I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … … - Nicholas Wade

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I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … Most genetic variation is neutral – it doesn't do anything for or against the phenotype, and evolution ignores it – so most previous attempts to look at race have concluded that there's little difference between races. I think this position is the one on which the social scientists are basing their position. … If you look at the genes that do make a difference, selected genes, which are a tiny handful of the whole, you do find a number of differences, not very many, but a number of interesting differences between races as to which genes have been selected. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because once the human family dispersed from its homeland in Africa, people faced different environments on each continent, different climates, different evolutionary challenges, and each group adapted to its environment in its own way.

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About Nicholas Wade

Nicholas Wade (born May 17, 1942) is a British science reporter and nonfiction author. He was formerly a staff writer for the Science Times section of The New York Times. He has written a number of books on human evolution, including the controversial A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014).

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Nicholas Michael Landon Wade
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Additional quotes by Nicholas Wade

From an evolutionary perspective, the human races are all very similar variations of the same gene pool. The question that looms over all the social sciences, unanswered and largely unaddressed, is how to explain the paradox that people as individuals are so similar yet human societies differ so conspicuously in their cultural and economic attainments.

The classification of humans into five continental based races is perfectly reasonable and is supported by genome clustering studies. In addition, classification into the three major races of African, East Asian and European is supported by the physical anthropology of human skull types and dentition.

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The idea that human populations are genetically different from one another has been actively ignored by academics and policy makers for fear that such inquiry might promote racism. The argument offered here is that people the world over are highly similar as individuals but that societies differ widely because of evolutionary differences in social behavior. It would be better to take account of evolutionary differences than to continue to ignore them.

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