A fruitful encounter

 

Original Sin, by Michiel Coxie (1499-1592). Did the Christian doctrine of original sin create the guilt cultures of Northwest Europe? Or did the arrow of causality run the other way? (source: Wikicommons)

 

By definition, gene-culture co-evolution is reciprocal. Genes and culture are both in the driver's seat. This point is crucial because there is a tendency to overreact to cultural determinism and to forget that culture does matter, even to the point of influencing the makeup of our gene pool. Through culture, humans have directed their own evolution.

Take the ability to digest lactose, commonly called milk sugar. Among early humans, only babies could digest it because only they made the enzyme that breaks it down. This enzyme was lost as one grew up, with the result that milk consumption would cause indigestion, abdominal gas, and diarrhea. This is still the case in humans from much of Africa and Asia.

Then some cultures began to domesticate cattle, initially for meat. In times of famine, they turned to milk, and those who could better tolerate it had better chances of survival. So there was now natural selection for individuals who could produce the necessary enzyme not only in childhood but in adulthood as well.

The resulting evolutionary change was both genetic and cultural. With more and more adults being able to digest milk, it became possible to develop various dairy products, like cheese, and use milk as an ingredient in a wide range of foods. It also became possible to select for cattle that produce more and better milk (Beja-Pereira et al., 2003). A new way of life developed and thus brought about even more selection for this enzyme.

In sum, a genetic change can open up new paths for culture to follow and thereby create new paths for genes to follow. But that isn't all. The same situation can develop even when no genetic change has taken place, at least not initially. We see this, for instance, when a culture spreads out of one population and into another. The gene-culture interaction is new even though neither party to the interaction is new.

 

A fruitful encounter

One specific example is the encounter between Christianity and the guilt cultures of Northwest Europe, which differ from the shame cultures that prevail elsewhere. The difference is a major one. In a shame culture, your wrongdoings are punished only when witnessed by someone from your community. In a guilt culture, they are punished even when there is no witness, other than the one inside your head.

Guilt culture is commonly attributed to the Christian doctrine of original sin, and more specifically to the radicalization of this doctrine under Protestantism (see Note 1). Yet neither of these presumed causes really lines up with the presumed effect.

For one thing, it's doubtful whether this doctrine was even known to early Christians in the Middle East. True, Paul did write that humans had lost their immortality because of Adam's sin:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned. Romans 5.12

This belief also appears in the Talmud, but it was never understood there as meaning that people are sinful because they inherit Adam's burden of sin. The Jewish view, like the later Muslim one, has been that people are sinful because they are imperfect beings. This was probably also the view of early Christians. Even today, Eastern Christians reject the doctrine of original sin, preferring the term "ancestral sin":

In the Orthodox Christian understanding, they explicitly deny that humanity inherited guilt from anyone. Rather, they maintain that we inherit our fallen nature. While humanity does bear the consequences of the original, or first, sin, humanity does not bear the personal guilt associated with this sin. (Original sin, 2014)

It was among Western Christians—Roman Catholics and, later, Protestants—that original sin developed into a doctrine. We see this in the writings of Irenaeus (2nd century) and Augustine (354-430), who identified the original sin as concupiscence, i.e., ardent, sensual longing. Protestantism is then said to have radicalized this doctrine, as seen in the Augsburg Confession of Lutheranism:

It is also taught among us that since the fall of Adam all men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin. That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers' wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit. 

But this radicalization was already under way before Protestantism. An English Catholic, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), was the one who first separated original sin from concupiscence and defined it as "privation of the righteousness that every man ought to possess" (Original sin, 2014). Within Western Christendom, pre-Protestant England was likewise the epicenter of an intense penitential tradition that dated back at least to Anglo-Saxon times (Frantzen 1983). This tradition can be summed up as follows: "it is better to be shamed for one's sins before one man (the confessor) in this life than to be shamed before God and before all angels and before all men and before all devils at the Last Judgement" (Godden, 1973). The English abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955-1010) described the need to do penance for all shameful acts, even those that are witnessed solely by spirits of the dead: 

He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002, p. 80)

Conclusion

As evidenced by the doctrine of original sin and the penitential tradition, Northwest European guilt culture was not a product of Christianity in general or of Protestantism in particular. It seems to have its origins in pre-existing tendencies that were absorbed into the new spiritual environment, much like the Christmas tree and other formerly pagan traditions. It thus grew steadily more important as the geocenter of Christianity moved steadily west and north.

This is not to belittle Christianity’s role. The new faith created ideological, social, and physical structures that were better at enforcing moral norms than anything beforehand. These norms may have had pagan antecedents, but they were now being enforced much more thoroughly.

We see this in the Medieval Synthesis that took hold from the 11th century onward, when Church and State joined forces to defend the Christian world: externally, through military campaigns against Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, and the Middle East; and internally, through vigorous efforts to pacify social relations, either by increased use of capital punishment or by the Pax Dei—a Church-led movement to limit the scope of war in feudal society (Peace and Truce of God, 2014). Finally, guilt culture was strengthened through confession of one's sins, particularly after this practice became mandatory with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). All wrongdoings had to be atoned at least once a year, however private or personal they might be (Sacrament of Penance, 2014).

Medieval Christian culture favored the survival and reproduction of people who previously would not have survived and reproduced. Conversely, by criminalizing personal violence, particularly in cases where the offender felt no guilt or remorse, this culture was now eliminating people for behavior that had once been admired.

It is often believed that Europe took off from the 15th century onward, when it expanded into Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Actually, the takeoff began earlier, particularly during this period when Church and State teamed up to lay a new basis for social relations. It was this new moral order that enabled Europe to get ahead (Frost, 2012). As Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote, no advanced society can develop where men have no "other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal." 

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [The Leviathan, 13]

Note

Missionaries, for example, point to the relationship between Christianity and guilt culture:

There is a lack of a sense of sin in African thinking for many reasons: (1) there is a belief that God and the ancestors are unconcerned about private and public morality. People believe more in this life than the next life; (2) there is more of a shame-culture than a guilt-culture. People are more afraid of public opinion than of God; and (3) there is a focus on communal living where people look at who caused a problem. (Tittley, 2001)

See also Lebra (1971) and Carroll (1981).

 

References

Bedingfield, M.D. (2002). The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England, The Boydell Press. 

Beja-Pereira A., G. Luikart, P.R. England, et al. (2003). Gene-culture coevolution between cattle milk protein genes and human lactase genes, Nature Genetics, 35, 311-313.

http://www.bioquest.org/summer2007/sessionA/ng1263.pdf 

Carroll, J. (1981). The role of guilt in the formation of modern society: England 1350-1800, The British Journal of Sociology, 32, 459-503.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/590129?uid=3739448&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21104745207513 

Frost, P. (2012). On global inequality, Evo and Proud, August 25

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2012/08/on-global-inequality.html

Frantzen, A.J. (1983). The literature of penance in Anglo-Saxon England, New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers University Press.

Godden, M.R. (1973). An Old English penitential motif, Anglo-Saxon England, 2, 221-239.

Hobbes, T. (2010). The Leviathan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. 

Lebra, T.S. (1971). The social mechanism of guilt and shame: the Japanese case, Anthropological Quarterly, 44, 241-255.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3316971?uid=3739448&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21104745207513 

Original Sin. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin 

Peace and Truce of God. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God 

Sacrament of Penance. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrament_of_Penance_(Catholic_Church)  

Tittley, M. (2001). Book summary of The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion, by John V. Taylor, SCM Press, 1963.

http://www.ymresourcer.com/Summaries.php

Ich bin Mittel-Ostländer?

Spread of farming in Europe. Der Spiegel

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture -- and their miracle food, milk.
(Schulz 2010)

This recent Der Spiegel article has stirred up comment in the blogosphere (Hawks 2010, Khan 2010, Sailer 2010). It argues that Europeans do not descend from the reindeer hunters who once roamed the continent during the last ice age. Nor do they descend from the more recent hunter-fisher-gatherers of the Mesolithic. All of those people went extinct. They were replaced by the real ancestors of present-day Europeans—farmers who began to spread out of the Middle East only 9,000 years ago and who reached northern Europe two millennia later—almost at the dawn of history!

If you have any doubts, this finding is based on “a barrage of articles in professional journals like Nature and BMC Evolutionary Biology, [whose authors] have turned many of the prevailing views upside down over the course of the last three years.”

There is nothing wrong with the above journal articles. A lot is wrong, however, with the Der Spiegel article. It neatly confuses two separate findings, only one of which supports the ‘population replacement’ hypothesis.

1. Origins of the European allele for adult digestion of lactose

Unlike most humans, Europeans can digest milk sugar (lactose) as adults. This is made possible by an allele that allows adults to produce an enzyme, lactase, that breaks down milk sugar. So where did this allele come from? Did it originate in Europe or in some place outside Europe?

According to Der Spiegel:

But where did the first milk drinker live? Which early man was the first to feast on cow's milk without suffering the consequences?

In a bid to solve the mystery, molecular biologists have sawed into and analyzed countless Neolithic bones. The breakthrough came last year, when scientists discovered that the first milk drinkers lived in the territory of present-day Austria,
Hungary and Slovakia.

The reader is left with the impression that the new allele had been brought to Europe from the Middle East. That impression is false. In fact, the above molecular biologists found no trace of this allele in DNA retrieved from the earliest European farmers. It apparently arose later as a mutation and then spread among Europeans through natural selection.

[…] the absence of the 13.910*T allele in our Neolithic samples indicates that the early farmers in Europe were not yet adapted to the consumption of unprocessed milk. Dairying is unlikely to have spread uniformly over Europe, and the use of milk in the Early Neolithic may have been rare. Although our data are consistent with strong selection for LP [lactose persistence] beginning with the introduction of cattle to Europe ≈8800 B.P., it is unlikely that fresh milk consumption was widespread in Europe before frequencies of the 13.910*T allele had risen appreciably during the millennia after the onset of farming.
(Burger et al. 2007)

Consequently, this area of research argues against the Der Spiegel article. Europeans did change genetically, but the change occurred through natural selection, not through population replacement (1).

2. Genetic divide between late hunter-fisher-gatherers and early farmers

Researchers have also retrieved mitochondrial DNA from Europe’s late hunter-fisher-gatherers and early farmers. Comparison shows a sharp genetic divide between the two groups. In particular, the first group had high incidences of haplogroup U—a genetic lineage that was rare among early farmers and still is among present-day Europeans.

The past year, however, has brought evidence of genetic continuity. After studying 92 Danish human remains that range in time from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages, Melchior et al. (2010) found that high incidences of haplogroup U persisted among the earliest farmers and declined only in later groups.

Thus, the sharp genetic divide was not between late hunter-fisher-gatherers and early farmers. It seems to have been between the earliest farmers and groups that had been farming for at least a millennium or so. Once again, the evidence points to natural selection, and not to population replacement.

But isn’t mtDNA unresponsive to natural selection? That’s what I and others used to think. There is growing evidence, however, that some mtDNA loci can change in response to natural selection. In particular, some haplogroups seem to reflect a tradeoff between thermogenesis and ATP synthesis (Balloux et al 2009). If true, the decline of U-type haplogroups among early farmers may reflect the differences in physical activity (leading to overheating or underheating) that exist between hunting/fishing/gathering and farming.

Conclusion

The jury is still out. The evidence, however, seems to be tilting toward natural selection and away from population replacement as the best way to explain these genetic changes among ancestral Europeans. In short, the Der Spiegel article is bad science.

And bad journalism.

Note

1. Towards the end, the Der Spiegel article seems to acknowledge that the allele for adult digestion of lactose must have arisen after farming had spread to Europe:

Some [farmers] had genetic mutations that enabled them to drink milk without getting sick. They were the true progenitors of the movement.

As a result of "accelerated evolution," says Burger, lactose tolerance was selected for on a large scale within the population in the space of about 100 generations. Europe became the land of the eternal infant as people began drinking milk their whole lives
(Schulz 2010)

References

Balloux F., L.J. Handley, T. Jombart, H. Liu, and A. Manica (2009). Climate shaped the worldwide distribution of human mitochondrial DNA sequence variation. Proceedings. Biological Sciences, 276 (1672), 3447–55.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2817182/?tool=pmcentrez

Burger, J., M. Kirchner, B. Bramanti, W. Haak, and M.G. Thomas. (2007). Absence of the lactase-persistence-associated allele in early Neolithic Europeans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 104(10), 3736-3741.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/10/3736.full

Hawks, J. (2010). Neolithic milk fog, John Hawks weblog, October 17.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/demography/neolithic/spiegel-volkerwanderung-2010.html

Khan, R. (2010). Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance, Discover, October 17.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/10/volkerwanderung-back-with-a-vengeance/
Melchior, L., N. Lynnerup, H.R. Siegismund, T. Kivisild, J. Dissing. (2010). Genetic diversity among ancient Nordic populations, PLoS ONE, 5(7), e11898.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011898

Sailer, S. (2010). Are Europeans all Middle Easterners? October 17.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/10/are-europeans-all-middle-easterners.html

Schulz, M. (2010). How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe, Spiegel Online International, October 15.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,723310,00.html