nationalreview.com
>Or so we thought. New methods reveal that modern people are mostly unrelated to those who lived in the same area in the past. The ancestors of the modern British, for example, arrived 4,500 years ago and did not, in fact, raise up Stonehenge.
>A similar dynamic of replacement or mixture applies to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In other words, the vast majority of the world’s populations date to migrations and mixing within the last 10,000 years. Even characteristics that we think to be fundamental and primal, such as the fair complexion of modern Northern Europeans, are likely a recent phenomenon, driven by the mixing of disparate genes 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and reshaped by natural selection over the next few thousand years.
>Who We Are and How We Got Here then addresses the reality that large numbers of public intellectuals are extremely hostile to the idea that humans can be grouped together into distinct population clusters. In other words, since race is a pernicious social construction, population geneticists need to tread very carefully. Reich is frank that the time may have come to break the alliance geneticists have made with academics who declare that all differences between groups are trivial. He suggests that science is advancing at such a rate that we will soon understand the genetic basis of complex behaviors in exquisite detail — and that researchers should be prepared for the possibility that some findings will be discomfiting to contemporary sensibilities.
Actual science speaks.
