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City Journal addresses the “Nicholas Wade reinvents Darwinian racism” story

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And everybody loves it. Okay, we sure didn’t call that one. Who would have thought that at this late date racism would be fashionable again?

Here.

“Wade would go further. He offers the self-evident observation that human societies differ significantly, then argues that civilizations “have been deeply shaped by their respective histories as each responded to the specific challenges of its environment.”

Here’s my view (O’Leary for News): Study the similarities and differences between Canada and the United States?

The population mix is mostly similar, though most black Canadians probably arrived after 1960, and Canada probably has a greater proportion of Aboriginals.

Why not do this comparison before we go along with some revisit of racism? Why do the two countries differ so much today?

Wade might have stopped here, having provided enough controversy to last a lifetime, but he ploughs on with a series of speculative observations. In a chapter audaciously titled “The Recasting of Human Nature,” he expands on his observations about how natural selection shapes societies by drawing on the works of economists like Thomas Sowell on ethnic minorities (especially in Sowell’s books Conquests and Cultures and Migrations and Cultures) and Daron Acemoglu on nations (Why Nations Fail, written with the political scientist James Robinson). Observing that experts still argue over what forces produced the Industrial Revolution, Wade magnifies the ideas of economic historian Gregory Clark, who suggested that an evolutionary behavioral change might have triggered the great economic advances that began in the late eighteenth century. Wade admits that there is no direct evidence of any genetic link—no “capitalist gene” that science has uncovered, if you will—but he does his best to shape a plausible scenario anyway. As if this isn’t enough, Wade’s penultimate chapter, “The Rise of the West,” argues that natural selection similarly helped produce European societies that were open and innovative, which enabled them to “achieve a surprising degree of dominance in many spheres.” Given the influence that multiculturalists have on today’s American campuses, it’s unlikely that Wade will be delivering any commencement address anytime soon.

I’d prefer to listen to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for sure. Oh wait. We can’t, at Brandeis.

Did you know that evolutionary biologists know so little about human evolution that some actually claim we are chimp-pig hbrids? So they get paid to say that, instead of getting fines for creating a public disturbance.

Comments
I did. I called it. i noticed some 20 years ago they were strongly saying intelligence was due to biology and carefully hinting, only hinting, race did determine smarts and sex too. In fact they would say its just TIME NOW to introduce this. Remember these writers live in high circles and so they already believe its accepted in those circles. Its only the common people or loser identities that they need be wary of. AGAIN however it all comes back to allowing people to ignore or deny the greatest civilization was a product of identity. it was the Anglo american civilization . everyone else just copied or assimilated. Dropping this, ignorance or racism charges, is why they now can bring back these horrible race/sex ideas about humanity. THey never give up.Robert Byers
June 10, 2014
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