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A new contender in the war of books over the implications of the onrushing discoveries in genetics is the exhaustive 656-page She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer, winner of the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize.

Zimmer, who is more or less Nicholas Wade’s successor as The New York Times’ go-to genetics reporter, applies his Stakhanovite work ethic to recounting the past and present of genetic science. Who were the bad guys responsible for the “perversions” such as eugenics and who are the good guys?

Because just about any scientific advance’s glass is part full while still part empty, these kinds of historical questions are endlessly arguable.

Not surprisingly, because ancestry tends to be emotionally meaningful to humans, writers on the topic of inheritance tend to take familial pride in their own ethnic group’s contributions, while slightly resenting the achievements of scientists from other ancestries.

The most famous figure in this struggle for hereditary bragging rights over heredity was the late Stephen Jay Gould, author of the 1981 best-seller The Mismeasure of Man. It had not pleased the Queens-born Gould that many of his rivals for scientific glory in the 1960s and 1970s had extremely WASPish names such as Ed Wilson, Bill Hamilton, George Williams, Jim Watson, Dick Dawkins, and John Smith.

Gould found it suspicious that so many of the famous contributors to the biological and human sciences before his own generation, such as Charles Darwin and his half cousin Francis Galton, had likewise tended to come from similar backgrounds. To Gould, it seemed rather sinister that all these Protestant country boys had been getting credit for more discoveries in evolution than had the honest sons of the Outer Boroughs.

Gould’s literary innovation of snidely recounting scientific history as largely a tale of bigotry and failure among overprivileged WASPs whose pseudoscience is responsible for racism, the Holocaust, and IQ testing has done much to mold today’s conventional wisdom.

Granted, the cascading scientific discoveries of the 21st century haven’t been kind to Gould’s reputation among those paying careful attention. Still, the Gouldian perspective remains immensely influential upon the kind of person who tweets about how Charles Murray deserves to be beaten up by Middlebury College Antifa ski bums.

Today, the cost of DNA scans is falling radically, so a reckoning about who was more wrong than right is approaching.

Wade, a proud Englishman whose grandfather survived the Titanic, used his New York Times bully pulpit to try to undermine the Gouldian neo-orthodoxy by reporting the hurricane of genetic findings that showed those old Protestant pioneers weren’t always so far off. But the zeitgeist seemed to keep all but a few from catching Wade’s drift.

Wade’s 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance pointed out that, if you’ve been reading the genetics journals, you’ll notice that race really does exist and that evolution under different environments on different continents likely has led to some genetic differences on average.

For this he was roundly denounced.

Earlier this year, David Reich, the energetic head of the ancient DNA lab at Harvard, published Who We Are and How We Got Here. Reich tried a different approach to getting away with making many of the same points as Wade. First, Reich announced his fear and loathing of the Bad Old WASPs:

Writing now, I shudder to think of Watson, or of Wade, or their forebears, behind my shoulder.

Reich then asserted that everybody before himself had been ignorant; and who knows what he might find next. This might seem either disingenuous and/or megalomaniacal in that many of the findings Reich announced, such as that race is real and that ancient Aryans had invaded India, had been old hat to, say, Schopenhauer.

Reich’s book outraged a few last-ditch social constructionists, such as cultural anthropologists. But so far his transparent ploy of not giving due credit to those who’d come before him—unlike Newton, Reich portrays himself as standing on the shoulders of pygmies—has proved fairly successful, confusing and intimidating the science denialists. (Those who grasp Reich’s stratagems don’t much mind because his new technology is churning out so many answers to interesting old questions.)

The energetic science journalist Carl Zimmer might seem well-endowed by ancestry to broker a moderate compromise between the warring tribes on the subject of heredity. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, he reports that his DNA test shows he is 43 percent Ashkenazi through his father, former Republican congressman Dick Zimmer, while his mother, a Goodspeed, is largely from pre–Ellis Island stock.

Zimmer has come up with a double track solution to meet popular demand for vilification of the old scientists while still making sense of the history. Thus, Zimmer starts off in the Gouldian vein with lots on how evil and wrong were the old Protestants like Linnaeus and Galton. He brings in Gould’s pals Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, and Steven Rose to set everybody straight.

But, hundreds of pages later, Zimmer goes back to admit that Linnaeus and Galton and the like had made huge innovations. And, by the way, he concedes: You know that IQ testing stuff? Well, it’s basically good science.

Yet how many will still be reading by that point? Zimmer, to his credit, is an extremely clear writer at explaining complicated things. Nonetheless, while I admire his vast industry, there’s something a little off-putting about his prose style in this book. In contrast to Gould’s famous mellifluousness, Zimmer’s taste for short sentences—combined with his lack of irony—makes him sound didactic, as if his vast tome were intended for the proper moral edification of unusually diligent and intelligent schoolchildren.

But perhaps that’s what adults want in 2018?

An obsessive theme in Zimmer’s book is that the old hereditarians like Galton caused the Holocaust. You might think that Zimmer would try to balance off this rather strained argument by pointing out that anti-hereditarian ideologies such as the Marxist obsession with egalitarian social engineering had their own downsides in terms of mass murder.

But Marxism never comes up. Indeed, Zimmer only mentions the Soviet Union’s four-decade anti-hereditarian derangement, Lysenkoism, for a single paragraph on page 500.

Zimmer also insists upon the clichéd but extremist position that race doesn’t really exist biologically. Sure, he admits, 21st-century DNA research keeps coming up with “genetic clusters” not too different from earlier racial maps, such as Blumenbach’s way back in the 18th century. But pay no attention! Zimmer comically flails:

But any resemblance between genetic clusters of people and racial categories concocted before genetics existed can have no deep meaning.

Actually, they can and do. By staring at skulls and the like, the old scientists tended to come up with pretty reasonable guesses of who was related to whom genealogically, which new genetics findings sometimes disprove but often uphold.