Oof. Berkeley biologist and oft-outspoken blogger Michael Eisen writes perhaps the most vehement book review by a scientist I’ve ever read here, in his verbal firebombing of “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.”
The new book, written by longtime New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, had already kicked up controversy. Last week, the Huffington Post ran his defense against three separate critics, in which he counter-attacked “the social science position that there is no biological basis to race.”
This latest offensive seems all the more powerful because it comes from a lab-type scientist, who accuses Wade of veering into “racist claptrap.” And it seems all the more noteworthy because Eisen is so persuasive when he talks about the limits of what science now knows, and the verboten storytelling territory beyond:
In making the leap from the broad to the specific – from signature of natural selection in the human genome to explanations of the industrial revolution, Jewish Nobel Prizes and political turmoil in Africa and the Middle East – Wade tries to paint himself as a courageous scholar, going places with modern evolutionary biology that scientists WILL not go. But the truth is that scientists don’t go there, not because we are afraid to, but because we CAN’T. The data we have before us simply do not allow us to reconstruct human evolutionary history in this way. Continue reading
