Troublesome Science: the Misuse of Genetics and Genomics in Understanding Race, by Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall

This seems a little one-sided, given the opposed views expressed by others with similar qualifications - e.g. the famous letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" on IQ research and heritability in the Wall Street Journal in 1994.

The point I am making is that these authors specialise in natural science and speak with the authority of their fields. However, if the results of these sciences are misrepresented, say in the interests of egalitarian ideology, it is no benefit to those in the humanities who cannot evaluate the primary data. The effect for the humanities is that biological causes are wrongly ruled out in explaining human behaviour. (corrected for typos)

If you can’t refute someone’s argument, first distort it into something you can refute and hope no one will notice the switch. This is the strategy of Steven Rose’s attack on my book, “A Troublesome Inheritance.” My goal in the book is to explain the biological basis of human races, many details of which have emerged from the human genome project. I recount the evil history of racism and stress that there is nothing in the genome that supports racist claims. But this statement of the obvious has been controversial. Many on the left have long locked themselves into the position that race is a social construct with no biological validity. This is not a good way to combat racism, in my view, because it is founded on an untruth. A standard tactic of the social construct school is to attack anyone who talks about the biology of race as implying that races are distinct, a proposition that is easy to refute because it’s not true. As I stress in my book, the moment that races become distinct they are no longer races but different species. As Darwin convinced biologists who then thought otherwise, there is but a single human species. Mr. Rose opens his review by saying “Racism’s core belief is that human populations can be divided into distinct groups, ranked hierarchically...” He then accuses me of arguing for “the existence of five distinct human races,” a straight misrepresentation of what I said, and of being a “propagandist for the new racism,” whatever that is. I am a science writer, not a propagandist for anything. But I am a proponent of founding opposition to racism on the best available truth, not on the lie that races don’t exist. I think that almost anyone who reads my book will be impressed by how thoroughly Mr. Rose has misrepresented it, and will wonder why he found it so necessary to do so.

Scientists are supposed to remain objective and focus on facts. This review is difficult to read because the reader is immediately immersed into what seems like an emotional rant (a polemic) about racism, scientific racism and the new racism as defined by the good Professor Rose. One of the focuses of Professor Rose's ire seems to be someone by the name of Nicholas Wade, whom the Professor describes as a propagandist for the New Racism. The book under review (Troublesome Science ...) seems to be brought in only as an afterthought and only for the purposes of a tool to metaphorically beat Nicholas Wade over the head with and to debunk the notion of what the Professor calls New Racism. I actually have read books by Professor Stephen Rose as well as some of his past reviews. Normally he provides what appears to be an objective account of things, but in this instance, I think a raw nerve of his has been touched and emotion has rather got in the way of him providing us with a clear review of this book.