Cochran and Harpending: "In Our Genes"

The Human Biodiversity Reading Club: I thought I would start to periodically list important articles and books I'm reading in order to generate discussion about them. Andrew Sullivan's been doing this for a few weeks and is making rather a lot of money off the little kickback that Amazon gives you for touting books. Good for Andrew. It's one of the best ideas yet for making money off personal web journalism.

I'm going to start off, however, with something free, a 7-page article called "In Our Genes," which proposes a "model system for understanding the relationship between genetic variation and human cultural diversity." A rather interesting and important topic, no?

It's by two friends of mine, Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah, who is a rare combination of mathematical geneticist and field anthropologist (inventor of the important Dad vs. Cad distinction), and by Greg Cochran, the brilliant rocket scientist turned evolutionary theorist. The title is a pointed rejoinder to Not in our Genes, the famous anti-sociobiological tract by the neo-Lysenkoist scientists Richard Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, although it's also an attack on the evolutionary psychology party line handed down by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, which Steve Pinker enthusiastically summed up as "differences between individuals are so boring!" (I've since managed to persuade Steve that differences between individuals are a tiny bit interesting.)

Harpending and Cochran's paper starts off rather technically but it soon turns into a wild ride through some of the biggest questions out there about humanity.