Jim's Reviews > A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History

I really enjoyed Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, so I didn't read beyond the title to get this & I'm glad I read it. It was well narrated, but too long & repetitious.

His major points are well made: There are human races & we are still evolving. The idea that we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago or so is implicit in many studies & discussions today. That's just silly since we've identified quite a few changes such as lactose tolerance. Unfortunately, it is politically fraught territory, especially when it comes to those changes that might influence our cultures. Wade states that these areas aren't well understood, but maintains (correctly, IMO) that we'll never understand them until we examine them. He takes great pains & much repetition to point out that this doesn't require judgements of good or bad or superiority, but it does require acknowledging & discussing them, something which is highly discouraged now.

Wade points out that it only hurts science to be guided by political correctness. No, there aren't hard boarders between races & there are a number of ways to qualify them depending on the use, but they exist. For instance, there are enough generally recognizable skeletal differences to let forensic science identify races. Some medical conditions are more common in some groups or races as are reactions to some drugs. (He didn't mention it, but there was a drug (heart or blood pressure?) that didn't seem to pan out for Caucasians & was considered a failure. Another study found that it worked well on Mexicans & Caribbean's, though. It became a financial success for the company.)

If he had stuck to these points, the book would have been a lot shorter & I would have liked it better. Instead he tries very hard to appease the politically correct, so he broadens his examples into areas that I thought were sketchy. I found a lot of interesting trivia interspersed with opinions & incredible repetition. The book gets 5 stars for its main points, but it gets 2 stars for much of the opinion & repetition beyond that. Overall, I'll give it 4 stars with the caveat that skimming will help a lot.

Table of Contents
1. EVOLUTION, RACE AND HISTORY
2. PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE
3. ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIAL NATURE
4. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT
5. THE GENETICS OF RACE
6. SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONS
7. THE RECASTING OF HUMAN NATURE
8. JEWISH ADAPTATIONS
9. THE RISE OF THE WEST
10. EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON RACE