Science Writers. A Troublesome Inheritance 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 has been widely denounced by scientists, including many of those upon whose work the book was based. On 8 August 2014, The New York Times Book Review published an open letter signed by 139 faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology which read: After publication, the letter was signed by four more faculty members. In response to the letter, Wade said these scientists had misunderstood his intent. The book was further criticised in a series of five reviews by Agustín Fuentes, Jonathan M. Marks, Jennifer Raff, Charles C. Roseman and Laura R. Stein, which were published together in the scientific journal Human Biology. Marks, for instance, described the book as "entirely derivative, an argument made from selective citations, misrepresentations, and speculative pseudoscience." Biologist H. Allen Orr called the book "lively and generally serviceable", but said it was "not [...] without error", stating that Wade had overstated the evidence for recent natural selection in the human genome. COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis In May 2021, Wade published a 10,000-word article on Medium and later in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled "The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?" in which he argued that the possibility that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered and had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, couldn’t be dismissed. Wade's article fuelled the controversy around the origins of the virus, and has become one of the most-cited pieces in support of the lab leak hypothesis. Wade's argument is at odds with the prevailing view among scientists that the virus most likely has a zoonotic origin. While some experts have supported taking the lab leak possibility seriously, the majority consider it very unlikely, unsupported by available evidence and bordering on speculation. David Gorski of Science-Based Medicine described Wade's argument as a conspiracy theory. See also COVID-19 misinformation References External links Archived articles at The New York Times Nicholas Wade Oral History Collection at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 1942 births Living people 20th-century British journalists 20th-century British writers 21st-century British journalists 21st-century British writers Alumni of Kingston College (England) British magazine editors British