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256 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 9, 2025
Nicholas Wade has had a long career as a science journalist, and in recent years has become a controversial science journalist. For details on the controversial stuff, I recommend his Grokipedia entry, which seems far more even-handed than Wikipedia's, which has an unrebutted anti-Wade bias.
I reported on one of his controversial works, A Troublesome Inheritance, back in 2014. In more recent years, he has written in favor of the lab-leak origin of Covid; my posts on that are here, here, here, and here.
This book looks at how humans have organized themselves into governing groups over their long existence; Wade feels (with much justification) that the role of our underlying genetic code has been given short shrift. To a certain extent this is ideology-driven: the notion that humans are born as "blank slates" and their cultural environment can mold them arbitrarily, shedding ancient ideas of sex roles, opening up a utopian vision of an egalitarian future.
Wade notes that blank-slatism has been thoroughly debunked. He details the experiment with kibbutzim in early Israel, where idealists set up communities based on collective ownership, sexual equality, child-rearing by the community instead of mom and dad, etc.; over the span of a relatively few years, this proved unstable, and the communities mostly reverted to more traditional ways.
Our original social organizations were tribal, similar in many ways to our chimp cousins, and they were a decent evolutionary "solution" to the problems of cooperation, defense, production, and cultural survival. They "worked" for many millennia, after all. And they still persist in some parts of the world. But cultural evolution has molded most of us into citizens of nation-states, a model that has more survival value in the modern world.
Wade argues that humanity is still constrained by the realities of our genetic heritage; ideologies that (for example) deny the fundamental differences between guys and gals are always going to wind up in disappointment, but not before causing a lot of misery along the way.
He also argues that the traditional bonds that hold nation-states together seem to be badly fraying today: common languages, religions, ethnicities. He points out increasing social stratification caused by assortive mating in our meritocracy.
So, Wade provides quite a bit to think about. Progressives aren't going to like his take on a number of contemporary issues. Even I am not convinced of the semi-determinism that his evolution/genetic insights seem to imply. Back in (say) 1750, a Wade-like essayist could have looked at the historic record of chattel slavery and concluded that it was destined to be with us forever as part of our genetic heritage. But it wasn't, thank goodness.