Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade was a leading New York Times science writer for three decades. He left the paper weeks after the May publication of his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, a book many reviewers say is a full-throated defense of “scientific racism.” Wade’s views raise questions about his tenure at the Times, and about corporate media vigilance on coverage of racism.
There are many reasons media fail to adequately challenge racism, particularly racism in high places (FAIR Blog, 6/27/14). But one rarely discussed reason is that some highly placed corporate media figures are open to racism. I documented this a while back in Extra! (4/05), after New York Times columnists David Brooks (12/7/04) and John Tierney (10/24/04) approvingly cited the work of Steve Sailer, a central figure in the promotion of racist and anti-immigrant theories.
For his part, Brooks praised a Sailer article in the American Conservative (12/20/04) promoting a movement that saw white people, as Brooks would have it, flouting Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the ”disorder, vulgarity and danger” of cities to move to ”clean, orderly” suburban and exurban settings where they can ”protect their children from bad influences.”
As I wrote of Brooks’ embrace of natalism at the time:
Did Brooks understand his source’s views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: ”illegal immigrants and other poor minorities,” ”ghetto hellions” and ”public schools.” Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to ”disorder, vulgarity and danger” and ”bad influences” in his Times column?
In 1994, when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book espousing the so-called “academic racist” theories that black people are inherently less intelligent and more prone to crime than whites or Asians, the New York Times Book Review (10/16/94) published a fawning, credulous review by Times science reporter Malcolm Browne.
The Times wasn’t the only “liberal” outlet to praise a book that, according to co-author Murray, was largely based on sources so odious he would hide them from public view. The allegedly liberal New Republic verily gushed over the book, with editor Andrew Sullivan dedicating an entire issue of the magazine to it, and defending its key premise. Wrote Sullivan: “The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.”
FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 1/95) answered Sullivan and fellow Bell Curve defenders:
In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism. What the New Republic was saying—along with other media outlets that prominently and respectfully considered the thesis of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein’s book—is that racism is a respectable intellectual position, and has a legitimate place in the national debate on race.
Even outlets that praised The Bell Curve balked at Nicholas Wade’s genetic determinism.
It goes without saying that right-wing outlets like the National Review, long steeped in bogus IQ science, biological determinism and plain old racism, were thrilled by the Bell Curve, dedicating most of an issue to the book (12/5/94), including an approving piece by Arthur Jensen, one of the patriarchs of scientific racism and one of the sources Murray had seen fit to hide from public view.
To bring us up to date, in his recent book, A Troublesome Inheritance, long-time New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade comes fully out of the closet as an adherent of academic racism.
Wade argues that race is not, as many experts say, little more than a social construct, but rather centrally important, something like destiny. One culture’s superiority over another, in one area or other, is determined by evolutionary differences—genetics—which Wade argues are forged by differing environments and manifested in various cultures. This leads Wade to some crude conclusions, like:
Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.
Expanding on the lack of economic success in African nations relative to those in Western Europe, Wade writes, “Variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.”
Perhaps Wade’s conclusions aren’t surprising, considering his reliance on some of the same sources that Charles Murray saw fit to hide from public sight. As Jon Phillips writes in “Troublesome Sources: Nicholas Wade’s Embrace of Scientific Racism“ (Hatewatch, 5/28/14), Wade employed leading scientific racists (and Murray favorites) Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn, but didn’t seem too eager to set their work entirely in context:
Even more remarkably, Wade manages to write a summary of American eugenics that completely neglects to mention the Pioneer Fund. Founded by Nazi sympathizers in 1937, the Pioneer Fund was, and continues to be, the chief source of financial support for eugenic research in the postwar period. One cannot help but wonder if this omission is related to the fact that Wade approvingly cites Pioneer grantees like Arthur Jensen, and relies heavily on the work of the Fund’s current president, Richard Lynn, for data on the low IQs of black populations worldwide.
There’s one encouraging sign resulting from the publication of A Troublesome Inheritance: The book has fared badly with reviewers, even in the outlets where the harsher, more malicious Bell Curve thrived. For instance, Wade’s former home, the New York Times (5/15/14), ran a review that states half-way in, “This is where Mr. Wade’s argument starts to go off the rails.” The reviewer is describing Wade’s views on the differences “between tribal and modern societies”:
At times, his theorizing is merely puzzling, as when he notes that the gene variant that gives East Asians dry earwax also produces less body odor, which would have been attractive “among people spending many months in confined spaces to escape the cold.” No explanation of why ancient Europeans, presumably cooped up just as much, didn’t also develop this trait. Later, he speculates that thick hair and small breasts evolved in Asian women because they may have been “much admired by Asian men.” And why, you might ask, did Asian men alone prefer these traits?
The New Republic, which gushed over Herrnstein and Murray’s book, called Wade’s “racist” and its arguments “stupid” (5/25/14), shooting holes in its scientific rigor and unsupported assumptions. Perhaps a different editor and the fact that the piece was a reprint from the leftish UK magazine New Statesman made the difference, but the New Republic seems to have changed its mind about scientific racism.
Wade’s genetic obsession isn’t anything new. In “The Hunt for the Hat Gene,” (11/15/09), University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman noted Wade’s bizarre insistence that for every human action, cultural trait, or behavior their must be a gene, and how Wade’s seeming gene fetish leads him to over-interpreting or even fabricating the science:
Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast—he’s got 68 stories in the NYT index with “gene” in the headline—and he’s had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: “Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature”, 11/12/2009, and “The Evolution of the God Gene”, 11/14/2009.
Liberman explains why the first of these stories as “basically nonsense,” while the second is “a completely hypothetical just-so story” that “verges on the bizarre.”
Why aren’t people in Ghana as wealthy as Danes? Maybe it’s their genes, Nicholas Wade suggests. (cc photo: P. Casier/CGIAR)
Statistician Andrew Gelman (Slate, 5/8/14) elaborated on Wade’s gene obsession, showing how his assumptions often get him into trouble. For instance, in one passage, Wade asks, “Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark?” Wade wants us to assume that genes are the answer; however, writes Gelman:
But one might just as well ask why can’t Buffalo, New York, take out a loan and become as rich (per capita) as New York City. Or, for that matter, why can’t Portugal become as rich as Denmark? After all, Portuguese are Caucasians too! One could of course invoke a racial explanation for Portugal’s relative poverty, but Wade in his book generally refers to Europe or “the West” as a single unit. My point here is not that Haitians, Portuguese and Danes are equivalent—obviously they differ in wealth, infrastructure, human capital and so forth—but that it is not at all clear that genetic differences have much of anything to do with their different economic positions.
Wade’s book has been well-received by traditional racist outlets, including VDARE.com (3/14/14), where former National Review writer John Derbyshire weighed in with “heartfelt” praise; and former National Review contributor Steve Sailer published a positive review in Taki’s Magazine (4/30/14.) (Taki’s seems to be where old bigots go when their racism takes too gauche a turn for the National Review.) Derbyshire’s and Sailer’s mutual friend Jared Taylor, who once told me he considered himself a “white separatist,” wrote his own fawning review on his American Renaissance website (3/2/14).
One thing that’s useful in racists’ adoring reviews: the revelation that they have had a fond eye on Wade for years, seeing him as one of their own. For instance, in his VDARE review, Derbyshire harshly criticizes the Science Times, the New York Times science section, which is his setup to single out Wade as an exception:
All the more reason to treasure Nicholas Wade, longtime science reporter at the Times. Wade belongs to the older tradition of science writer.
Yes, a tradition going back more than a century, as Derbyshire clarifies: “In his articles on genetics, he has distinguished himself for at least the past dozen years by writing frankly about biological race differences.” In Taki’s, Sailer praises Wade’s Times work, including a Times editorial (6/15/11) blasting the late paleontologist and bête noire of racial pseudoscience, Stephen Jay Gould, for, of all things, scientific bias.
Wade wrote his last piece for the Times on May 27, three weeks after his book was released. It’s striking that in all those years that the racist right was admiring Wade’s work, the Times either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Love FAIR, especially CS. Thank you. But, the ending here goes too far for the typical biting comment at the end. (I can hear all three CSers reading it) Wade’s NYT work is all the thing said earlier, but not racist. Cheap shot to say the paper harbors racists.
“This leads Wade to some crude conclusions, like:
Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments. ”
Wow, what a drag for you, this just came out today in the LA Times:
Tibetans get high-altitude edge from extinct Denisovans’ genes
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tibetans-high-altitude-20140702-story.html
“What a drag for you”: Did the LA Times also report that the Jewish-capitalism gene had been identified? That was the punchline of that quote. I should have clarified that.
Oh, well since you put it that way, Steve Randall, hardy har har:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16867211
J Biosoc Sci. 2006 Sep;38(5):659-93.
Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence.
Cochran G1, Hardy J, Harpending H.
Abstract
This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection.
http://www.economist.com/node/4032638
The evolution of intelligence
Natural genius?
The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past
Jun 2nd 2005 | From the print edition
Timekeeper
THE idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection.
Even he, however, might tremble at the thought of what he is about to do. Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection.
(much longer article at link above)
Are you one of those Creationist nutcases who denies evolution and holds to the faith-based belief that everyone was “created equal”?
What a drag for you: Not that anyone should give a toss what these throwback cognitive “researchers” have to say, but even in their creepy little world, the Cochran, Hardy and Harpending study you cite has been hung out to dry. “[T]he most obvious test of a genetic cause of the Ashkenazi advantage would be a cross-adoption study that measured the adult IQ of children with Ashkenazi biological parents and gentile adoptive parents, and vice versa,” wrote Steven Pinker, but “no such study exists, so [Cochran]’s evidence is circumstantial.” You should have read up before posting a 9 year old study, discredited even in the odious mini-domain of IQ research. What a drag for you.http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2006_06_17_thenewrepublic.html.
What a drag for you: And thanks so much for posting the Economist link and reminding us that Gregory Cochran, the esteemed lead author on the study you posted, says that homosexuality is caused by an infection…
I’m gay, but what if it is?
“[T]he most obvious test of a genetic cause of the Ashkenazi advantage would be a cross-adoption study that measured the adult IQ of children with Ashkenazi biological parents and gentile adoptive parents, and vice versa,” wrote Steven Pinker, but “no such study exists, so [Cochran]’s evidence is circumstantial.”
So Pinker is speculating as much as he accuses Cochran of speculating. Got it.
That’s hardly the damning discrediting that you are attempting to make it out to be.
“What a drag for you: And thanks so much for posting the Economist link and reminding us that Gregory Cochran, the esteemed lead author on the study you posted, says that homosexuality is caused by an infection…”
Well what does cause it? Surely it can’t be genes, because as you and I know it’s racist to attribute genes to human behavior. RACIST! Loud enough?
And it’s certainly not social, because if it is, then those dumb white Christians might be onto something with their societal decay and conversion theories.
So what you’re saying is that northern European really aren’t taller than southern Europeans? Ok, got it.
Someone in social science should do a study on how far smart people are willing to blind themselves to basic scientific facts to support religious beliefs like racial equality. That would be one interesting study.
To the writer of this article you need to realize that these racist people are using some correct evidence to bolster something that is mostly unrelated to what they say(which is an hypothesis). They will also over exaggerate and leave out specifics of those like with the Tibetan thing to make it fit.
Take the Tibetan one as an example.
High altitude gene mutation(an allele) that they got from another species(possibly) that regulates osygen in blood cells is not the same thing as an alleles for intelligence. That mutation came from a very specific place, does a very specific thing that was effected extremely by one very specific selection process(that has finished).
Nobody has even found alleles for intelligence properly, they just associate some alleles weakly now and then. On top of that its based on a questionable test that also only correlates with everything it measures. Everything it is supposed to measure like school aptitude it only correlates with. As in somebody who has high or low IQ can do opposite to what the test score correlates with. Their scores can change too the next time they take it.
IQ scores which is what the main thing here regarding Ashkenazi Jewish people is about are not like that Tibetan allele for breathing. Or alleles for height(if they found them) The alleles are not even known. Also things like having a breathing problem, or even just being lazy can effect this IQ score.
On top of that average IQ scores have been changing way too rapidly for selection. Some of the time by very large amounts. Same goes for average height. Check Flynn effect, you should know it though.
The structure of the brain is nothing like skin tone or adult height. It can change simply doing something like playing video games, meditating, learning. You can even fall down, have a stroke and wake up one day with a mental ability you did not have before. Check acquired savant syndrome. You can even pass down experiences you have to your children because the environment can effect how a gene works. It can even damage the genetic structure of it and then pass it down until a better environment fixes it up again. So even adoption studies are not accurate.
Average income, maths scores, reading scores, IQ scores, height, inventions, sexual orientation, behavior, crime rate etc can and been changing too fast for selection.
This is all a big trick. That gay germ theory is not on their side, its on yours, because its environment effecting behavior. Or its epigenetic by the looks of it.
Just be careful, they spend immense amounts of time constructing their pseudoscience, with nothing but the purpose of reducing everyone to what they want and grouping everyone from birth like mice in a lab.
Marseybar: Northern Europeans are not taller than Southern Europeans. Average difference does not mean that.
These “races” are equal, they can just get the same average regardless of whats causing the difference, even without thinking about it. They already have the same traits. Two groups of Northern Europeans are equal even though any two groups will have average differences. Two families of Northern Europeans can differ by massive amounts of everything on average yet equal so same applies for any other population of humans.
@Steve Randall
“Did the LA Times also report that the Jewish-capitalism gene had been identified?”
I wouldn’t be so incredulous. The way the genome data is shaking out, you would be well advised to take Wade’s recommendation and put your opposition to racism in the sphere of morals and ethics rather than science. Besides giving ammunition to true racists, you’re just cheapening the scientific currency of the Left in the process.
Are white folks genetically disposed to racism?
If you adopt the pretzel logic of these charlatans’ theses
It’s a rational conclusion, isn’t it?
Mark Miller– Capitalism, as we know it, has been around a few hundred years. You would might want to brush up on evolutionary theory, particularly with regard to how long adaption generally takes. As for the heights of various “racial” groups, mentioned by another commenter, the average height of Japanese 11 year-olds has increased by six inches since 1960. Does that mean Japanese evolve even more rapidly than Jews?
Are white folks genetically prone to being racists?
Yes, it’s in our Jeans – make mine 501’s. (:-0)
In my travels, those who prone to racism, are also prone to being terrified of life and tend to be the weaker links in the chain of society. So they have to spend all their time making sure that they aren’t being ‘taken over’, instead of taking advantage of the diversity of the human race.
Steve Rendall – do you cling to the faith-based, evolution-denying religious belief that everyone on Earth was “created equally”?
I would definitely say that these comments could use a bit more intellectual evolution. At least I got to learn that VDare has an avid fan club. Good thing Europeans don’t have a propensity for violence or anything. They’d have to be clever enough to couch their genecides in science somehow.
*genocide
My IQ must be adapting already.
Wades first part is utterly wrong though about race being a biological construct.
Its an arbitrary taxonomic construct based on shared temporary differences in the same genes/traits. It depends on who is constructing and what they want. It works the same way with animals with similar variation too. Race in humans is a social construct there is no two ways around it.
@pseudoramus:
You need to go figure out what equality is.
What depressing comments. First, there is no such thing as the white race. We all come from Africa; if you want to identify people genetically, Europeans are 65 percent Asian genes and 35 percent African genes. That would be modern genes; obviously, Asians came from Africa as well.
Where to go next? Only incredibly stupid people spend their time looking for people they can claim lack their personal brilliance. One can certainly understand why David Brooks enjoys these theories; it would be hard for him to find anyone on Earth he can feel superior to.
Idiots of whatever persuasion are always on the lookout for so-called hard evidence of their superiority. Males are still trotting out theories of women’s intellectual inferiority, and they apparently receive hardly any criticism for doing so. Tossing words such as evolution high in the air does not make one a scientist, a geneticist, or even a person with a minimally functioning brain.
Big picture says our racist gov inflicts welfare slavery and charges Americans for it. If gov had to pay for welfare we would each and all have jobs!
Your opinion.
Eaglesglen
I disagree with your assesement. The Government is bought and paid for by the corporation, they are the reason we went to war in the middle east, and parts of Europe. It was about Oil and control, but not for the american people; for the American Corporations. It was about the raw materials that Oil is.
The unemployement level is needed to keeo the workers from making demands; the unemployed are used as Political footballs, and all around scape goats and the Corporations don’t want ‘Full Employement. According to the Vulture Capitalists that would give workers too much power to make demands, so you have to have a given percentage of the working population that must be ‘out of work, but ready to get back in’, and can be hired for less money thereby being an immediate threat. The worker has no choice but to accept a lousy settlement (usually not enough to keep up with the inflation caused by the corporations manipulating the econmony) or go with out a job.
And the government doed pay for it but it is supposd to be non-profit, The Government in reality doesn’t have it’s own ‘money’, it works to share the wealth. The same folks who are working hard on overtime trying to make sure the american people have no living wages, are the one who working hard to bring you “Zero Hours” on your weekly schedule. You can be unemployed a day at at time and have no say in it.
Ergo, the Government, whose Huevos’ and Canjones’ are in the back pocket of the Corporate elite doesn’t want to eliminate all unemployment, because their corporate masters don’t wish it.
Lots of Folks are out there mentally masturbating on this pet theory or that.Why are we giving mr Wade so much attention?Just another ya hoo spouting away….
“”Lots of Folks are out there mentally masturbating on this pet theory or that.Why are we giving mr Wade so much attention?Just another ya hoo spouting away….””
But a yahoo who is being given Prime Time News place to spew his nonsense. Some one has to call B.S. on him, or they think they are doing just fine with no opposition. And far too many who adhere to the psudeo-science of racism.
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Once and for all, there is only one ‘human race’. If it were not so, then we could not procreate with the others, just as a Horse and Donkey produce a mule (which is sterile), or a more eggerated example the Humans and the Chimps.
And what if heterosexuality is caused by a response to a bacterial infection?
It seems that Wade et al. dismiss challenges by claiming their opponents are genetically predisposed to rejecting genetic causation.
Using a similar reductionism as Wade, scientists at Columbia University decided (and sought to prove) that Black and Latino children are genetically predisposed to committing acts of violence at much greater rates than White people, and administered dangerous (banned) drugs to 6-year-old boys to “balance” their natural serotonin levels, as I wrote about in an essay in “Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering”, ed. by Brian Tokar, and reprinted here:
http://www.mitchelcohen.com/?p=2805
Also I want to add that 87% of the Tibetans had that allele. Are the others Tibetans who don’t have it another race now? All this is very temporary too. Just few Tibetans leaving and making babies with anyone will spread that allele across the planet.