Rice farming and gene-culture coevolution

 

Why didn’t alcohol intolerance evolve the same way in China as it did in southern Europe? One reason was that the Chinese have a long tradition of boiling water for drinking. So they didn’t need wine as a safe, pathogen-free alternative to water. Facial flushing, before and after (Wikicommons, Brooks et al. 2009)

 

 

In a study of 1,162 Han Chinese, a team led by Thomas Talhelm (2014) found certain psychological differences between Chinese from rice-farming regions and those from wheat-farming regions. The latter tended to be more individualistic, more analytic in their thinking, and less likely to make a big distinction between friends and strangers. Interestingly, these findings were no less true for subjects who had no connection to farming of either sort.

 

Talhelm et al. (2014) attributed these psychological differences to differences between rice farming and wheat farming:

 

The two biggest differences between farming rice and wheat are irrigation and labor. Because rice paddies need standing water, people in rice regions build elaborate irrigation systems that require farmers to cooperate. In irrigation networks, one family's water use can affect their neighbors, so rice farmers have to coordinate their water use. Irrigation networks also require many hours each year to build, dredge, and drain—a burden that often falls on villages, not isolated individuals. 

 

In comparison, wheat is easier to grow. Wheat does not need to be irrigated, so wheat farmers can rely on rainfall, which they do not coordinate with their neighbors. Planting and harvesting wheat certainly takes work, but only half as much as rice. The lighter burden means farmers can look after their own plots without relying as much on their neighbors. (Talhelm et al., 2014)

 

The term “gene-culture coevolution” isn’t mentioned, but it did cross my mind when I read that paper, and I suspect it also crossed Talhelm’s. Did rice farming favor the success of individuals who were better at rice farming? And were those individuals sometimes better because they had certain mental and behavioral tendencies?

 

That hypothesis has recently been tested in a study by Chen Zhu and other co-researchers, including Thomas Talhelm:

 

Here, we report evidence that the advent of rice domestication and cultivation may have shaped humans not only culturally but also genetically. Leveraging recent findings from molecular genetics, we construct a number of polygenic scores (PGSs) of behavioural traits and examine their associations with rice cultivation based on a sample of 4101 individuals recently collected from mainland China. (Zhu et al. 2021)

 

The polygenic scores were for height, body mass index, depression, time discounting, age at first birth, educational attainment, risk preference, and tolerance for alcohol (as measured by the ability to break it down via two enzymes: alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase). For each mental or behavioral trait, the polygenic scores were compared with the subjects’ county of birth, specifically the county’s proportion of farmland devoted to rice paddies.

 

The trait/county correlations were then investigated for possible confounds. Because rice farming is more common in southern China, there may be confounds with latitude, temperature, certain minority groups, and so on. After controlling for these confounds, the authors found that two negative correlations remained significant: (1) age at first birth and (2) tolerance for alcohol, as measured by the ability to produce aldehyde dehydrogenase.

 

It seems, then, that people from rice-farming regions are more likely to feel sick after drinking alcohol, and that women are more likely to begin having children at a younger age. Let’s take a closer look at both findings:

 

Age at first birth

 

Rice-farming regions are associated with a younger age at first birth. Historically, rice was far more labor-intensive than wheat. The labor demands were so high that a husband and wife could not farm a large enough plot to support their family through their labor alone. Life expectancy may have also been shorter in rice-farming regions than in wheat-farming ones, with the result that the reproductive schedule was shifted toward younger ages wherever rice was primarily grown (Zhu et al. 2021). 

 

Alcohol tolerance

 

Rice-farming regions are associated with defective enzymes for alcohol tolerance. This seems to be much truer for aldehyde dehydrogenase than for alcohol dehydrogenase. Both defects reduce clearance of alcohol by the liver, but the first one has a stronger effect. In about 36% of East Asians, it causes facial flushing, nausea, and tachycardia after alcohol consumption. Not surprisingly, carriers appear to suffer less from alcoholism and alcohol-related liver disease (Brooks et al. 2009; SNPedia 2020).

 

Zhu et al. (2021) argue that selection against alcohol tolerance was stronger in rice-farming regions because rice farmers had surplus rice for wine production at an earlier date. This argument assumes that alcohol consumption was always maladaptive: once it became common, selection immediately favored individuals who couldn’t tolerate alcohol. Yet we know that alcohol consumption used to be adaptive in many parts of the world, such as southern Europe, where fermented beverages were safer to drink than water because they had no water-borne pathogens.

 

I would argue that selection against alcohol tolerance began in China when fermented beverages, notably rice wine, ceased to be the best alternative to water. Consumption of rice wine was widespread at first but later gave way to consumption of boiled water, particularly in the form of tea, during the Tang dynasty (7th to 10th centuries). There then followed a period of relative abstinence until the 19th century:

 

Following the Yangtze's incorporation into the Chinese state during the Qin dynasty, beer progressively disappeared from use over the course of the Han dynasty in favor of the stronger huangjiu and the rice wines of the southern Chinese. […] The Dutch historian Frank Dikötter describes the period between the Han and Tang dynasties as a "golden age" for alcohol […] The "rise of a tea culture during the Tang was a significant shift away from heavier patterns of intoxication".  […] Wine was reintroduced to China at Macao by Portuguese traders and missionaries, who produced small batches for communion. […] The production and its effect was minor, prior to the opening of the country by the 19th-century First and Second Opium Wars, after which European alcoholic beverages and methods of alcohol production were introduced throughout China. (Wikipedia 2022)

 

With the replacement of rice wine by tea during the Tang Dynasty, people no longer had the same need for enzymes that break down alcohol. The advantages of alcohol, in terms of preventing water-borne diseases, became outweighed by the disadvantages, in terms of alcoholism and alcohol-related diseases.

 

Thus began a long Chinese tradition of drinking hot water (Ye 2017). Rice wine, with its high alcohol content of 18-25%, became seen not only as unnecessary but also as problematic, due to the risk of alcoholism and alcohol-related diseases. Rice-farming regions may have therefore experienced a steeper decline in alcohol consumption during China’s long period of relative abstinence between the 7th and 19th centuries. If so, alcohol intolerance would be a recent evolutionary development in China’s rice-farming regions.

 

Elsewhere, as in southern Europe, people continued to drink wine as a safe alternative to water. There was thus selection for willingness to consume alcohol, but not to excess.

 

What about individualism?

 

Why didn’t Zhu’s research team look at genetic markers for individualism? Wasn’t that the main behavioral difference between rice-farming and wheat-farming regions in Talhelm’s study? The oversight is all the more puzzling because Talhelm was one of Zhu’s co-authors.

 

There is, in fact, a genetic marker for individualism: the short allele of 5-HTTLPR (Chiao and Blizinsky 2010; Schroeder et al., 2016). In addition, I would look at genetic markers for the propensity to identify social norms, to comply with them, and to ensure that others comply (Frost 2020).

 

What about cognitive ability and future orientation?

 

Zhu et al. (2021) also looked at cognitive ability (as measured by educational attainment) and future orientation (as measured, inversely, by time discounting). Cognitive ability and future orientation are both high in East Asians, but neither seem to differ significantly between Chinese from rice-farming regions and those from wheat-farming regions. In the initial results (i.e., before they were controlled for possible confounds), the first group was less future-oriented than the second, but this difference seems to be due to southern Chinese being less future-oriented than northern Chinese.

 

Things are rarely simple. No single theory can explain all the mental and behavioral differences that exist within our species. Yes, some researchers have proposed various unified theories of human biodiversity: r/k selection, selection in tropical vs. northern environments, and selection among trading vs. non-trading peoples, etc.  Each of them explains part of the picture, but none explains the whole picture.

 

There will never be a unified theory of human biodiversity, other than Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Human nature is shaped by many different selection pressures with many different causes.

 

References

 

Brooks, P.J., M-A. Enoch, D. Goldman, T-K Li, and A. Yokoyama. (2009). The Alcohol Flushing Response: An Unrecognized Risk Factor for Esophageal Cancer from Alcohol Consumption. PLoS Med 6(3): e1000050. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000050  

 

Chiao, J. Y., & K.D. Blizinsky. (2010). Culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277: 529-537. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.1650   

 

Frost, P. (2014). Rice farming and gene-culture co-evolution. Evo and Proud, May 31

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2014/05/   

 

Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology 10(3): 214-134.

https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012    

 

SNPedia (2020). rs671

https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs671   

 

Talhelm, T., X. Zhang, S. Oishi, C. Shimin, D. Duan, X. Lan, and S. Kitayama. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science 344: 603-607.

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1246850   

 

Wikipedia (2022). Alcoholic drinks in China.

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

 

Ye, F. (2017). The History of Drinking Hot Water in China (from a Cold-Water-Drinking Chinese). Radii, June 23

https://radiichina.com/the-history-of-drinking-hot-water-in-china/   

 

Zhu, C., T. Talhelm, Y. Li, G. Chen, J. Zhu, and J. Wang. (2021). Relationship between rice farming and polygenic scores potentially linked to agriculture in China. Royal Society Open Science 8(8):210382. https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.210382   

Stumbling into the future

China's TFR before and after introduction of the one-child policy (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). Did that policy really change anything?



The European world has entered "demographic autumn"—on the one hand, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level; on the other, non-European immigration has risen progressively. These two trends can have only one outcome.

A similar demographic autumn is developing in East Asia. In some ways the situation is worse—fertility rates are at their lowest here. The record is held by the provinces of northeastern China, which have a total fertility rate of only 0.75 children per woman (Wang 2018). South Korea has an estimated TFR of 0.96, and a significant number of those births are to immigrant mothers from Southeast Asia (Haas 2018). Japan is doing better only by comparison, with a TFR of 1.4.

As for China as a whole, the rate is officially 1.6 and unofficially 1.05; the authorities revise this statistic upward to include second children who go unreported because they are illegal under the one-child policy (Wang 2018). That policy was scrapped in 2016, yet those second children still seem to be in hiding. Do they really exist? Did they ever? The Chinese government is stuck in a classic quandary: what do you do when you realize you've not been telling the truth?

The truth is that China’s TFR is half of what it needs to maintain its current population. This should be no surprise. In fact, it’s in line with what we see in Taiwan (1.1), in Singapore's Chinese community (1.1), and in Malaysia's Chinese community (1.3). Looking back, one can wonder whether the one-child policy ever had much impact on the TFR (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). The decline seems to have deep roots in modern Chinese society:

China faces an intractable and protracted demographic crisis driven by millions of individual family planning choices made by its increasingly wealthy and urbanized population. Policies restricting births imposed by the authorities have played only a contributing role in the drama. Similar aging trends can be seen throughout East Asia, especially in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong — territories that never had the types of legal restrictions imposed upon mainland Chinese couples.

[...] The current relaxation of family size restrictions is simply too little, too late. Before the policy was completely abolished in 2013, the Chinese government relaxed the one-child policy by allowing 11 million couples in which both spouses had no siblings to have two children. However, by May 2015, only 18 percent of eligible couples had taken advantage of the opportunity. This shows to what extent China's declining fertility is driven by personal considerations, as opposed to public policies.

In October 2015, the country's National Health and Family Planning Commission estimated that some 90 million families would qualify for the new, two-child policy. By the end of the year, however, only two million families had applied for permission to have a second child. China Daily conducted a survey in 2016 which showed that nearly 60 percent of working mothers do not want a second child, citing time and energy needed to raise it. Other concerns of the women included career risks, the pain of childbirth and little faith in their marriages. (O'Reilly 2019)

This problem is made worse by the gender imbalance: fewer girls than boys are being born. China now has 33 million more males than females. Finally, there is no reason to believe that the decline will stop at one child per woman.


Stumbling into the future

China's workforce is already shrinking, and the total population will begin to shrink before the mid-2020s.  The decline could be offset by pro-natalist measures. For instance, men and women could be encouraged to remain in rural areas and small towns, where conditions are better for family formation. To deal with the shrinking workforce, there could be measures to phase out low-paying jobs through automation and robotization. Of course, there must first be a willingness to act. Unfortunately, such willingness is far from evident, to judge by the current denial and inaction.

China will stumble into its demographic future, with one ad hoc solution after another. One of them may be immigration: "[China] currently hosts some 900,000 legal migrants and untold numbers of illegals, most of them factory workers from Vietnam. Also, desperate Chinese bachelors, unable to find Chinese mates because of the gender imbalance, are increasingly marrying Cambodian or Vietnamese women" (O'Reilly 2019). This is not to say that immigrants will be actively recruited. As is already the case, most will come illegally, being lured by jobs and empty housing. The onus will then be on the authorities to act—in the face of opposition not only from the business community but also from the migrants' home countries, many of which provide Chinese industry with valuable raw materials.

The solutions will ultimately depend on the ideological environment. Westerners often believe that the Chinese are intensely nationalist. In reality, there is a range of views within China, with the majority supporting civic nationalism. This is not coincidentally the view that the government promotes, partly out of conviction and partly to co-opt Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Meanwhile, younger, university-educated people are moving toward the globalist consensus that reigns in the West.

One such person is Yinghong Cheng, who went abroad to study and is now a professor at Delaware State University. His latest book has a chapter titled "Racism and Its Agents in China" (Cheng 2019). In it he argues:

As an ideology, racism or racial discourses do not exist for their own sake or by themselves but always reflect power relations that may be addressed in other social hierarchy-based or identity-related discourses. In China today, racial thinking can appear in various discourses addressed to the political and ideological needs of the party-state, cultural and intellectual elites, and ordinary citizens: nationalism, patriotism, statism, social Darwinism, Han Chauvinism (or Hanism), non-Han ethno-nationalism, populism, and the Chinese civilizational supremacism in general (associated with the traditional ethnocentrism of China). (Cheng 2019, p. 241)

Elsewhere, he describes Hanism as “an ultra-ethnic supremacism” that “comes close to racism in its way of essentializing differences in a condescending manner” (Cheng 2019, p. 264). “The anti-Qing Hanist racism and a racial hierarchy of the world are the twin of the discourse of race in modern Chinese history. Like any other racial discourse in the world, they reflect power relations in reality but construct imaginary orders for a racially ideal—or “natural”—world” (Cheng 2019, p. 16). “… the Han political and intellectual elite exploited the social science disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology to establish the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors …” (Cheng 2019, p. 7).

Cheng overstates his case when he describes racism as an ideology that always reflects power relations. This is untrue if we examine its core value: preference for one’s kind. Throughout history and prehistory, humans have cared a lot about their kith and kin, even to the point of sacrificing their lives—and this has been no less true in simple societies with no elite or ruling class. Indeed, the oldest societies were essentially clans of related individuals. Furthermore, kinship is key not only to human life but also to the lives of organisms incapable of having ideas, let alone an ideology. 

Please note: I'm not arguing that kin preference is innate (although that argument can be made). I'm simply saying that it predates ideology and has long been the main organizing principle of society. Perhaps it's now obsolete. Perhaps it’s time for us to become self-defining individuals in a global marketplace. That’s the mainstream liberal argument. But that’s not Cheng's argument. He is arguing that kin preference always was wrong, and now we finally have a chance to get rid of it for good—by eliminating the "agents of racism." How this elimination is supposed to happen is not discussed. Indeed, he never applies to himself the sort of painstaking analysis he applies to others.

In all this, Cheng’s thinking is strangely ahistorical. If kinship has always been the basis for human society, perhaps there is a reason. Perhaps it has been the best way to organize social relations. Or perhaps not. Could we at least have a debate without being accused of base motives? Or being eliminated?

A big problem here is cargo-cult reverence for the West, and this reverence extends to the individualism and globalism that has become so dominant in North America and Western Europe, particularly in elite circles. Cheng denounces China for not doing enough to follow their example, while quoting Chinese writers who point to the resulting problems. If that model of society is already problematic in the West, where it has existed for a longer time, has deeper roots in the culture, and has greater chances for success, why should it do better in a country like China?

Cheng further reveals his ahistoricism when he argues that racism suits elite interests. Yes, it did back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when elites were nation-based. But they haven’t been that way for some time. Elites no longer have a national conscience, particularly in the West. Their self-interest now pushes them to liquidate the nation-state, notably by outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be outsourced in construction, agriculture, and services. It is this two-way movement—and not "racism"—that is steadily increasing the Gini index, the most common measure of the gap between the rich and the poor.

Do China’s elites still have a national conscience? One can wonder. Unfortunately, this question goes unanswered in Cheng's book. Only nationalism is seen as problematic in the new China, and only nationalism is viewed as serving elite interests. Yet globalism, too, exists within a context of power relations. It, too, serves certain interests. 

As China's working population continues to shrink, will the elites push for higher wages so that labor may be used more sparingly? Or will they keep wages down by bringing in migrant labor? Which scenario is more likely if policymaking is in their hands? And which scenario will get better coverage in the Chinese media?


References

Chaparro, R. and K. Kulkarni. (2015). Does high population growth help or hurt economic development? Cases of China and Pakistan. International Journal of Education Economics and Development 6. 162. 10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629.
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629

Cheng, Y. (2019). Discourses of Race and Rising China. Palgrave Macmillan
https://books.google.ca/books?id=ht-GDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Haas, B. (2018). South Korea's fertility rate set to hit record low of 0.96. The Guardian, September 3
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/south-koreas-fertility-rate-set-to-hit-record-low

O'Reilly, B. (2019). China lacks the wherewithal to adjust to demographic decline. Austrian Economics Center
https://www.austriancenter.com/china-lacks-the-wherewithal-to-adjust-to-demographic-decline/

Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3234861 

Rise of the West

Soldats sénégalais au camp de Mailly (1917) by Félix Vallotton. During WWI, France recruited half a million Africans to fight in Europe.

When did "the West" begin? Usually historians look back to the 17th century, when the maritime nations of northwest Europe—Great Britain, France, and Holland—overtook Spain and Portugal in colonizing the Americas, Africa, and Asia. One can look farther back. Greer (2013a, 2013b) pinpoints the 14th century as the time when the North Sea economies began to diverge from the rest of the world:

[...] the two exceptions are Netherlands and Great Britain. These North Sea economies experienced sustained GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to diverge from the rest of Europe long before the 'West' begins its more famous split from 'the rest.'

[...] we can pin point the beginning of this 'little divergence' with greater detail. In 1348 Holland's GDP per capita was $876. England's was $777. In less than 60 years time Holland's jumps to $1,245 and England's to 1090. The North Sea's revolutionary divergence started at this time. (Greer 2013b; see also Hbd *chick 2013)

This process began before the European conquest of the Americas, the invention of printing, the creation of modern finance institutions, the Atlantic slave trade, or the Protestant Reformation. None of these can be proper explanations for this "little divergence." (Greer 2013a)

One can look even farther back to the 7th century, when North Sea trade began an expansion that would later eclipse Mediterranean trade (Callmer 2002, also see Barrett et al. 2004).

Coevolution with the market economy

There is reason to believe that northwest Europeans were pre-adapted to the market economy. They were not the first to create markets, but they were the first to replace kinship with the market as the main way of organizing social and economic life. Already in the fourteenth century, their kinship ties were weaker than those of other human populations, as attested by marriage data going back to before the Black Death and in some cases to the seventh century (Frost 2017). The data reveal a characteristic pattern:

- men and women marry relatively late

- many people never marry

- children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households

- households often have non-kin members

This behavioral pattern was associated with a psychological one:

- weaker kinship and stronger individualism;

- framing of social rules in terms of moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to kinship-based morality (nepotism, amoral familialism);

- greater tendency to use internal controls on behavior (guilt proneness, empathy) than external controls (public shaming, community surveillance, etc.)

This is the mindset that enabled northwest Europeans to exploit the possibilities of the market economy. Because they could more easily move toward individualism and social atomization, they could go farther in reorganizing social relationships along market-oriented lines. They could thus mobilize capital, labor, and raw resources more efficiently, thereby gaining more wealth and, ultimately, more military power.

This new cultural environment in turn led to further behavioral and psychological changes. Northwest Europeans have adapted to it just as humans elsewhere have adapted to their own cultural environments, through gene-culture coevolution:

1.      People adapt to the new environment by pushing their envelope of phenotypic plasticity.

2.      Natural selection then favors those individuals whose genotype more closely matches the new phenotype.

3.      Over time, the mean genotype of the population moves closer and closer to the new phenotype.

Northwest Europeans adapted to the market economy, especially those who formed the nascent middle class of merchants, yeomen, and petty traders. Over time, this class enjoyed higher fertility and became demographically more important, as shown by Clark (2007, 2009a, 2009b) in his study of medieval and post-medieval England: the lower classes had negative population growth and were steadily replaced, generation after generation, by downwardly mobile individuals from the middle class. By the early 19th century most English people were either middle-class or impoverished descendants of the middle class.

This demographic change was associated with behavioral and psychological changes to the average English person. Time orientation became shifted toward the future, as seen by increased willingness to save money and defer gratification. There was also a long-term decline in personal violence, with male homicide falling steadily from 1150 to 1800 and, parallel to this, a decline in blood sports and other violent though legal practices (cock fighting, bear and bull baiting, public executions). This change can largely be attributed to the State's monopoly on violence and the consequent removal of violence-prone individuals through court-ordered or extrajudicial executions. Between 1500 and 1750, court-ordered executions removed 0.5 to 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial (Clark 2007; Frost and Harpending 2015).

Similarly, Rindermann (2018) has argued that mean IQ steadily rose in Western Europe during late medieval and post-medieval times. More people were able to reach higher stages of mental development. Previously, the average person could learn language and social norms well enough, but their ability to reason was hindered by cognitive egocentrism, anthropomorphism, finalism, and animism (Rindermann 2018, p. 49). From the sixteenth century onward, more and more people could better understand probability, cause and effect, and the perspective of another person, whether real or hypothetical. This improvement preceded universal education and improvements in nutrition and sanitation (Rindermann 2018, pp. 86-87).

Ideology of the market economy: the rise of liberalism

Finally, the emergence of the middle class was associated with ideological change: the rise of liberalism and its belief in the supremacy of the individual. John Locke (1632-1704) is considered to be the "father of liberalism," but belief in the individual as the ultimate moral arbiter was already evident in Protestant and pre-Protestant thinkers going back to John Wycliffe (1320s-1384) and earlier. These are all elaborations and refinements of the same mindset.

Liberalism has been dominant in Britain and its main overseas offshoot, the United States, since the 18th century. There is some difference between right-liberals and left-liberals, but both see the individual as the fundamental unit of society and both seek to maximize personal autonomy at the expense of kinship-based forms of social organization, i.e., the nuclear family, the extended family, the kin group, the community, and the ethnie. Right-liberals are willing to tolerate these older forms and let them gradually self-liquidate, whereas left-liberals want to use the power of the State to liquidate them. Some left-liberals say they simply want to redefine these older forms of sociality to make them voluntary and open to everyone. Redefine, however, means eliminate. If you make a community truly "open" it will eventually become little more than a motel: a place where people share space, where they may or may not know each other, and where very few if any are linked by longstanding ties—certainly not ties of kinship.

For a long time, liberalism was merely dominant in Britain and the U.S. The market economy coexisted with kinship as the proper way to organize social and economic life. The latter form of sociality was even dominant in some groups and regions, such as the Celtic fringe, Catholic communities, the American “Bible Belt,” and rural or semi-rural areas in general. Today, those subcultures are largely gone. Opposition to liberalism is for the most part limited, ironically, to individuals who act on their own. 

Success of the liberal model, in peace and in war

How did liberalism become so dominant, even hegemonic? In a word, it delivered the goods. Liberal regimes were better able to mobilize labor, capital, and raw resources over long distances and across different communities. Conservative regimes were less flexible and, by their very nature, tied to a single ethnocultural community. Liberals pushed and pushed for more individualism and social atomization, thereby reaping the benefits of access to an ever larger market economy.

The benefits included not only more wealth but also more military power. During the American Civil War, the North benefitted not only from a greater capacity to produce arms and ammunition but also from a more extensive railway system and a larger pool of recruits, including young migrants of diverse origins—one in four members of the Union army was an immigrant (Doyle 2015). 

During the First World War, Britain and France could likewise draw on not only their own manpower but also that of their colonies and elsewhere. France recruited half a million African soldiers to fight in Europe, and Britain over a million Indian troops to fight in Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa (Koller 2014; Wikipedia 2018b). An additional 300,000 laborers were brought to Europe and the Middle East for non-combat roles from China, Egypt, India, and South Africa (Wikipedia 2018a). In contrast, the Central Powers had to rely almost entirely on their own human resources. The Allied powers thus turned a European civil war into a truly global conflict.

The same imbalance developed during the Second World War. The Allies could produce arms and ammunition in greater quantities and far from enemy attack in North America, India, and South Africa, while recruiting large numbers of soldiers overseas. More than a million African soldiers fought for Britain and France, their contribution being particularly critical to the Burma campaign, the Italian campaign, and the invasion of southern France (Krinninger and Mwanamilongo 2015; Wikipedia 2018c). Meanwhile, India provided over 2.5 million soldiers, who fought in North Africa, Europe, and Asia (Wikipedia 2018d). India also produced armaments and resources for the war effort, notably coal, iron ore, and steel.

Liberalism thus succeeded not so much in the battle of ideas as on the actual battlefield. 

To be cont'd

References

Barrett, J.H., Locker, A.M. and Roberts, C.M. (2004). Dark Age Economics revisited: The English fish bone evidence AD 600-1600. Antiquity 78 (301): 618-636.

Callmer, J. (2002). North-European trading centres and the early medieval craftsman. Craftsmen at Åhus, North-Eastern Scania, Sweden ca. AD 750-850+, UppSkrastudier 6 (Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Ser. in 8, no. 39), 133-158.

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

Clark, G. (2009a). The indicted and the wealthy: surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in pre-industrial England.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf  

Clark, G. (2009b). The domestication of man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos 2: 64-80. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277275046_The_Domestication_of_Man_The_Social_Implications_of_Darwin

Doyle, D.H. (2015). The Civil War Was Won by Immigrant Soldiers, June 29, Time

http://time.com/3940428/civil-war-immigrant-soldiers/

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe. Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015b). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract 

Greer, T. (2013a). The Rise of the West: Asking the Right Questions. July 7, The Scholar's Stage

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-rise-of-west-asking-right-questions.html

Greer, T. (2013b). Another look at the 'Rise of the West' - but with better numbers. November 20, The Scholar's Stage

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.ca/2013/11/another-look-at-rise-of-west-but-with.html  

Hbd *chick (2013). Going Dutch, November 29

https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/going-dutch/

Koller, C. (2014). Colonial military participation in Europe. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. 

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/colonial_military_participation_in_europe_africa 

Krinninger, T., and Mwanamilongo, S. (2015). Africa in World War II: the forgotten veterans. July 5, DW

https://www.dw.com/en/africa-in-world-war-ii-the-forgotten-veterans/a-18437531 

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Wikipedia (2018a). Chinese Labour Corps.

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

Wikipedia (2018b). Indian Army during World War I

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

Wikipedia (2018c). Débarquement de Provence

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Débarquement_de_Provence#Composition_des_forces_terrestres_françaises

Wikipedia (2018d). Indian army during World War II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_II

We make the environments we adapt to

Distribution of malaria in Italy, 1944 (Wikicommons). Malaria used to be common in parts of Italy, particularly Sardinia.

Gene-culture coevolution seems to be attracting more interest. According to Google Scholar, this term is appearing in more and more scientific articles:

2010-2017 - 248 mentions per year

2000-2009 - 107 mentions per year

1990-1999 - 22 mentions per year

1980-1989 - 31 mentions per year

I’d like to take some of the credit, but most of it actually goes to John Hawks and the landmark paper he authored in 2007 with Eric Wang, Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Robert Moyzis. That paper, more than any other, changed the way we view the relationship between genetic evolution and cultural evolution in our species.

Rinaldi (2017) provides a good review of this field of research. He starts off with a definition of gene-culture coevolution:

"[All] organisms adapt to their environment, and in humans much of our environment is defined by our culture. Hence, cultural change can actually spur on adaptive evolution in humans", wrote evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA. Following this argument, culture, social learning and technology have not replaced biological adaptation. Rather, human evolution is driven by the environmental conditions we created ourselves through culture, a process that has been accelerating since the beginning of agriculture and urban civilization.

Indeed, human genetic evolution 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 (Hawks et al. 2007).

Among other changes, farming exposed humans to new diseases. "Virulent epidemic diseases, including smallpox, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and cholera, became important causes of mortality after the origin and spread of agriculture" (Hawks et al. 2007). This causation has been amply documented in the case of malaria:

If malaria was contracted by humans in the Pleistocene, it likely would have been in isolated incidences. For example, recent genetic analysis of the glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase gene, some variants of which confer resistance to the infection, confirmed that malaria is a recent selective force in human populations, occurring within the last 10,000 years. Based on the mitochondrial genome of the parasite itself, Joy et al. concluded that though the parasite that causes falciparum malaria originated long ago (perhaps 50,000-100,000 YBP), a sudden increase in the population size of the parasite did not occur until around 10,000 years ago when humans began to practice agriculture.

[...] Livingstone argued that slash-and-burn agriculture in West Africa would have exposed populations to Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito that serves as the vector for Plasmodium falciparum, the cause of malaria. Slash-and-burn agriculture resulted in sedentary populations surrounded by the pools of sunlit water required for propagation of the Anophelese mosquito. (Harper and Armelagos 2010)

Farming changed the adaptive equilibrium between the human body and Plasmodium falciparum. A new equilibrium arose in those human populations that had to coevolve with a high incidence of this parasite. Now, modern health measures are upsetting this equilibrium, and those same populations are falling prey to certain diseases—ironically, because of efforts to fight another disease:

The increase in multiple sclerosis and probably other autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes in Sardinia, Italy, has been linked to the elimination of malaria from the island in the early 1950s. Centuries of exposure to Plasmodium falciparum would have shaped the human immune system to aggressively fight the parasite with a tendency to over-respond to triggering factors even after the disappearance of the parasites. Recent research has indeed identified a number of gene variants involved in malarial resistance and increased risk of multiple sclerosis in Sardinians. (Rinaldi 2017)

Human culture has created new environments of biological adaptation, and these environments differ from one human population to the next because human culture likewise differs from one to the next. Subsequent cultural change will therefore have a greater biological impact on some populations than on others. This is a general principle and is not limited to the above example of malaria.

In my next post, I will explore the biological impacts of another cultural change: the shift from a "thick" to a "thin" social environment. A "thick" social environment is characterized by intense interaction with a relatively small number of people. This interaction is not only recurrent but also predictable because it is constrained and structured by social rules. A "thin" social environment is characterized by interaction with more people on a less frequent basis, and this interaction is less predictable because social relations are less constrained and less structured.

Human cultures fall along a continuum from "thick" social environments, such as exist in small bands of hunter-gatherers, to "thin" social environments, such as exist in large societies where conditions for personal autonomy are optimal. In the latter, people are freer not only to change their networks of social interaction but also to reduce them to the minimum necessary for personal survival.

For several centuries, the West has been expanding personal autonomy by transferring collective authority from personal “bottom-up” structures (family, clan, ethny) to impersonal “top-down” structures (the State). Beginning in the 19th century, we have exported this cultural model to the rest of the world. Have there been adverse effects? And have they been worse in some human populations than in others? Most experts would answer “Yes” to both questions, while adding that the adverse effects are temporary. Once everyone has grown accustomed to being merely individuals, the effects should be pretty much the same everywhere. 

I will argue that some of these adverse effects will be permanent in all human populations. This is because no population has ever fully adapted to a social environment where individualism is at a maximum and where the State has largely replaced traditional “bottom-up” structures. I will also argue that these permanent adverse effects will be worse in some populations than in others.

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I've been trying to measure the degree to which my blog is being "deplatformed," i.e., intercepted by blocking software. This search took me to the site Easy Counter, which told me that Evo and Proud is "poorly socialized" and may be "penalized." I also learned something else: on March 13, 2018, my blog was set to expire in 4 months. To date, no one has notified me of this decision, and I would still be unaware if I hadn’t gone to Easy Counter.

As I understand it, this sort of thing happens when a blog is inactive. Blogger is supposed to be free, and I've never had to renew my registration through an annual payment. So I'm asking you for advice. For whatever reason, Google wants to terminate this blog. Should I fight this decision or migrate to another platform? If so, which one would be best? And what is the easiest way to transfer all of my blog posts?

References

Harper, K. and G. Armelagos. (2010). The changing disease-scape in the third epidemiological transition, Int J Environ Res Public Health. 7(2): 675-697.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872288/

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.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henry_Harpending/publication/5761823_Recent_Acceleration_of_Human_Adaptive_Evolution/links/0c9605240c4bb57b55000000.pdf

Rinaldi, A. (2017). We're on a road to nowhere. Culture and adaptation to the environment are driving human evolution, but the destination of this journey is unpredictable, EMBO reports 18: 2094-2100

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea_Rinaldi2/publication/321214867_We%27re_on_a_road_to_nowhere_Culture_and_adaptation_to_the_environment_are_driving_human_evolution_but_the_destination_of_this_journey_is_unpredictable/links/5a2692eaa6fdcc8e866da26e/Were-on-a-road-to-nowhere-Culture-and-adaptation-to-the-environment-are-driving-human-evolution-but-the-destination-of-this-journey-is-unpredictable.pdf 

Wishing you a merry ... something

 

Yale was founded by English Congregationalist ministers. Today, only 22% of its student body has a Christian European background of any sort.

 

Last year, around this time, friends and acquaintances offered me all sorts of religiously neutral salutations: Seasons Greetings! Happy Holidays! Joyeuses fêtes! Meilleurs vœux! Only two people wished me Merry Christmas.

One was Muslim, the other was Jewish.

They meant well. After all, isn't that the culturally correct greeting? In theory, yes. In practice, most Christians feel uncomfortable affirming their identity. And this self-abnegation gets worse the closer you are to the cultural core of Anglo-America. Immigrants of Christian background enjoy being wished Merry Christmas. Black people likewise. Catholics seem to split half and half, depending on how traditional or nominal they are.

But the WASPs. Oh, the WASPs! With them, those two words are a faux pas. The response is usually polite but firm: "And a very happy holiday season to you!"

Things weren’t always that way. The situation calls to mind a Star Trek episode where Capt. Kirk persuades an alien robot to destroy itself. "That which excludes is evil. If you affirm your identity, you are excluding those who don't share your identity. You are therefore evil."

I could question this logic. What about other cultural groups? Why single out just one? But I’ve heard the answer already. WASPs and their culture dominate North America. The path to power, or simply a better life, runs through their institutions. Minorities can affirm their own identities without restricting the life choices of others, but the same does not hold true for WASPs. Their identity affects everyone and must belong to everyone.

I’m still not convinced. Yes, WASPs did create the institutions of Anglo-America, but their influence in them is now nominal at best. The U.S. Supreme Court used to be a very WASPy place. Now, there's not a single White Protestant on it. That's a huge underrepresentation for a group that is still close to 40% of the population. We see the same thing at the Ivy League universities, which originally trained Protestant clergy for the English colonists. Today, how many of their students have any kind of Christian European background? The proportions are estimated to be 20% at Harvard, 22% at Yale, and 15% at Columbia (Unz, 2012).

Sometimes reality is not what is commonly believed.  WASPs are not at all privileged. In fact, they have been largely pushed aside in a country that was once theirs.

Whenever this ethnic displacement comes up for discussion (it usually doesn't), it gets put down to meritocracy. In the past, WASPs were the best people for the job of running the country. Now it's a mix of Jews, Asians, and other high-performing groups. A cynic might ask whether merit is the only factor ... and whether the U.S. is better run today than it was a half-century ago. Indeed, the latest Supreme Court appointee had little experience as a solicitor general and a scanty record of academic scholarship.

Merit isn't the whole story. There is also networking. In most parts of the world, an individual gets ahead in life by forming bonds of reciprocal assistance with family and kinfolk. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." That's how most of the world works.

But not all of the world. Northwest Europeans have diverged the most from this pattern, at least since the 12th century (Macfarlane, 1978a - 2012). Their kinship ties have been weaker and their sense of individualism correspondingly stronger. As a result, their cultural evolution has to a large degree been emancipated from the restraints of kinship, and this emancipation has facilitated other ways of organizing social relations: the nation-state, ideology, the market economy ... not to mention the strange idea of personal advancement through personal merit alone. This model of society has succeeded economically, militarily, and geopolitically, but it's vulnerable to people who don't play by the rules, since the threat of kin retaliation is insufficient to keep them in line. Societal survival is possible only to the extent that rule-breakers are ostracized and immigration restricted from cultures that play by other rules. 

This brings us to the dark side of traditional WASP culture: the busybodiness, the judgmentalism, the distrust of foreigners no matter how nice or refined they may seem. That mentality still exists, but it has been turned against itself. The people to be excluded are now those who exclude. The cultural programming for survival has been turned into a self-destruct mechanism ... as in that Star Trek episode.

Even if we could somehow abort this self-destruct sequence, it's hard to see how WASPs can survive on the current playing field. WASPs believe in getting ahead through rugged individualism. Most of the other groups believe in using family and ethnic connections. Guess who wins.

Anyway, I wish all of you a merry end of 2014! Far be it for me to exclude anyone from the merriment.

 

References

 

Unz, R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy, The American Conservative, November 28

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ 

Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/07/invention-8/ 

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/On_Individualism.pdf 

Macfarlane, A. (1978a). The origins of English individualism: Some surprises, Theory and society: renewal and critique in social theory, 6, 255-277.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Origins_HI.pdf

Macfarlane, A. (1978b). The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition, Oxford: Blackwell.