Reviews of Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance"

Greg Laden — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:13:28 +0000

A list of reviews of Nicholas Wade’s book “A Troublesome Inheritance,” mainly by anthropologists and others who have investigated issues surrounding the concept of “race” in humans.

Bethune, Brian: Inheritance battles

Daniels, Anthony: Genetic disorder

Dobbs, David: The Fault in Our DNA

Fuentes, Augustín: The Troublesome Ignorance of Nicholas Wade

Geneticists, Lotsofthem: An Open Letter

Goodman, Alan: A Troublesome Racial Smog

Johnson, Eric Michael: On the Origin of White Power

Laden, Greg: A Troubling Tome

Marks, Jonathan: The Genes Made Us Do It

Marks, Jonathan: Review of A Troublesome Inheritance

Myers, PZ: The hbd delusion

O, Josyln (AAA): Is Cultural Anthropology Really Disembodied?

Orr, Allen H.: Stretch Genes

Raff, Jennifer: Nicholas Wade and race: building a scientific façade

Steadman, Ian: “Jews are adapted to capitalism”, and other nonsenses of the new scientific racism

Terrell, John Edward: A Troublesome Ghost

Yoder, Jeremy: Cluster-struck

Yoder, Jeremy: How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong

My Review of Nicholas Wade's Book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.

Greg Laden — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 14:18:26 +0000

I first heard about Wade’s book when a colleague started talking about bits and pieces of it. He was reading it pursuant to a writing a review. I asked the publisher for a review copy, which they kindly supplied, and started tracking the pre-publication reactions. After reading the first couple of chapters, I realized that I needed to write a review of this book, but I wanted to do something a bit more than a blog post. So, I contacted American Scientist. I had reviewed two books for them earlier. American Scientist is actually my very favorite science magazine (among magazines that are not peer reviewed research outlets). It is a bit higher level than Scientific American (which is also a good mag) in its treatment of subjects.

The book review editor told me that American Scientist had shifted its book review approach to be more of a notice section, mainly talking about books that they recommended to their readers without intensive critical reviews. But they felt that my review of this particular book would be important so they agreed to try out a more extensive review to feature in the next issue.

For this reason I’ve been mainly quiet about Wade’s book. I did attend an online seminar with him and Agustín Fuentes, during which I asked a few questions, but for the most part I decided to focus only on this printed review which would come out after the dust had settled around Wade’s publication date. Keeping my mouth shut has been painful (as some of you know from our private conversations).

And now that review is done, in print, and thankfully, available on line.

You can read it here.

My original plan was to point to the American Scientists review and at the same time provide a longer blog post with all the stuff that would not fit in the printed review. But as I wrote the review and interacted with the editors at American Scientist, the phrase “Normally our reviews are under 800 words” evolved into something more like “This is important, don’t worry about length. We’ll figure it out.” This is not something you hear from editors very often, especially in print media! In the end, the review that got published is the review I’d write on my blog, significantly improved with editorial input form Scientists’ Nightstand editor Dianne Timblin and the American Scientist’s Editor in Chief.

Note: The online review is one of those muti-page web pages, so don’t forget to read all of it!!!

Enjoy. Or rage. As you wish.

Nicholas Wade – Greg Laden's Blog

Reviews of Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance"

My Review of Nicholas Wade's Book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.