While the reading that we discussed by Nicholas Wade does not tread into these waters, Ronald Hinds offers us something very important to consider about his other work:
Attached here, in addition to my comment itself, is an update on Nicholas Wade, who, in his article of July 15, 2003 in the Science Times, of the New York Times, “Early Voices: The Leap of Language,” makes reference to Dr. Pinker and acknowledges his position that language is the product of natural selection. However, in a letter appearing in the New York Times on August 8, 2014, over 100 signatories assert, after thanking David Dobbs’s (David Dobbs writes for the New York Times Magazine, Play, Scientific American Mind, Slate, Audubon, and other publications) for his review of Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” state that Wade “juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results.” These signatories soundly reject “Mr. Wade’s implication that their findings substantiate his guesswork.”
Learn more about Nicolas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance here.
David Dobb’s rebuttal to Wade’s book can be found here.
The letter Ronald references above can be found here.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an excellent book describing the history of race and biological determinism titled The Mismeasure of Man. It was updated before his death with two new chapters discrediting Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, a popular book that rehashed many of these tired and repudiated arguments mirrored in Wade’s book.
