Portside

The myth: Darwin's friends cooked up a scheme to rob the working-class Wallace of his priority and instead put their friend Darwin first. The fact: every substantive claim in the popular narrative about Wallace turns out to be incorrect. As Wallace himself wrote: "this vast, this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years!"

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Broken Bridge Already Off Google Maps; There May be a Glow-in-the-Dark Cockroach, or Not; Peace Corps Says Yes to Gay Couples, Exxon Says No; New On-line Source for TV News Archives; Newseum Gets Flack for Honoring Slain Arab Newsmen; Climate Change Will Be Fought in the Courts; How Harvard Approved That Racist Immigration Dissertation; Physicist Eric Weinstein May Have the Answer to Everything, or Not; How the Federalist Society Got Custody of the Law.

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.