Nicholas Wade > Quotes

“Though there is still a large random element, the broad general theme of human history is that each race has developed the institutions appropriate to secure survival in its particular environment. This, then, is the most significant feature of human races: not that their members differ in physical appearance but that their society’s institutions differ because of slight differences in social behavior.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Politically oriented scientists often proclaim that there are no distinct human races, seeking to imply, without actually saying so, that races do not exist. One reason that races exist, though not distinctly, is that the features characteristic of a race are often distributed along a gradient. Almost all northern Chinese have the sinodont pattern of dentition, but the farther one goes toward southern China and Southeast Asia, the greater the percentage of people who are sundadonts and the fewer who are sinodonts.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“The genes supply the motivation for warfare, [E. O.] Wilson is saying, in humans as they do in chimps, but people, blessed with the power of language, look for some objective cause of war. A society psychs itself up to go to war by agreeing that their neighbors have wronged them, whether by seizing property or failing to deliver on some promise. Religious leaders confirm that the local deity favors their cause and off go the troops. ”
― Nicholas Wade

“Because of these divisions in the human population, anyone interested in recent human evolution is almost inevitably studying human races, whether they wish to or not. Scientific inquiry thus runs into potential conflict with the public policy interest of not generating possibly invidious comparisons that might foment racism.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Diamond writes, can be summarized in a single sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” 7 Geographic determinism, however, is as absurd a position as genetic determinism, given that evolution is about the interaction between the two.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“it’s possible that for many thousands of years all modern humans outside Africa, as well as those inside, had black skin.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Among the !Kung, men are driven wild by a sizable protuberance of fat on a woman’s buttocks, presumably a signal of being able to nourish a child in difficult environments.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Almost every element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the industrial revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China,” concluded the historian Mark Elvin.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“The chief has great mana,” “Pharaoh is the living Horus,” or “Henry is by the Grace of God”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Darwin’s theory of evolution, at least in its author’s eyes, dealt solely with the natural world. Yet it was as attractive to political theorists as a candle’s flame is to moths. Karl Marx asked if he could dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, an honor the great naturalist declined.5 Darwin’s name was slapped on to Spencer’s political ideas, which would far more accurately have been called Social Spencerism. Darwin himself demolished them in a lapidary reproof. Yes, vaccination has saved millions whose weaker constitutions would otherwise have let them succumb to smallpox, Darwin wrote. And yes, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind, which, to judge from animal breeding, “must be highly injurious to the race of man.” But the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is part of our social instincts, Darwin said. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature,” he wrote. “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.” 6 Had Darwin’s”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“It is a few selected genes, not the many neutral ones, that may account for the differences between continental races. Substantial evidence for this idea has now emerged from a genomewide survey by Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago. Devising a test to identify genes under recent selective pressure, he found roughly 200 such genes in Africans, in East Asians, and in Europeans. Each race’s set of selected genes overlapped very little with those of other races, just as would be expected if the populations on each continent had adapted independently to evolutionary pressures.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Knowledge advances, funeral by funeral,” the economist Paul Samuelson once observed.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“From the proportion of Mongol royal house Y chromosomes in their sample, Tyler-Smith and his colleagues have been able to calculate just how well Genghis succeeded in his procreative program. An astonishing 8% of males throughout the former lands of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan. This amounts to a total of 16 million men, or about 0.5% of the world’s total.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“it is easy to recognize an evolutionary process at work that has molded the human form for better survival in an arctic environment. Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments; in this case, the changes in blood cell regulation are less visible but have been identified genetically. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process, though harder to recognize because the niche to which Jews are adapted is one that has required a behavioral change, not a physical one.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Only some 3% of the DNA in the genome is devoted to genes; the rest of the DNA is mostly yards of filler material.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities. Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. The notion of inherent superiority, which is generally absent from mere ethnic prejudice, is held to justify unlimited abuse of races held to be inferior, from social discrimination to annihilation. “The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are imagined to share physical, mental and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that they cannot change these traits individually,” writes the historian Benjamin Isaac.2 It’s not surprising that the notion of racial superiority emerged in the 19th century, after European nations had established colonies in much of the world and sought a theoretical justification of their dominion over others.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Several primate species have communication systems of considerable sophistication. Gelada baboons have 22 different kinds of call, and gorillas have been recorded using some 30 different gestures.34 One of the best studied animal communication systems is the repertoire of alarm calls uttered by the vervet monkeys of East Africa. Vervets lead a perilous existence, at constant risk from eagles, leopards and snakes, and they possess a distinctive warning call for each. When researchers record one of these calls and play it back to other vervets, the monkeys reliably scan the skies in response to the eagle call, look down at the ground at the snake call, and leap into bushes at the leopard call.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“The most fundamental, a major shift from the ape brand of sociality, was the human nuclear family, which gave all males a chance at procreation along with incentives to cooperate with others in foraging and defense. A second element, developed from an instinct shared with other primates, was a sense of fairness and reciprocity, extended in human societies to a propensity for exchange and trade with other groups. A third element was language. And the fourth, a defense against the snares of language, was religion. All these behaviors are built on the basic calculus of social animals, that cooperation holds more advantages than competition.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Bantu”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk.”
― Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

“They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Genes do not determine human behavior; they merely predispose people to act in certain ways. Genes explain a lot, probably far more than is at present understood or acknowledged. But their influence in most situations is or can be overwhelmed by learned behavior, or culture. To say that genes explain everything about human social behavior would be as absurd as to assume that they explain nothing.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“If you are born into a chimp society, you will know your mother and the siblings born a few years before or after you, because these are the chimps who hang out around your mother. But you will have no idea who your father is, though he must be one of the males in the community, nor any notion of who his relatives are, even though you see them every day.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.3 Such achievement requires an explanation, and an interesting possibility is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is possible that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Knowledge advances, funeral by funeral,”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“When the glaciers retreated, starting around 20,000 years ago, both Europe and East Asia were repopulated by former northerners who had survived the Last Glacial Maximum in the southern refuges they had wrested from their previous inhabitants.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“In the fragmented political conditions of medieval Europe, the church became rich and powerful but started to develop tribal or nepotistic problems of its own. Its priests became keenly interested in passing on their property and offices to their kin. Pope Gregory VII forced priests to become celibate so that their loyalty would be to the church and not to their kin.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“particular”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“The first migration out of Africa, the one that gave rise to both Europeans and East Asians, eventually reached Sahul, the ancient Ice Age continent that was split by rising sea levels into the three landmasses of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

“Intellectuals as a class are notoriously prone to fine-sounding theoretical schemes that lead to catastrophe, such as Social Darwinism, Marxism or indeed eugenics.”
― Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History