Before the Dawn

After reading Klein's book The Dawn of Human Culture I jumped right to a more recent book on the same subject, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, in hopes of learning where the science has gone in the three or four years since Klein's book was published. Although there was some good information about what has been happening in the field, chiefly due to the separate lines of scientific development going on in the application of genetics to the field, the presentation was totally different, and it took me half the book before I realized that what I was reading was journalism, not science. What it comes down to in my view is that journalists are willing to cut corners on science for a good story, whereas for a truly good popular scientific writer the science always is the story. There are intermediate cases: Brian Greene would be one such in my experience. His books about physics and string theory are meant to be popular scientific arguments, but it's possible that when the subject gets too close to the cutting edge that he too is guilty of cutting some corners. I mean, the guy in my opinion was almost single-handedly responsible for string theory being seen as scientific orthodoxy by the general public.

Anyway, Wade is ever anxious to point out the ways in which concepts like "race" actually do have scientific validity. His game seems to be to go over areas that touch on a lot of political sensitivities and see whether anything explosive, and yet "proven" by some combination of genetic evidence and probabilistic reasoning (which is never made explicit enough to be understood in the book itself), can be drawn out of applying natural selection to modern human history. Whereas an author like Klein is always willing to describe the paucity of evidence involved in getting to the prevailing view of human history, Wade always leans toward a sophisticated version of "the scientists tell you so" when discussing why a particular scientist's view is or is not orthodox, confirmable, or based on evidence that is still in a state of flux. Wade's book left a bad taste in my mouth, as much as I appreciate and agree with his foremost argument, which is that the idea that natural selection stopped when human culture arose is absurd.