Cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula

 

A recent polygenic study has shown that mean cognitive ability is higher in the North of Italy than in the South. Cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest in the Northeast, perhaps because the Northwest earlier went through the Industrial Revolution, which severed reproductive success from economic success.

 

 

 

As a country, Italy came into existence only a century and a half ago. Regional differences are still strong, particularly between the North and the South. The “Southern question” is usually said to date from the unification of Italy in the 19th century:

 

In the decades following the unification of Italy, the northern regions of the country, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria in particular, began a process of industrialization and economic development while the southern regions remained behind. At the time of the unification of the country, there was a shortage of entrepreneurs in the south, with landowners who were often absent from their farms as they lived permanently in the city, leaving the management of their funds to managers, who were not encouraged by the owners to make the agricultural estates to the maximum. Landowners invested not in agricultural equipment, but in such things as low-risk state bonds. (Wikipedia 2022a)

 

De Rosa (1979) argues that the South had already fallen behind the North by the 18th century. At that time, its middle class was small, and economic relations were still structured by paternalism and familialism. One could go back even farther, to the Renaissance or even the late Middle Ages, to identify the moment when northern Italy, and Western Europe in general, embarked on sustained economic growth and thus pulled ahead of the rest of the world.

 

That sustained economic growth brought sustained demographic growth, particularly of the middle class. Gregory Clark found that the English middle class expanded steadily from the twelfth century onward, its descendants not only growing in number but also replacing the lower classes through downward mobility. By the 1800s, its lineages accounted for most of the English population. That demographic change coincided with mental and behavioral changes: higher cognitive ability, lower time preference, and a lower threshold for violent behavior. In a word, the English became more middle-class in character. “Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving” (Clark 2007, p. 166).

 

Elsewhere in Western Europe, the middle class similarly expanded during late medieval and early modern times. The result would be a growing contrast between regions that had participated in this economic and demographic change and those that had not, such as southern Italy. The contrast can be seen not only on purely economic measures but also on mental ones, like the INVALSI standardized test—an annual test of skills in Italian schools. It is divided into two sections: Italian language skills and Math skills. On both tests, northern Italian students do better than southern Italian students, the difference being a little over half a standard deviation:

 

Yes, the North-South gap in academic achievement could have a purely environmental cause—and this is a recurring problem when we try to tease apart genetic and cultural evolution. If economic development is held back by a culture of poverty, that same culture may discourage students from trying to do better at school. Those students may also have less access to proper nutrition, medical care, libraries, and so on.

 

Polygenic scores for cognitive ability

 

That is why there is so much interest in measures of innate cognitive ability. The most promising one is the polygenic score (PGS)—the summation of alleles (genetic variants) that have been associated with cognitive ability, as measured by educational attainment.  At present, we have identified enough of these alleles to explain 11-13% of the overall variation in cognitive ability (Lee et al. 2018).

 

Yes, those alleles are just a sample of the total number, but why would they be an unrepresentative sample? More to the point: why would PGS data show certain geographic patterns and not a lot of random noise? The mean PGS does indeed differ geographically among human populations. It is highest in Eurasia, with East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Finns having the highest scores. That geographic pattern is in line with IQ data (Piffer 2019).

 

Polygenic scores on the Italian Peninsula

 

In a recent study, Piffer and Lynn (2022) have found regional differences in Italy for alleles associated with educational attainment. They used two datasets: one encompassing 129 Italian individuals and the other 947. All of these individuals had all four grandparents born in the same part of Italy (this requirement was imposed to eliminate the effects of recent interregional migration). When the authors grouped the data into three large regions—North, Central, and South—they found “a clear north-south gradient, with central Italians occupying an intermediate position.” There was more overlap between central and southern Italians than between central and northern Italians.

 

The datasets were too small to show genetic differences within each of the three large regions. If we go back to the INVALSI data, we see that academic achievement is much stronger in the North-Northeast (Lombardia, Trentino, Veneto, Friuli) than in the Northwest (Valle d’Aosta, Liguria).

 

At first thought, that geographic pattern may seem counter-intuitive. In northern Italy, industrialization began in the northwest and came later to the northeast: “the diffusion of industrialisation that characterised the northwestern area of the country largely excluded Venetia and, especially, the South” (Wikipedia 2022b). If economic development had driven cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula, why would this evolution have gone farther in the northeast? Why would it be negatively associated with industrialization?

 

Because the Industrial Revolution put a stop to cognitive evolution. It severed the link between economic success and reproductive success. Previously, businesses were family-run, and the family provided the workforce. Successful business owners were incentivized to have larger families, and their children would have the means to marry at a younger age. Then, in the late 19th century, that stage of economic development began to give way to industrial capitalism. Financial success no longer translated into early marriage and large families who could help with the work. If more workers were needed, they would simply be hired. Business owners now tended to have smaller families because of the high maintenance costs of middle-class children (Canlorbe and Frost 2020; Frost 2018).

 

Cognitive evolution thus ended earlier in the Northwest of Italy than in the Northeast. By the same token, interregional migration has had more time to erode the cognitive advantage that evolved in the Northwest. Yes, the datasets were limited to people who had all four grandparents born in the region, but, for most people, that limitation would not eliminate the effects of interregional migration before the mid-20th century.

 

 

References

 

Canlorbe, G., and P. Frost (2020). Why are human groups so different? American Renaissance, March 20. https://www.amren.com/features/2020/03/why-are-human-groups-so-different/  

 

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA.

 

De Rosa, L. (1979). Property Rights, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth in Southern Italy in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries. Journal of European Economic History 8(3): 531-551.

 

Frost, P. (2018). Rise of the West. Part II. Evo and Proud, December 27

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/12/rise-of-west-part-ii.html  

 

Lee, J. J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics 50(8): 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0147-3

 

Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1(1): 55-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010005    

 

Piffer, D., & Lynn, R. (2022). In Italy, North-South Differences in Student Performance Are Mirrored by Differences in Polygenic Scores for Educational Attainment. Mankind Quarterly 62(4), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2022.62.4.2  

 

Wikipedia (2022a). Economy of Italy – Southern Question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy#Southern_question  

 

Wikipedia (2022b). Economic history of Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Italy