Reestablishing the Significance of Race: Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” rebuts the pseudoscience of race denial
Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance is the latest setback for the pseudo-scientific claim that race is meaningless. In lucid prose, Wade establishes the validity of race from converging lines of scientific inquiry. The gist of A Troublesome Inheritance is that races are biological formations, race differences are genetically based, and human evolution didn’t end with the ice age. Wade’s conclusions rest on a mounting volume of evidence, much of it only recently available since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003.
Wade’s perspective flies in the face of current orthodoxy in the social sciences. For several decades, radical ideologues in the scientific community have insisted that race is strictly a “social construct” — a vague, worthless concept that is biologically insignificant. Spearheading the race denial movement have been professors at elite universities, such as Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin among others.
In their 1984 book, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin argue that race is a “fuzzy concept.” The authors note that “differences between major ‘racial’ categories, no matter how defined, turn out to be small. Human ‘racial’ differentiation is, indeed, only skin deep. Any use of racial categories must take its justifications from some other source than biology.”
In a 2012 article Lewontin claims, “‘Race’ is a term of uncertain etymology and many meanings.” He notes that it is often used interchangeably with “people,” “tribe,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” the “human race,” etc.—presumably an attempt to undermine its utility. But words often have multiple meanings or can be used rather loosely as a slang expression. This isn’t unique to the concept of race nor does it invalidate its use as a taxonomic category. This obfuscation reveals deliberate deception on Lewontin’s part. (Ullica Segersträle examines Lewontin’s political agenda and sketchy scientific arguments in her book Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond; Lewontin also has a starring role in Chapter 2 of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, p. 40ff)
The concept of race never disappeared from the biological sciences. The Dictionary of Genetics (fifth edition, Robert C. King and William D. Stansfield, Oxford University Press, 1997) defines race as “a phenotypically and/or geographically distinctive subspecific group, composed of individuals inhabiting a defined geographical and/or ecological region, and possessing characteristic phenotypic and gene frequencies that distinguish it from other such groups.”
Essential works on the subject, such as John R. Baker’s landmark Race (Oxford University Press, 1974), clarify the meaning of race and address much of the repetitive slipshod arguments that race deniers often make. Race as invoked in common parlance has been broad and vague at times, but to conclude that it has no specific meaning is simply a fallacy.
For example, University of Texas genetics professor Jennifer Raff faults Wade because computer programs designed to find genetic clusters in human populations can be programmed to come up with different numbers of clusters. But the number of races is a trivial issue. Obviously there are many meaningful human genetic clusters—a fine enough clustering would separate out Japanese and Chinese while a broader clustering would place them with other East Asians.
But this hardly makes the clusters arbitrary. A convincing argument for the arbitrariness of race would be if the computer program which was designed to find genetic clusters and used in the research cited by Wade found that the Japanese cluster just as easily with Africans or Europeans as they do with other Asians. But of course, that can’t happen.
Wade notes that if race is biologically insignificant how can physical anthropologists and criminal forensic investigators identify the race of victims and perpetrators with 80 percent accuracy? Also, if race is a “fuzzy” biological classification, why is there a strong interest in racial and ethnic ancestry, particularly among minorities? Several genealogical services, such as Oxford Ancestors, use DNA to track human origins, trace ancestral migrations, and pinpoint racial pedigrees.
Races are biological descent groups. They are real. Read more