The most succinct precis of Nicholas Wade’s new book I have found has been in City Journal. It sets out Wade’s arguments and draws attention to the fight that biological realism has with the political Left, which strongly desires that man have no nature, and if he has no nature, then he is capable of endless reformation under the wise guidance of – who else? – the political Left.
But if man is the product of evolutionary forces (in part or in whole), and that these forces have acted and continue to act on our genome, so that we are really different from one another, then, despite our biological unity as a species, humans have evolved into different races, ethnicities, and tribes, and hence are significantly inclined to different social behaviours as races, ethnicities and tribes..
Which is heresy to those who think race is a social construct. The future is not going to be kind to Marxism.
Stephen Malanga, citing Wade, writes:
Geneticists now estimate that about 14 percent of the human genome has changed under evolutionary pressures over the last 30,000 years, forging differences among us. Some scientists have discounted these changes as insignificant and merely cosmetic, but as Wade asserts, small shifts in isolated populations can produce enormous transformations over time in behavior, and hence in entire societies.