Nicholas Wade

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Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human storyFewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand yearsto be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

With the decoding of the human genome, researchers can now read the script in which evolution has written the program for the design and operation of the human body. A new generation of medical treatments is at hand. Researchers are developing therapies so powerful that there is now no evident obstacle to the ancient goal of conquering most major diseases. Nicholas Wade has covered the sequencing of the genome, as well as other health and science stories, for The New York Times, in the course of which he has interviewed many of the principal researchers in the field. In this book he describes what the genome means for the health of present and future generations. Someday soon physicians will have access to DNA chips that, from a drop of blood, will screen a persons genes for all the diseases to which he or she may be genetically vulnerable. From full knowledge of the instruction manual of the human body, provided by the genome, pharmaceutical companies hope to develop a new generation of sophisticated drugs; one of the first genome-derived drugs is already undergoing clinical trials. Another vital tool will be regenerative medicine, a new kind of therapy in which new organs and tissues will be grown from a patients own cells to replace those that are old or diseased. With the help of DNA chips, medical researchers will soon be able to diagnose diseases such as cancer much more precisely and to tailor specific treatments for each patient. Individualized medicine will also become an important part of the pharmaceutical world. Many drugs will be prescribed based on information from DNA chips that identify which of a range of drugs is best for each patient, as well as which drugs are likely to cause side effects. The medicine of the post-genomic era will be customized for a patients genetic make-up, providing treatments based on a precise understanding of the mechanism of disease. Life Script describes a future in which good health, even perfect health, may become the standard for everyone -- at every age.

Societies that ignore social disintegration and collapsing birth rates are putting their future in peril. So why are we ignoring the signs??In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing societythose developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions. This tension plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable. In other cases, culture has successfully modified evolutionary behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving the bonds of tribalism to make way for modern states. But the evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together. The worldwide decline in fertility in most countries except those in Africa signals a severe derangement in the behaviors evolution has devised for ensuring that a population will maintain itself. If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction. Other fraught issues in which human biology and politics conflict include the innate specializations of the sexes, the stratification of society by ability, and the mismatch between the inequalities of wealth-creating societies and the egalitarian ethic inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.We live in an iridescent bubble, the intoxicating richness of modern culture. Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies. The Origin of Politics explores the risks of underestimating evolutions fundamental role in human affairs.

En los últimos años, una auténtica avalancha de estudios científicos basados en el análisis del genoma humano ha proporcionado nuevas y persuasivas respuestas a muchas de las preguntas relativas a nuestros ancestros. ¿Cuando perdieron el pelaje y empezaron a vestirse? ¿Practicaban el canibalismo? ¿Como lograron derrotar y exterminar a los neandertales, fisicamente mas poderosos que ellos? ¿Como y cuando salieron de Africa? ¿Eran realmente mas pacificas las sociedades preagricolas de cazadores-recolectores? Antes del alba explica como fueron los inicios de la evolucion humana; por ejemplo: cuando empezaron los humanos a utilizar un lenguaje completamente moderno (hace unos 50.000 años) o cual era el tamaño de las poblaciones humanas ancestrales (unos 150 individuos). Nicholas Wade hace un magnifico trabajo sintetizando los descubrimientos de los paleantropologos y los de los genetistas, en algunos casos confirmando lo que creiamos saber de nuestros ancestros y en otros suscitando nuevas y a veces incomodas y perturbadoras cuestiones. Arrancando con el antepasado comun de humanos y chimpances, que vivio hace 5 millones de años, Wade explora las ultimas teorias acerca del desarrollo de los hominidos y explica por que el Homo sapiens siguio una senda evolutiva diferente de la de sus primos hermanos los chimpances y ...

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

Meaty, well-written. Kirkus ReviewsTimely and informative. The New York Times Book ReviewBy far the best book I have ever read on humanitys deep history. E. O. Wilson, biologist and author of The Ants and On Human NatureNicholas Wades articles are a major reason why the science section has become the most popular, nationwide, in the New York Times. In his groundbreaking Before the Dawn, Wade reveals humanitys origins as never beforea journey made possible only recently by genetic science, whose incredible findings have answered such questions as: What was the first human language like? How large were the first societies, and how warlike were they? When did our ancestors first leave Africa, and by what route did they leave? By eloquently solving these and numerous other mysteries, Wade offers nothing less than a uniquely complete retelling of a story that began 500 centuries ago.

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand yearsto be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traitsthrift, docility, nonviolencehave been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These values obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

El libro del año. Tan políticamente incorrecto como científicamente irrefutable. Escudriña las bases genéticas de la diferencia entre razas para trazar una historia del ser humano y las sociedades que integra.Buceando en las nuevas evidencias que ha dejado la descodificacion del genoma humano, el periodista cientifico Nicholas Wade nos adentra en las bases geneticas de la raza y su rol fundamental en la historia de la humanidad.Pocas ideas han sido mas perniciosas que aquellas que afirman que hay razas inherentemente superiores a otras. Por esa razon, el debate sobre las diferencias biologicas entre razas ha sido completamente proscrito del ambito cientifico. La evolucion humana, se insiste desde un inusitado consenso, acabo en la prehistoria. No obstante, el consenso parece ser erroneo. Wade demuestra a lo largo de este libro que la evolucion humana siguio su curso, que el aislamiento en el que han vivido las distintas poblaciones a lo largo de los siglos ha propiciado ese desarrollo y que existen distinciones, divergencias, en el comportamiento y por tanto en las sociedades mismas. Que, en consecuencia, atributos como el ahorro, el pacifismo, o la alfabetizacion, propios de las clases medias, han sido lentamente inoculados geneticamente desde la poblacion agraria, culminado en la Revolucion Industrial y la emergencia de las sociedades modernas. Rechazando sin ambages la nocion de superioridad racial, este libro demuestra como nuestra informacion genetica contiene una informacion vital para entender nuestra historia y las sociedades que la integran, y que la mejor forma de servir al interes publico es buscando incesantemente sin miedo la verdad cientifica.

Buceando en las nuevas evidencias que ha dejado la descodificación del genoma humano, el periodista científico Nicholas Wade nos adentra en las bases genéticas de la raza y su rol fundamental en la historia de la humanidad.Pocas ideas han sido mas perniciosas que aquellas que afirman que hay razas inherentemente superiores a otras. Por esa razon, el debate sobre las diferencias biologicas entre razas ha sido completamente proscrito del ambito cientifico. La evolucion humana, se insiste desde un inusitado consenso, acabo en la prehistoria. No obstante, el consenso parece ser erroneo. Wade demuestra a lo largo de este libro que la evolucion humana siguio su curso, que el aislamiento en el que han vivido las distintas poblaciones a lo largo de los siglos ha propiciado ese desarrollo y que existen distinciones, divergencias, en el comportamiento y por tanto en las sociedades mismas. Que, en consecuencia, atributos como el ahorro, el pacifismo, o la alfabetizacion, propios de las clases medias, han sido lentamente inoculados geneticamente desde la poblacion agraria, culminado en la Revolucion Industrial y la emergencia de las sociedades modernas. Rechazando sin ambages la nocion de superioridad racial, este libro demuestra como nuestra informacion genetica contiene una informacion vital para entender nuestra historia y las sociedades que la integran, y que la mejor forma de servir al interes publico es buscando incesantemente sin miedo la verdad cientifica.

Buceando en las nuevas evidencias que ha dejado la descodificación del genoma humano, el periodista científico Nicholas Wade nos adentra en las bases genéticas de la raza y su rol fundamental en la historia de la humanidad.Pocas ideas han sido mas perniciosas que aquellas que afirman que hay razas inherentemente superiores a otras. Por esa razon, el debate sobre las diferencias biologicas entre razas ha sido completamente proscrito del ambito cientifico. La evolucion humana, se insiste desde un inusitado consenso, acabo en la prehistoria. No obstante, el consenso parece ser erroneo. Wade demuestra a lo largo de este libro que la evolucion humana siguio su curso, que el aislamiento en el que han vivido las distintas poblaciones a lo largo de los siglos ha propiciado ese desarrollo y que existen distinciones, divergencias, en el comportamiento y por tanto en las sociedades mismas. Que, en consecuencia, atributos como el ahorro, el pacifismo, o la alfabetizacion, propios de las clases medias, han sido lentamente inoculados geneticamente desde la poblacion agraria, culminado en la Revolucion Industrial y la emergencia de las sociedades modernas. Rechazando sin ambages la nocion de superioridad racial, este libro demuestra como nuestra informacion genetica contiene una informacion vital para entender nuestra historia y las sociedades que la integran, y que la mejor forma de servir al interes publico es buscando incesantemente sin miedo la verdad cientifica.