Steve Sailer reviews Nicholas Wade’s recent New York Times science column, Adventures in Very Recent Evolution — but first he introduces it with this preamble:
Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I’ve been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular.
But think how Nicholas Wade, the genetics correspondent of the New York Times, must feel. He has the top soapbox in the world for educating the public, the New York Times, and he covers for the NYT the trendiest topic in science, genetics. He has spent the last decade (here are VDARE articles I wrote praising Wade’s NYT work in 2003 and 2006) diligently debunking the reigning dumb ideas of our age, such as “Race doesn’t exist,” “Race is just skin deep,” and “Racial differences couldn’t have evolved because there hasn’t been enough time.” For nine or ten years, he has used dozens of New York Times articles to aim a firehose of the latest scientific findings at these dogmas… and, as far as I can tell, nobody ever notices.
They don’t Watson him. I’ve never noticed anybody objecting to Wade. They just don’t ever get what he’s saying. It doesn’t register. The conventional wisdom is so comforting and so status-raising that relentless reporting in the New York Times can’t dent it, or even make most NYT readers notice that their favorite beliefs are being subverted. Wade has been engaging in Popperian falsification of the age’s dominant theories, and nobody notices.