The Burakumin of Japan, the Paekchong of Korea, and
the Cagots of France … What do they have in common? All three were despised
castes—closed groups of people who married among themselves. A despised caste
is not just a low class. Otherwise, it would always be gaining and losing
members, with some moving up and out and others down and in. As Gregory Clark
has shown, the English lower class is descended largely from people who were
middle or even upper class a few centuries before. This may seem strange if you equate the middle class with voluntary childlessness, but until the late
19th century they were the ones who had the most children—even more so if we
look only at children who lived to adulthood. The resulting demographic
overflow continually spilled over into the lower class.
In contrast, not much new blood flows into a
despised caste, at least not on an ongoing basis. Social stigma discourages
people from marrying out or marrying in. Nor does one enter simply by virtue of
being poor, since the fear of losing caste keeps out most of the downwardly
mobile. Despite this lack of new blood, a despised caste can perpetuate itself
indefinitely because its members usually have enough resources—through their
monopoly over equally despised occupations—to get married, form families, and
have enough children to replace themselves. This was not the case with urban
lower classes of pre-industrial times, which typically had large numbers of
childless single men.
Because a caste is closed and self-perpetuating, it may
preserve genetic traits that disappear everywhere else. It thus becomes more
and more different not because it is changing but because its host population
is changing.
But how can a population change over a few
centuries? Didn’t human nature assume its present form back in the Pleistocene
when cultural evolution took over from genetic evolution? In reality, these two
evolutionary processes have reinforced each other. Human genetic evolution
actually accelerated 40,000 years ago and even more so 10,000 years ago,
apparently in response to a growing diversity of cultural environments.
What about Richard Lewontin’s finding that human
genes vary much more within populations than between populations? Isn’t that
proof that genetic evolution stagnated while humans were spreading over the
earth and forming the many populations we see today? Lewontin’s finding is
correct but does not mean what it seems to mean. Indeed, the same genetic overlap has
been found between many species that
are nonetheless distinct anatomically, morphologically, and behaviorally.
Genetic variation between populations differs qualitatively from genetic
variation within populations. In the first case, genes vary across a boundary
that separates different environments and, thus, different selection pressures.
This kind of genetic variation is shaped by selection and gives rise to real
phenotypic differences. The situation is something else entirely when genes
vary among individuals who belong to the same population and face similar selection
pressures. That kind of variation matters much less, the actual phenotypic
differences often being trivial or nonexistent.
Human evolution is a logarithmic curve where most of
the interesting changes have happened since the advent of farming and complex
societies. Homo sapiens
was not a culmination but rather a beginning … of gene-culture co-evolution. There
are many ways to study this co-evolution, but one way is to look at the
different evolutionary trajectories followed by castes and their host
populations.
The year is ending, and it’s time to take stock.
Which posts interested you the most? Here are the five most popular ones, with the number
of visits to each post:
The first two belonged to a five-part series on the
white slave trade (see also Trading in fair-skinned women. Did it happen elsewhere?From Slavs to slaves, From Slavs to slaves. Part II). The existence
of this trade is little known even among the well-educated, who typically react
with disbelief. Surely those white slaves were fewer in number than the black
slaves taken across the Atlantic.And
surely all of that happened long before the Atlantic slave trade.
Wrong on both counts. Europe exported about as many
slaves to the non-European world as were exported from Africa to the Americas.
Eastern Europeans continued to be “harvested” until the mid-1700s and the
population of the Caucasus until the mid-1800s. By comparison, the black slave
trade was banned within the British Empire in 1807 and throughout the Western
Hemisphere by the 1860s. The difference was qualitative and not quantitative.
Black slaves were mostly male; white slaves mostly female.
In writing those posts, I wasn’t driven by a desire
to slander Muslims. Many white slave girls went on to become the wives of
leading men, including sultans (like Roxelana). Their slave status was a
passing thing, as explained by a notable of Tunis, Mohamed Rechid, when the
authorities questioned him in 1891 on his role in slave trafficking:
Q. Do you have any white slave women of Circassian
or other origins?
A. No, I don’t have any. Q. When you went to Constantinople, you didn’t bring
any white slave women back with you? A. I brought two women back with me, this is true,
but they aren’t slaves. They are two sisters, one of whom is my wife. One is
called Zohra and the other Daïde. Q. If they aren’t slaves, how did you get them? A. I bought them in Constantinople, I freed them,
and I married one of them. The other one is my sister-in-law. (Dali, 2012)
In Tunis, the noblest families are partly descended
from such women (Dali, 2012). The same seems true for most of North Africa and
the Middle East, according to this historian of Muslim Spain:
The same convoys of booty also
included women, these Frankish women who were all the more sought after in
Cordova because they were blond and fair-skinned. It was among them, as among
the captive women from Gascony, that the Umayyad princes chose their most
pampered concubines and who, once they became mothers, were themselves raised
to the rank of veritable princesses, of proven sultanesses (umm walad) who were influential and
quick to enter, with the assistance of Slav eunuchs, into secret and
complicated palace intrigues. But the Frankish women did not populate only the
caliph's harems; the dignitaries of the khassa
and the rich burghers of the cities also procured them at lavish prices, like,
in the modern period, the Circassian women who have so curiously tinted the
upper classes of oriental Muslim society. (Lévi-Provençal, 1953, p. 179)
Of course, many white slave women had less fortunate
outcomes, never rising above the level of concubine, singing girl, or
prostitute. But this is not something to feel bitter or guilty about. The past
is another country. We study it so that we may better understand the present.
In this five-part series, I was responding to
Cameron Russell’s argument that she and other top models are cashing in on a
legacy of white privilege. In other words, if Europeans had not become so
dominant socially, economically, and geopolitically, her white skin and facial
features would today seem much less attractive. Well, that alternate reality
did exist. Until five centuries ago, white folks were weaklings on the world
scene, with large areas of their continent under the rule of outsiders. And
yet, European women were greatly admired in Muslim Spain, North Africa, the
Middle East, and South Asia, this being why so many of them were enslaved and
exported to those regions … just because of their looks.
This post was about Karel Kleisner’s study on eye
color and face shape. In sum, blue eyes are associated with less robust and
more feminine faces, but only if the faces are male. It may be that female face
shape is overdetermined, i.e., all girls are exposed to enough estrogen in the
womb to feminize their faces, but only blue-eyed boys reach this level of
estrogenization. Thus, to some degree, blue eyes are a female trait. This
finding is consistent with the view, supported by other findings, that the most
visible features of Europeans are actually female
features, i.e., they are a product of a selection pressure that acted primarily
on women.
I was initially taken aback on seeing the averaged
blue-eyed and brown-eyed male faces that appear in Dr. Kleisner’s first paper
on this subject. Surely some of those photographed subjects were partly Jewish
or Roma. But, then, the brown-eyed men would have been more variable in face
shape, yet they were not. And how would that reason explain why blue eyes
correlated with facial feminization in men but not in women?
Two years ago, the Danish psychologist Helmuth
Nyborg published a paper on his country’s demographic future. He made the
following points:
- Contrary to official statistics, immigrant birth
rates are not falling. In fact, they have been rising since 1980 and were over
twice the ethnic Danish birth rate in 2009. Since 1995, the ethnic Danish birth
rate has been falling.
- After rising for half a century, average national
IQ began to fall in 1997. This decline has also been observed in Norway, even
though average IQ has continued to rise elsewhere in line with the Flynn
effect.
- By 2050, less than one fifth of the population
will have IQs in the 90 to 104 range, and over half in the 70 to 85 range.
Primary schools will mainly have low IQ children of sub-Saharan, Middle
Eastern, North African, Latin American, and Caribbean backgrounds.
- By 2072, ethnic Danes will have fallen to 60% of
the population and 33% of all births. They will become a minority around 2085.
These predictions may or may not be correct (see
Does Nyborg’s study make sense?). Is the rapidity of demographic change
overstated? Are the differences in IQ due to poor upbringing and hence amenable
to improvement? Criticism can and should be made, but that option was passed
over by three of Nyborg’s colleagues. They complained to the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty,
which ruled that he must withdraw his study from the scientific literature. I
denounced this decision in an e-mail to Morten Østergaard, the Danish Minister
for Research, Innovation, and Higher Education, as did many other academics.
I got the following reply (words bolded as in the
original):
Dear Dr. Frost,
The Minister for Science, Innovation and Higher
Education Morten Østergaard acknowledges receipt of your e-mail dated 14
November 2013.
Further to your concern as to the decision (ruling)
dated 28 October 2013 of the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty on
Helmuth Nyborg’s contribution to the article “The Decay of Western
Civilization: Double Relaxed Darwinian Selection” published in the scientific
journal “Personality and Individual Differences”, we are now pleased to invite
you to study the translation into English of the decision. You will find the
translation following this link:
Based on the conclusions of the Committees they recommend that the article be
withdrawn. But, as you will see, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty
have not in any way considered the
conclusions drawn by Dr. Nyborg, nor have they ordered him to withdraw the article.
The Committees have been established as stipulated
in an act of Parliament to “investigate allegations on research misconduct
only, i.e. falsification, fabrication, plagiarism and other serious violation
of good scientific practice committed wilfully or grossly negligent on
planning, performance or reporting of research results”. The Committees are not
entitled to consider cases involving the validity or truth of scientific
theories or cases involving the research quality of a scientific product.
If you are interested in more information on the
mandate of the Committees, you may find all the relevant regulations translated
into English here:
General Counsel and Head of Secretariat for Danish Committees on
Scientific Dishonesty
Yes, it was just a recommendation, but
recommendations are made to be acted upon by someone in authority. Or maybe the
Committee expected that Dr. Nyborg would just voluntarily purge his study from
the scientific literature? Anyhow, it’s clear that no one in authority wishes
to proceed further.
The scientific community is slowly realizing that
microscopic parasites can manipulate human behavior. Attention is now focused
on the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii,
but only because we already know what it does to cats and mice. There is no
reason to think that human-specific microbes have not also evolved in this
direction. As the Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr points out: “A large number of
parasitic organisms […] may influence the phenotype of their human host even
more than the Toxoplasma. These
organisms are, however, still waiting for research teams to engage in a
systematic study of their influence on the human host.”
Some of them may be surprisingly commonplace,
organisms like vaginal yeast and bacterial vaginosis. See also Brainwashed by a microbe?
And now for the
duds …
My year-end review would be incomplete unless I
mentioned my least popular posts:
In this post, together with previous ones on the Paekchong of Korea and the Burakumin of Japan, I argued that outcaste groups
are evolutionarily conservative and thus tend to preserve predispositions that
once were prevalent in the general population, e.g., with respect to time
orientation, impulse control, anger threshold, etc.
Such groups exist in many societies, such as those
of East Asia. The existence of stigmatized occupations, notably trades that
involve contact with dead flesh (butchering, leather making, undertaking),
provide lower-class individuals with a protected means of livelihood, but at
the cost of becoming themselves stigmatized. The occupational class becomes a
caste and, hence, no longer participates in the evolutionary changes that
affect the general population. Over time, this caste tends to perpetuate the
same behavioral profile and thus increasingly diverges from the evolving
behavioral profile of the larger society, with the result that social
stigmatization and genetic isolation further increase.
The situation is unlike that of England where, over
the past millennium, the reproductive success of the upper and middle
classes caused a demographic overflow that continually replenished the
ranks of the lower classes, who had negative
natural increase. Today, the population of English background, even in the
lower classes, is composed of lineages that half a millennium ago were
predominantly upper or middle class (Clark, 2007; Clark, 2009).
The Paris
Spring, racism, and antiracism
Time will tell whether anything will come of the
Paris Spring (better known as the French Spring). By “time” I mean the next
year or so. Can antiracism reform itself? I doubt it. Yes, there is a growing
willingness to extend the concept of “hate crime” to cases of interracial
violence where the victim is white, e.g., the knockout game. But such
willingness can never be more than tokenism. First, whites are the victims in most
cases of interracial violence, and overwhelmingly so. Any acknowledgement of
that reality would completely transform antiracism. Second, as antiracists are
right to point out, non-white on white violence is less ideologically motivated
than the reverse. The motive is typically a perception that whites are soft
targets. “Whites don’t fight back.” In particular, they don’t fight back
collectively. The White man has no friends.
In the real world, motives are less important than
consequences. Humans have been ganging up on soft targets for millennia, but
for most of that time they had no conscious ideological motive. Were the Thule
Inuit aware that they were driving the Dorset people to extinction? Not really.
They would first move into Dorset territory and work out a modus vivendi. When
they became more numerous, they would drive those people out. Then they moved
into the next patch of Dorset territory. And the cycle repeated again and again
until the Dorset were no more.
References
Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World,
Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.
Clark, G. (2009) The indicted and the wealthy:
surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in
pre-industrial England,
Dali, I.M. (2012). Problématique du phénotype.
Approche comparative des esclavages dans la Tunisie du XIXe siècle, in R. Botte
and A. Stella (eds.) Couleurs de
l’esclavages sur les deux rives de la Méditerranée (Moyen Âge-XXe siècle),
(pp. 337-369), Paris: Éditions Karthala.
Lévi-Provençal, E. (1953). Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, tome III, Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve.
Relative frequencies of surnames of the rich and the poor (common criminals) 1236-1858. In England, there seems to have been much downward mobility among descendants of the medieval rich and some upward mobility among descendants of the medieval poor (Clark, 2010). H/T to Jason Malloy
Henry Harpending (2012) argues that a meritocracy would become a caste society in a few generations:
Consider free meritocracy in a two-class system, meaning that for each generation anyone in the lower class who has greater merit than someone in the upper class immediately swaps class with them. Mating then occurs at random within class.
[…] Class mobility after the first generation is 30% while after four generations it has declined to 10% and continues to decline after that. The average merit in the two classes is about -1SD in the lower and +1SD in the upper on the original scale, corresponding to IQs of 85 and 115.
[…] after four generations, about 70% of the variance is between classes.
This model, however, contradicts what Clark (2009a) found in his historical study of surnames and social class in England. He first collected rare English surnames that were exclusive in the year 1600 to the rich (as represented by wealthy testators) or to the poor (as represented by common criminals). He then went forward in time to the year 1851 and determined the occupational profile of the same rare surnames:
How do the descendants of these two groups look in terms of socioeconomic status by 1851? Surprisingly there seems to be almost complete regression to the mean.
Between 1600 and 1851, there was apparently great downward mobility among descendants of the rich and modest upward mobility among descendants of the poor. Clark (2010) subsequently found that this regression held true for the entire period stretching from 1236 to 1858 (see above chart).
Why does this outcome diverge so much from the theoretical outcome described above? One reason is the assumption that marriage takes place only within each social class. Yet assortative mating is only a tendency, and exceptions are numerous. In post-medieval England, a widower would likely take a second wife of lower social status because of his disadvantaged position on the marriage market, given the care required for his existing children. It was also accepted for an upper-class man to marry a woman of lower rank, on the condition that she be beautiful. This phenomenon was noted by Darwin:
Many persons are convinced, as it appears to me with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes; yet the middle classes are placed under equally favourable conditions of life for the perfect development of the body. (Darwin, 1936 [1888], p. 892)
Another reason is downward mobility. In England, the upper and middle classes were reproductively more successful than the lower class until the late 19th century. But higher-class families could offer their children only a limited number of occupational slots. A certain proportion thus had to emigrate or move down the social ladder. The lower class was thereby continually replenished by the demographic overflow of the upper and middle classes.
Finally, the word “merit” has different meanings in different contexts. It is never just IQ. In post-medieval England, merit meant a mix of “middle-class” values: thrift, self-control, future time orientation, and rejection of violence as a way to settle disputes (Clark, 2007; Clark, 2009a; Clark, 2009b). In other societies, merit may involve a different mix of predispositions and personality traits, such as ruthlessness and willingness to use violence.
Yet caste societies do exist. How do they come about? The main precondition seems to be not only the existence of social classes, but also a monopoly on certain occupations by each class. In such circumstances, downwardly mobile individuals cannot compete with the existing lower class, since the latter’s livelihood remains off-limits.
Take Japan. That country had a social evolution similar to England’s, i.e., gradual demographic expansion of the middle class and, correspondingly, gradual demographic replacement of the lower classes by downwardly mobile individuals. But the lowest class, the Burakumin, survived because it had a monopoly on occupations that involved taking life or handling dead bodies (e.g., leather working, butchery, undertaking, etc.). The Burakumin thus survive as a remnant of the majority Japanese population that existed several centuries ago.
Stigmatized castes, like the Burakumin, may provide a window into a population’s evolutionary past. Such groups cannot participate in the gene-culture co-evolution of the majority population. Nor do they have much leeway for their own gene-culture co-evolution, since they are rigorously confined to a few occupations.
References
Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
L'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête — Pascal
Welcome to my blog! For the most part, this page will be an extension of my website, with comments relating to my research. But it will also branch out into more general discussions of human evolution.
Since November 2022 I've been publishing my posts at Peter Frost's Newsletter on Substack. These are longer posts that expand on earlier material I've previously published at Evo and Proud. I'm also contributing articles to Aporia Magazine.
