Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(Update: Instead of this book, read "Who We Are and How We Got Here" by David Reich. Written by a prominent human population geneticist who specialises in ancient DNA, it's an accurate portrayal of human genetics.) Not only did Wade fail to achieve his stated goals in "Troublesome" (showing that ongoing evolution has shaped culture in the last 10K years), he scored a number of outrageous own-goals in the process. And let's be clear, I expected to like this book. I'm a behavioral geneticist studying variation in social group structure (in a model system) resulting from behaviors like aggression. I fully accept that there are genetic differences between lineages of humans. I know there are tons of genetic differences among people in behavior, and traits like IQ. I'll even accept that there are probably mean differences in these traits among different lineages (it's pretty much a statistical truism that one horse can run faster than another). I think it's also probable that social-evolutionary feedback contributes somewhat to ongoing social change (though let me emphasize, we have absolutely no evidence that this is true in humans). I should have loved this book. I thought it might be a book that I could recommend to my linguistics and anthropology friends. I thought, this might finally open up some rational discourse on a thorny subject. I was so wrong. If you care about truth, or science, or sociology, or humans: please don't read this book. So much needs to be said against "Troublesome" I've tried to be brief, but structured my criticism in case you care to read what follows. In A) I describe the nature of Wade's argument, and a few of the many problems in it. In B) I present just a little of the huge body of scientific evidence regarding how complex the biology of intelligence, personality, and culture is --- all of which Wade completely ignored. In C) I do a Wade-style analysis of some of his own case studies (Japan, Iraq, Africa) using the biology from B, and readily come to completely opposite conclusions. In D) I mention some of the stuff Wade gets right. A) The bulk of the book is a mishmash of broad strokes history (summaries of Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson and a little Steven Pinker) that Wade tries to explain using a fairy-wand of Darwinism borrowed from Greg Clark (and this is not to fault any of these other writers, except partly Greg Clark). Wade is prone to unsupported proclamations like "if stronger bonds of trust help a society flourish, genes that increase oxytocin levels will become more common." When pressed about why we can't measure these changes (in the same way we can measure recent human evolution in insulin or lactase, or skin color) he invokes subtle mechanisms and indirect effects "But these small nudges, acting on every individual, can alter the nature of a society". The shame is, he never tries to support any of these claims with actual data, or even rigorous models, and then he switches right back to simplistic genetic determinist language."European or American institutions cannot easily be exported to tribal societies like those of Iraq or Afghanistan because they presuppose a large measure of trust toward non-kin..." Ignore for a moment the fact that Iraq was a cradle of civilization, where (western) writing and cities, and farming, and bureaucracy, and mathematics began. Forget Sumeria and the Babylonian empire. There is a single case of an identified behavioral allele (strictly, a complex of alleles) - MAO-A - that Wade can link to variation among populations. In this case African Americans and white Americans. There are a couple major problems with the arguments he makes here, that contradict other arguments he makes elsewhere. Even granted (based on the evidence of 8 positive cases) that MAO-A 2R correlates with higher aggression (and it probably does); and even granted that African Americans have higher levels of the 2R allele - this says little to nothing about genetic mean differences in aggression between the 2 groups. It's like trying to demonstrate global warming on the basis of a single warm afternoon in Wyoming. Aggression is highly polygenic and (as Wade acknowledges) mean levels will be set by the combined interaction of many small effect genes. White Americans are therefore almost certain to have higher frequencies of different aggression alleles than African Americans. The thing is, we've only found a single "aggression gene" so far.** Wade however extrapolates from this one difference and directly states that Africans have been selected at many loci to be more aggressive than Europeans. You might as well claim "white people have a high frequency of cystic fibrosis alleles, therefore they've been selected to not breathe". His reasoning? Tribal social structure probably leads to positive selection for more violence, because violent men probably have more children in tribes. No support for any of this. Can I also mention here the purported "smart genes" he cites in Ashkenazi Jews? He says (I loosely paraphrase) "they cause disease therefore they were probably selected for because they increase intelligence, though we haven't been able to measure their contribution to intelligence in any way. Someone should probably study that." He apparently does not realize that Ashkenazi Jews are one of the best-studied populations for genetic association mapping (including for IQ). B) A major problem with all this broad brush Darwinizing (and again, I've worked in population genetic and evolution labs for over 10 years - I love Darwinizing) is that it cherry picks mechanisms and entirely ignores some of the strongest forces that we know in human inheritance of behavioral traits: cultural transmission and epigenetics. We know (from several studies especially the Dutch Hunger Winter cohort) that starvation during pregnancy leads to long term (multigenerational) deficits in IQ, increased risk of antisocial personality disorder, reduced impulse control, and reduced openness to experience. Early development exposure to violence and trauma, early exposure to drugs, or alcohol, or environmental contaminants like lead - all have similar effects. These effects (in the short to medium term, say hundreds of years) can swamp the contributions of genetics. We know this.** There are large, consistent differences between the way that Asians and Americans conceptualize and interpret stories, characters and scenes. These are pervasive, and might explain a lot of the evident cultural differences between East and West (simplifying, Asians focus on context, and the interrelation of parts; Americans on a single focal agent). These differences <del>disappear</del> attenuate greatly* in a generation for Asian Americans, and apparently are due entirely to patterns of dialogue between parents and young children. We know this.** Wade claims that if consistent patterns exist in cultures for hundreds or thousands of years, they are clearly genetic. To this I say, bulls***. Institutions like the Catholic Church; philosophy (sayings of Confucius or Buddha or the Mahabharata or Jesus or Moses); children's stories; metaphors and patterns of language; climactic, famine and food differences; disease differences - all these things and more will result in large, consistent, often transmissible, behavioral differences that have nothing to do with genetics. We know this. Wade claims that social selection (citing Clark here) is responsible for the rise of literacy around the world. Again, bulls***. It's an astonishing fact (it's one of the most amazing truths about humans I know) that you can take people from anywhere in the world who have never in the entire history of evolution had a literate ancestor, and teach 90% or more of them to read. We know that reading (and reading novels) changes the way people think and feel and interact (see Pinker, and a slew of more recent neurological studies). Literacy is heritable, and has changed societies without evolution. We know this. Wade ignores the Flynn Effect - measured IQ in the States has risen by about 1 standard deviation in only a generation or so - far too fast for evolution. And yet Wade says (paraphrased) "without genetics we can't explain differences between races, or changes in societies across time." Damningly, his single purported social genetic mechanism, oxytocin, works in exactly the opposite way he claims. High oxytocin levels promote in-group loyalty, and discrimination against outgroups. That is - high oxytocin promotes tribalism. The very institutions he claims result from reduced tribalism are in fact the mechanisms by which we co-opt tribalism and expand our social horizons. The military, Church, sporting events, national anthems, schools - all these things establish the broad borders of trust on which modern society depends. Based on extensive research - we know this!** [someone rightly pointed out that Wade nods to some of this research in his introduction to oxytocin, but then proceeds to ignore it and extrapolate in the "cuddle chemical" vein.] C) The problem is, none of Wade's most bold claims are backed up by anything like the actual science he claims to be writing about. It is easy to make more plausible "just so" stories that "prove" exactly the opposite. I present 3 (and I stress, they have no more validity than Wade's arguments - I would fail a student for presenting, as "evidence" any of the scenarios I'm about to present.) 1) Starvation/fasting during early pregnancy can lead to pronounced lifelong cognitive and behavioral problems for the resulting baby. Despite Quranic prescriptions, pregnant Muslim women often fast - about 10% of Middle Eastern babies are negatively affected. This subtle population change is the source of all violence, tribalism and unrest in the Middle East. To remedy this, teams of Muslim doctors, armed with Quranic verse, sex-education tracts and gestational multivitamins are going in and in a generation the resulting change in sociobiology will bring peace to the Middle East. Soon, Jewish-Christian-Mulsim brotherly-love-sandwiches will be littering the streets of Tehran and Baghdad. 2) Japan and China transitioned from hunter-gatherer to feudal societies independently and with no gene flow. They share many highly derived cultural and behavioral traits, despite an exchange of only material culture. This proves there is no genetic underpinning to "Asian Character". 3) Given the degree of population structure and genetic diversity among African tribes, there are expected to be a number of different tribes with a higher genetic-IQ than even Ashkenazi Jews. The fact that they haven't produced highly developed literate and commercial cultures shows the determining effect history and geography have on cultural evolution. D) In fairness, Wade is a decent writer, and he gets a few things right. (I'll give him a pass on a complete howler, what must have been a typo - the claim that the "lactose tolerance allele" provided a 10x fitness advantage. Imagine if people who drank milk had 20 children and everyone else had 2? What?) He defines human genetic "race" in an accurate and completely sensible manner (but only about a third of the way through the book, in chapter 5, and glosses over a lot of detail regarding clines, and the arbitrariness of selecting 5 races, rather than 3 or 13). He spends another excellent chapter describing the pitfalls of eugenics, and the ways in which poor genetics and shallow racial stereotyping can lead to crap science and horrible social outcomes. In one of the most unintentionally ironic passages in the book, he says "Scientia means 'knowledge', and true scientists are those who distinguish meticulously between what they know scientifically and what they don't know or suspect." Too bad he didn't take his own advice. *edited based on comments from people reviewing my review **citations (just paste this in your address bar, it's a link to a comment in this thread): http://www.amazon.com/review/R1RSEJ1J53S2FN/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&asin=B00G3L7VFM&cdForum=Fx1U9OTXIDASY9F&cdMsgID=Mx3TO439H7YT5JY&cdMsgNo=27&cdPage=3&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx10ALD9IG97J80&store=digital-text#Mx3TO439H7YT5JY *** "hit"