Further to “Real clear racism: Does it mean that as long as you front Darwin, you can be a racist?” (While claiming to “oppose racism”) , the UK Spectator describes the whole thing as “Darwin’s Unexploded Bomb” True, there hasn’t been an explosion.
Wade is critical of leading biologists, economists and psychologists who have simply dismissed possible non-cultural explanations as racist, or who pin their hopes in geographic determinism, or shy away from recent evolution because of the political implications. This, he says, has nothing to do with its scientific validity but the ‘political dangers’ that researchers face in ‘pursuing the truth too far’.
The political dangers are very real; various academics have lost their jobs or faced quite extreme harassment for voicing the belief that differences in group IQ scores are partly hereditary, despite there being solid evidence that intelligence is under genetic control.
And yet these ‘accusations of racism against anyone who suggests that cognitive capacities might differ between human populations groups… are shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma, not by science.’ He says: ‘The common sense conclusion – that race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences – has also eluded’ much of academia.
This book’s ideas are indeed fraught but beyond carefully explaining the dangers of misusing science, the consequences are not for scientists to ponder, but rather lawmakers and others of influence; they can choose either to consider the evidence and make things work as best as they can, using what knowledge we have, or they can continue to ignore the ticking of Darwin’s unexploded bomb, punishing anyone who raises the subject.
So far, Wade has been highly lauded, actually.
But then, these days, racism means you don’t like Mexican food, not that some groups of human beings are less “evolved” than others. It’s so last century to see racism as being about race or something.
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