Nicholas Wade

Wade was born in Aylesbury, England[1] and educated at Eton College.[10] He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1964 where he was an undergraduate student of King's College, Cambridge.[1]

Wade emigrated to the United States in 1970.[1] Wade has been a science writer and editor for the journals Nature, from 1967 to 1971, and Science, from 1972 to 1982.[11] He joined The New York Times in 1982[1] and retired in 2012, but he freelances occasionally for his former employer.[12] He had been an editorial writer covering science, environment and defence, and then an editor of the science section.

Two of his books deal with the more controversial aspects of scientific research. His 1980 book, The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists' Twenty-one Year Race to Win the World's Most Coveted Research Prize, described the competition between Andrew Schally and Roger Guillemin, whose discoveries regarding the peptide hormone led to them sharing the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. According to the Washington Post Book World, it "may be the most unflattering description of scientists ever written." Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science (1982), co-authored with William J. Broad, discusses historical and contemporary examples of scientific fraud.

In 2014, Wade released A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in which he argued that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional" and that genes may have influenced a variety of behaviours that underpin differing forms of human society. The book was criticised in the New York Times Book Review of Sunday 13 July; David Dobbs wrote that it was "a deeply flawed, deceptive, and dangerous book" with "pernicious conceits". Libertarian political scientist Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, praised it as scientifically valid, and predicted that opposition would be "fanatical" due to political correctness.[13]

Over a hundred geneticists and biologists categorically dismissed Wade's view of race in a joint letter published in The New York Times on 8 August 2014:

Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in Intelligence quotient (IQ) test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork.[14]

Wade replied:

I make no such statement. To the contrary, my book explicitly takes no position on the cause of racial differences in IQ results, given the difficulty of assessing the many factors other than genetics that heavily influence IQ scores. I find it hard to see how any reader of the book could have missed this point, and can only assume that the organizers of the biologists' letter induced many signatories to condemn a book they had not read.[15]

Other scientists claimed that Wade had misrepresented their research.[16] Other books on human evolution by Wade include Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2006), about what Wade has called the "two vanished periods" in human development, and The Faith Instinct (2009), about the evolution of religious behaviour.

Wade is the grandson of teacher and author Lawrence Beesley, a survivor of the RMS Titanic.[17]