You can read the whole letter, signatures included, here. All the signatures and their affiliations make for a long read, but the body of the letter itself is short and sweet:

As scientists dedicated to studying genetic variation, we thank David Dobbs for his review of Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” (July 13), and for his description of Wade’s misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies.

As discussed by Dobbs and many others, Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not.

We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.

There has been a lot of debate about this book on the Internet (behold, my bookmarks). Many people, including cultural anthropologists like me, find Wade’s book fatally flawed. But Wade has always claimed that this didn’t matter, since social scientists were incapable of appreciating his Pure Science approach.

In fact, it is now clear that population geneticists agree with cultural anthropologists: Wade’s book is bad science. “Our findings do not even provide a hint of support in favor of Wade’s guesswork” says Harvard professor David Reich.  “He’s claiming to be a spokesperson for the science and, no, he’s not,” says Sarah Tishkoff, the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Wade has issued a response in which he says “This letter is driven by politics, not science. I am confident that most of the signatories have not read my book and are responding to a slanted summary devised by the organizers.” To the best of my knowledge this claim, like his claim that Chinese people have a gene for hierarchy and obedience, has no evidential basis. At least one signatory, Jerry Coyne (author of the excellent Why Evolution Is True) says of Wade’s book, “I read the damn thing twice to review it—an experience I wouldn’t want to repeat.” I think its telling, too, that this letter did not appear the moment Wade’s book was published, but months afterwards. This is not a letter from the die-hard anti-Wade contingent, its a group of scientists who discussed the book for some time before making this statement.

In his letter, Wade claims that the geneticists have merely asserted his book is flawed without proving that their claim is true. It’s an important point, given that this debate hinges on the question of who is rigorous and who is not. Jennifer Raff has responded with some links describing criticisms of Wade. But I think its also important to understand that some questions only seem reasonable when you don’t know the answer.

There are some questions — does genetics determine behavior? — on which the answer is so well established that it is simply a waste of time to explain to people why its wrong. If someone wrote a book about how Mayans arrived on earth from outer space, would we expect professors to stop doing real research to go over the argument with a fine-tooth comb? No. They would write it off as a depressing waste of time. And in fact, this is more or less what Jerry Coyne has said about the prospect of reviewing Wade’s book: “I was asked to review Wade’s book for a major magazine, but after reading it became so dispirited that I simply didn’t have the stomach to eviscerate it.”

Actually, I shouldn’t say that its a waste of time to explain, very slowly, what the actual results of science are. It’s actually an incredibly important activity called ‘teaching.’ If Wade wants to understand what’s wrong with his book, he should take a class in genetics.

Many of the hard-core anti-Wade types (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Marks) have made much over the fact that Nicholas Wade is well-loved by Nazis and white supremacists, seemingly suggesting that he is a white supremacist himself. I’ve always felt this was unfair and mean-spirited. But when Wade’s response to this letter is to accuse scientists of being part of an anti-science conspiracy, its hard to be charitable. Wade may not be a paranoid racist, but his epistemology shares a lot of features with theirs: an insistence on “commonsense” over evidence, and a tendency to explain away disconfirming evidence through ad hominem argument, and a belief that the truth is simple and he already knows it.

Wade has been writing flawed, biased popular science for years now. This time, the experts he reads have taken the time to respond.

Ouch. Just…. ouch.

A good example of this can be found in Chris Gregory’s recent Anthony Forge lecture. Its difficult to overstate the respect I have for Gregory’s work, and I enjoyed reading the published version of his lecture. In fact, In my own work I’ve tried to undertake the sort of comparative political project that (I think) he’s calling for in the lecture.

But Gregory’s piece is marred by  his attack on ‘the culturalists’ who are criticized and even occasionally named but rarely quoted. Can we really call Arjun Appadurai a particularist uninterested in comparison, as Gregory suggests? I don’t think so — if anything, his fault lies in a scholarship that is miles wide and inches deep. At his best, Appadurai generated fruitful frameworks for comparative work such as his essay in Social Life of Things or (if this sort of thing floats your boat) in “Disjuncture and Difference”. It’s hard to credit Gregory’s critique of ‘culturalism’. It may be that he has a point. But its hard to find him convincing because his engagement with the position he criticizes is so vague.

Another good example of this comes from the HBD crowd currently supporting Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance. For them, the great enemy is ‘Cultural Marxism’ which is allied with ‘Creationism’. Its difficult to understand what, specifically, they mean by Cultural Marxism, and even harder to find people who actually identify as Cultural Marxists. They appear to have taken a term loosely designed to cover the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools (institutional identities with a genuine and identifiable network of scholars) and applied it to primatologists like Augstín Fuentes. Its sloppy and embarrassing, and proves the point that, in the current debate over race, the problem is not that social scientists haven’t read enough biology, but that biologists haven’t read enough social science. The result is that they spend their time attempting to understand the relationship between biology and culture, while denouncing so-called ‘Cultural Marxists’ like Alan Goodman…. who is studying the relationship between biology and culture.

Now, there are reasons to separate someone from their argument and take issue with an abstraction. Its much more polite and less confrontational. That is one reason why I often begin seminars getting students to critique positions rather than people — it is easier to build solidarity in a seminar that way. Its also sometimes the case (for instance in academic philosophy) for positions to be so explicitly fleshed out that they can be discussed in the abstract without reference to who holds them. And even if abstractions are vague at times, it can still be useful to compare and contrast them, for instance at the beginning of a literature review if you are going to orient the reader.

But at the end of the day, there is no substitute for close reading. It can be bruising to receive them, but it is much better to have a clear and accurate sense of where you stand with people than it is for you to talk past each other — or have them dislike you for things you don’t even believe. Giving people’s words and arguments the attention they deserve is the best way for you to improve the quality of your own understanding because you have no option but take seriously what the other person is saying. When done calmly and respectfully, it is also the best way to move towards agreement.

After a brief introduction by Liebow, Fuentes began the discussion. He claimed that Wade’s argument in A Troublesome Inheritance rested on two fundamental claims, both of which were wrong: first, that “humans are divided into five genetically identified continental races, maybe three or seven depending who [is doing the classifying]” and secondly, that “there are significant differences in the genetically based social behavior between these races.”

Fuentes pointed out that “genes matter” but that “they’re just a small part of a whole evolutionary picture” which results in behavior. He also argued that Wade was imprecise in his terminology. “Wade uses cluster, population, group, race, sub-race, ethnicity in a range of ways with few concrete definitions, and occasionally interchangeably throughout the book” he said.

Fuentes then went on to deal with the topic of human genetic variation. Humans share all of their genes and 99.9 percent of variation, he said, so what was being discussed in the webinar was just “0.1 variation of all the variation in the genome.” He emphasized that “most variation in human genetics is due to gene flow and genetic drift, which basically mean that the further apart two populations are, the more differences there are going to be between them.” Wade relied on a study which showed differences between people in Nigeria, Western Europe, Beijing, and Tokyo which showed differences between these groups but, Fuentes claimed, if you studied people from Liberia, Somalia, and South Africa you would get similar variation. “So for zoologists,” Fuentes concluded, “no human populations are different enough from one another to be called subspecies.”

Fuentes argued that the color-coded clusters of genetic data that Wade used in his book were a product of arbitrary choices made by Wade and scientists, and did not emerge automatically in the data themselves. In one study, the computer program Structure was asked to cluster data into 3, 4, 5, and 6 groups. Fuentes claimed that Wade noticed the arbitrariness of this scheme in his book and decided on a five-race scheme because it was “practical for most purposes” and not because it was naturally there in the data.

Liebow then turned the discussion over to Wade. He began with some history, describing the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s fight against racism in the 1950s. Montagu (who died in 1999) argued that biological race did not exist so that he could fight racism, colonialism, and imperialism. He was successful, but as a result “scientists are afraid to talk about race. They risk being denounced as racist and having their careers destroyed and they use code words.” His book was meant to “explain what we know about race.” Morality, he argued, should rest on “absolute principle” since if it does not, then “you risk distorting science” to serve your moral cause, which is “exactly what is happening” at present.

Wade defined “human races” as “population groups” and then began a description of human migration out of Africa and the development of five racial groups or continental groups of African, Caucasian, East Asian, Oceanian, and Native American. He then turned to the results of cluster analysis using the computer program Structure to demonstrate how these groups show up in the genetic data. Wade showed a slide in which Structure was asked to divide human genetic diversity into 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 different clusters.  Wade described how the clusters of 2, 3, 4, and 5 groups increasingly made sense, but that grouping into 6 clusters “you suddenly get this little yellow group appearing, which is the Kalash population in Pakistan, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

Wade then concluded “So this is an easy way of visualizing how the world’s populations cluster together in groups you can call races because that corresponds very robustly to our notion of race.” He then moved to another slide and argued that “you can take this further down and subdivide each of the groups.. if you want to avoid the word subraces you can use the word ethnicities…. though anthropologists use that in a slightly different sense.”

Wade then argued that different genes are under natural selection in different races. “We’ve got no idea what specific role these genes play,” Wade said, “My belief, which I explore in the book, is that they shape human social behavior and generate societies in a slightly different way.” (this last quote was hard to hear because of noise on the line — I think I’ve got it right).

Finally, Wade clarified that the “genetic structure of races” was not due to having different genes, but rather in the frequency of different alleles of genes. “Racial difference is something quite subtle” Wade pointed out, but could “make a big difference to the physical traits of populations.” To make this point, he used the example of the complex mix of genes that affect height.

Liebow then asked a question posed by an audience member: Don’t the existence of human adaptations like large brains and altricial young indicate selection for social behavior, rather than behavior that is genetically patterned? No, Wade said, “We’re a highly social species and we survive in social groups and natural selection would pay intense selection to the nature of our society and therefore to the social behavior on which a society depends. So we haven’t yet have much success in identifying these genes, but we have a start with genes like oxytocin which promotes sociality and I think you can say sociality is under genetic influence.”

Liebow then asked Fuentes to explains his views of the relationship between genetic variation and behavioral variation. Fuentes again emphasized claims he made earlier: the more clusters you ask Structure to make, the more unwieldly the image becomes, but the more accurately it visualizes the data. Returning to Wade’s claim that certain genes were under selection in certain races, Fuentes pointed out that Wade’s slide showed that there were 23,374 areas that were not selected.

Continuing, Fuentes argued that “genes don’t lead to behavior… We think of evolutionary biology as a complex system in which genes are participants, so to try to get away from all the other components and just talk about the genes doesn’t get us very far, especially if what we are doing is comparing small disparate populations and teeny percentages of patterns of genetic variation.”

Fuentes did agree with Wade on the importance of “staying to the science.” “Maybe there are a lot of political issues here,” Fuentes said, “But I want to focus on actual science.”

Liebow then asked Wade to respond. Wade said “I think Agustín is trying to go for what I could call obfuscation and I’m trying to go for clarity. Human genetics is a complicated subject so you have to start by looking for guideline principles or you’ll never understand it.” The samples used in the studies he discussed were representative of populations that they were from, he insisted. “Race is just a reflection of recent human evolution,” Wade said, “and to deny it puts you in the category of creationism.”

Liebow then relayed two more questions from the audience: Could Wade provide a biological definition of race? Is the level of genetic variation that we see in humans large enough to “warrant significantly different biological groups” if we found them in other species? Wade replied by saying that he thought it was interesting that in a study by Lee et. al. “you could split out the Caucasian group in two others: the Middle Easterners and the people of the Indian subcontinent… So if you wanted you could say there are seven human races instead of five. But there’s no need to get hung up on numbers, race is a very fuzzy (?) concept. It doesn’t matter how many there are, the fact that people may differ on a number of races is a matter of definition and not of the fact that races exist.”

Regarding the genetic homogeneity of humans when compared to, say, chimpanzees, Wade replied that “just a handful of genes will cause a big difference” in the right circumstances and that “because of the intense selective pressure we’ve been under the last 50,000 years, considerable of variation has developed in human species, that’s why the other races look somewhat different.”

Fuentes then responded to the question by pointing out that Lee  et. al., the study that Wade cited, concluded that their data could be explained by random drift rather than natural selection, as Wade claimed. “Bottom line here,” Fuentes said: “I’m not arguing variations don’t exist, but Nicholas consistently says that they’re reflective of races as opposed to populations… We’re talking about biological differences, we need a biological definition. So what’s the definition?”

This is the point at which Wade’s connection went on the fritz, so Liebow invited Fuentes to talk about geographic drift. Fuentes returned to his earlier theme, arguing that “if we lined up populations from West Africa all the way over to East Asia, then you’d have consistent sort of patterns and you wouldn’t be able to divide it into five things. You’d see patterns of slight changes over time. That doesn’t give us five or three or seven races. That gives us one human race with some really interesting patterns of genetic variation.”

Wade still wasn’t back on, so Liebow asked Fuentes to talk about how biological evolution is linked with social evolution. Fuentes stresssed that “rather than just the environment shaping organisms and their gene pool, we know there’s interaction between organisms and the environment, which actually changes the way natural selection works. Evolution is ongoing over time and complex, it’s not just the environment targeting genes.”

For Fuentes complexity was clearly important. “The representation of little teeny minor differences in some areas of the DNA and connecting that to large sociopolitical and historical differences as Nicholas Wade did in his book, it’s misleading because it’s not giving true credit to the complexity of evolutionary biology and the complexity of understanding how things evolve.”

Another audience member asked what the difference was between races in humans and breeds of, say, dogs. Fuentes replied that the term ‘race’ meant two different things: the biological concept of subspecies as used by biologists, and “what we call race in humans: black, white Asian, Latino. Those two things are separate. There’s some relationship between characteristics we assign them, but one is socially constructed, the other biological… The biological race question is easy: There’s one. The social race question is complicated because it’s dynamic, but it’s also it’s very, very real and very, very powerful.

Liebow then asked whether Wade was correct in arguing that “the consensus explanation of almost all social science is that human societies differ only in their culture?” “No,” replied Fuentes, “I don’t think humans only differ in culture, I just made the case that humans differ genetically a lot in many ways and interesting ways. But most important is actual science behind variation. We know how that works: Humans differ in lots of ways, but not by biological race.”

Wade then rejoined the conversation and turned to the topic of the definition of a race. He returned to the theme of continuity that Fuentes had discussed. “Biological variation is a continuum,” he wrote, “so where you want to cut this continuum  is kind of arbitrary, and population geneticists have developed measures.” By one such measure, FST, humans did have enough variation to have subspecies. Wade said that a claim to the contrary was “a political judgment.”

He continued: “There’s enough variation for you to say these are subspecies or races within the single human species if you wish to, and exactly how many of them there are is really a question of not very much interest. The whole system is continuous, an unbroken spectrum from races to the ethnicities between races, which all depends on how many genetic markers you wish look at.”

Fuentes replied by saying that “human populations on average” are much lower in diversity than the amount needed by the FST standard to be considered separate. He returned to the issue of the definition of race again: “these kinds of patterns matter because understanding what we’re comparing is really important. So, Nicholas… if we say African, what is the definition? We need a definition of this. It matters if it’s three or five or seven if these are actually evolutionary units or biological categories we’re using. If we’re just saying, here’s a bunch of variations, call this this and that’s that. That’s one thing, but that’s not science.”

Liebow then began winding down the session by asking each participant one last question. He began with Wade, asking him why he thought scientists were afraid to talk about race. “They fear to say it because their careers would be destroyed. There’s a truly oppressive atmosphere that I find when talking to geneticists” he said, urging Liebow, as executive director of the AAA, to update the association’s statement on race.

Liebow then asked Fuentes to comment about the pace at which scientific knowledge advances. “Science is moving forward, but we need to talk about it accurately… and actually reflect debate… going on in science, not select just those that select a particular agenda or position. I agree with Nicholas. We need to talk more about race clearly and factually, we need to not be afraid to get these science discussions out there, and have them in ways that are as accessible as possible.” And with that the session ended.

Anthropologists of a critical bent take deep personal satisfaction in denouncing racism and reductionism wherever they find it. These days, its rare for something as blatant as Wade’s book to appear with the blessing of a major press. So… yeah. I’m guessing that it’s going to be on.

I personally prefer to use claims, reasons, and evidence to criticize authors. When books like this appear, however, its easy for passions to get inflamed and for people to make personal attacks: Jared Diamond’s comb-over is ugly, Charles Murray’s male pattern baldness makes him look like Princess Leia, etc. We also tend to make arguments of guilt from association: Madison Grant was wrong and so are you. Both of these rhetorical maneuvers don’t do justice to the uniqueness of an author’s position or engage its particulars directly — and thus are unanthropological.

As this moves forward I hope people punch above the belt. It shouldn’t be hard, since Wade is such an easy target.