Nicholas Wade

There are lots of sort of tweaks you can make.

None of them have worked in the past, maybe because they haven't been applied in a wholesale and systematic way.

But if this were recognized as an important function of government, then we might be able to turn it around.

I don't have any empirical data.

I don't know if women do, in fact, vote more often to the left.

My book on the evolution of race was attacked by a bunch of geneticists.

They didn't find any error in the book.

So I didn't pay any particularly serious attention to them.

It did me no harm because the book had already been out for a year and a half by that stage.

It may have increased sales a little.

And I retired from The Times.

So there were no repercussions at work since I didn't have any work.

Well, the central argument was simply that if you're interested in human evolution, nothing is more fascinating than seeing how the population adapts to different localities as it spreads out from Africa, as any species will.

So that...

The book gave you a biological explanation of race, sometimes in very great detail, which was then becoming possible.

Like, for example, we know that both Chinese and Europeans have pale skin, but they do so for entirely different genetic reasons.

There's one set of genes that produces pale skin in Europeans and a mostly different set that produces pale skin in Chinese.

So...

You know, if you look at all these genes, often you can sort of tell their history when they sort of develop.

So you can sort of put a date on when we acquired pale skin and blue eyes, just from the point of view of natural history, which was really all my book was concerned about.