“Human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.” With these heroic words, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade opens fire on two of the obligatory myths of our time: that there is no such thing as race, and that human evolution stopped in the Stone Age. ...The obsolete idea that genetic diversity disproves race as a scientific concept is known as Lewontin's Fallacy.
Mr. Wade notes that the early peddlers of race-is-a-myth, such as Ashley Montagu (the stylish name British-born Israel Ehrenberg chose for himself), were clearly trying to distort science for political purposes, and that more recent peddlers, such as Jared Diamond and Steven Jay Gould have done the same thing.
The physical differences we see in human groups reflect separate evolutionary paths that led to unmistakably biological differences. Hunter-gatherers left Africa about 50,000 years ago, and once they wandered into all of earth’s habitable spaces, they stayed put and bred with their neighbors. DNA testing shows there was essentially no crossing until the modern era. For tens of thousands of years, independently breeding populations developed distinct genetic patterns.
Mr. Wade explains that the physical traits of populations are dramatically and consistently different even though there are very few alleles, or gene variants, that occur exclusively in only one group. This is because most traits are influenced by many genes. Norwegians, for example, need have only a preponderance of Norwegian-style alleles in their genes in order to give birth exclusively to Norwegians—and never to Malays or Pakistanis. As Mr. Wade puts it, “The fact that genes work in combination explains how there can be so much variation in the human population and yet so few fixed differences between populations.”
I did not know that Montagu changed his name, but I see that he was Jewish, just like Diamond, Gould, and Lewontin. Judaism is the most racially-obsessed religion in the world. Just look at how Israel deports Africans.
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