On March 23, 2018, David Reich published an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race.” In this article, Reich attacks the “orthodoxy” (his word) of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin on race being a social construct with no validity. He claims that the differences among the races are real and important, and that the races have been separated by 40,000 years of evolution, which he think is enough time for many differences to evolve.



Well, David Reich may be a big-shot geneticist at a very prestigious university, but his knowledge of population genetics and evolutionary biology seem to be meager at best, and his misrepresentation of the data and nomenclature can only be described as brazen.

Let me analyze just a few paragraphs from his New York Times article.



“A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.”

Well, I read the paper by Okbay et al. (2016) very carefully, beyind the title that contains the phrase “74 genes,” and I found out that only 15 genes are identified consistently across various analyses, not 74. These 15 genes explain less than 10% of the variation.

Also, the data on which Okbay et al. (2016) based their analysis was derived from Europeans, so how can the conclusions in this article apply to the concept of race? While mentioning Richard Lewontin in the article, Reich deliberately ignores Lewontin’s most relevant contribution to the question of race, i.e., that heritability measures within a population can tell us nothing about heritability difference between populations. For a recent paper on the subject, I recommend “The Heritability Fallacy” by Moore and Shenk (2017).

Interestingly, by using the same correlational methodology as Okbay et al. (2016), I can show that close to 100% of the variation in educational attainment can be explained by socioeconomic status (see figure below).

Figure 1: Percentage of 2002 high-school sophomores (by socioeconomic status of their parents) that graduated from college by 2012. Data from National Center for Education Statistics

Of course, people may claim that differences in socioeconomic status between races are also genetic. There may be some perverted truth in that. The reason is that the bulk of the wealth in the United States is inherited (i.e., wealth is a genetic trait if one believes that heritability equals genetics) and only African Americans experienced slavery in the United States (i.e., among the other indignities of being considered a chattel, they started with no wealth to bequeath next generations).

Let us now look at another paragraph in David Reich’s op-ed piece:

“You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work.”

What a load of nonsense! For selection to operate and counteract the effects of random genetic drift, the effective population size should be large. Unfortunately, the long-term effective population size for all the humans in the world is barely 10,000—lower than that of chimpanzee. By necessity, the effective population size of each “race” separately is much smaller. So, the chances that 74 loci will experience significant changes in allele frequencies simultaneously in each of the four populations is zero.

With one locus, a change in human allele frequency may occur, albeit very rarely, as evidenced by the case of lactase persistence in North European and the case of the EDAR allele in East Asians. To imagine that 74 alleles change frequency in concert and that the 74 alleles have successfully battled genetic drift and recombination in merely 2,000 generations requires an extremely naïve and unsophisticated view of the evolutionary process.

Moreover, according to Augustine Kong, whom David Reich quotes, educational attainment is a deleterious trait that is selected against. The selection against educational attainment, according to Kung, is extremely powerful, so much so that differences in allele frequencies are observable after merely 3-5 generations (100 years). If one believes these claims, one should explain how come there are so many university graduates in Iceland. With such huge purifying selection against education, it’s a miracle that any one in Iceland knows how to read and write.



Kong A. et al. 2017. Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment. PNAS 114: E727-E732

Moore DS, Shenk D. 2017. The heritability fallacy. WIREs Cogn Sci, 8:e1400. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400



Okbay A et al. 2016. Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment. Nature 533:539–542