“Jews are adapted to capitalism”, and other nonsenses of the new scientific racism

Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance argues that the genetic differences between racial groups explain why the West is rich and Africa is poor - but beneath the new science lies an old, dangerous lie.

By Ian Steadman

(Photo By J L Barr, a phrenologist, demonstrates how to read someoneâ?Ts personality from the bumps on their head, 27 January 1937. Photo: Getty Images)

Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance – a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic “adaptation to capitalism” – is racist, it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. Viewers of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics on 10 August would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes:

The slaves of the Caribbean and American plantations predominantly came from a select group of west African ethnic groups
Only the fittest slaves survived the horrors of transportation to, and working on, plantations
Their descendants overwhelmingly make up the best professional sprinters in the world
African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people are genetically predisposed, through evolution, through survival of the fittest, to be sprinters