Henry
Harpending (1944-2016) died this past Sunday. He had a stroke a year ago, and
then a second one three weeks ago, but apparently he died of a lung infection.
This is one of the risks of getting older: you dodge one bullet only to get hit
by another.
The
cemeteries are full of people who die before their time, but this is one case
where I really wish death had held off a while longer, so that he could see
more of the fruits of his labors, particularly in the area of gene-culture
coevolution.
No,
he wasn’t the only academic to show that culture and genes have coevolved in our
species. In fact, the idea probably originated with Claude Lévi-Strauss in the
early 1970s:
When
cultures specialize, they consolidate and favor other traits, like resistance
to cold or heat for societies that have willingly or unwillingly had to adapt
to extreme climates, like dispositions to aggressiveness or contemplation, like
technical ingenuity, and so on. [...] each culture selects for genetic
aptitudes that, via a feedback loop, influence the culture that had initially
helped to strengthen them. (Lévi-Strauss, 1971)
This
idea of gene-culture coevolution became popular in the 1980s through papers by
L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Pierre van den Berghe.
It then fell out of fashion because ... well, because. When Paul Ehrlich wrote Human Natures (2000), he returned to the
conventional wisdom that cultural evolution had largely replaced genetic
evolution in our species. As one became more important, the other became less
so.
In 2007, Henry
Harpending turned this thinking on its head with a study on
changes to the human genome over the past 80,000 years. With four other
researchers, he found that these changes actually sped up more than a hundred-fold
some 10,000 years ago, when hunting and gathering gave way to farming, which in turn led to population growth and larger, more complex societies. Our ancestors were no longer
adapting to relatively static natural environments but rather to
faster-changing cultural ones of their own making. They created new ways of
life, which in turn influenced who would survive and who wouldn't.
As
Henry and his co-authors pointed out, this estimate of a hundred-fold
acceleration is actually conservative:
It
is sometimes claimed that the pace of human evolution should have slowed as
cultural adaptation supplanted genetic adaptation. The high empirical number of
recent adaptive variants would seem sufficient to refute this claim. It is
important to note that the peak ages of new selected variants in our data do
not reflect the highest intensity of selection, but merely our ability to
detect selection. Due to the recent acceleration, many more new adaptive
mutations should exist than have yet been ascertained, occurring at a faster
and faster rate during historic times. (Hawks et al., 2007)
Few
ideas belong solely to one person, but Henry deserves credit for perseverance.
Most of the others, like L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, eventually found it expedient
to focus on other ideas. Henry pushed on, not only by co-writing a
book with Greg Cochran, but also by continuing to do original research.
I
would like to say that Henry was allowed to work in peace. That's how things
are in a free society, no? Unfortunately, he was repeatedly warned to stop,
subtly at first and then not so subtly. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law
Center added his name to its list of "extremists"—a list that,
curiously, omits people whose skin is darker than peaches and cream.
In
its "Extremist File" the SPLC describes him as follows:
Harpending
is most famous for his book, co-authored with frequent collaborator Gregory
Cochran, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How
Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which argues that humans are
evolving at an accelerating rate, and that this began when the ancestors of
modern Europeans and Asians left Africa. Harpending believes that this
accelerated evolution is most visible in differences between racial groups,
which he claims are growing more distinct and different from one another. The
evolution of these racial differences are, in Harpending's account, the driving
force behind all of modern human history. He is also a eugenicist who believes
that medieval Europeans intuitively adopted eugenic policies, and that we
should recognize the importance of eugenics in our own society. (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2015)
I
would give that summary a D+.
-
The book's argument was that genetic evolution slowly accelerated as modern
humans spread outward from a relatively small area in Africa, beginning some 80,000
years ago. Much later, this acceleration greatly increased when farming began
to replace hunting and gathering some 10,000 years ago. The actual Out of
Africa event—when modern humans spread out of Africa some 50,000 years
ago—was tangential to this process of accelerating genetic evolution, yet the
SPLC summary makes it seem pivotal (perhaps to show that Henry was obsessed
with black people?).
-
The book's argument was that culture and genes coevolve: culture drives genetic
evolution just as much as genes drive cultural evolution. And this process can
take place within groups that are not normally thought to be “racial.”
-
The last sentence is way off the mark. Yes, a culture will make it harder for
some individuals to survive and reproduce, thereby removing certain
predispositions and personality types from the gene pool, but this process is
no more a "eugenic policy" than is natural selection itself. It's silly to use
words like "eugenics" and "policy" for something that
happens unconsciously in any culture, even in small bands of hunter-gatherers.
I
don't mind people making unfounded criticisms. That's par for the course in
academia. But was the SPLC interested in academic debate when it listed Henry
as an "extremist"?
Indeed,
what's the point of that list? Information gathering? Or is it more like
incitement to extrajudicial punishment and, yes, extrajudicial violence?
"Look folks, this is a BAD PERSON, so go and do what the justice system is
too cowardly to do!" Isn't that the point of the exercise? And isn't that
exactly what the KKK was condemned for doing?
A
strange role reversal has taken place between the long-dead KKK and the
SPLC. It's now the latter that tries to enforce its notions of good behavior
through intimidation, veiled threats, public shaming, and blacklisting. It's
now the SPLC that is conspiring, literally, to deny people their civil rights.
Anyway,
Henry Harpending seemed unfazed by the SPLC's blacklisting. He was apparently
one of those rare tenured professors who put his tenure to good use and
blissfully went on doing what he had always been doing. I wish he had lived
longer. He was irreplaceable not so much because he knew more but because he
was unafraid to say and act on what he knew. I will miss him.
References
Cochran,
G. and H. Harpending. (2010). The 10,000
Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, New York:
Basic Books.
Ehrlich,
P. (2000). Human Natures. Genes,
Cultures, and the Human Prospect, Penguin.
Harpending,
H., and G. Cochran. (2002). In our genes, Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 99, 10-12.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC117504/
Hawks,
J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent
acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 104, 20753-20758.
http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/Documents/accel_pnas_submit.pdf
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971). Race et culture, conférence de
Lévi-Strauss à L'UNESCO le 22 mars 1971
http://politproductions.com/sites/default/files/art-%C2%ABrace_et_culture%C2%BB_levi-strauss_unesco_22_3_1971.pdf
Southern
Poverty Law Center (2015). Henry Harpending, Extremist Files,
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/henry-harpending