Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History is certain to be this year’s most important book, and not only for the controversy has its own title assumed. As Charles Murray wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “A scientific revolution is under way—upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.” Whether he says that only for rhetorical purpose or not, it couldn’t be more precise, and philosophers of science should pay attention. Wade’s book is, above all, a lucid and patient explanation of the latest in the science of race, and makes the most discrete gesture that the reason for its existence is to make a controversial-seeming argument about a subject that should be as widely understood as other leading scientific theories. Though it is but a summary of best science on biology and its intersection with society, it is another spark on the gathering tinder of a true scientific revolution, a true Kuhnian paradigm shifting event, in the social sciences.

Wade demonstrates subtly but incisively to the reader a deep understanding of the relationship between biological variation in human populations and its role in the explanation of social phenomena. A fascinating example of his effortless seeming logic, from a chapter on the Origins of Human Social Nature:

“One of the strangest features of human anatomy, when people are compared with the other 200 monkey and ape species in the primate family, the sclera is barely visible. In humans it stands out like a beacon, signaling to any observer the direction of a person’s gaze and hence what thoughts may be on mind.

Why should such a feature have evolved? A signal that reveals a person’s thoughts to a competitor or to an enemy on the battlefield can be a deadly handicap. For natural selection to have favored it, there must be a compensating advantage of overwhelming magnitude. And that advantage must have something to do with the social nature of the interaction, the abundant benefit conferred on all members of a group by being able to infer what others are thinking just by sizing up the direction of their gaze. The whites of the eyes are the mark of a highly social, highly cooperative species whose success depends on the sharing of thoughts and intentions.”

This passage at once acknowledges the role social relations influence outcomes, and with the same evocativeness grounds the nature of relations in entirely biological features. It is with this same adeptness he attends to the questions of understanding society and the interaction of nature and nurture in the latter half of the book. Though the text remains replete with illuminating details, the former half attends more strictly to the biology of race and its troubled history. In the latter half he elaborates on the essential thesis that “Follow an institution all the way down, and beneath thick layers of culture, it is built on instinctual human behaviors.”

This at once acknowledges the role of society in developing the individual, but just like how a structure depends on its material, the society you will have depends in great part on the social material. The distribution of traits in a population cannot be discounted when inquiring as to the cause of social outcomes. Some people are rich, some people are poor, and many of them just are innately that way. The naïve view of any average person who lived from the 19^th century or before that some people were just different has turned out to be true. This is important because it is despite an intensive and powerful investment by Western society in nearly all of the endeavors in the 20^th century which were predicated on the notion that all peoples everywhere were essentially the same. The welfare prescriptions of the left and the nation building prescriptions of the right have only helped to prove that the KKK are right where the Progressive do-gooders of the Ivy League are wrong. Success has more ingredients than social environment, and some people you will just never be able to raise out of poverty. That is the simpler hypothesis, proven time again, that some people no matter how much help they have at their disposal end up poor for the sheer poverty of will.

The KKK were right.

Dispel at once questions of morality, that’s not what we’re scrutinizing. Step outside the initial response of disgust at the KKK. Our day and age, our society, reviles the KKK; in turn, it holds up to the highest standard its dispensers of Progressive wisdom, whether one has a taste for Rawls or Jon Stewart. But the bad guys were right in a deep fundamental way which the good guys were not. Nobody is suggesting the KKK are tasteful or friendly, but it’s the academic and activist leftists in the media and attached to government that have had the overwhelming influence on the policy choices of Western nations. These choices being predicated on the notion that individuals and groups are essentially interchangeable, it may turn out the programs of intervention to raise people’s out of poverty may be thwarted by the nature of the people.

To the leftist discourse, the idea of race at all could only be motivated by racism, since ultimately according to the standard social science model, race didn’t exist. Now we are finding that the failure to incorporate the reality of race is itself the ideologically motivated and problematic turn of 20^th century social philosophy. Stephen Jay Gould claimed that the “scientific racism” of the 19^th century which documented different skull sizes between racial groups was the result of wishful thinking over scientific rigor, but now it has been shown that Gould is the charlatan.

As Wade notes, with reference to the eugenics movement of the early 20^th century, “Intellectuals as a class are notoriously prone to fine-sounding theoretical schemes that lead to catastrophe.” The target of such a reproach in this context is clearly an indictment of the present social science elite. The vacuity of the left on race comes to the fore where Wade demonstrates how Pinker, in his book on the historical long-run decline of violence, avoids the explanation of human evolution only because the reality of human evolution in human history “would be terribly politically inconvenient if this were so.” Much in the same way it’s thought that heliocentrism posed a political inconvenience for the Church of the 17^th century, racial biology poses the same problem to the modern “multicultural orthodoxy.” The leftists who have dominated the do’s and do not’s of race are left looking like religious fundamentalists opposing evolutionary theory out of sheer religious zealotry.

The importance of this book shall not be lost on the entrenched interests of political correctness which he is challenging. Speaking to the specific adaptations of Western civilization, Wade declares “The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.” Such distilled heresy will get him excommunicated from the halls of polite society as a matter of course, but the greater question is how long until he is vindicated. The issue of race is a decisive fracture in the Left’s monopoly on the narrative of social phenomena, and it will lay the groundwork of a resurgence in ideas previously anathematized from public discussion by leading thinkers.