hree attacks on my book A Troublesome Inheritance have appeared on The Huffington Post’s blog this month. For readers puzzled by the stridency and personal animus of these compositions, I’d like to explain what is going on.
The issue is how best to sustain the fight against racism in light of new information from the human genome that bears on race.
My belief is that opposition to racism should be based on principle, not on science. If I oppose racism and discrimination as a matter of principle, I don’t care what the science may say because I’ll never change my position. As it happens, however, the genome gives no support to racism, although it does clearly show that race has a biological basis, just as common sense might suggest.
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Academic researchers won’t touch the subject of human race for fear that their careers will be ruined. Only the most courageous will publicly declare that race has a biological basis. I witnessed the effects of this intimidation during the 10 years I was writing about the human genome for The New York Times. The understanding of recent human evolution has been seriously impeded, in my view, because if you can’t study the genetics of race (a subject of no special interest in itself), you cannot explore the independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans.
Read the full, original story: In Defense of A Troublesome Inheritance
