A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

by Nicholas Wade

2.Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23.

  3.Nell Irving Painter, “Why White People Are Called ‘Caucasian’?” paper presented at the Fifth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Nov. 7–8, 2003, www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf.

  4.Jason E. Lewis et al., “The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould Versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias,” PLoS Biology 9, no. 6 (June 7, 2011), www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001071.

  5.Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, xvi.

  6.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1898), 136.

  7.Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 166.

  8.Ibid., 357.

  9.Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 37.

  10.Ibid., 45–47.

  11.Ibid., 90.

  12.Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), 69.

  13.Black, War Against the Weak, 87.

  14.Ibid., 99.

  15.Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 81.

  16.Ibid., 106.

  17.Black, War Against the Weak, 123.

  18.Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 97.

  19.Black, War Against the Weak, 393.

  20.Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1932), 170.

  21.Ibid., 263.

  22.Jonathan P. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009), 375.

  23.Black, War Against the Weak, 100.

  24.Ibid., 259.

  25.Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 117.

  26.Ibid., 118.

  27.Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985, student edition), 31.

  28.Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) 60.

  CHAPTER 3: ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIAL NATURE

  1.Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4.

  2.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1898), 131.

  3.Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 27.

  4.Ibid., 23.

  5.Ibid., 7.

  6.Esther Herrmann et al., “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis,” Science 317, no. 5843 (Sept. 7, 2007): 1360–66.

  7.Michael Tomasello and Malinda Carpenter, “Shared Intentionality,” Developmental Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 121–25.

  8.Cade McCall and Tania Singer, “The Animal and Human Neuroendocrinology of Social Cognition, Motivation and Behavior,” Nature Neuroscience 15 (2012): 681–88.

  9.Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al., “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 4 (Jan. 25, 2011), 1262–66.

  10.David H. Skuse et al., “Common Polymorphism in the Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) Is Associated With Human Recognition Skills,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (December 23, 2013).

  11.Reviewed in Zoe R. Donaldson and Larry J. Young, “Oxytocin, Vasopressin and the Neurogenesis of Sociality,” Science 322, no. 5903 (Nov. 7, 2008): 900–904.

  12.Nicholas Wade, “Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes,” New York Times, July 25, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/health/25rats.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed Sept. 25, 2013).

  13.Robert R. H. Anholt and Trudy F. C. Mackay, “Genetics of Aggression,” Annual Reviews of Genetics 46 (2012): 145–64.

  14.Guang Guo et al., “The VNTR 2 Repeat in MAOA and Delinquent Behavior in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Associations and MAOA Promoter Activity,” European Journal of Human Genetics 16 (2008): 624–34.

  15.Yoav Gilad et al., “Evidence for Positive Selection and Population Structure at the Human MAO-A Gene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 2 (Jan. 22, 2002): 862–67.

  16.Kevin M. Beaver et al., “Exploring the Association Between the 2-Repeat Allele of the MAOA Gene Promoter Polymorphism and Psychopathic Personality Traits, Arrests, Incarceration, and Lifetime Antisocial Behavior,” Personality and Individual Differences 54, no. 2 (Jan. 2013): 164–68.

  17.Laura Bevilacqua et al., “A Population-Specific HTR2B Stop Codon Predisposes to Severe Impulsivity,” Nature 468, no. 7327 (Dec. 23, 2010): 1061–66.

  18.Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 547–75.

  19.Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 167.

  20.Sarah A. Tishkoff et al., “Convergent Adaptation of Human Lactase Persistence in Africa and Europe,” Nature Genetics 39, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 31–40.

  21.Hillard S. Kaplan, Paul L. Hooper, and Michael Gurven, “The Evolutionary and Sociological Roots of Human Social Organization,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Science 364, no. 1533 (Nov. 12, 2009): 3289–99.

  CHAPTER 4: THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT

  1.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1898), 171.

  2.Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011).

  3.J. Craig Venter, A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

  4.Jared Diamond, “Race Without Color,” Discover, Nov. 1994.

  5.Francis S. Collins and Monique K. Mansoura, “The Human Genome Project: Revealing the Shared Inheritance of All Humankind,” Cancer supplement, Jan. 2001.

  6.Jerry A. Coyne, “Are There Human Races?” Why Evolution Is True, http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/are-there-human-races.

  7.Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 41.

  8.Ibid., 47.

  9.Norman J. Sauer, “Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races Don’t Exist, Why Are Forensic Anthropologists So Good at Identifying Them?” Social Science and Medicine 34, no. 2 (Jan. 1992): 107–11.

  10.Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), xi–xii.

  11.John Novembre et al., “Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe,” Nature 456, no. 7218 (Nov. 6, 2008): 98–101.

  12.Colm O’Dushlaine et al., “Genes Predict Village of Origin in Rural Europe,” European Journal of Human Genetics 18, no. 11 (Nov. 2010): 1269–70.

  13.See, for example, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), a classic work by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza.

  14.Esteban J. Parra, “Human Pigmentation Variation: Evolution, Genetic Basis, and Implications for Public Health,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50 (2007): 85–105.

  15.Rebecca L. Lamason et al., “SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans,” Science 310, no. 5755 (Dec. 16, 2005): 1782–86.

  16.Akihiro Fujimoto et al., “A Scan for Genetic Determinants of Human Hair Morphology: EDAR Is Associated with Asian Hair Thickness,” Human Molecular Genetics
17, no. 6 (Mar. 15, 2008): 835–43.

  17.Yana G. Kamberov et al., “Modeling Recent Human Evolution in Mice by Expression of a Selected EDAR Variant,” Cell 152, no. 4 (Feb. 14, 2013): 691–702.

  18.Koh-ichiro Yoshiura et al., “A SNP in the ABCC11 Gene Is the Determinant of Human Earwax Type,” Nature Genetics 38, no. 3 (Mar. 2006): 324–30.

  CHAPTER 5: THE GENETICS OF RACE

  1.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1898), 132.

  2.A. M. Bowcock et al., “High Resolution of Human Evolutionary Trees with Polymorphic Microsatellites,” Nature 368, no. 6470 (Mar. 31, 1994): 455–57.

  3.Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang, “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease,” Genome Biology 3, no. 7 (March 2002), http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007.

  4.Noah A. Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science 298, no. 5602 (Dec. 20, 2002): 2381–85.

  5.Frank B. Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky, “On the Non-Existence of Human Races,” Current Anthropology 3 no. 3 (June 1962): 279.

  6.David Serre and Svante Pääbo, “Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents,” Genome Research 14 (2004): 1679–85.

  7.Noah A. Rosenberg et al., “Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure,” PLoS Genetics 1, no. 6 (2005): 660–71.

  8.Jun Z. Li et al., “Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation,” Science 319, no. 5866 (Feb. 22, 2008): 1100–1104.

  9.Sarah A. Tishkoff et al., “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans,” Science 324, no. 5930 (May 22, 2009): 1035–44.

  10.Benjamin F. Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli, Xiaoquan Wen, Jonathan K. Pritchard, “A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome,” PLoS Biology 4, no. 3 (Mar. 2006): 446–53.

  11.Sharon R. Grossman et al., “Identifying Recent Adaptations in Large-Scale Genomic Data,” Cell 152, no. 4 (Feb. 14, 2013): 703–13.

  12.Ibid. These figures are not provided in the text but can be gleaned from a supplementary spreadsheet, Table S2.

  13.Joshua M. Akey, “Constructing Genomic Maps of Positive Selection in Humans: Where Do We Go from Here?” Genome Research 19, no. 5 (May 2009): 711–22.

  14.Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser, and Mark Stoneking, “Molecular Evolution of Pediculus humanus and the Origin of Clothing,” Current Biology 13, no. 16 (Aug. 19, 2003): 1414–17. Another louse researcher, David Reed, has argued that a much older date, perhaps 500,000 years ago, is correct.

  15.David López Herráez et al., “Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs,” PLoS One 4, no. 11 (Nov. 18, 2009): 1–16.

  16.Graham Coop et al., “The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation,” PLoS Genetics 5, no. 6 (June 2009): 1–16.

  17.Matthew B. Gross and Cassandra Kniffen, “Duffy Antigen Receptor for Chemokines: DARC,” Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Dec. 10, 2012, http://omim.org/entry/613665.

  18.C. T. Miller et al., “cis-Regulatory Changes in Kit Ligand Expression and Parallel Evolution of Pigmentation in Sticklebacks and Humans,” Cell 131 (2007): 1179–89.

  19.Ryan D. Hernandez et al., “Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution,” Science 331, no. 6019 (Feb. 18, 2011): 920–24.

  20.Jonathan K. Pritchard, “Adaptation—Not by Sweeps Alone,” Nature Reviews Genetics 11, no. 10 (Oct. 2010): 665–67.

  21.Hua Tang et al., “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies,” American Journal of Human Genetics 76, no. 2 (Feb. 2005): 268–75.

  22.Roman Kosoy et al., “Ancestry Informative Marker Sets for Determining Continental Origin and Admixture Proportions in Common Populations in America,” Human Mutation 30, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 69–78.

  23.Wenfei Jin et al., “A Genome-Wide Detection of Natural Selection in African Americans Pre- and Post-Admixture,” Genome Research 22, no. 3 (Mar. 1, 2012): 519–27.

  24.Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 396–97, quoted in Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 45–46.

  25.Quoted in Daniel L. Hartl and Andrew G. Clark, Principles of Population Genetics, 3d ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1997), 119.

  26.Quoted by Henry Harpending and Alan R. Rogers, “Genetic Perspectives in Human Origins and Differentiation,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 1 (2000): 361–85.

  27.A.W.F. Edwards, “Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy,” BioEssays 25, no. 8 (Aug. 2003): 798–801.

  28.Ed Hagen, “Biological Aspects of Race,” American Association of Physical Anthropologists position statement, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 101 (1996): 569–70, www.physanth.org/association/position-statements/biological-aspects-of-race.

  29.American Anthropological Association, “Statement on ‘Race,’” May 17, 1998, www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm.

  CHAPTER 6: SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONS

  1.Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 18–19.

  2.Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 99.

  3.Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 124–43.

  4.Napoleon A. Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” Science 239, no. 4843 (Feb. 28, 1988): 985–92.

  5.Robert L. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169, no. 3947 (Aug. 21, 1970): 733–38.

  6.Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), vol. 1, p. 48.

  7.Ibid., 99.

  8.“The Book of Lord Shang,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang.

  9.Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 421.

  10.Ibid., 14.

  11.Daron Acemog˘lu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012), 398.

  12.Ibid., 364.

  CHAPTER 7: THE RECASTING OF HUMAN NATURE

  1.Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 329.

  2.Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.

  3.Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007), 127.

  4.Ibid., 179.

  5.Ibid., 234.

  6.Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 112.

  7.Clark, Farewell to Alms, 259.

  8.Ibid., 245.

  9.Gregory Clark, “The Indicted and the Wealthy: Surnames, Reproductive Success, Genetic Selection and Social Class in Pre-Industrial England,” Jan. 19, 2009, www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf.

  10.Ron Unz, “How Social Darwinism Made Modern China: A Thousand Years of Meritocracy Shaped the Middle Kingdom,” The American Conservative, Mar. 11, 2013, www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248.

  11.Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2d ed. (New York: Cambri
dge University Press, 2003), 282.

  12.Marta Mirazón Lahr, The Evolution of Modern Human Diversity: A Study of Cranial Variation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 263.

  13.Marta Mirazón Lahr and Richard V. S. Wright, “The Question of Robusticity and the Relationship Between Cranial Size and Shape in Homo sapiens,” Journal of Human Evolution 31, no. 2 (Aug. 1996): 157–91.

  14.Richard Wrangham, interview, Edge.org, Feb. 2, 2002.

  15.Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 167.

  16.Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 48–50.

  17.Ibid., 60–63.

  18.Ibid., 149.

  19.Ibid., 613.

  20.Ibid., 614.

  21.Jonathan Gibbons, ed., 2011 Global Study on Homicide: Trends, Context, Data (Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2010).

  22.Philip Carl Salzman, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2008), 184.

  23.Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries (New York: United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States, 2009), 9.

  24.Ibid., 193.

  25.Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 682.

  26.Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 535.

  27.Shantayanan Devarajan and Wolfgang Fengler, “Africa’s Economic Boom: Why the Pessimists and the Optimists Are Both Right,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2013, 68–81.

  28.Clark, Farewell to Alms, 259–71.

  29.Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 297.

  30.Daron Acemog˘lu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012), 73.

  31.Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xiii.

  32.Jeffrey Sachs, “Notes on a New Sociology of Economic Development,” in Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters, 29–43 (41–42 cited).