Andrew Sullivan, getting all excited about the theories in Gregory Clarks' A Farewell To Arms, enthuses:
Conservatism has long posited that human nature has no history. But what if it does? What if genetic adapation occurs more swiftly among humans than we once believed? This implies that human nature is actually more plastic than we have long thought - but generationally, not individually. It suggests that different populations may have not just different cultural but different genetic inclinations...These are my wild-eyed inferences from a book I have not yet read.
Sigh. Do we have any evidence that this happens? I know people are excited about Clark's book, but Clark is an economic historian, not a biologist or geneticist. It's one thing to say that human nature changes and evolves -- particularly when the rich reproduce at a faster rate than the poor, which is all Clark shows -- but this genetic stuff should be informed by, you know, some sort of expertise on the question of genetics. Maybe someone could ask the folks at Gene Expression, say?
