I’m not sure anyone denies the existence of race mixing and David’s own background is one of considerable diversity.
Reich grew up in Washington, D.C. His parents are novelist Tova Reich (sister of Rabbi Avi Weiss) and Walter Reich, a professor at George Washington University, who served as the first director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[3] David Reich started out as a sociology major as an undergraduate at Harvard College, but later turned his attention to physics and medicine. After graduation, he attended University of Oxford, originally with the intent of preparing for medical school.
Reich received a BA in physics from Harvard University and a PhD in zoology from the University of Oxford, St. Catherine’s College[4]. He joined Harvard Medical School in 2003.[3] Reich is currently a geneticist and professor in the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and an associate of the Broad Institute, whose research studies comparing human DNA with that of chimpanzees, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Reich’s genetics research focuses primarily on finding complex genetic patterns that cause susceptibility to common diseases among large populations, rather than finding specific genetic flaws associated with relatively rare illnesses.
But now the brilliant Harvard geneticist David Reich has published a bombshell scientific book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, whose revelations would have been found congenial by a smarter version of Buchanan (such as Fitzgerald himself).
Despite Reich’s occasional need to stop his otherwise lucid narrative to spew irrational rage against his fellow race-science heretics such as James D. Watson, the genome expert conclusively demolishes the post-Boasian anthropologists’ conventional wisdom.
For poorly explained reasons, Reich feels it satisfying to occasionally vilify some of his own admirers, such as Watson, New York Times genetics reporter Nicholas Wade, the late genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending, reporter Jason Hardy, physicist Gregory Cochran, and economic historian Gregory Clark. In the funniest line in the book, Reich exclaims: “Writing now, I shudder to think of Watson, or of Wade, or their forebears, behind my shoulder.”
Evidently, Reich has…issues. But a close reader of his book can enjoy his prodigious research without taking terribly seriously Reich’s prejudices.
