Troublesome Inheritance
In
his 2007 book “A Farewell to Alms,” the economic historian Gregory
Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because
their rich outbred their poor, and thus embedded their superior genes
and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the
historian Deirdre N. McCloskey noted that Clark’s idea was a “bold
hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists
such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before
last.” Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists
and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for
Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as
McCloskey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.
Now,
in “A Troublesome Inheritance,” Nicholas Wade, a longtime science
writer for The New York Times, says modern genetics shows that “the
three major races,” Africans, Caucasians and East Asians, are
genetically distinct races that diverge much as subspecies do, and that
their genetic differences underlie “the rise of the West.”
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