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Americans reject aspects of science—vaccinations, anthropogenic climate change, evolution—for diverse reasons. Sometimes those reasons are religious, sometimes economic, sometimes political. Segregationists in the early 1960s, for example, maintained that the American public was being led astray by a cabal of Communists, anthropologists and Jews, who were busily subverting the minds of students with insidious ideas about human equality. That was indeed the takeaway of a widely read 1961 book called Race and Reason by a segregationist named Carleton Putnam.
Several decades later, those themes are given a new life in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade. It is not about segregation, of course; even racists have moved on. But it is a paranoid, anti-intellectual screed about how scientists are misleading you about race in order to set their own egalitarian political agenda, one that does not harmonize with Wade’s.
The thesis of this book is that although culture is important, genetic microevolution (subtle genetic changes in a population over time) best explains the course of human history—from how we first settled down...