Is intelligence all that matters for a successful society?

 

If we consider intelligence to be the only worthy mental attribute, we’ll end up with an elite that is not only intelligent but also narcissistic … and indifferent to the rest of us.

 

 

 

George Francis and Emil Kirkegaard have come out with a study that shows a strong correlation between IQ and wealth creation. The higher the mean IQ, the more a nation can create wealth:

 

We find national IQ to be the “best predictor” of economic growth, with a higher average coefficient and average posterior inclusion probability than all other tested variables (over 67) in every test run. Our best estimates find a one point increase in IQ is associated with a 7.8% increase in GDP per capita (Francis and Kirkegaard 2022)

 

The study is essentially an update of an earlier one by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2002). It’s better done, and I agree more or less with the conclusion. Wealth is not created in a vacuum. It’s created by flesh-and-blood humans who possess certain mental and behavioral attributes, one of which is high cognitive ability.

 

I do, however, have two criticisms.

 

Criticism #1: On a societal level, cognitive ability is confounded with other mental and behavioral attributes

 

Yes, high cognitive ability is important. But sustainable creation of wealth also requires other mental and behavioral attributes, notably:

 

·         propensity to identify social rules, obey them, and enforce them on others

·         feelings of guilt when one breaks the rules, even when there are no witnesses

·         empathy for others and a desire to understand how one’s behavior affects them

·         inhibition against using violence to settle disputes

·         high degree of future time orientation (also known as low time preference)

 

High IQ + high trust + low violence + low time preference = sustainable creation of wealth (Clark 2007; Clark 2009a; Clark 2009b; Frost 2020). Some will argue that intelligence goes hand in hand with high trust and low time preference (Carl 2014; Kirkegaard and Karlin 2020). That is true on a societal level: the same selection pressures that favor high intelligence usually favor the entire mental and behavioral package. On an individual level, however, intelligent sociopaths do exist, and they can prosper while others suffer. If they become too numerous or too influential, they will eventually destroy their host society. But that can take time.

 

In all fairness, Francis and Kirkegaard did investigate social trust and time preference. Unfortunately, those attributes are confounded with IQ: successful societies tend to have people who are not only intelligent but also trustworthy and future-oriented. That’s survivorship bias: if a society lacks the full mental and behavioral package, it usually goes extinct, and extinct societies get overlooked by cross-national studies. To be precise, societal extinction happens when the intelligent are unrestrained in their contempt for the less intelligent in their midst; they thus prey on them by any means possible, and the resulting strife leads to societal collapse.

 

IQ, social trust, and time preference are normally confounded with each other, at least in most existing societies. Therefore, if you control for IQ, the other two variables will go away, and you’ll think: “Aha! The key variable must be IQ!”

 

And you’ll feel all the more certain because IQ is not just equal to social trust or time preference in predicting wealth creation. It’s actually better! That greater predictive power, however, has a simple explanation: measurement of IQ is based on less subjective data. In this study, social trust is measured by self-report, and time preference is measured by an amalgam of survey responses and credit risk.

 

Criticism #2: The correlation is driven largely by unreliable African data

 

This study has another weak point: the correlation between wealth creation and IQ is driven largely by economic and cognitive data from Africa. If you remove Africa from the chart, the correlation becomes a lot weaker.

 

How reliable is the African data? Not very. First, a lot of African economic activity is “off the books.” That is particularly true for subsistence farming in the countryside, but it’s also true for many businesses in the towns and cities. GDP thus tends to be underestimated.

 

Second, even HBD writers disagree among themselves on mean African IQ, as pointed out by Heiner Rindermann:

 

The [cognitive] ability levels for Africans in Africa are the subject of strong disagreement. Rushton studied positively selected samples (South African university engineering students; Rushton, Skuy, & Fridjhon, 2003), but the mean differences between Africans and Europeans (14 IQ points) were similar to the ones found in Western countries. Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) estimated that sub-Saharan African countries had a mean IQ of 70. Wicherts, Dolan, and Maas (2010) using a different selection procedure came to a mean IQ of 82.

 

Rindermann’s “best guess” is 75. He concludes: “Given the quality of the data, it is not possible to come to a really precise result” (Rindermann 2013, p. 3). If we look at the chart from Lynn and Vanhanen (2002), we see that most sub-Saharan African countries are assigned mean IQs lower than 75. In fact, 75 seems to be the upper limit. That’s the IQ dataset of the new study.

 

Francis and Kirkegaard (2022, pp. 22-23) are aware that the IQ/GDP correlation is a lot weaker without the African IQ data, and they defend the validity of that dataset at some length. I’m still unimpressed, for two reasons:

 

·         If mean African IQ is 70, one must conclude that Africans are much less intelligent than African Americans, whose mean IQ is usually estimated at 85. Such a large difference cannot be explained by European admixture, heterosis, or nutrition.

 

·         The Yoruba of Nigeria have about the same polygenic score as that of African Americans (Piffer 2021, Fig. 7). Their mean IQ should therefore be 85. Yet, according to Lynn and Vanhanen, Nigerians have a mean IQ of 67. Since Nigeria is 18% Igbo, and since the Igbo show high academic achievement, mean Yoruba IQ should therefore be much less than the presumed Nigerian average of 67 (Chisala 2015; Frost 2022). The numbers don’t seem to add up.

 

Please don’t get me wrong. I agree that mean IQ is lower in Africa than in Eurasia, but the Lynn and Vanhanen estimates seem too low. In any case, they are not widely accepted even by researchers who accept that cognitive ability varies among human populations.

 

Similarly, I agree that more wealth is created per capita in Eurasia than in Africa. The difference, however, is overstated because so much of African GDP goes unreported. Furthermore, I don’t believe that lower IQ largely explains Africa’s economic underperformance. There is also the excessive use of violence to achieve one’s goals, both by the State and by private individuals. There is also the low level of trust that people have in each other—for the most part, Africans trust only their immediate family and friends. Finally, because family ties are so important, nepotism is widespread, and successful entrepreneurs end up being plundered by greedy relatives. The market economy cannot realize its full potential because the logic of the market has to compete with the logic of kinship.

Edit: George Francis has informed me that the correlation between IQ and GNP per capita remains unchanged if African cognitive and economic data are excluded. Without the African data, GDP per capita would increase 7.7% with each one point increase in IQ, rather than 7.8%.

Conclusion

 

Cognitive ability is only one of several mental and behavioral attributes that are key to building successful economies and societies. If we focus on it to the exclusion of others, we will be talked into supporting policies that have unintended consequences. A good example is the idea of reorienting immigration policy toward recruitment of high-IQ individuals.

 

That idea has the support of many conservatives throughout the West, but the consequences are very un-conservative. In short, we would be selecting immigrants who excel at creating wealth for themselves, by hook or by crook. The eventual result: an elite of rich narcissists who feel little sympathy for common people and who see them as objects to be used, when useful, and thrown away, when not.

 

Please don’t get bamboozled by reassurances that IQ correlates with trustworthiness and low time preference. That’s true only at the societal level. Those three attributes align with each other because they have to: otherwise, society would become dysfunctional and collapse. That’s survivorship bias: we get data from societies that have survived, and not from those that haven’t. If we cherry-pick high IQ immigrants from all over the world, we will create a new kind of society that has not stood the test of time.

 

Actually, that kind of society has arisen in the past:

 

And you should know that all the Cathayans [Chinese] detested the Grand Khan's rule because he set over them governors who were Tartars, or still more frequently Saracens, and these they could not endure, for they were treated by them just like slaves. You see the Great Khan had not succeeded to the dominion of Cathay [China] by hereditary right, but held it by conquest; and thus having no confidence in the natives, he put all authority into the hands of Tartars, Saracens, or Christians who were attached to his household and devoted to his service, and were foreigners in Cathay [China].

            The Travels of Marco Polo, Book 2, Chapter 23

 

Why do you think revolutions happen? It was precisely to avoid such a prospect that elite schools sought to develop not only intellect but also character, including the idea that the powerful have a duty to rule wisely and fairly. That view of higher education has given way to “meritocracy” throughout the West, with results that could have been predicted.

 

References

 

Carl, N. (2014). Does intelligence explain the association between generalized trust and economic development? Intelligence 47: 83-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2014.08.008

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue. The Unz Review, June 25. http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/     

 

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  

 

Francis, G., and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2022). National Intelligence and Economic Growth: A Bayesian Update. The Mankind Quarterly 63(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.46469/mq.2022.63.1.2  

 

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     

 

Frost, P. (2022). Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa: the Niger’s role. Evo and Proud, April 30. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2022/04/recent-cognitive-evolution-in-west.html  

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Karlin. (2020). National intelligence is more important for explaining country well-being than time preference and other measured non-cognitive traits. Mankind Quarterly 61: 339-370. http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11  

 

Lynn, R. and T. Vanhanen. (2002). IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Westport, Conn: Praeger

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych https://openpsych.net/files/submissions/14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ.pdf     

 

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.022     

The mental qualities that make a society workable

 

A questionnaire survey found very low levels of altruism in Czechs and very high levels in Moroccans, Egyptians, and Bangladeshis. Do these results show differences in actual behavior or differences in socially desired response? (GPS 2020)

 

Emil Kirkegaard and Anatoly Karlin have written a paper on the relative importance of intelligence versus other mental traits in determining national well-being. Their conclusion? Intelligence contributes a lot more to national well-being than do time preference, reciprocity, altruism, and trust.

 

We find that overall, national IQ is a better predictor of outcomes than (low) time preference as well as the five other non-cognitive traits measured by the Global Preference Survey (risk-taking, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust). We find this result across hundreds of regression models that include variation in the inclusion of controls, different measures of time preference, and different outcomes. Thus, our results appear quite robust. Our results do show some evidence of time preference's positive validity, but it is fairly marginal, sometimes having a small p value in one model but not in the next. (Kirkegaard and Karlin 2020)

 

The two authors especially focus on time preference, i.e., the willingness to defer gratification in exchange for long-term gains. While acknowledging previous studies, which show that time preference has a strong effect on national well-being, they argue that this effect is only apparent. If a society has low time preference (i.e., a strong orientation toward the future), it almost always has a high mean IQ. So the relationship between national well-being and time preference is largely spurious.

 

If true, this is a significant finding. But is it true?

 

I see one big problem: the paper compares datasets with very different levels of error. Intelligence was measured by IQ tests under controlled conditions. On an IQ test you cannot make yourself seem more intelligent than you really are, unless someone has provided you with the right answers.

 

This is not the case with the method for measuring the other mental traits: a questionnaire, on which the "right answer" is whatever the respondent chooses to write down. The difference between the two methods is thus the difference between direct measurement and self-report. The level of error is much higher with the latter, and this difference can explain the findings by Kirkegaard and Karlin, specifically why national well-being correlates more with intelligence than with time preference:

 

The median ß across the indicators was 0.11 for time preference but 0.39 for national IQ. We replicated these results using six economic indicators, again with similar results: median ßs of 0.15 and 0.52 for time preference and national IQ, respectively. Across all our results, we found that national IQ has 2-4 times the predictive validity of time preference.

 

What will happen to the same correlations if intelligence is measured by a questionnaire? Let's survey a thousand people and ask them: "How smart do you think you are?" The result will correlate with their performance on an IQ test, but far from perfectly. So the correlation between self-reported intelligence and national well-being will be lower than the correlation between IQ and national well-being. Instead of getting the correlation of 0.39 that Emil and Anatoly found, we now have something closer to 0.11, i.e., the correlation they found between time preference and national well-being.

 

The problems with questionnaire data are especially apparent if we look at the results of the Global Preference Survey for altruism (see map at the top of this post). We see considerable differences even between neighboring countries that are culturally similar. For some reason, Czechs are at the low end of human variation in altruism, whereas Moroccans, Egyptians, and Bangladeshis are at the high end.

 

What’s going on here? The results are based on the following two questions of the Global Preference Survey:

 

1. (Hypothetical situation:) Imagine the following situation: Today you unexpectedly received 1,000 Euro. How much of this amount would you donate to a good cause? (Values between 0 and 1000 are allowed.)

 

2. (Willingness to act:) How willing are you to give to good causes without expecting anything in return? (Falk et al. 2016, p. 15)

 

The first problem is that the respondents will answer the above questions in a way that is viewed favorably by others and by their own conscience. This is called “social desirability bias,” and it’s stronger in a society with a high level of religious belief, like Morocco, than in one with a low level, like the Czech Republic.

 

Second problem: the term “good cause” has different connotations in different places. In the Western world, it generally refers to a non-religious organization that may endorse controversial views on political or social issues. As a result, many Westerners have mixed feelings about donating to “good” causes. This is not the case in the Muslim world, where “good causes” are explicitly Islamic or at least compliant with Islamic teachings. There is a similar problem with the term “donate.” It usually means the act of giving money to an organization, whereas the corresponding word in another language may simply mean “give.”

 

I wrote to Emil Kirkegaard about my criticisms:

 

In my opinion, you're comparing apples and oranges. Cognitive ability is difficult to fake on an IQ test - unless somebody has provided the participant with the right answers. On a questionnaire, anyone can give the "right" answer. It's entirely self-report. It's like measuring intelligence by asking people how smart they think they are.

 

His reply:

 

Your stance on this seems to imply you are unhappy with any kind of comparison of self-rated data vs. objectively scored cognitive data. One difficulty for you here is that people can also cheat on cognitive tests, namely by scoring low on purpose. Furthermore, while you may disapprove, such comparisons are the norm everywhere. I don't know any other person who refuses to do this comparison. There are also other-rated personality data, and these show even more validity than self-rate ones. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6457  There is a lot of research on faking good on personality tests, generally showing that subjects are not very good at this, presumably owing to lack of understanding of how the tests work.

 

I checked out the link he provided. This is what I found:

 

Self-rating measures of personality suffer from not just regular, random measurement error, but also have systematic measurement error (bias): people are not able to rate their own personality as well as other people who know them can. They introduce self-rating method variance into the data, and this variance is not so heritable. There is a twin study that used other-ratings of personality and when they used them or combined them with self-ratings, the heritabilities went up:

 

So with self-report they found H 42-56%, mean = 51%. Other-report: 57-81, mean = 66%, combined: 66-79, mean = 71%. (I used the AE models' results when possible.) In fact, these analyses did not correct for regular measurement error either, so the heritabilities are higher still according to these data, likely into the 80%s area. This is the same territory as cognitive ability. (Kirkegaard 2017)

 

 

Parting thoughts

 

Emil and Anatoly are right when they argue that intelligence is confounded with other mental traits. If, on average, a human population is high in intelligence, it is almost always low in time preference and high in altruism. This doesn't mean, however, that the latter are secondary expressions of intelligence. Many individuals are high in intelligence but low in altruism, sometimes pathologically low. They're called "sociopaths."

 

Few, if any, populations are both sociopathic and highly intelligent because such a combination can succeed only at the level of individuals, and not at the level of an entire population. The same pressures of selection that increase the mean intelligence of a population will also increase the average level of altruism and the average future time orientation. Consequently, all of these traits correlate with each other at the population level.

 

Will we ever be able to parcel out the relative importance of each mental trait in determining national well-being? In others words, will we ever find out how much of national well-being is due to intelligence, how much to time preference, and how much to altruism?

 

Not for a while. First, because these traits correlate with each other at the population level, it would be difficult to separate them and measure the relative importance of each one. They’re confounded. Second, they probably interact with each other. Altruism, for instance, is not a successful group strategy unless other mental or behavioral mechanisms are in place, in particular mechanisms to exclude non-altruists, i.e., the “free rider problem.” Intelligence, likewise, does not exist in a vacuum.

 

 

References

 

Falk, A., A. Becker, T. Dohmen, B. Enke, D. Huffman, and U. Sunde. (2016). Online Appendix: Global Evidence on Economic Preferences.

https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/qje/133/4/10.1093_qje_qjy013/5/qjy013_supplemental_file.pdf?Expires=1611916150&Signature=Bc-zlE8jYXQUPteS3fbcNvbEI60jZ0VRXsPC0xkiG3G-5xgW9K2N4hn0LUJ2i-2oxn1BIE9wLMSNdf5-nlMTHf4Hf78TZcsUV-7yGui72UCFz-e7OrcCyiZpzhy-P6LIKXaAqWhIMva5ZKi0Rcf2wuIt195WSSWE7Y2hq9ilWKMuR~xqjHlkMkiq9Exq9D2xS4EIQX3O96IpRm-oMYpEbaCDaehxRA4BinqbuGhWcUcK9i3ocb5kxe2ZjF7OqDDiVZuaRAtDRYezLe8oQciZf4skXuLTfM5aSkNarWkOh617x0kcc1jOBgzrVUZYZ9FeWZY0r9OvHsDQNs6Z2CDp-A__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA

Global Preferences Survey (2020). https://www.briq-institute.org/global-preferences/about  

Kirkegaard, E.O.W. (2017). Getting personality right. Clear Language, Clear Mind.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/02/getting-personality-right/

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Karlin. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. Mankind Quarterly 61(2): 339-370. http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347563852_National_Intelligence_Is_More_Important_for_Explaining_Country_Well-Being_than_Time_Preference_and_Other_Measured_Non-Cognitive_Traits

 

Have we been selected for long-term thinking?

GDP per capita as a function of future orientation (Preis et al. 2012)



To what degree do we value the short term over the long term? The answer varies not only from individual to individual but also from society to society. Hunter-gatherers, for instance, value the short term. Perishable food cannot be stored for future use and, in any case, is not normally obtained in large enough amounts to make storage worthwhile. If a hunter gets more meat than his family can consume, he'll give it away to others in the local band.

There are exceptions, especially at northern latitudes. Meat can be stored in caches during winter and in cold lake waters during summer. With limited opportunities for food gathering, women specialize in technologies that need more cognitive input and longer-term thinking, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and use of kilns. Finally, men hunt over longer distances and therefore plan over the longer term. Northern hunting peoples thus broke free of the short-term mental straitjacket imposed by hunting and gathering. In time, their descendants would spread south and rise to the challenges of social complexity (Frost 2019).

Those northern hunting peoples were better able to exploit the opportunities created by farming, but the transition from one lifestyle to the other was still far from easy. Farming requires not only longer-term thinking but also less monotony avoidance and higher thresholds for expression of personal violence. In recent times, hunter-gatherers usually refused offers to be settled on farms. They saw farming as akin to slavery.

The change in mindset didn't end with the transition to farming. There were different types of farming, and some required longer-term investment than others. Those types generated stronger selection for future orientation.


Language as a mirror of cultural evolution

Galor et al. (2018) argue that language is a mirror of cultural evolution. It can show a society’s degree of commitment to a long-term mindset, as well as other psychological traits.


The periphrastic future tense

The authors studied the relationship between future orientation and forms of the future tense that express intention and obligation, rather than simply prediction:

Languages differ in the structure of their future tense. In particular, linguists distinguish between languages that are characterized by an inflectional versus periphrastic future tense [...]. Inflectional future tense is associated with verbs that display morphological variation (i.e., a change in the verb form that is associated with the future tense). In contrast, periphrastic future tense is characterized by roundabout or discursive phrases, such as `will', `shall', `want to', `going to' in the English language [...] (Galor et al. 2018, p. 6)

[U]nlike the inflectional future tense, the periphrastic future tense is formed by terms that express a desire, an intention, an obligation, a commitment as well as a movement towards a goal. In particular, in the English language, "shall has developed from a main verb meaning 'to owe', will from a main verb meaning 'to want', and the source of be going to is still transparent" [...]. Moreover, "intention and prediction are most commonly expressed by the periphrastic future, while the synthetic one is more common in generic statements, concessives, and suppositions" [...]. Inflectional futures "also appear systematically (often obligatorily) in sentences which express clear predictions about the future (which are independent of human intentions and planning), whereas less grammaticalized constructions [i.e., periphrastic] often tend to be predominantly used in talk of plans and intentions - a fact which is explainable from the diachronic sources of future tenses" [...] (Galor et al. 2018, p. 6)

Galor et al. (2018, p. 16) used pre-1500 AD data to estimate the return on agricultural investment ("crop return") in the homeland of a language’s speakers. They found a positive correlation between this return on investment and the existence of a periphrastic future tense. They concluded that "a one standard deviation increase in crop return in the language's contemporary homeland is associated with a 6 percentage points increase in the probability that the language is characterized by a periphrastic future tense."

Using the World Values Survey, the authors also found a positive correlation between the existence of a periphrastic future tense and future orientation. The correlation held true both for the people of the world as a whole and for Old World peoples who speak languages originating in the Old World (Galor et al. 2018, p. 23).

Interestingly, the return on agricultural investment did not correlate with other linguistic characteristics, like the existence of the past tense or the perfect tense, the existence of possessive classifications, the existence of coding for evidentiality, the number of consonants, and the number of colors (Galor et al. 2018, pp. 18-19).


Grammatical gender

The authors also looked into the relationship between grammatical gender and the sexual division of labor in a language's homeland:

Further, consider ancient civilizations that had been characterized by a sexual division of labor and consequently by the existence of gender bias. Linguistic traits that had fortified the existing gender biases have plausibly emerged and persisted in these societies over time. In particular, geographical characteristics that had been associated with the adoption of agricultural technology that had contributed to a gender gap in productivity, and thus to the emergence of distinct gender roles in society (e.g., the suitability of land for the usage of the plow […]), may have fostered the emergence and the prevalence of sex-based grammatical gender in the course of human history. (Galor et al. 2018, p. 2)

Galor et al (2018, p. 24) found a negative correlation between grammatical gender and “plow negative” crops (i.e., crops not requiring use of the plow and, hence, requiring less male participation). A one standard deviation increase in the potential caloric yield of plow negative crops was associated with a 13 percentage point decrease in the probability that the language has grammatical gender.  The correlation was reversed in the case of all crops, the caloric yield now being associated with a 17 percentage point increase in the probability that the language has grammatical gender.


Politeness distinctions in pronouns

Finally, Galor et al. (2018) looked into the relationship between politeness distinctions in pronouns and ecological diversity, which they related to the emergence of hierarchical societies.

Linguistic traits that had reinforced existing hierarchical structures and cultural norms had conceivably emerged and persisted in these stratified societies in the course of human history. In particular, politeness distinctions in pronouns (e.g., the differential use of "tu" and "usted" in the Spanish language, "Du" and "Sie" in German, and "tu" and "vous" in French) had conceivably appeared and endured in hierarchical societies. Thus, geographical characteristics, such as ecological diversity that had been conducive to the emergence of hierarchical societies (Fenske, 2014), may have contributed to the emergence of politeness distinctions. (Galor et al. 2018, p. 2)

Galor et al. (2018, p. 32) found a significant relationship between politeness distinctions and ecological diversity in a language's homeland. A one standard deviation increase in ecological diversity corresponded to a 15 percentage point increase in the probability that the language has politeness distinctions.

I'm skeptical about the last finding. Is ecological diversity conducive to hierarchical societies? The authors refer to a study that mostly uses African data. More to the point, the study seeks to link ecological diversity to centralized states. Centralization of state power and social hierarchization are not the same thing. Japan, for instance, had a weak central state for much of its history and yet was very hierarchical, as seen in the politeness distinctions of the Japanese language.


Conclusion

Although the authors refer to work by L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, Peter Richerson, and Robert Boyd on gene-culture coevolution, they avoid discussing the possibility that selection for future orientation, gender specialization, and hierarchical politeness has influenced not only culture and language but also human biology. The coevolution they propose is simply between culture and language. It can be summed up as follows:

- Certain patterns of mind and behavior have been favored to varying degrees in different societies.

- These cultural patterns are transposed into language.

- Language then reinforces those cultural patterns: "In light of the apparent coevolution of cultural and linguistic characteristics in the course of human history, emerging linguistic traits have conceivably reinforced the persistent effect of cultural factors on the process of development" (Galor et al. 2018, p. 1).

Language is not a passive mirror of culture. It can also act upon culture. For instance, the way we perceive the future, and its relative importance to us, may be shaped by the way we speak. This is of course the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  In a farming society, the periphrastic future tense might make it easier to envision farming methods and technologies that pay off over the longer term. Similar arguments have been made for grammatical gender and politeness distinctions. The way we speak influences our thoughts and behavior.

Again, the authors leave it to the reader to go one step farther: patterns of mind and behavior may influence the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool.


References

Fenske, J. (2014). Ecology, trade, and states in pre-colonial Africa. Journal of the European Economic Association 12(3): 612-640.
https://www.eeassoc.org/doc/paper/20130704_190013_FENSKE.PDF 

Frost, P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 1(1): 166-181
https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012 

Galor, O., O. Özak, and A. Sarid. (2018). Geographical Roots of the Coevolution of Cultural and Linguistic Traits (November 7, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3284239 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3284239  

Preis, T., H.S. Moat, H.E. Stanley, and S.R. Bishop. (2012). Quantifying the advantage of looking forward. Scientific Reports 2: 350
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00350

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