Nicholas Wade “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race And Human History” The Penguin Press, 2014, 251 pp.
Another book I judge important in furthering my personal education. The theme of this book is that “human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” it did not stop 10,000 years ago as conventional wisdom maintains. This is, as might be expected, quite controversial, especially for people that do not shop at Walmart--Wait, not a good analogy--I like Walmart.
All humans of all races share an instinct to cooperate vigorously with members of an in-group, to obey the in-group’s rules, and to punish those who deviate. There is an instinct for fairness and reciprocity, at least among members of each group. People have an intuitive morality, which is the source of instinctive knowledge that certain actions are right or wrong. People will fight to the death to protect their own group or attack that of others. Probably all these social behaviors, to one degree or another, have a genetic basis although, with a few exceptions, the specific underlying genes have yet to be identified. (Pg. 124). What distinguishes one race from another is the different cultural influences that act on these base social instincts.
A productive economy requires : (1) trusting others that are not close relatives, (2) settling disputes by agencies outside of the tribe, not personal violence, and (3) thrift, the ability to delay gratification. The author believes these traits are genetically influenced. But any genetic differences are now minimized with the recent globalization of the planet which has eliminated pockets of humans isolated from others; the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel and intermarriage.
Pg. 242: The thesis presented in this book assumes that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time, that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others, and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.
My Notes:
Pg. 1: The decoding of the human genome in 2003 has allowed a much better understanding of human evolution, raising many interesting but awkward questions. It is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously up to the present day and did not end 10,000 years ago as many politically correct disciplines maintain. Any degree of evolution in social behavior found to have taken place during historical times could help explain significant features of today’s world.
Pg. 3: One of the most recent known dates at which a human gene has been changed by evolution is from 3,000 years ago, when Tibetans evolved a genetic variant that lets them live at high altitude. Another recent genetic change is lactose tolerance in adults developing in northern Europeans.
Pg. 4: The period 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, from which signals of recent natural selection can be detected, occurred after the splitting of the three major races, and so represents a selection that has occurred largely independently within each race. The three principal races are Africans (those who live south of the Sahara), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans), and Caucasians (Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and the Indian subcontinent). The genes especially affected by natural selection control not only expected traits like skin color and nutritional metabolism but also some aspects of brain function, although in ways that are not yet understood.
Pg. 31: Up until 1928, fewer than 9,000 people had been sterilized in the U.S., even though the eugenicists estimated that up to 400,000 citizens were ‘feeble-minded.’ After the Buck v. Bell* decision, the floodgates opened. By 1930, 24 states had sterilization laws on their books, and by 1940, 35,878 Americans had been sterilized or castrated.
* Wikipedia: Buck v. Bell, (1927), is a decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.
The Supreme Court has never expressly overruled Buck v. Bell. However, in the last 50 years, both federal and state courts have severely criticized and questioned the legal reasoning underlying the decision.
Pg. 41: Human and chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, split apart some 5 to 6 million years ago. A fierce drought gripped Africa at this time, and the forests shrank, giving way to open woodland or savannah. The apes at the head of the human lineage abandoned the forest and ventured out into the open savannahs of Africa, obliging them to go through many evolutionary transitions in both body and behavior as they grew more and more unlike the joint ancestor they shared with chimps. Chimps remained in the dwindling forest habitat and thus did not have to adapt.
Pg. 50: Human sociability is two-edged. The trust extended to members of one’s own group is mirrored by the suspicion and potential mistrust shown toward strangers. Willingness to defend one’s own people is the counterpart of readiness to kill the enemy. Human morality is not universal, as philosophers have argued: it is strictly local at least in its instinctual form. Reflections of this ambivalence are now apparent from the level of the genes.
Pg. 53: Although trust is apparent in humans at the level of genes, culture is far more important in most short-term interactions. As with most human behaviors, the genes provide just a nudge in a certain direction. But these small nudges, acting on every individual, can alter the nature of a society.
Besides trust, another important social behavior that is clearly under genetic influence is that of aggression, or rather the whole spectrum of behaviors that run from aggression to shyness. The fact that animals can be domesticated is proof that the trait can be modulated by the selective pressures of evolution.
Pg. 59: The idea that human behavior has a genetic basis has long been resisted by those who see the mind as a blank slate on which only culture can write. The blank slate notion has been particularly attractive to Marxists, who wish government to mold socialist man in its desired image.
Pg. 62: A hunter-gatherer society consists of small, egalitarian bands without leaders or headmen. This was the standard human social structure until 15,000 years ago. That it took 185,000 years for people to take the seemingly obvious step of settling down and putting a permanent roof over their heads strongly suggests that several genetic changes in social behavior had to evolve first. The aggressive and independent nature of hunter-gatherers, accustomed to trusting only their close kin, had to yield to a more sociable temperament and the ability to interact peaceably with larger numbers of people. A foraging society that turns to agriculture must develop a whole new set of institutions to coordinate people in the unaccustomed labor of sowing and harvesting crops.
Pg. 71: Races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. The environment keeps changing, and organisms will perish unless they adapt.
Pg. 76: The earliest known modern human (homo sapien) remains outside Africa, about 46,000 years old, come from Lake Mungo in Australia.
Pg. 77: The humans (homos) that evolved and left Africa some 500,000 years ago, included what became Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in East Asia. Both disappeared about the time that modern humans entered their territories, implying that modern humans had something to do with their disappearance.
Pg. 93: …50,000 years ago a small group of people left Africa. Therefore, the first major split is between Africans and non-Africans. Then this band of non-Africans split and became a European branch and an East Asian branch. We, therefore, have Africans, East Asians, and Caucasians.
This same migration 50,000 years ago that gave rise to both Europeans and East Asians, eventually reached Sahul, the ancient Ice Age continent that was split by rising sea levels into the three landmasses of Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania. Australian aborigines, surprisingly, turn out to be a race unlike any other. They and their relatives in New Guinea have no trace in their genome of admixture with other races until the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century. Australian aborigines can reasonably be considered a race, although a minor one in terms of population size. Native Americans can also be considered a race.
Pg. 124: Social institutions are a blend of genetics and culture. Each major institution is based on genetically influenced behaviors, the expression of which is shaped by culture. Warfare, religion, trade, and law are social institutions found throughout the world. Warfare is based on the deep-seated instinct to protect one’s family and group, as well as on predatory motives, such as stealing the women or property of others. The instinct for religious behavior, found in every society, was essential for group cohesion among early human communities and continues to play a leading role in modern societies, even though other institutions have assumed many of its former roles. Trade is founded on the human instincts for exchange and reciprocity. Law is rooted in several complex social instincts, including those for following rules, punishing violators of social norms and the sense of personal transgression that underlies self-punishment and shame.
Pg. 127: If institutions were purely cultural, it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another. But American institutions do not transplant so easily to tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan. Afghans, in order to survive in conditions where central government is usually weak, have had to rely on tribal systems for protection over the centuries, and tribal institutions require behaviors—like blood revenge and the killing of female relatives deemed to have dishonored the tribe—which differ from those that are successful in, for instance, Scandinavian democracies.
Pg. 137: Tribalism is the default state of early human societies, just as autocracy is the default state of modern ones. Tribal societies have existed probably from the beginning of the human species, and many still exist in the present day.
Pg. 145: A central part in the development of European institutions was played by religion. Religion was critical first in detribalization and second in instating the rule of law. The essence of the tribal lineage was the descent of property through the male line. But producing a male heir under medieval conditions of short life expectancy and high infant mortality was far from a sure thing. So the tribes had various strategies for keeping wealth within the lineage. These included cousin marriage, divorce if a woman bore no heir, adoption and the levirate (marrying of widows to their husband’s brother). In addition, women were not allowed to own property.
The church opposed all these heirship strategies, not because of anything in existing Christian doctrine but because it had a better idea: that people should leave their property to the church instead of their heirs. By the end of the 7th century, a third of the productive land in France belonged to the church. Separated from their property, the road to feudalism was paved.
In the fragmented political conditions of medieval Europe, the church became rich and powerful but started to develop tribal or nepotistic problems of its own. Its priests became keenly interested in passing on their property and offices to their kin. Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) forced priests to become celibate so that their loyalty would be to the church and not to their kin.
Pg. 149: The Malthusian trap, described in 1798: each increase in productivity was followed by a growth in population, which ate up the surplus and brought the population back to the edge of starvation. Note: it was from Malthus that Darwin derived the principle of natural selection, the central mechanism in his theory of evolution. (The Industrial Revolution provided an escape from this trap).
Pg. 155: Gregory Clark believes the escape from the Malthusian trap can be explained by four documented behavioral changes that occurred between 1200 and 1800. The four behaviors are those of a lessening of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to delay gratification by saving, and the propensity to work.
Pg. 172: The homicide rate in the U.S., Europe, China, and Japan is less than 2 per 100,000 people, whereas in most African countries south of the Sahara, it exceeds 10 per 100,000, a difference that does not prove but surely allows room for a genetic contribution to greater violence in the less developed world.
Pg. 189: The two camps in the IQ debate are known as hereditarians and environmentalists. Both sides generally agree that when IQ tests are administered in the U.S., European Americans score 100, Asian Americans score 105 and African Americans score 85 to 90. The African American score is noticeably lower. The hereditarians say the difference in scores is due to 50% to environmental reasons and 50% to genetics. The environmentalists assert that the entire gap is due to environmental impediments and that if these were removed, the gap would ultimately disappear altogether.
Pg. 212: Common belief is that the Jews chose professions in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine because they were banned to have professions other than those. But there is little or no evidence for such prohibitions. Jews concentrated in professions like trade and moneylending for a simple reason. In a world where most people were illiterate, the literacy of almost all Jews gave them a decided advantage in any occupation that required reading contracts or keeping accounts. Also, Jewish communities were subject to law, as laid out in the Talmud and rabbinic courts oversaw contract enforcement and disputes. They also had networks in all major communities.
Pg. 229: Religious authorities in Islamic countries disdained any source of knowledge other than the Qur’an, and frequently exercised their power to suppress it. Printing presses were forbidden. In the Ottoman Empire a decree of Sultan Selim I specified the death penalty for anyone who even used a printing press. Istanbul did not acquire a printing press until 1726 and the owners were allowed to publish only a few titles before being closed down.
Pg. 230: Toby E. Huff: The reason Arabic science was so good in the 8th to 14th centuries despite such inhospitable conditions from religious authorities, is that in the early centuries of Muslim rule few people had in fact converted to Islam. It was only when the pace of conversion picked up in the 10th century that Muslim majorities had negative consequences for the pursuit of the natural sciences and intellectual life in general.
No comments:
Post a Comment