David Reich on Wade, Harpending and Watson

Amazon link

I've now finished Reich's book, having read with trepidation those parts where he criticises Nicholas Wade, Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran, and James Watson by name, not shrinking from use of the r-word. His criticisms are curiously uncompelling, though veiled by intemperate language and tendentious argumentation.

Reich observes that the message of his book is profoundly unsettling to the current liberal orthodoxy. He himself deals with the resulting cognitive dissonance by compartmentalisation .. exhibiting psychic stress when dealing with people who are less inhibited.

None of this really takes anything away from what is a fine piece of science-writing at a high conceptual level, which if taken on board revolutionises our ideas of human history.

And the work is just beginning!

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Here's Greg Cochran's considerably more acerbic take.