Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgements of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total leagl subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... coerced. It probably _is_ coerced. (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he's prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling "just-so stories.")
Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgements of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total leagl subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... coerced. It probably _is_ coerced. (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he's prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling "just-so stories.")