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.”

According to a report by Michael Balter at Science,

The letter was spearheaded by five population geneticists who had informally discussed the book at conferences, says co-organizer Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley. “There was a feeling that our research had been hijacked by Wade to promote his ideological agenda,” Nielsen says. “The outrage … was palpable.”

Ewen Callaway at Nature, meanwhile, reports Wade responding that

“This letter is driven by politics, not science,” Wade said in a statement. “I am confident that most of the signatories have not read my book and are responding to a slanted summary devised by the organizers.”

The letter was signed directly by Noah Rosenberg, Rasmus Nielsen, Molly Przeworski, Graham Coop, and Michael Eisen. As the Times does not print long lists of letter authors, those five authors linked to a full list of signers elsewhere. The list includes many of the world’s most renowned population geneticists — as well as the lead and other key authors to the very papers Wade cites most heavily in building his genetic argument.

Those signers include

• Noah Rosenberg, the lead author of a 2002 paper that Wade leans on especially heavily, ”Genetic Structure of Human Populations,“ as well as at least two other authors of the paper.
• Yale’s Kenneth Kidd, who is one of the world’s most respected population geneticists, a central figure in establishing the field, and another co-author on the 2002 Rosenberg paper.
• Stanford’s Jonathan Pritchard, another co-author on that paper and the researcher whose lab designed the ”Structure“ genetic analysis software that created the ”clustering“ data Wade says supports his argument.
• Sarah Tishkoff, lead author of a 2009 paper on ”The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African-Americans“ that Wade cited extensively as crucial support.
• Jun Li and Richard Myers, the lead and senior authors of a 2008 paper, ”Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation,” that, as I noted in my review, Wade misrepresented as supporting his argument.

In the Nature report, some of the quotes hit rather hard:

Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania says she signed the letter because “[m]y own research was used as scientific proof of concepts such as there being between three and five races.” Tishkoff says that her work on the genetics of diverse African populations does not support this claim. Adds David Reich of Harvard University: “Our findings do not even provide a hint of support in favor of Wade’s guesswork.”

The text of the full letter reads:

As scientists dedicated to studying genetic variation, we thank David Dobbs for his review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance 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 description of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ 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.

For more, see

• The letter to the Times Sunday Book Review
• The full list of the letter’s authors
• My review
• Reports on the letter from Nature and from Science

It turns out to be far easier to demonstrate that there has been a fair amount of recent natural selection acting on the human population, than it is to pinpoint specific examples, or to rigorously evaluate specific hypotheses. The reason is that different types of evolution (drift, positive selection, purifying selection) leave different fingerprints in the genome, and we can use these to estimate how prevalent each of these forces has been in human history, and, to a lesser extent, identify regions of the genome that have been subject to certain types of selection.

But the effect of specific examples of selection are almost always weak – especially the kinds of transient selection affecting relatively small groups of people on which Wade hangs his speculation. Furthermore, while natural selection leaves a signal behind in the genome, the signal is primarily that it happened – it’s much more difficult to precisely identify what was being selected, let alone why or how.

Knowing that natural selection has occurred, in some cases recently, but being unable to be more specific leaves a huge void – and it is into this void that Wade has inserted himself.

And a bit later:

In making the leap from the broad to the specific – from signature of natural selection in the human genome to explanations of the industrial revolution, Jewish Nobel Prizes and political turmoil in Africa and the Middle East – Wade tries to paint himself as a courageous scholar, going places with modern evolutionary biology that scientists WILL not go. But the truth is that scientists don’t go there, not because we are afraid to, but because we CAN’T. The data we have before us simply do not allow us to reconstruct human evolutionary history in this way.

from Michael Eisen’s On Nicholas Wade and the blurring of boundaries between science and fantasy, which I urge you to read whole.

I’m afraid my own review is not exactly glowing. Given how hard it is to write a book, I generally don’t review books I dislike — unless I think they’re dangerous, laughably bad, or abusive of a position of authority. There’s nothing laughable about this one. Wade demonstrates how a lucid, well-written, selective presentation of evidence — eloquent, elegant cherry-picking — can sell smart people pernicious ideas that seem scientific, but which science does not support. Much of the sleight of hand in this book will not be evident to people who don’t know the field. In some cases one has to read a specific paper cited by Wade to recognize that he thoroughly misrepresents its findings.

There are other sleights of hand as well. From my review:

Wade … indulges in circular logic. He tells just-so stories. While warning us to avoid filtering science through politics, he draws heavily from conservative historians who minimize the roles played by political power, geographic advantage, momentum, disease and dumb luck. Conveniently, this leaves more historical questions for genetics to answer.

And despite his protests to the contrary, Wade often sounds as if he sees the rise of the West as a sort of stable endpoint of human history and evolution — as if, having considered 5,000 years in which history has successively blessed the Middle East, the Far East, and the Ottoman Empire, he observes the West’s current run of glory and thinks the pendulum has stilled.

If Wade could point to genes that give races distinctive social behaviors, we might overlook such shortcomings. But he cannot.

Something I lacked room to explore in the NYTBR review was Wade’s dismissal of culture. He repeatedly overlooks or ignores that culture provides a way through which societies can create and pass on values or behaviors. This dismissal is necessary, of course, for his argument that genetic differences create different social behaviors in “the three major races.” (These, per Wade, are Caucasians, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans; he more or less dismisses Austronesians and Native Americans from the race race.) He argues Caucasians are more trusting and cooperative, for instance, because genetic selection has made them so. But because he can’t plausibly point to specific trust-and-cooperation genes that were selected for, he ends up arguing that these group’s differences in social behavior must be genetic, or they would not be so persistent.

This, of course, is not just a just-so story but a tautology. It also ignores a wealth of findings showing that culture provides a powerful and flexible way for behaviors to evolve and pass on. In fact, transferring values, behaviors, and practices is culture’s entire purpose. Clearly genes give us the general power to create culture; we get that power from genes that create brains that help us make tools, form concepts, remember, and communicate. Those genes we all share. But there’s no evidence of genetic differences of the sort Wade insists upon, the sort that create race-specific differences in social behavior.

Wade asks an awful lot. He asks us to accept his premises as facts. He asks that we accept what he describes as the plausible and the possible as the most probable — and then to accept that what he describes as the most probable is an inconvenient truth we must face.

Finally, he asks us to accept that a causal link explains a (purported) association between two (highly questionable) assertions — namely, that Caucasians are more fit for modern life because Caucasians have distinctive genetic make-ups selected to do so. In asserting this link he is asking us to set aside one of science’s most fundamental tenets. This is the null hypothesis — the principle that we should not assert a causal relationship between two phenomena unless there’s hard evidence for doing so. Wade has no such evidence for his assertions. Yet he asks repeatedly that we set aside the null hypothesis and indulge him.

And why? To speak of three genetic races, one more fit than the others, instead of a world of ever-changing overlapping genetic populations. To see humanity in three colors, divided, instead of in its rich and continuous spectrum.

Which is why I find this a “deeply flawed, deceptive and dangerous book.”

Note: I’m grateful to several anonymous readers who vetted drafts of my New York Times Book Review review, and to the fine editors and fact-checkers at that publication.