the result of genetic changes that gave survival advantage in new social circumstances to those who were less inclined to aggression and personal violence. These social circumstances not having yet developed in Africa, the homicide rate in the latter continent remains much higher than in Europe or the United States, the implication being that Africans are genetically more violent than the populations of Europe and the USA.

The author paints with far too broad a brush. Are there really no variations in the regions and countries of Africa, both in time and place? Is there really such continental uniformity? This was certainly not my experience of Africa, and I once travelled across it by public transport, such as it was.

Moreover, the statistics that the author uses are suspect. He says of the United States that its homicide rate is less than 2 per 100,000. The last time I looked the rate was 4.7 per 100,000—itself a very sharp decline of recent years. But a paper not long ago suggested that if the same resuscitation and surgical techniques were used as were used in 1960, the homicide rate in the United States would be five times higher than it is today, that is to say 23.5 per 100,000. The new techniques in surgery and resuscitation are unlikely to have reached much of Africa, where (the author says) the homicide rate is 10 per 100,000. In other words, either the statistics in Africa are unreliable—which in my opinion is very likely—or the statistics prove precisely the opposite of what the author wants to prove. Either way, his point is vitiated.

It’s banal to admit that genetics has helped shape human history. But one must balance genetic explanations with those based in history, culture, institutions, and random chance. Wade, under the guise of science, invents out of thin air theories to explain and justify current racial inequalities. He admits that history and culture play a role in the fates of nations, but he minimizes those factors and does not go looking for non-genetic explanations for regional inequalities. I do not detect any racial malice in Wade’s writing, but he appears to be suffering from the Just World Fallacy. David McRaney explained this psychological bias back in 2010. The short version:

The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.

The Truth: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.

For Wade, there must be an innate reason why one population succeeds and another fails. He cannot accept that historical circumstance and pure luck are perhaps larger reasons for the current state of affairs. For example, here’s Wade downplaying the role of colonialism in keeping Africa down:

If running a productive , Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.

Incredibly, he uses the fact that a mere two generations have passed since colonialism to argue that is should no longer be considered an adequate explanation for Africa’s continued economic problems. It would funny if it weren’t so depressing.

by Patrick Appel

This speech by Charles Mills, which we’ve posted before, does an excellent job explaining the social construction of race:

Nicholas Wade’s new book on race and genetics, which takes the biological basis of race as a given, provides no consistent definition for “race.” During his debate with Wade, anthropologist Agustín Fuentes pointed out that “Wade uses cluster, population, group, race, sub-race, ethnicity in a range of ways with few concrete definitions, and occasionally interchangeably throughout the book.” In a response to Wade’s book, Fuertes explains how A Troublesome Inheritance gets race so wrong:

The originators of the computer program most often used to support the argument that humans divide into the continental genetic clusters (which Wade says are “races”) comment that their model (called structure) is not well-suited to data shaped by restricted gene flow with isolation by distance (as human genetic variation data on large scales are). They warn that if one does try to apply this model to those data, the inferred value of K (how many clusters emerge) can be rather arbitrary. For example, one article Wade cites shows not three, not five, not seven but 14 clusters, six of which are in Africa alone.

So when Wade states in chapter 5 of his book, “It might be reasonable to elevate the Indian and Middle Eastern groups to the level of major races, making seven in all,” he notices a problem: “But then, many more subpopulations could be declared races.” But he has a solution: “[T]o keep things simple, the 5-race continent based scheme seems the most practical for most purposes.”

Sure, it is practical if your purpose is to maintain the myth that black, white and Asian are really separable biological groups. But if your goal is to accurately reflect what we know about human biological variation, then no, it is a really not practical at all; in fact, it is flat-out wrong. What we know about human genetic variation does not support dividing humans into three or five or seven “races.”

Other writers who argue that race is biological aren’t as sloppy as Wade. And, even though I do not believe that defining race biologically is correct, it’s best to engage with the strongest arguments of those who disagree. For starters, here is part of a 2012 post by Jerry Coyne that defends defining human races biologically:

What are races?

In my own field of evolutionary biology, races of animals (also called “subspecies” or “ecotypes”) are morphologically distinguishable populations that live in allopatry (i.e. are geographically separated).  There is no firm criterion on how much morphological difference it takes to delimit a race.  Races of mice, for example, are described solely on the basis of difference in coat color, which could involve only one or two genes.

Under that criterion, are there human races?

Yes.  As we all know, there are morphologically different groups of people who live in different areas, though those differences are blurring due to recent innovations in transportation that have led to more admixture between human groups.

Coyne, in the midst of a scathing review of Wade’s book, writes that “Wade’s discussion of genetically differentiated subgroups, whether or not you want to call them ‘races’—is not too bad.” H. Allen Orr, who tears Wade’s book to shreds, likewise defends a genetic definition of race:

The central fact is that genetic differences among human beings who derive from different continents are statistical. Geneticists might find that a variant of a given gene is found in 79 percent of Europeans but in only, say, 58 percent of East Asians. Only rarely do all Europeans carry a genetic variant that does not appear in all East Asians. But across our vast genomes, these statistical differences add up, and geneticists have little difficulty concluding that one person’s genome looks European and another person’s looks East Asian. To put the conclusion more technically, the genomes of various human beings fall into several reasonably well-defined clusters when analyzed statistically, and these clusters generally correspond to continent of origin. In this statistical sense, races are real.

Coyne adds:

This is what I also claimed, and of course got slammed by the race-denialists who are motivated largely by politics.  To a biologist, races are simply genetically differentiated populations, and human populations are genetically differentiated.  Although it’s a subjective exercise to say how many races there are, human genetic differentiation seems to cluster largely by continent, as you’d expect if that differentiation evolved in allopatry (geographic isolation).

Relatedly, Razib Khan argues that “the modern American consensus that race is a social construct is true but trivial”:

It’s true because a de facto race such as “Latinos/Hispanics” were created in the 1960s by the American government and elite for purposes of implementing public policies such as affirmative action. Obviously this is a classic case of a social construct, as the quasi-racial category is based upon social, not biological, factors (Latinos/Hispanic can explicitly be of any race, though implicitly it’s transformed into a non-white class in the United States). A group like “black Americans” ranges from people with considerably less than 50% African ancestry to more than 90% African ancestry (though almost always black Americans who are not immigrants from Africa or first generation offspring of those immigrants have some segments of European ancestry). The problem is that people move from this non-controversial point, that some racial categories are social constructs, to the assertion that all racial categories are social constructs, and that phylogenetic clustering of human populations is irrelevant or impossible. It is not irrelevant, or impossible. Human populations vary, and that variation matters. Human populations have specific historical backgrounds, and phylogenetics can capture that history through methods of inference.

I disagree with Khan calling “phylogenetic clustering of human populations” races, but Razib is far more intelligible here than Wade is in most of his book. Nevertheless, the biological definitions of race outlined above are problematic because they are not the same as the social definitions of race. There is significant overlap between the biological and social definitions but defining “race” two ways only confuses matters. In an interview, Wade offers an explanation for why he uses the term “race” as he does:

It seems that the problem might be, as you said, that there is so much historical baggage associated with the term race. Is there a way to get around that? Do we just need a different term than race to talk about these genetic differences?

I’m not sure how that will play out. The geneticists, if you read their papers, have long been using code words. They sort of dropped the term “race” about 1980 or earlier, and instead you see code words like “population” or “population structure.” Now that they’re able to define race in genetic terms they tend to use other words, like “continental groups” or “continent of origin,” which does, indeed, correspond to the everyday conception of race. When I’m writing I prefer to use the word race because that’s the word that everyone understands. It’s a word with baggage, but it’s not necessarily a malign word. It all depends on the context in which it’s used, I guess.

Wade says that “everyone understands” the word race. But what everyone understands are the social definitions of race: White, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, Samoan, and so on. Wade dismisses geneticists who use terms like “population structure,” “population stratification,” “ancestry” and “ancestry informative markers.” But those terms are useful when discussing genetics because they allow for far more complexity and specificity than our social definitions of race do.

Obviously, skin color and the other physical characteristics society uses to categorize individuals racially are biological. But skin color and other physical traits are not the same as race. And, as Khan noted recently, one “of the ironies of traits which we use to differentiate populations, such as skin color and facial features, is that these might actually have relatively shallow time depth within a given lineage.” So prioritizing skin color above all other ancestry informative markers finds little basis is biology. In a 2012 post, Fuentes argued against a biological understanding of race for related reasons:

Even something thought to be so ubiquitous as skin color works only in a limited way as dark or light skin tells us only about a human’s amount of ancestry relative to the equator, not anything about the specific population or part of the planet they might be descended from.

There is not a single biological element unique to any of the groups we call white, black, Asian, Latino, etc. In fact, no matter how hard people try, there has never been a successful scientific way to justify any racial classification, in biology. This is not to say that humans don’t vary biologically, we do, a lot. But rather that the variation is not racially distributed.

Alfred W. Clark, a strong defender of Wade’s book, has a useful round-up of commentary on A Troublesome Inheritance. In it, he dismisses Fuentes by arguing that he is suffering from a “slightly more sophisticated version of Lewontin’s Fallacy.” What is Lewontin’s Fallacy? In a 2005 NYT article arguing that race is biological, Armand Marie Leroi explained it:

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given “race.” If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an “indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge.” Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin’s facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger’s face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from – and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren’t written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many – a few hundred – variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so.

But this still fails to prove that races are biological. Calling these populations “races” is a semantic rather than a scientific decision. Wikipedia provides useful context on this front:

Philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther have argued that while Edwards’s argument is correct it does not invalidate Lewontin’s original argument, because racial groups being genetically distinct on average does not mean that racial groups are the most basic biological divisions of the world’s population. Nor does it mean that races are not social constructs as is the prevailing view among anthropologists and social scientists, because the particular genetic differences that correspond to races only become salient when racial categories take on social importance. From this sociological perspective, Edwards and Lewontin are therefore both correct.^[13][14][15]

Similarly, biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks agrees with Edwards that correlations between geographical areas and genetics obviously exist in human populations, but goes on to note that “What is unclear is what this has to do with ‘race’ as that term has been used through much in the twentieth century – the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin’s analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards’ critique does not contradict that interpretation.”^[6]