Wonder whether there was also genes for slaving, setting maximum wage laws, raiding the public purse, evicting the poor, forcing the import of opium, the seizing of tribute from India, the monopolizing of colonial markets, chancing upon well placed coal deposits and the extraordinary ecological riches of the Americas and the winning by the newly enriched Atlantic based merchants of the political power to secure strong rights in private property. Weren't these chief moments in the genesis of industrial capitalist society?
The Industrial Revolution spread faster than genetic change or catch up could have been realized in the late industrializers which soon enough became innovators as England came to rely more on tribute and political domination in the period of late Victorian holocausts, which were of course stoically tolerated for social Darwinian reasons. Yes indeed the middle class values of non violence and thrift.
So let's not kid ourselves: if not Wade's, then many others' interest in such ideas reflects racist smugness about the current explosion in international inequality as many of the darker nations, trapped in agro mineral exports and screwdriver technologies, find themselves ever more relatively impoverished. The other sinister subtext of course not perpaps for Clark is the specter of dysgenics, that this great bourgeois white stock which was left to modern England and its offshoots is being outreproduced in its homelands.
I suppose Galton's work would have been (or indeed was) praised as great sociology, unique for its understanding or innovation of modern statistical theory.
Perhaps Wade excised the more critical comments of Brenner and Pomeranz and others?
Also it may well be true that the better prenatal and perinatal care which the rich can afford (along with enriched infant environments) can makes a difference in terms of even biological capacities and capabilities. That is, biological difference is not reducible to genetic causes; nor are biological differences necessarily unchangeable. Social inequality may well however reproduce itself in and through biological inequality.
I mentioned on another list James Heckman's work on this which I see Michael Perelman has since blogged on.
Rakesh