I am moving my reviews over to this temporary blog, which I'll redevelop into a new blog.
Anyway, I just finished reading Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance and I want to offer up a short review.
In short, I agree with the first half of the book, disagree with the second half.
Regarding the second half, I find many parts to be compelling, but I'm not sure it's the whole story. For example, IQ certainly matters and there seem to be strong differences in average IQs between the races, but I'm not sure this is the final word. For instance, in what I call "general mental robustness" blacks seem to perform just as well as other races and also a black with an IQ of 70 seems much more functional than a white with an IQ of 70. Whites with IQs of 70 seem retarded while blacks do not. Something odd is going on here, which might well turn out to be genetic.
Regarding the first half of the book, it's completely sound. Biological race is real, there are real genetic differences between the races, and only complete fools deny biological race and call it a "social construct".
I'd like to address some of the fools maintaining "race is a social construct", in particular Jonathan Marks, AgustÃn Fuentes, Jennifer Raff, and Alan Goodman.
While I consider myself a good liberal and I voted for Obama, these nuts make me look like a rabid right-winger. What are these people? Well, they're what I call Boas-Lewontin-Gould Marxists (so-called academics who put Marxist politics before scientific truth), and their #1 ideological axe to grind is to promote propaganda that "race is a social construct". Of course, science isn't on their side here, but they're all politically motivated so it doesn't matter.
Science shows race is biologically real, but we also know that racism is morally wrong. Science and morals are two different domains. Our motto should be: "race and racial differences are biologically real, but racism is morally wrong".
As a black man myself, it's personally insulting for me to hear Cultural Marxists say that "race is a social construct". The biological reality of race is something I feel and experience everyday and it's really laughable to hear these Marxists spread their lies. In fact, as a black man, I'd rather be called "nigger" than to have some Ashkenazi or white academic Marxist try to tell me race is a "social construct". The latter is more insulting.
The irony of these Marxists is that they say they're against racism but by insisting that race is a "social construct" they are in fact committing a soft form of genocide against black people. Many pharmaceutical drugs vary in their effectiveness based upon someone's race. Race is a good indicator how a drug will work and how it should be taken. But most drugs have been tested on whites so we don't know how they will perform on blacks. By denying the biological reality of race, these Marxists want to keep things this way --- slowly genociding the black race --- where their quest for Marxist purity is actually killing black people every single day. These people are sick in the head.
That said, I'd recommend the first half of Wade's book but I'd be a little more skeptical of the second half.
