Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Piliucci.

And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today's topic was inspired by a book that recently came out by a long-time science writer at the New York Times named Nicholas Wade.

His book is called A Troulesome Inheritance, Genes, Race, and Human History.

Uh-oh.

And the thesis of the book is essentially that race is not a social construct, that in fact, the racial distinctions that we can see

map to real and meaningful genetic clusters in the human species, and that race on a genetic

level is the root cause of all sorts of features of modern society. Wade speculates about the fact that Ashkenazi Jews

win a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes to the poverty in Haiti, all sorts of things.

He traces back to genetic basis and race.

So it's a strong claim to say the least, and one that we're going to interrogate.

That's right. Don't forget. He also mentions, suggests that the industrial revolution in England

happened because the aristocracy, you know, actually not the aristocrat, but the rich people,

they had good genes, which literally trickled down to the poor classes when they started interbreeding.

Trickle down genetics.

That's right.

Trickle down genetics.

I never heard of that one before.

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