Re: [asa] Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

On Feb 17, 2007, at 4:29 PM, Richard Fischer wrote:

> Hi Janice, you wrote:
>
> @ I'm surprised that this book isn't on the list.
>
> I hope the book is better than the review! Talk about a hatchett
> job. And what qualifies a clinical psychologist to review a book
> about genetics anyway?
>
> ~Dick Fischer

This is just turf protection by the reviewer. Note the following from
last year's review of the same book ( http://
article.nationalreview.com/?
q=MmFiNGE0NjcyMjA0MGFmYjBmNzQzZTE5OGVjZGYyMGQ= ) by John Derbyshire
of the conservative political journal, National Review:

> It is tempting to add the adjective “fearless” there, since many of
> these results are subversive of the egalitarian, “blank slate,”
> Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the
> modern Western intelligentsia. A great superstructure of policies
> has been erected on the SSSM, in policy areas from education to
> immigration, from welfare to diplomacy. Countless academic,
> bureaucratic, journalistic, and political careers are invested in
> it, together with correspondingly stupendous amounts of money. To
> contradict the SSSM — to assert, for example, that natural
> selection did not suddenly stop dead when homo sapiens sapiens
> branched off from the primate family tree, but has been working
> away even down through recorded history — is to risk being
> denounced by all the Great Panjandrums of our culture. And yet, as
> Nicholas Wade has been calmly reporting from his office at the
> Times — from the very belly of the SSSM beast! — these early
> results often do contradict the SSSM. In fact, as more and more of
> these results pile up behind the SSSM dam, they look set fair to
> burst it altogether quite soon. What will be swept away by that
> flood, and what the subsequent intellectual landscape will look
> like, are matters on which we can only speculate.

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Received on Sat Feb 17 20:34:16 2007