02367cam a2200301 i 4500 506169485 TxAuBib 20210907120000.0 150420s2015||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u bl2015016885 9780143127161 PAP 18.00 0143127160 PAP 18.00 TxAuBib rda Wade, Nicholas. Troublesome inheritance. A troublesome inheritance [BOOK] : genes, race and human history / Nicholas Wade. New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2015. x, 278 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-266) and index. 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 years—to 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. Provided by publisher. 20210907. Human evolution. Sociobiology. Race. Civilization, Western.