Navigating Controversy: Race and Intelligence in Academia

Nicholas Wade worked as an editor and science journalist at the New York Times from 1982 to 2012. He is the author of several books including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. His megaviral 2021 article, “The Origin of COVID: Did People or Nature Open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?,” played a major role in making the lab-leak theory mainstream. Wade initially self-published “The Origin of COVID” on Medium after it was rejected from “every outlet [he] could think of, left, right, and center.”

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:51 Social behavior vs. IQ

8:51 Rice vs. wheat farmers

16:14 Persistent race differences

19:30 Environmental explanations

28:55 Response to A Troublesome Inheritance

36:43 Academic censorship

39:53 Reforming academia

49:59 Origins of race denial

58:11 Making race realism mainstream

1:01:15 A racial hierarchy?

1:11:04 Academia after race realism

1:13:50 Groupthink and resistance to the lab-leak theory

1:20:43 Conclusion