3524 Genetics, Race and Human History | Nicholas Wade and Stefan Molyneux
Evidence suggesting the biological reality of race and that ethnicity is more than just a social construct is something that few people are willing to honestly discuss. Against all available evidence, many academics insist that human evolution ended in prehistory. Nicholas Wade joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss his book "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History" and the impact of evolution and selective pressures on human populations. Nicholas Wade was a Science writer and editor with The New York Times and is the author of many books including: “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, ”The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures,” and “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.”A Troublesome Inheritance: http://www.fdrurl.com/Troublesome-InheritanceBefore The Dawn: http://www.fdrurl.com/Before-The-DawnThe Faith Instinct: http://www.fdrurl.com/Faith-InstinctFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I'm very, very pleased to have the one and only Nicholas Wade.
He was a science writer and editor with the New York Times and is the author of many fine books, including Before the Dawn, Recovering the Last History of Our Ancestors, The Faith Instinct, How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, and the one we're going to dip into a little bit today, A Troublesome Inheritance, Genes, Race, and Human History.
Mr.
Wade, thank you so much for taking the time today.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for your interest.
Now, before we dive into the troublesome aspect of our inheritance, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about some of the resistances that society as a whole, that my listeners, that some of your readers and some of your reviewers have had with the basic questions.
I was struck by a quote that you have in the book about some of the resistance within the scientific establishment to challenging existing dogmas.
I think it was the National Geological Society that resisted the idea that continents floated on the Earth's surface for about 50 years.
And the quote that really came across to me was, science advances one funeral at a time, or knowledge advances one funeral at a time.
So before we start diving into the controversies or the challenges of the ideas, I wonder if we can talk about where science is with relation to the idea of genetic differences between human subspecies or groups or ethnicities or races or whatever we want to call them.
Well, the academic community...
It tends to be rather monolithic in many ways.
And over history, it will sort of veer from the right to the left and back again.
And right now, for several decades, it's been in a very leftist mode, which is unfortunate because we who support universities don't get the benefit of objective, neutral opinions.
And this is particularly so in the case of Of race, where for rather very complicated historical reasons, social scientists in particular, but the academic community as a whole, have come to the view that the best way to fight racism is to deny, quite contrafactorily, that it has any biological basis.
So this movement started really in the 1950s, when everyone had the Holocaust much on their mind.
And people sort of readily accepted that it was best to play down the biological aspects of race, and this went playing down evolution too.
So many social scientists have no use for evolution, even though it is the informing theory of biology.
So you have this quite profoundly, I would say, anti-scientific attitude that reigns among in the United States and elsewhere.
Well, and of course, there's a system of peer review and of grant application and grant granting, which is supposed to keep some sort of purity within the scientific community, is a sort of double-edged sword insofar as if you wanted to talk about race and biology and so on, you're going to face an uphill climb in terms of being attacked.
And not just attacked like people disagree with you, but you may have your funding cut, you may not get tenure.
It could be disastrous for your career as a whole.
There is, I think, quite a strong chilling effect in the pursuit of these very important topics in the scientific community, which does arise, I think, out of some of the peer review process.
You have to have people recommend you for publication and approve your grants and so on.
That's exactly the case.
Peer review, whatever its merits and uses, and there are many, is nonetheless a force for conformity, particularly political conformity.
So if you don't conform to The views of your peers, you stand to jeopardize your grant and your career.
It's a very serious matter.
So that, I think, is why we find this extraordinary conformity among academics ranging from anthropologists even to geneticists, that there is no biological basis to raise.
Well, and as you've pointed out, there were some geneticists who penned responses to your book, but who neglected to do the rather important task of pointing out where your arguments or your data were incorrect, which, again, seems a little bit below the ideal standards of scientific objectivity.
Yes, sure.
That attack on my book was purely political.
It had no scientific basis, whatever, and it showed the more ridiculous side of this sort of herd The herd belief that academics have fallen into.
Obviously, if there were mistakes in my book, how many geneticists would it take to point them out?
Surely just one.
But there aren't any mistakes in my book, so therefore they had to gather 100 or 150 geneticists on their ridiculous letter to try and make it seem that I had made some horrible mistake, which I did not.
So let's start talking about the content.
And one of the things I sort of wanted to frame this discussion with is that people on the left are very mocking and sometimes hostile towards Republicans or fundamentalists or people who they consider to be anti-science, deny evolution and so on.
The brain is our most expensive organ.
It's the one that consumes most of our resources.
And the idea that the human brain would remain identical across different groups of humans who were separated by tens of thousands of years and inhabiting wildly divergent climates and environments would seem to me to be very anti-scientific itself.
And there's nothing we need to fear about the examination of biological differences.
None of them come with any moral judgments or any sort of normative conclusions about relative value or worth.
There's no such thing as supremacy or inferiority.
There is merely adaptation to local environments.
So I wonder if you could step people through the sort of out-of-Africa hypothesis and where the three major races, and I know you've included two sub-races in terms of continents, but how that process wove itself out genetically over the past, I don't know, 100,000, 150,000 years or so. - 100,000, 150,000 years or so. - Yeah.
Well, the basic genetic fact is that as long as you have a pool of individuals who breed among themselves, you'll never get sort of great variation.
I mean, there'll be internal genetic variation, but everyone will share in this pool.
But as soon as you start Spreading this pool out so people can no longer intermarry.
And assuming that evolution is going to continue, which it certainly will, then it follows that in each of these dispersed groups, evolution will now start to occur independently.
So this is what has happened to the three major races since we separated.
Although it's only very recently in evolutionary time, like we have 50,000 years ago, When we came out of Africa, and Asians and Europeans separated probably 10,000 years after that.
So even though the separation time is very short, nonetheless, there has been time enough for evolution to continue independently in these three groups, and that is why you see the sort of fairly minor differences, not only those that are visible to the naked eye, there are differences in skin and hair color and physique and scalp, But also probably minor differences in behavior as well.
So as you say, the brain is not exempt from evolution any more than any other organ of the body.
Everything is subject to evolution, and evolution cannot stop.
And it's enormously rapid.
One of the estimates that you talk about in your book is that 8% of the human genome has changed under recent evolutionary pressure.
And that is an extraordinary amount.
Because when I was growing up, evolution was considered to be, you know, in the millions of years and so on.
But we've seen very rapid evolution that has occurred within a few thousand years among human populations.
I think that was a surprise to everyone, to see just how much...
How heavy recent evolution has been.
Now, in retrospect, it's fairly understandable because here, as a species, we were leaving our accustomed habitat in the savannas of Africa, and we were exploring all kinds of totally different climates and adapting to different diets and different circumstances.
There were enormous evolutionary pressures bearing down on us as soon as we started dispersing from Africa, and there were probably pressures of a different kind continuing with Africa.
So all three major branches of the human race have been evolving at a pretty rapid clip in the last 50,000 years ago, and that was the very surprising result that has come out of modern studies of the human genome.
Now, I wonder if you could help people distinguish between genetics or genes and alleles, which I think is very, very important because, as you point out in the book, human beings share the same genetics, but it is the expression in alleles, I think, that is the defining characteristic of the potential differences.
Yes, you're right.
That is the important point.
We all have the same set of genes.
I forget how many there are nowadays.
I think that people have settled on a number of, like...
20 or 25,000 human genes.
So everyone on Earth has that same set of genes.
But there must be a variation somewhere or we'd all look like, or we'd all be clones of each other.
So where the variation comes in, it's in each gene, say the gene for insulin, has developed minor differences from one population to another.
So, when you have...
So, in each population, you'll have sort of maybe 10 or 20 versions of the insulin gene.
So, these versions are something called alleles, which means a different, an alternative form of a gene.
So, it's these alleles that make members of a family differ slightly from another, and also, it's a difference...
In the commonness of these alleles that make races slightly different from one another.
And the question of culture, to me, has been fascinating.
And I have for many years been fascinated by the question of culture and the Industrial Revolution, which we can get to in a few minutes.
But the question of culture and its genetic basis.
On the left, in general, and I think this comes out of Marxist economic determinism, there is this argument that human beings are like water.
You just pour them into any container, the container being culture.
And the human being will take the shape of that container and the sort of maybe there's some mild epigenetic phenomenon, but basically we are blank slates to be written on 100% by environment.
There is a lot of information that seems to be coming out of examinations of the human genome that is – I don't know how to put this nicely – Pushing back somewhat against the sort of blank slate or human beings as a liquid that can be poured into any cultural container.
I wonder if you could step people through some of the challenges to the leftist narrative of the blank slate.
That, as you say, has been the dominant orthodoxy of the social sciences, and it still is.
I think the first sort of major crack in it or the first major assault in it came from Noam Chomsky with his idea that The rules of language are so complex, you couldn't possibly expect a baby to learn them from scratch.
But there must be some innate mechanism, a sort of language learning machine that allows a baby to understand the language spoken around it and to build on the internal syntactical structures that its neural wiring is presenting itself.
So language is a very nice example of something that is a hybrid between genes and culture.
The genes set up the learning mechanism, but culture provides the whole content of any particular language.
And I think there are many other aspects of our mind, particularly our social behavior, that represent the same mix of genes and culture.
The genes must supply, when you come to think of it, Lots of restraining mechanisms that change our inherently selfish nature as individuals and reshape us into very sociable beings who don't just go out and kill each other for an advantage.
We have all kinds of inbuilt mechanisms that restrain us from killing one another and doing all kinds of bad things.
So it's this mixture between the genes and the The cultural forms in which we forbid violence, that give us our justice system.
So there must be lots of behaviours that have a genetic basis, the genes of which we have not yet identified, but they are surely there and we will find them in time.
Well, and I can certainly see that in a tribe, it's less overhead if people self-police for cultural or social or moral norms.
In other words, if you feel guilt or shame or you self-attack for breaking a rule, then you're going to comply without the waste of resources of external ostracism or attack or that sort of stuff.
So I can certainly see that it would liberate resources within the tribe if people self-policed.
However, if they self-policed to the point where they lost their capacity for any kind of aggression, Then that would cause them to be more easily overtaken by some other tribe.
Yes, I think that's right.
Living in a society that's very complex, you need to be kind and open to the fellow members of your community, and you need to be prepared to be very aggressive to members of outside communities, particularly in our early days as hunters and gatherers, When these little tribes were fighting with each other almost every day in many circumstances.
Right.
Now, let's touch upon one of the challenges that I think gave rise along with, of course, the Second World War and Nazism.
But the question of eugenics, I think, is important and needs to be discussed because whenever we start talking about genetics and populations and so on, a lot of people's minds do drift.
towards eugenics.
Now, of course, eugenics is practiced by everyone all the time.
You know, who you choose to have as the mother or father of your children is a part of eugenics.
The welfare state, you could argue, by taking resources from richer people and giving them to poorer people is a form of eugenics.
However, the question of state intervention directly in fertility, in terms of sterilizing people considered to be substandard in ways that could never really be objectively defined.
Could you help differentiate people's fear of sort of state-driven eugenics programs with the natural eugenics of selection by individuals and by groups for fitness characteristics?
Well, I think it's helpful to distinguish between what you might call positive eugenics and negative eugenics.
So Francis Galton, who invented the idea of eugenics, his idea was of purely positive eugenics.
In other words, he wanted to encourage the leaders of society in various ways, the intellectuals or otherwise, to breed among themselves and thus somehow to raise the quality of people in society.
That actually is very difficult to do, and in many ways it wouldn't work because the genes of interest are too complex to enhance in a simple way.
So Galton's idea was then taken up mostly by the left in both Britain and the United States and these leftist academics changed Galton's idea of positive eugenics into one of negative eugenics because it's much easier to get rid of genes you think are bad and it was from the eugenic programs set up by academic geneticists at leading Institutions in the United States,
Harvard and Michigan and Stanford, that led to the American eugenics program, which was adopted almost unchanged by the National Socialists in Germany, except that they added to it Jews and they changed the method from sterilization to murder.
So certainly people have a very well-founded fear of negative eugenics.
And with regards to the West, which has been a giant puzzle, of course, around the world that was superseded historically by Chinese or other East Asian civilizations, which were far more advanced and had complex layers of bureaucracy that were open to a meritocracy and paper currency and interest rates and banks and all of these things when the Europeans weren't...
Weren't quite so advanced, but there has of course been over the last few hundred years a massive vaulting forward of Western innovation, of technology, of I think a wonderful state of mind that was described by the physicist Richard Feynman, which is that all science is founded on skepticism of expertise, you know, that we go with empiricism rather than with tradition.
And I've heard some of the arguments around...
You know, that the Black Death would wipe out the poorer and therefore maybe the less intelligent people, thus liberating more intelligence.
But I think you've sifted through some of the data and got some fascinating ideas as to what propelled in England in particular the Industrial Revolution, which is, I think, the single biggest event in human history in terms of changing people's capacities to live and thrive, as well as the innovation of the West as a whole. the single biggest event in human history in terms of I wonder if you could step people through some of the arguments put forward to explain this phenomenon that has resisted being explained for so long.
Well, the causes of the Industrial Revolution are very complex, so much so that there is no agreed explanation among economic historians, even though it is the prime issue in economic history.
But what I think is new is bringing to bear the possibility of a genetic change, as you have implied.
So, the reason this is a very interesting exercise is that Darwin got his idea of natural selection from Malthus.
And Malthus was interested in the growth of the English population.
In his fear that as population increased, it would outrun the production of food and it would lead inevitably to starvation.
Now, as it happened, at the very moment Malthus was writing, England was breaking out of the Malthusian trap, and so Malthus' fears did not come to pass, but they were in fact true of all previous history.
That this is indeed what happened repeatedly as populations outgrew their food supply.
Now what Darwin perceived was that when people are at the edge of starvation and are fighting for their survival, anyone who has a very slight advantage over anyone else is going to leave more children.
And it was this insight that gave him the idea of natural selection.
So you might step back a little and ask, well, if it was the growth of the English population in the 12th to 19th centuries that gave Darwin the idea of natural selection, maybe natural selection was indeed at work in that very population.
And there is evidence from several sources that that population was changing in social behavior.
And we can see, for example, that the rates of literacy were steadily going up from the 12th to the 19th century.
The rates of homicide were steadily going down.
The rates of saving were going up.
And all these differences in social behavior preceded the Industrial Revolution.
So therefore, it's reasonable to ask if they may not have been, in fact, a major problem.
Contributory cause of the Industrial Revolution.
In other words, there was a change in the social nature of the population, very similar to another major change that occurred when we made that transition from being hunters and gatherers to settled societies.
That was the other big revolution in human social history, from being solitary hunter-gatherers to living in large settled societies.
The Industrial Revolution, you can argue, It was another equally big transition, and may also have depended on a genetic change.
Right.
I was reminded when I was reading the book of that classic exchange between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, where F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the rich are different from you and I, and Hemingway said, yes, they have more money.
And of course, the question about the relationship between intelligence and wealth is very complex.
And I think it's fair to say that in general, and I think the data bears this out, that as IQ increases, wealth accumulation tends to increase because there's greater deferral of gratification, a more willingness to work hard in the moment and to save and to plan for the future and so on.
And I think as you point out, the rich in England were having about twice the number of surviving babies relative to the poor, which meant there were too many rich to stay in the upper class.
So they kind of had to sift down like snowflakes to lower classes, bringing some of the high intelligence or high IQ genetics with them and thus incentivizing.
in a sense, spreading intelligence through the population, which created a lot of the fertile conditions for the Industrial Revolution.
Well, there certainly was a trickle-down effect of social behavior.
Now, I think one should be...
We're very careful in defining intelligence as the most important aspect of that.
I think lots of different kinds of social behaviour, particularly the propensity to save, i.e.
to put off immediate gratification and the reduction in violence, were part of what trickled down.
Now certainly greater intelligence does not hurt.
But if you look at the world today, East Asians, for example, have higher average IQs than Europeans do, and their societies are successful, but not necessarily more successful than that of Europeans.
So I don't think there's a sort of one-to-one correlation between IQ and GDP. I think other social behaviours are equally important, particularly trust, cohesiveness, You know, willing to trust institutions.
The escape from tribalism is particularly important.
So all these other things go into the mix.
Well, I mean, and the question of IQ, as you point out, is only one part of innovation and creativity within a society.
I think one of the researches you pointed out in the book, Mr.
Wade, was talking about how Chinese society in particular rewarded intelligence, that 30% of the higher-level mandarins came from the very lowest classes because there was a real meritocracy.
Anyone could take the exams to get into the, I guess, relatively high IQ occupations within the civil service.
But at the same time, there was a very strong repression of dissent.
And dissent has, of course, its pluses and its minuses.
It can be destabilizing to existing political orders, but it also embodies the creative destruction of Western capitalism, which is the desire to overturn whatever is there with something that hopefully is better from an economic productivity standpoint.
And I think this is one of the reasons why there is this stereotype that sort of the East Asian communities are incredibly great at executing, but not quite as great at innovating, and there may be something to do with that.
I'm not.
Well, you put it very well.
It is a great problem, a very interesting issue, as to how to account for the greater average IQ of East Asian populations.
So the explanation you suggest, it was these examinations from very early on in Chinese history that awarded the scholars and allowed them to be rich and support more surviving children.
That certainly could be a factor.
However, I think it's too early to say that that was certainly the case because scholars are still debating the issue.
We don't have a final answer.
Some people argue that, well, the numbers...
In the mandarinate, which was too small to affect the whole population.
On the other hand, you can argue that this practice went far, far back in Chinese history when the population numbers were much smaller and could well be a process that affects the whole population right now.
The other thing you mentioned, the conformity, I think that also empirically is true.
East Asian societies do seem to be much more conformist than Western societies after the Renaissance.
So this could be something that holds back their economic productivity.
Let's turn to the question of aggression, which is one of these highly complicated and ambivalent about it in that aggression is kind of how we got to the top of the food chain, but it's not so great when we turn on each other.
So, you know, it has its sort of good and bad.
And I've done research in the past talking about how...
Aggression is really a potentiality in terms of genetic expressions, in that there were particularly young boys who, if not exposed to physical abuse as children, grew up to be relatively peaceful, but if they were exposed to physical abuse as children, it triggered epigenetic changes that had them almost certainly We're good to
But of course, as you point out, I think it was a 90-fold decrease in homicides over the past 700 or 800 years in England.
And what has changed genetically in humanity over the slow process of attempting to civilize, you know, we wild, bald apes?
What has changed over time genetically that has helped dampen down some of the wild aggression of our ancestors?
Well, it certainly is true there's been a steady decline in aggression, which is very surprising because you You might well suppose that it would go the other way, that it would be the most aggressive societies that would come to be top of the heap, and yet it hasn't been.
Maybe it's through rather narrow accidents in history, and the Mongol Empire might well have conquered Europe, so we could all be under Mongol rule by now, but for whatever reason that didn't happen, and the level of violence that Steven Pinker showed in his book, His wonderful recent book has steadily declined.
So it is a major issue as to how that happened on an individual basis.
You can see that people who are aggressive toward their neighbors or their friends would soon be killed or ostracized by This is certainly what happens in tribal societies.
If someone is continually aggressive, the members of the tribe will discuss what to do about it, and usually they will assign the individual's own family to kill him so that there is no blood feud set up.
But I think it's probably a separate question as to why...
Violence between societies has also reduced.
And I don't see that anyone has the answer to that question.
Now, let's talk about some of the differences between state societies and tribal societies.
And I sort of try not to divide societies into these bichromatic rainbows if it's either one or the other.
So, of course, there are elements of tribalism within the West and elements of statism within the Middle East and in Africa, or sub-Saharan Africa at least.
The growth of the state relative to tribalism has been, I think, a pretty defining characteristic, at least, of Western democracies.
Could you help people understand the sort of split between these two major groupings in societies and what might promote a society to go in either direction?
Well, I think the default political organization of human societies is one of tribalism.
It's one of kinship.
You support your family and tribes usually composed of related families.
And when they get so large that people aren't very closely related, they tend to sort of split up into groups that are more closely related.
So if you take a long view of history, you can see that a major development has been the escape from tribalism.
Which is very difficult because tribal societies can in fact be highly successful and highly complex and the Mongols after all were a tribal society.
The great weakness of tribal societies is succession so when the chief dies there's almost always a fight between his sons as to who will succeed and a rather long bloody period of chaos will ensue before it's all sorted out again.
So The first people who escaped from tribalism were the Chinese.
And this, I think, was largely a matter of population pressure.
The more people you have, and the larger units you fight in, the more necessary it is to have an organization based on merit rather than kinship ties.
But once you've broken out of Of tribalism, then you're into the beginnings of the modern state.
Now, it took the Europeans a lot longer to do that.
It wasn't really until about 1000 AD, 1000 years after the Chinese achieved this, that the Europeans started to leave tribalism behind them, an event often marked by the time when the King of the Franks became the King of France.
And for much of Africa and the Middle East, That transition has not yet occurred.
I think for other complicated reasons, I think in Africa it's maybe has been a matter of lack of population.
Demography is very helpful and in fact probably necessary to escape from tribalism.
You just need large numbers of people in a single place to make the mechanisms of tribalism no longer efficient.
In the Middle East, you've had people who ruled the Middle East In a very rapacious way, ever since the first Arab dynasties, followed by the Ottomans and the Mongols and then the Europeans,
all these regimes have essentially ruled in the same way, which is to extract as many taxes from the citizenry as they could and give nothing back.
So in those circumstances, it's a very rational behavior To distrust the government and to trust only your kin.
In other words, you stick with tribalism because that's what works for you.
Well, and I can certainly understand how tribalism doesn't provide much of a net negative as long as you're fighting other tribes.
However, when you start to fight the kind of armies that you can raise through a state, through taxation, through the development of a tax collecting class that is loyal to the state rather than to a particular tribe...
Well, you're going to face a lot larger armies that can be generated by, say, the Chinese government than you would by some local Arab tribe.
So I think then it becomes, you know, we have to join together, we have to get the same taxation base, we have to get the same size of armies, otherwise we're going to be overrun and incorporated into the new state in the sort of expansion of the Roman Empire kind of way.
Yes, I think many people don't really like to admit the large role of Of military force in shaping our past and maybe even our genetics.
But after all, we are the descendants of the people who came out top in these sanguine struggles.
And they lasted for a very long time.
They lasted throughout our hunter-gatherer history, which was the first 185,000 years of the human species existence.
And then they lasted through much of the tribal period that followed.
So it's only It's only in the last thousand years or so that we've been free of tribalism.
The question of the distinction or the distinctiveness between human races is something that gives people a lot of room to trip up and, I think, to get confused.
Sort of a guard-of-the-gaps argument because there is, of course, we know that human beings are the same species, partly because we can interbreed between the races.
And because of that, there's a lot of blending and there's a lot of overlap.
But what are the arguments as to why we should differentiate in three major races and not, I think, some of the estimates have gone as high as 63 different races, but what are the arguments as to why we should try and narrow it down to three with the potential extra of two continental races?
Well, I don't think there's any reason to prefer one number of races over another, except as a sort of explanatory principle.
The concept of race is very fluid, so it really depends on what measure you're using to define race as to how many races you come up with.
An analogy that's often used is to say, well, how many hills are there in New Hampshire?
Well, it depends on what your definition of a hill is.
By one definition, there can be three, and by another, there can be a thousand.
So it's just the same with races.
It depends on how many differences do you want to find I think it's easy to start with the fact that there are three major races, and these follow the sort of major population splits in human history.
So the first major population split is when one little group comes out of Africa and populates the rest of the world.
And then this little group, as it grows in numbers, Starts to divide into Europeans and East Asians.
So there, right away, you have sort of three major human groups, which the man in the street can differentiate at a glance.
We all look sort of reasonably different.
So there you've got three races.
Well, if you follow it a little further and look at the various, start looking on a sort of continent, on a geographic basis, well, The people who inhabited North and South America can be considered another race, since they're slightly different from...
It seems now they're a mix of Europeans and East Asians who got right to the top of East Asia and Siberia and then crossed the Bering Strait.
And these people were not pure East Asians, they were a mixture of East Asians and Europeans.
So American Indians then...
Native Americans provide a fourth race, and the people who got to Australia, which was a sort of very early migration, and it seems not to have been repeated, and once people got to Australia, they managed to fend off all further invaders, So they remained an isolated population.
And that includes people from Australia and New Guinea that was attached to it.
Australasians provide a fifth race.
So now you can go on, you can sort of define seventh and eighth races if you wish to.
It all depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
Right, okay.
Now, one of the reasons I think, and I know that this is a challenge to bring this information to people, but I think or I feel that I have a very strong responsibility, or I think those of us who are willing to explore these topics have a strong responsibility because you could argue that some very disastrous decisions or I think those of us who are willing to explore these topics have a strong responsibility because you could argue that some very disastrous decisions have been made in terms of foreign
Because there's this sort of idea that people in the West have, they look at, say, a country like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and they say, well, I would be absolutely, unbearably, horrifyingly miserable in that environment, so they must be just waking up every morning and wishing they were just like us.
And so if we take out that dictatorship under Hussein, and we attempt to impose a Jeffersonian-style democracy on Iraq, they'll just be rushing to it like kids to a candy bowl on Halloween, and it's all going to come out hunky-dory.
Well, our sociologists have totally our sociologists have totally let us down.
And because they deny or are not interested or pay no attention to evolution, They therefore fail to acknowledge that there could be genetic and therefore long-standing differences between societies.
So because they haven't told us that, no one acknowledges or is aware of the high probability that the institutions of every society are not purely cultural.
They have a genetic basis.
And although this genetic basis is probably pretty similar because...
Humankind is all a single species and we're all very close to each other genetically.
Nonetheless, because evolution has occurred independently in these societies for the last 40,000 years or longer, the genetic basis for these institutions may be slightly different.
That means, although behavioral genes can certainly be overridden by culture, nonetheless, there is a much profounder difference between Iraqi institutions and And American institutions than the sociologists have told us.
They keep telling us everything is cultural and therefore it can be easily changed.
But this is false.
It's not just cultural.
It's culture plus a certain measure of genetics.
We don't really know how big or small.
And this accounts for the inertia of institutions.
They're rather slow to change in any society because they're based on genetically influenced social behaviors.
Which differ from one major society to another.
So that's why you should be very cautious and humble in trying to transplant an American institution into a non-American or non-European society.
By and large, it doesn't work.
And I think our experience in Haiti, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, it's all pointing the same way.
This doesn't work.
So be a little careful about how you plan to do things.
Well, I think it's the old argument that if the woman doesn't love you for who you are, kidnapping her isn't going to change her mind.
And of course, these cultures have had the example of the West for hundreds of years, or at least you could argue over the last 50 years in very vivid movies and music and books and all of that.
And a lot of them have not made that particular transition.
And so it is that their cultures and their institutions are deeply rooted.
And to our eyes, they look horribly unjust.
But two, their eyes, our institutions look horribly flawed as well for a variety of reasons.
And I think that basic mistake of looking at other cultures and saying, well, they just want to be like us.
And if we have to go in with force to turn them into us, don't worry, they'll thank us later.
Like, don't worry, honey, the fact that you're in the back of my windowless van being driven to Vegas for a marriage, you'll love me afterwards.
I mean, we would never accept that in an individual level, the use of force to impose values.
But we seem to have very little problem with it, too.
The absolute disaster of the Middle East and now with the migrant wave through to Europe of imposing that on other cultures with no sense of how intransigent a lot of these institutions are.
Sorry, that's not even a question.
I just want to put that point out there and get your thoughts.
I agree with you entirely.
It implies the very important point that our institutions are not superior to other people's.
Our institutions work best for us, just as Iraqi institutions work best for them.
Now, it's true there are big disadvantages in tribal institutions, but it's up to Iraqis to figure out how to make the transition from tribal to a modern state, just as Europeans made that transition, not without a hell of a lot of war and turbulence, but it's something that each society has to go through.
And we should recognize, as you say, that each institution grows organically out of the nature of the people who it serves.
Well, it's like in manufacturing a pill.
Like the first pill is going to cost you $10 billion and the second pill is going to cost you a dollar.
So coming up with the institutions in the West was hugely difficult and hard and bloody, as you point out.
If anybody who wants to reproduce them, it's not like the West has a patent on the separation of church and state and you have to pay billions of dollars to whoever came up with the idea to implement it.
Anybody can implement it who wants and if they don't want to, we should listen to them.
Now, the other thing that goes on, and this is more within the West domestically, there's this game.
It's a rather dark and deadly game in some ways.
It's played by the left.
And what they do is they say, we're going to look at the field of human endeavor across particular ethnic groups or genders, and we're going to find discrepancies in outcomes.
And we are then going to ascribe all discrepancies in outcomes to prejudice, to bigotry, to racism, to sexism, to misogyny, or whatever.
One of the things I find fascinating about the examination of the contact or overlap points between genetics and culture is that the disparities in outcomes between particular groups, and we can go all the way from the very top in the West,
which is the Askenazi Jews clocking in at, what, 115 IQ and 120 plus when it comes to verbal skills, down to blacks who are clocking in at around 85 to 90 in terms of IQ. And this, again, doesn't explain everything, but if we accept that IQ has some relevance to success within an IQ-based society, obviously the IQ in sub-Saharan Africa was perfectly matched to that environment, but North America is not that environment anymore.
Is there not some capacity for us to at least push back on the argument put forward by the leftists that all discrepancies in outcomes must be the result of prejudice if we can start to look at the underlying fundamentals of genetics and culture, which doesn't make us complacent, but simply gives us a more factual place from which to start to alleviate some of these differences?
Yes, I would certainly agree.
I mean, the discrepancies I don't think are all due to intelligence, so that's certainly true.
And they could be due to sort of hard work and persistence to any other human traits.
But it's certainly true that the differences in effort and ability, at least in a true meritocracy, will by definition explain most of the differences in outcome and the role played by prejudice and discrimination, I would think, is small and continually diminishing.
Well, and there is, of course, the environmental factors to help make that case.
I wonder if you can step people through some of the big examples that is cited in your book, one of the many, is the difference between North and South Korea, where, of course, the populations are genetically indistinguishable.
Right.
Well, that's a very interesting test case.
And there, I think, you have to ascribe the great difference in outcomes to institutions.
So, North Korea is a Repressive autocracy and South Korea is a vibrant modern economy.
So surely the difference in institutions must be a sufficient explanation for those different outcomes.
And it also, I think, helps to explain, as you point out, over $2 trillion has been poured into the Third World by Western countries and other civilizations.
I mean, the results have certainly not matched expectations.
Let's at least go that far.
And given the...
We had Charles Murray on the show a little while back, and he, of course, with the Belker, have talked a lot about IQ, but he's also talked about, even if we say it's 100% cultural, nobody knows how to change another person's culture anyway.
Nobody knows how to go into another culture and rewire it from the ground up.
So the intransigence of...
Modes of existence within particular societies does not appear to be very much open to outside influence.
Maybe something that comes from within might be more revolutionary, but it does go, I think, a long way.
Taking this approach goes a long way towards helping to explain why certain goals have not been achievable when we try to sort of help other groups.
I think that's right.
I mean, poor countries are poor and rich countries are rich.
Not because of differences in resources, but because they have different institutions.
So however much aid you pour into a country, unless you change its institutions, all that money is going to be wasted.
And that is largely what we see from a lot of foreign aid invested in many African countries and elsewhere.
As you apply, it doesn't really matter if these institutions are genetically As I've been arguing, or purely culturally, it's sufficient to observe that they're long-enduring and hard to change.
So unless you change them, you won't see any improvement in results.
Now, just to sort of close off, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about...
Your decision process in taking on this kind of topic, it is not a topic that comes without cost.
It is not a topic that comes with great social accolades and ticket tape parades and thank heavens you published this work.
Obviously, there are some people like myself and others who very much appreciate the way that you've put together the evidence in a very readable and entertaining and erudite fashion.
But you must have, of course, known that, you know, especially since people saw what happened to Hernstein and Murray with the bell curve and, of course, what has happened to James Watson recently talking about human biodiversity and other people.
What was your thought process in deciding to write this book?
And it is a huge investment in time and research and so on.
And what have the results been positive and negative of bringing this kind of information to the forefront?
Well, maybe I was a little naive, but my job has been as a science writer.
So when I worked for the New York Times, I was writing a lot about the decoding of the human genome.
And science writers are always looking out for topics they can turn into books.
So I soon began to realize that That the genome was producing lots of information about human races, and yet no one was writing about it.
And when I interviewed people, they were strangely reluctant to talk about it.
Sorry to interrupt, but you see a market opportunity, not necessarily a smoking crater, which is wavy, what it sometimes turns out to be for people.
Sorry, go ahead.
Right, yeah.
It just seems to me this was a great topic for a book.
I'd never taken any particular interest in race before, and I'm not particularly interested in it now.
It was just a book topic, and one which I thought it was my duty to write about, because it's certainly an important subject, and lots of new information relevant to it was being produced, and no one was writing about it.
So therefore, it just seems to me a pretty obvious proposition to write a book about it.
Well, obviously, I realize it's controversial, but I just assumed that if I'm laid out the facts, as I did, and bearing in mind that you like many journalists who write books, essentially I've written all my book in daily articles for the newspaper.
So the book rests squarely on the sort of 20 or so articles I wrote about human races and the genome in the New York Times.
So I assumed that people would be by now sort of familiar with the subject and with the drift I was taking.
So the first part of the book, as I point out, is purely factual, and it's based on what I wrote in the New York Times.
The second half is more speculative.
We've discussed a lot of it here, and I thought, well, people will find that interesting and agree or disagree with it as they wish.
So I'm very happy with the book.
I wouldn't change a word of it.
I think it forms a useful service.
I've now retired from the New York Times, so I don't really mind when leftist scientists sort of act up and sign letters condemning me.
It makes them look ridiculous, not me, as far as I'm concerned.
And I just hope that as people get more acquainted with The facts, they'll come to realize that I'm broaching a subject that needs to be broached, that has to be dealt with sometime, that I've dealt with in a reasonable, non-racist, equitable way.
And I hope that despite the heavy criticism the book received when it first came out, people will come to see in time that it was a useful contribution.
Oh, absolutely.
And I just wanted to say, from a reader's standpoint, when I first got the book, I'm like, ooh, good!
It's very long!
And as I went through it, and I was pausing to take notes and talk to my friends about what ideas were brought up, and very stimulating on just about every page.
I can't tell you the bitter disappointment that I had when I realized that the last quarter is all annotations and references and so on, because those aren't that much fun to read.
So I was very disappointed when I came to the end, and I hope that you will continue to, of course I'm sure you will, to share the elegance of your pen and the insightfulness of your intellect with the world.
We'll put links to this book below, and perhaps we can lure you back another time to talk about the Faith Instinct book, which I also found to be fascinating.
But yeah, the book is called, just in case you're listening to this and can't directly click on getting a hold of your own copy, the book is called A Troublesome Inheritance, Genes, Race, and Human History.
It will be noted on the video low bar in the description below.
You can click on it to get your own copy, and it'll also be attached to the notes for the podcast podcast.
Mr.
Wade, thank you so much, of course, for your contribution to Human Knowledge and for your time today.
