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Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins by Steve Olson
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Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins

by Steve Olson

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This book is an unfortunate example of what happens when political correctness collides with the real world of science. Olson has such a determinedly preachy style of writing about an important topic of science, race, that if cannot help but flat out insult and nauseate all but the most determined or naive readers.
His central thesis is that race is not a biological construct (whatever that means), that there is no biological reality (whatever that means) to it, and thinking the contrary is the root cause of genocidal wars and all sorts of evil things. And did you know we are 99% chimpanzees too? And besides, race is only skin deep, and under our skin we are all alike...

This is a book filled with the superficial propaganda of the multiculturalists, longing for peace through diversity, and thoroughly indoctrinated with the impotent ideology of the wishful dreamers. Race doesn't matter? Try telling that to the participants in a race war, or the parents of marriage age children, or Jews. If race doesn't matter, why does he think intermarriage is a good thing? If race is merely a "social construct" why are most of the new things about race being discovered in the laboratory, not by poll-takers and pundits?

The science of race is rapidly progressing, using all sorts of exciting new tools and methods, with cooperative efforts expanding all across the world, and is being driven by new ideas and objectives impossible to even conceive of testing only a few decades ago. This is an amazing scientific endeavor, with immense importance for the proper understanding of man. Little of the excitement of this endeavor is communicated in the book, only the sound of an ax-grinding. ( )
DonSiano | Oct 19, 2006 | 1 vote
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0618352104, Paperback)

In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writer Steve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrations of our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years. Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human History is a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the latest genetic research, linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals the surprising unity among modern humans and "demonstrates just how naive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been" (Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining, for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius as forebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on the invention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the origins of language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging and lucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how we think about ourselves and our relations with others.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)

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