Few
areas of science have contributed more to human misery than the study
of racial difference. In the 1920s, eugenicists from top American
universities promoted the sterilization of the unfit and later praised
Hitler’s racial codes while advocating laws that would exclude thousands
of Jews from our shores.
Contemporary
researchers have found it useful to examine genetic variations that
affect traits like diabetes in Native Americans or high blood pressure
in African-Americans. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, scientists in
the United States have largely avoided the classification of races as a
“futile exercise,” in the words of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza; the very concept of race is a matter of scientific debate.
In “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,”
however, Nicholas Wade argues that scientists need to get over their
hang-ups and jump into studies of racial difference. “The intellectual
barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of
studying the recent evolutionary past,” he writes.
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