Radio Derb Is On The Air: The Evil of Faction, Etc.
03/01/2014
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As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.

In this week’s broadcast I note a forthcoming book whose reception might be as interesting as the book itself .

Nicholas Wade is a former New York Times writer on the human sciences.  He’s semi-retired now, but still contributes material to the Tuesday Science section.  Full disclosure:  I know Nick slightly; at least, we’ve sat round the same dinner table together on several occasions.  I’ve reviewed his last two books, Before the Dawn and The Faith Instinct, both of which sold very well.

Well, Nick has a new book coming out in a few weeks, and it will be very interesting to see what kind of reception it gets.  Title: A Troublesome Inheritance, subtitle:  Genes, Race and Human History.  You can see why I'm curious about the book’s reception.

A quote here from the book’s description at Amazon.com:

“Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail.  Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

“Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right.”

Nick takes his biology neat, and has published some fearless pieces, always well-grounded in science: so much so, the joke out here on the Dissident Right is that the people who write the op-ed pages of the New York Times obviously never read the science pages.  

Nick is also, if he won't mind my saying so, of a certain age… the age when you are not much encumbered with worries about what other people will think of your views.

As I said, we out here on the Dissident Right are waiting with much curiosity to see how the defenders of PC orthodoxy treat this book.  Good luck with the sales, Nick.

The full Radio Derb playbill:

  • Capitalism v. liberty.  (Business lobbies unite to crush Freedom of Association.)
  • Charge of the Putin Brigade.  (Get yer balaclava helmets out.)
  • Spanish is the shoving tongue. (At a taxpayer-funded college.)
  • Dieu et mon droit.  (Atheists in the closet?)
  • White flight payback.  (See how you like it, Spike.)
  • Cognitive dissonance at the New York Times. (The editorialists should try reading their own Science pages.)
  • Soldiers of Islam.  (If only the Red Army had taken Britain!)
  • Didn’t these guys burn the White House?  (One Limey, returned unopened.)
  • Asleep on the job.  (The annual necrophilia item.)
  • Poetry corner.  (War, what is it good for?  Poetry!)

It’s all there at Taki’s Magazine.

 

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