Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, a careful new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Few ideas have been more harmful than one race or another being inherently superior to others. For this understandable reason, discussion of biological differences between races has been virtually banished from polite academic conversation. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, the consensus view cannot be right. Nicholas Wade, the esteemed science journalist who has long reported on new genetic advances for the New York Times , cities the mounting evidence that human evolution has continued to the present day. Because populations stayed in place for thousands of years, substantially isolated from one another, evolution has proceeded independently on each continent, giving rise to the various races of humankind. In A Troublesome Inheritance , Wade explores the possibility that recent human societies evolution has included changes in social behaviour and hence in the nature of human societies.

He points to findings that middle-class social traits thrift, literacy, nonviolence have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically with agrarian populations, a process that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern societies. The notable achievements of Jewish communities are explored as another possible example of human evolution within the historical period. Rejecting unequivocally the notion of racial superiority, A Trouble Inheritance argues that the evolution of the human races holds information critical to the understanding of human societies and history, and that the public interest is best served by pursing the scientific truth without fear.