All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 31, 2014 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
45:55
A Troublesome Inheritance: A Conversation with Nicholas Wade
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
It's my pleasure to introduce Nicholas Wade, who has joined me today to talk about his most recent book, A Troublesome Inheritance, Genes, Race, and Human History.
Mr. Wade was born in England and educated at Eton and Cambridge before coming to the United States in 1970.
He is a professional science writer And well-known for his 20 years with the New York Times, from which he retired last year.
He's the author of many books, most recently, Before the Dawn, which appeared in 2006, and The Faith Instinct, which was published in 2009.
And of course, he is the author of A Troublesome Inheritance, which was published just this year.
Well, thank you very much, Mr.
Wade, for agreeing to join me in this conversation.
My pleasure. First, might I ask you to tell me, in your words, what this book is about?
What is its most important message, in your view?
Well, there are two principal themes in the book.
The first It's to establish that race has a biological basis and that the difference between races consists of what geneticists call relative allele frequency.
So this is a straightforward science story, but of course it's controversial.
Politically, because many people believe or say they believe that race has no biological basis.
So the second part of the book, I should say first, the purpose of the first part of the book to establish that race does have a biological basis is not because I have any great interest in race as such, but I'm very interested in human evolution, recent human evolution.
And you can't study recent human evolution unless you acknowledge race.
The fact of races, because each race has a different evolutionary history, because we've all traced different paths through historical time.
So if you cannot acknowledge race exists, then you're severely hung up on looking at the recent evolutionary past of the human population, which I think is a subject of great interest to everyone.
So the second theme of the book, then, is...
It's more speculative, and it's asking, well, what changes have there been in recent human evolution that might have an impact on the modern world?
And I suggest that natural selection pays particular importance to social behavior, because we are, after all, a supremely social species, and of all aspects of our Brain and body, the one that natural selection is least likely to ignore is that of our social behavior because the nature of our society determines our survival.
So the second half of the book is sort of gathering such evidence as exists.
There are some, but not much of it, that points to the idea that our social behavior has changed over our recent evolutionary history.
Earlier in your answer you said that people believe or say they believe that there's no biological basis for race.
Why do you think that this idea has gained such currency?
It seems like such an odd position to take just from an intuitive point of view looking at the world around us.
Yes, it's been taken largely for historical reasons that That began shortly after the Second World War, when people were particularly conscious of the pernicious effects of racism, and the idea developed that the way to abolish racism was simply to deny that races exist.
So it was a kind of simple-minded idea, but people have stuck with it ever since, and I think it's time they abandoned it.
Yes, it does suggest to me that to have taken a position that seems so counterintuitive suggests just how desperately people feel the need to fight what they conceive of as racism.
That if you have to fight racism by denying something that seems so biologically obvious, it seems to me you're in pretty dire straits.
I think so. It also implies a highly patronizing attitude to those you're trying to convince as if they If the holders of this view believe that racism can never be abolished unless you sort of brainwash people into thinking there is no real difference between human races, Yes, yes.
Well, you said that it was important to know, or at least you found it fascinating, and so do I, to look into the recent evolutionary history of our species, but that many scientists have been dissuaded from looking into this.
Because it leads into this dangerous territory of race, could you perhaps tell me what might we have learned had there not been this skittishness about race?
In what fields would we be better informed if people had not been afraid to go into this dangerous territory?
Well, it's hard to predict the future of scientific discovery, but I believe If scientists were less fearful of the subject of race, we would just be a lot further forward in understanding, at least in cataloguing the various differences between human populations, and therefore in understanding The pressures of natural selection in our recent past.
After all, when you find that one gene or version of a gene known as an allele, if you find one allele of a gene has increased in frequency, then that tells you that that population was under a certain kind of pressure to adapt to some challenge.
This, of course, is a great way of understanding the events that have driven recent human history.
Well, I share your curiosity to know what it is That has changed different populations.
But I suspect that aside from those who have a more historical and scientific interest in these matters, probably what is even more interesting to most people is simply to know or to acknowledge that different populations are themselves different.
And I think surely that's the area where people are terrified, simply to acknowledge that populations are different.
Yes, that's right.
And I think there's far less to fear from that knowledge than many people seem to think.
I mean, most humans as individuals, I believe, are very similar.
You know, we can all learn each other's languages.
Whatever language you're exposed to from a young age, you can learn with perfect fluency.
So this is a common trait Throughout the human population, and since language is the sort of defining feature of the human mind, it tells us that our minds are pretty much alike.
So I think, if I can use an analogy with ants, who are the other species at the pinnacle of sociality, what nature has done is to keep us as individuals very much similar, but what it is is change is the nature of our societies.
So the differences...
The significant differences between human populations are ones that you cannot really see in an individual at all.
There are very slight and subtle differences in social behavior.
And it means individuals sort of cohere and cooperate together in slightly different ways.
And that gives a slightly different cast to our various societies.
That, I think, is the essential difference.
And that's what I suggest in my book.
I suppose it's a matter of interpretation and degree, but I'm not sure it's correct to see the differences between, say, Central African society and Northern Asian society and dismiss them as the results of slight differences.
Well, of course, culture is extremely important and I don't wish to underplay the role of culture.
So I think the differences that arise between societies They are not totally cultural as is the dogma among social anthropologists today.
What I think is a more reasonable expectation is that although they are mostly cultural, there's a small genetic component.
And this small genetic component is one that sort of lies at the basis of each society's institutions.
So yes, there can be large differences.
There are large differences between societies around the world, but we can't say yet what What part is due to genetics and what part is due to culture.
But you are convinced that there is a genetic component and that is what in the minds of many anthropologists and sociologists and even scientists cast you into outer darkness.
Is that correct? In brief, yes.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm convinced that this is the case because it's not proven.
But I lay out in my book the reasons for thinking is quite plausible.
And this is another reason, besides the question of the biological basis of race, why I have been attacked by social anthropologists.
Yes. It is extraordinary just how closed one could describe the Western mind on these subjects.
And I recall that you wrote, I think very convincingly, that one of the reasons why the West has been dominant in the last several hundred years is because of the...
Open mind, the intellectually curious and the open mind that Westerners have had, which makes them open to new theories and to science.
Would it not be correct to say that, at least in this respect, when it comes to the biological basis of...
Population differences or even individual differences, that the Western mind is relatively closed.
I can imagine, well, I know that the Chinese, for example, are much less inhibited about this sort of thing than we are.
Yes, I don't know if I'd go quite so far as to say that the Western mind is becoming closed.
I think this is a parochial problem of the academic left in the US. They They're very fearful of each other, I think.
So if you step out of line just a little, particularly in this subject, if you write anything that doesn't accord with current dogma about the nature of race, you'll be branded as a, quote, scientific racist.
So I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a scientific racist and a racist.
The bottom line is you'll be set upon as a racist and your career will be destroyed.
So the whole of the academic left is sort of hoist on its own petard.
It's sort of captured by this monster it's created, which cannot brook criticism or dissenting thought.
And it's very sad.
And it has to change someday, I just hope, the sooner and the better.
Well, you just mentioned in particular in the United States, but I think it's not restricted to the United States.
In Europe, I think in some respects, there are even greater strictures on what people are allowed to think.
A book like the Belkur, for example, was never translated into any German language, despite its impact here.
And I would suspect that your book, I hope that your publisher, Penguin, is looking for translation rights into European languages or any other language, but my suspicion is your publisher is not succeeding.
Well, you're right, it hasn't placed the German rights, but it has placed rights in several other languages, so the book is not doing too badly.
Oh, into which languages will it be translated?
Well, I think it's going into Italian and Spanish, Japanese and Chinese so far.
Well, isn't that interesting?
I'd say bravo for the Italians and the Spanish.
I'm not at all surprised that the Japanese are interested in the book.
I recall the bell curve was translated into Japanese.
Phil Rushton's race, evolution, and behavior had considerable success in Japan.
The Japanese are not startled or surprised by this kind of thing.
In fact, I remember once when The Bell Curve came out, I was speaking with some Japanese associates, and they'd heard of The Bell Curve, and they wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
And I took a few minutes to summarize the contents of the book, not dwelling on the racial aspect, but not excluding that either.
And afterwards, they sort of looked at each other and said, well, doesn't everybody know that?
Ha ha ha! So, it's not scandalous to them, but you're suggesting that this closed-mindedness or this, well, I don't know if it's not closed-mindedness, at least a kind of defensiveness or an obscurantism is limited really to the academic left of the United States.
You would probably know best as a science writer, but...
What makes you think that it is limited in that way?
It seems to me it's pretty widespread.
Well, you may be right. I'm not well informed about the situation in other countries.
So the virus may have spread elsewhere, but I think this is a problem of the academic left rather than of the Western world as a whole.
I certainly hope that's the case.
Well, yes, we can all certainly hope that.
I... I'm sure you're aware of the Beijing Genomics Institute.
They seem to be, well, for our listeners who may not be aware of it, I understand it to be a fairly, quite well-funded government enterprise that's busily trying to determine the genetic basis for intelligence and perhaps other desirable characteristics, that they are taking the genetic basis for this sort of thing very seriously, that they hope to find out How to manipulate the genome in useful ways.
And if this is something at which the Chinese succeed, but at which we are not willing, there be dragons in our view, and we're not going to try any of that, is there a possibility that we could be left behind by the Chinese?
Well, that's certainly an interesting thought.
That particular experiment you mentioned on looking for genes for IQ, I think in fact it's a It was devised by an American psychologist working in London, Dr.
Plomin, who's been interested in intelligence for many years.
So I think what the Chinese have is Plomin's mathematically gifted children from the US. I think that's right, but I'm not sure.
And I think they've added a cohort of their own.
So they have a quite interesting mixed experiment going on.
Whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know.
I mean, it's very hard to find genes for IQ. They certainly exist, but I think the situation is that instead of there being a few easily discernible genes, There are a very large number of genes, each of which has a very small effect, an effect so tiny it's very hard to pick it up.
So I think it's an entirely open question as to whether the Beijing Genomics Institute will succeed.
Is that right? I tend to be more struck by the extraordinary progress that's been made in decoding the genome, and it's my expectation that the alleles for high intelligence, as well as many other characteristics, are likely to be found within the next several decades.
Are you more pessimistic in that respect?
Well, it's just a matter of how much money one's prepared to invest.
I think you're right. We may start to find quite a few of them over the next decade.
I think I'm right. I'm saying that as of now, there are no or very few alleles for intelligence that have been sort of confirmed beyond any doubt.
So we're right at the beginning of this episode.
So I'm sure we'll pick up a few more alleles as time goes.
But how much they will tell us remains to be seen.
Of course, the hope is that they'll tell us how the brain works.
But this is a very complicated issue, and these alleles will provide just one piece of the puzzle.
Yes, yes, I'm sure that's true.
But my sense of the work in China is that if it ever does become possible to fine-tune the human genome in order to...
To make desirable characteristics more widespread in the population, that the Chinese, and it's my sense from speaking with Japanese, I have a fair amount of contact with Japanese, Japanese would find no moral objections to this.
Whereas in the West, there's a huge amount of controversy about this, about playing God or about somehow manipulating things in unfair ways.
It seems to me that surely at some point it will be possible for parents to, either through embryo selection or some other way, give their children...
Specific and definite, concrete genetic advantages.
Do you see that as an ethically troubling thing?
What is your sense of whether we should do that, if it becomes possible to do that?
Well, I think you're absolutely right.
It certainly will become possible, and probably sooner than people expect.
But it is troubling, and I think we should go very carefully.
I mean, the nearest precedent I can think of is The liking in Asian countries, China particularly and also India, for male children as opposed to female children.
So this is a kind of interference in nature by aborting the female infants.
So at present China has a large excess of young males, which is very hard on them because many won't be able to find wives.
It's also demographically destabilizing and historically what people, countries do when they have an excess of young
men is to send them off to war.
Yes.
So this is an extremely undesirable outcome by any standard.
So applying this to the possibility of germline genetic engineering, I think it's a sort of big red flag warning us
to go very carefully.
I think anything that parents do is probably more likely to be benign than anything that any scheme that governments
might have in mind.
And yet does one really want to allow parents totally free choice?
If we could get together a package of good health alleles, say, which we could insert into every...
It seems hard to object to that, except that if everyone does it, then you might be inserting an unwelcome genetic uniformity into the human genome.
That's something to bear in mind.
And of course, the other thing is the usual slippery slope argument.
Once you've allowed genes for health, then you'll allow genes for beauty and intelligence and other desired qualities.
All this could be very dangerous.
I mean, if everyone tries to make their child into a Superman, you get a very unbalanced society.
I think how appalling it would be if we lived in a society where everyone had an IQ of 150.
I mean, such a society would drive itself into ruin in just a few generations, I would expect, given how intellectuals often aspers far-flung theories which have disastrous consequences.
That's very interesting.
I had not thought of making the parallel between this germline manipulation and this excess number of males in China.
But as you suggest, that is a very interesting red flag to be raised.
When people are left to their own devices, they sometimes make choices that they think are good for them, but that end up being very bad for society.
At the same time, Although Americans are very, very leery about anything that could be described as eugenics, the fact of amniocentesis being a common thing that results in abortions of fetuses that show genetic defects of some kind, that is in effect a eugenic undertaking.
So it's not as though Americans are completely opposed to the idea.
But I'm intrigued by your idea that a population of 150 would drive itself to perdition.
Are you really convinced of that?
I mean, is a population of 100, an average of population IQ of 100, as opposed to an average population of 70?
And here, to take the most controversial example, I suppose we could be talking about Denmark and Central Congo.
That difference seems to be salubrious rather than driving the Danes to perdition.
Well, I think the point I was making maybe in too flippant a way was that And all human societies we know of sort of work with a mixture of talents and abilities.
So if you make one particular ability uniform, like say intelligence, you may not be better off.
Yes, yes. Well, that was a point that struck me about your package of good health alleles.
If we all are carbon copies in some particular respect, then we do become subject to something like the potato famine, I suppose.
We're so uniform that if something strikes one down, it strikes us all down.
Yes, exactly. The potato blight or southern cotton corn blight And there are many examples from agriculture where you make a crop too uniform and you also make it highly vulnerable to devastating diseases.
So that definitely will be sort of one caution against a uniform package of health alleles.
But genetic engineers are very clever.
So once the idea had started, I'm sure they'd sort of soon learn how to vary the package.
Yes, yes.
Well, I... In my own case, I'm resigned to the inevitability of this.
Even if the United States and Western Europe ban this kind of engineering, I suspect that someone, the Cayman Islands or maybe the Cape Verde Islands, someone will permit it and have this booming business that will be available only to millionaires and their children.
And so in that sense, it would certainly lead to Greater inequality.
But I think that it's something that we're going to have to come to terms with rather than simply turn our backs on and say, this is horrible and we don't dare even think about it.
Yes, I fully agree with you.
I think we will have to deal with it.
I think so far, we haven't banned germline genetic engineering, but we've just made clear that anyone who wants to do it will have to Go through an elaborate sort of regulatory approval process.
And I think that's probably the correct approach.
And obviously it's something we should think very carefully about.
Is that the case?
I was under the impression that it has in fact been...
Well, I thought it was banned.
I didn't think it was actually legal.
There is an approval process for this for humans?
Well, there would be.
Let me think.
What is banned would be to...
Take an embryonic stem cell and raise it to term, that has been banned.
Yes, yes. But I don't think, and the question of altering an embryo during the in vitro fertilization process, I don't think that's been banned.
Maybe it hasn't been banned because no one has attempted it, no one's sure it would work yet.
But my suspicion is that that would be banned.
I think it's something everyone would agree we should go very carefully on, and I think that's what will happen.
Right. Yes, yes.
Well, you're right.
I think one of the most interesting things in your book is your discussion of radius of trust and how important that is in establishing societies where there is A wider range of cooperation and less tribalism, less factionalism, and that this is an important prerequisite for a more bountiful and fruitful society.
And this is in the speculative part of your book, of course, but you suggest that this is something that is At least to some degree, influenced by genes.
Of all the things that you discussed in that speculative portion, other things like deferred gratification and less violence, I think all of those are important, but the one that struck me most was this question of radius of trust.
And if radius of trust really is an important key to a Well, yes.
I think all forms of human behavior can be manipulated and modified by educational tax incentives and so forth.
I think it's very reasonable to say that trust is under genetic control, at least to some extent.
What has not been proved is that the radius of trust sort of varies from one population to another.
But it seemed to me that given the sort of review of tribalism provided by Francis Fukuyama in his wonderful book, The Origins of Political Order, one could see that the tribalism is the default state of human political organization.
It's a very effective way of organizing a society.
The largest land empire in the world, that of the Mongols, was a tribal society.
And therefore, it's very hard to escape from.
It's very hard to find a better way.
And that's why it's taken the various human populations so long.
And they've all done it on a slightly different timescale.
So with the Chinese escaping from tribalism first 2,000 years ago, and the Europeans clambering out of tribalism Just a thousand years ago.
So there's no reason to expect that everyone will be on exactly the same timetable.
Different populations have made different exits from tribalism at different times.
That's the situation as I read it.
So it seems plausible there is a genetic basis and that this has to be Which is why it's so hard to do.
But do we have the proof?
No, we don't. We just have a plausibility in the form of this oxytocin system about which a great deal is known already.
Of course...
It's difficult for me to imagine a foreign aid project based on expanding radius of trust.
We have a hard enough time suggesting that the Afghans or the Iraqis would live better if they have representative government.
There's something fairly concrete we can describe in terms of parliaments and governments and executives and judiciaries.
We have certain models for that.
But to aid a society, expand its radius of trust, I can't conceive of a project, a foreign aid project, that could even contribute in that direction, much less an American foreign aid organization proposing a project of that kind.
Well, I think you're right.
This is why foreign aid is so very difficult.
But although tribalism has a bad name, when we look down on it, It is a very rational human behaviour and it's sort of correlated, I think, with bad government.
So if you or I were Afghans, I don't think we would give up our tribalism in any way, given how bad the central government is and how we've learned over the centuries just to expect it to be purely an extractive force.
So we would cling to our tribalism at the very least until we saw some better option coming along.
Well, would it then be rational to take a society like Afghanistan or parts of Africa and just give up on the idea of central government?
That's in effect what seems to have happened in Somalia, although we don't consider that any kind of success.
But if we give up on central government and let tribalism run its course in smaller areas, is that a conceivable outcome for certain populations?
The West and other aid donors should just abandon various areas of the world.
I guess as has been the case in Somalia.
I don't know. It doesn't seem to be a desirable policy.
But I don't think anyone has a good solution of what to do with failed states.
Yes. There is a proper role for For states, and at its minimum, it's to provide order and security.
That seems to me a better situation than to have a group of warring tribes.
But how much outsiders can do to influence that, I don't know.
It's strictly limited. Do you see any real role for foreign aid, then, of the kind that the West has been practicing since, oh, mid-20th century?
Well, Jared, I'm not an expert on foreign aid.
I just know that, you know, I think it's generally agreed that many experiments in foreign aid have not been very successful.
They've just sort of aided kleptocracies.
Yes. I don't think it follows that we should cut it off, but we should always be sort of thinking hard how we can apply it more smartly.
If you don't mind, I'd like to shift now to your own experiences in this respect.
Have you always had these rather dissident views about race and genes, or did you come to these views in a gradual way?
And if so, what pushed you away from academic orthodoxy?
Well, I haven't really thought about race until the last few years when I was writing about the human genome.
That was part of my reportable duties of covering the human genome project.
I don't really regard myself as holding dissident views on race.
I think I hold a very common common sense view.
Race exists, but I'm opposed to racism.
I think that's a middle ground position that most people have.
And I think the critics of my book hold a far out position and one that has no factual basis, i.e.
that race does not exist in the biological sense.
Well, in that context, I thought it very interesting the huge variety of reviews that your book received, sometimes even in the same publication.
Scientific American, for example, had one review that was really quite favorable and respectful, and then they ran a different review that was almost contemptuous.
Has there been anything about the reception of your book that has surprised you?
Well, first I should say the standard of book reviewing in general is just very lamentably low.
Reviewers are not paid, particularly with science books.
I think book review editors don't really know the scientific field very well, so they're not very skilled at choosing good reviewers.
So I've, just from the experience of my previous books, I've come to expect very little of reviews.
As long as you get enough attention, whether in views or Radio or TV interviews to get a book talked about a little.
I think books will then sell by word of mouth.
So my books have generally been somewhat impervious to reviews, which has given me the luxury of not really caring too much about what they say.
That said, I do think the reviews of Troubles from Inheritance have been Unusually shameless, if I could say that.
I mean, very few of the reviewers have started by telling the reader what the book says.
I mean, it seems to me if you're reviewing a book, you have a choice.
Are you going to do a review as a service to the reader, or are you going to use it to promote your own personal political views?
And most reviewers of my book have fallen, alas, into the latter category.
They haven't... I have the courtesy to tell reader what the book is trying to say.
They just launched into various attacks on it.
And since they can't attack the book frontally because its message is basically accurate and solid, in my view, they do it by various standard tactics of guilt by association or trying to smear the book as racist, which it is not. Or by claiming repeatedly that the book is inaccurate, which again it is not.
So yes, I have been somewhat surprised at the extent of the depravity, if I may put it that way, of the current reviews of my book.
I'm a little surprised to hear though that even in the case of your earlier books, which were not so controversial, you were still generally dissatisfied with the quality of book reviews.
Of course, as an author myself, It is easy to be dissatisfied.
I think we all have a tendency to think, well, anyone who doesn't think that this is brilliant is wrong or perverse.
But, I mean, trying to look at things from an objective point of view, you've generally been disappointed with the quality of book reviews, even when your books have been less controversial.
Yes, I think that's fair to say.
Maybe, as you were implying, no author would ever Get a sort of perfect set of reviews.
But reviewing is unpaid, and it takes quite a lot of time and work to actually read a book carefully and review it well.
And for that and many other reasons, I think it's just a rather sort of unkempt corner of literary life.
I see. I see.
Well, I write book reviews and I also publish book reviews at American Renaissance.
And I'm always surprised when I hear rumors of people who write reviews of books they have not read cover to cover.
I hear about that.
I suppose that must happen.
But that just seems so utterly dishonest to me.
But I'm sorry to hear that your experience has been so discouraging in terms of just the quality of the review.
It's one thing to agree or disagree, but at least you'd like to think the reviewer has read your book and thought carefully about it.
But, well, as a science journalist, I assume that you've spent a lot of time with scientists Do you have any sense of what makes a good scientist?
What sort of people are scientists?
Are they different in any way from other people?
What is your sense of the sort of people they are?
You must have interviewed hundreds of them.
Do you have any conclusions about the nature of science or who scientists are?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
And I don't think I've ever formulated the answer to myself.
But I suppose it's fair to say scientists will think in a certain kind of way.
Perhaps some of them are more interested in things than in people.
So they're very interested in how things work.
I think they all have to be very hard working and optimistic.
I mean, science is a very hard occupation and most experiments lead nowhere.
And an awful lot of published research turns out to be wrong.
So you have to really hang in there and overcome the inevitable disappointments.
And in addition, you have to raise money all the time, which is difficult.
You have to build a team.
It's very demanding work.
So I have great admiration for People who succeed in science and they deserve all the fame and glory that comes to them.
I suppose, given all of these challenges and difficulties, the fact that certain areas of science lead to controversy and professional scorn is just one other burden that a great many scientists simply don't want to add to all the others that you've just described.
Yes, well, I think scientists tend to be a little too politically active for their own good.
It would be better if they just kept to the lab.
But there are many groups of scientists who enjoy being in the public eye and I guess they feel they can do a lot of good.
And sometimes I think perhaps that they...
They get too much involved.
The nuclear physicists want to protect us from nuclear war, and the environmental scientists want to save the environment, and the geneticists want to save us from racism.
It's good to have people caring about these things, but I sometimes think we have a little too many messiahs trying to save us from things.
I see. I see.
Well, now that you are no longer with The Times and you have completed this book, are you working on something else?
I'm sure you must have plans for yet more books.
Do you have any formulations in mind?
Well, I'm present on a book on the origins and history of language.
I see. So I've always been interested in the human past, and this is another but very important aspect of it.
Can you give us any foretaste as to what direction you plan to go in?
Well, the first part of the book is looking at the ideas about the evolution of language, which is a very difficult problem because language seems to pop up so suddenly in the evolutionary record.
Most of our faculties, the eye, air or sense of smell, You can trace back millions of years into the past, and they've developed very gradually.
This is how evolution does things.
But language, which is a sort of fully engineered faculty, just suddenly pops up sometime in the last five million years.
So it's very hard to explain, and all the more so because we have no species to compare ourselves to.
We probably killed off any of our rivals who did have language show.
So it's very hard to reconstruct the chain of events that led us to this amazing ability.
And the other half of the book is looking at historical linguistics.
There must have been...
There almost certainly was a mother tongue, a time when language had first developed, when the little tribe...
Who developed it, sort of spoke this single language, the mother tongue from which all today's living language must be descended.
So linguists have long despaired of sort of working back toward the mother tongue, but biologists who've entered the field with new tree drawing methods are more optimistic that they can get back closer to this first language.
Is it your view that all languages descend from a common mother tongue?
That language did not arise Independently, because it was my impression that linguists are at a loss to find any kind of commonality, in some cases, no cognates, no similar grammars, depending on what kind of isolated languages they're looking at.
Yes, you're right. The linguists feel you can't really go back more than 5,000 years into the past.
So you can define various sort of language families like Indo-European.
Yes. But you can't link these families together.
Now whether they all do in fact link to a single mother tongue in the past, we cannot prove.
It just seems likely that there was at one stage a single tongue or at least very few tongues.
The language is so unusual, it probably evolved only once, in which case there would have been a single mother tongue.
So I think there's a reasonable argument from plausibility, but it's somewhat academic since in no way can we sort of reach back 50,000 years into the past, which is the sort of minimum age for language.
We can reach back at most 15,000, but still we're sort of getting there and there's always hope of future progress.
Well, this sounds like a fascinating book, perhaps when it comes out.
I'll have an opportunity to speak to you again.
Thank you. I look forward to that.
I think most of the people who are listening to this podcast know of you primarily in the context of A Troublesome Inheritance, but of all the books that you've written, did you have one that is your favorite, one that you think made the best or most important contribution?
I suppose Before the Dawn was the most successful book.
It does cover a wide range of ground that now the book does.
I think the one that I enjoyed writing most came out many years ago.
It's called the Nobel duel and it was about the competition between two scientists to win the Nobel
prize for a certain aspect of the body's hormones. So that was a rattling good
yarn because they hated each other so much and it made a good tale. So those are the two books I
think I would mention. Isn't the one about the Nobel laureates, isn't that the one that was at
the Washington Post described it as the most uncomplimentary portrayal of scientists ever
published?
Oh, I think that's right.
Two very unusual characters going at each other hammer and tongs.
Well, that certainly makes for drama.
Well, Mr.
Wade, I certainly appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Thank you very much for your insights into your book and your own experience.
And I do look forward to speaking to you again about this new book about language.
When do you expect it to be out?
I guess it's hard to say, huh?
I'll probably finish it sometime next year, so maybe 2016.
I see. Well, we'll be looking forward to it.
Thank you very much again for being part of this conversation.
▲
Export Selection