Time Magazine, BY NICHOLAS WADE MAY 9, 2014 6:33 PM EDT
A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.
In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.
New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.
Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality...
Nicholas Wade is a former science editor at The New York Times. This piece is adapted from the new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, published by the Penguin Press.
time.com
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Ten years ago it was still possible for an organ of the mainstream news to run an article like this. For reasons I do not understand, as the scientific evidence for race realism increase, efforts to suppress this evidence also increase.
Scientists looking for genes that effect intelligence and behavior have learned to perform their research as privately as possible.
A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.
In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.
New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.
Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality...
Nicholas Wade is a former science editor at The New York Times. This piece is adapted from the new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, published by the Penguin Press.
NYT Science Editor: Race Is Real
Science shows that evolution didn't stop when human history began
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Ten years ago it was still possible for an organ of the mainstream news to run an article like this. For reasons I do not understand, as the scientific evidence for race realism increase, efforts to suppress this evidence also increase.
Scientists looking for genes that effect intelligence and behavior have learned to perform their research as privately as possible.
As it is, they'd have to show printout of the Ancestry.com research to claim any sort of racial minority status or quota favor since neither looks the slightest bit of Black/African-American.
