A Troublesome Inheritance

by Nicholas Wade

  Europe lacked the military advantage of being united but could afford its fragmentation, though only narrowly, because, unlike China, it was not under continual threat of invasion. Lying at the western extremity of the Eurasian landmass, Europe was protected on its eastern flank by the buffer states of Russia and Byzantium. From the 10th century on, after onslaughts of Vikings, Magyars and Muslims had been turned back, Europe was reasonably free from external attack, and England, with the extra defense of being an island, enjoyed the greatest security of all.

  Hence, unlike the Chinese, Europeans were never forced to seek or accept an autocratic regime strong enough to protect them from outsiders. They had the luxury of preferring independence and of fighting just among themselves. These internal wars let them benefit from the spur of military competition, but the geography and politics of Europe blocked the usual endgame leading to a single permanent empire. The post-Roman empires that arose in Europe, whether of Charlemagne, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon or Hitler, were never complete and tended to be short-lived.

  In authoritarian societies, the ruler can coerce taxes, raise armies and wage war. In principle, the authoritarian states of China and the Islamic world should have enjoyed greater military power than Europe’s handful of disunited states, each with a sovereign obliged to various degrees to acknowledge local laws and elites. And so for many centuries they did. Europe in the 13th century was no match for the western Mongol army that invaded Poland, Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire with orders to push to the Atlantic coast; only because the Great Khan Ögedei died in 1241, precipitating a succession crisis, did the Mongols voluntarily withdraw from Europe. After the Byzantine state collapsed in 1453, removing the buffer that had separated Europe from the Turkish horde, Ottoman armies were able to penetrate Europe as far as Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.

  But Europe’s growing wealth and inventiveness eventually reversed its position of military weakness. Its backwardness in 1500, compared with the Islamic and Chinese empires, was only apparent. European expeditions were soon to conquer India, North and South America, Australia and most of Africa. Europe occupies 7% of the earth’s landmass but came to rule 35% of it by 1800 and 84% by 1914.

  Unlike in Europe, where science, technology and industry were closely intertwined, technology in China was never harnessed to industry, and industry was never allowed the space for autonomous development. China’s enthusiasm for invention had long since ossified. The mandarins had a distaste for novelty. They spurned foreign inventions and lacked the curiosity that drove the intellectually adventurous Europeans to reach beyond technology to the scientific principles behind it.

  There was no free market nor institutionalized property rights in China. “The Chinese state was always interfering with private enterprise—taking over lucrative activities, prohibiting others, manipulating prices, exacting bribes, curtailing private enrichment,” writes the economic historian David Landes. “Bad government strangled initiative, increased the cost of transactions, diverted talent from commerce and industry.” 22

  In the lapidary words of Adam Smith, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” 23 But the “little else” is something of an understatement. Peace, easy taxes and justice are seldom found together in history. Only in Europe was this magic formula achieved, and it became the basis for Europe’s unexpected ascent in the world.

  The Adaptive Response to Different Societies

  In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economic historian David Landes examines every possible factor for explaining the rise of the West and the stagnation of China and concludes, in essence, that the answer lies in the nature of the people. Landes attributes the decisive factor to culture, but describes culture in such a way as to imply race.

  “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference,” he writes. “Witness the enterprise of expatriate minorities—the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews and Calvinists throughout much of Europe, and on and on. Yet culture, in the sense of the inner values and attitudes that guide a population, frightens scholars. It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritance, an air of immutability.” 24

  Sulfuric odor or not, the culture of each race, whether genetically based or otherwise, is what Landes suggests has made the difference in economic development. Given the distinctiveness of European societies and the period for which they have been on their own path of development—at least 1,000 years—it is highly likely that the social behavior of Europeans has been adapting genetically to the challenges of surviving and prospering in a European society. The data gathered by Clark on declining rates of violence and increasing rates of literacy from 1200 to 1800, described in chapter 7, are evidence that this is indeed the case.

  Though equivalent data does not exist for the Chinese population, their society has been distinctive for even longer—at least 2,000 years—and the intense pressures on survival discussed in chapter 7 would have adapted the Chinese to their society just as Europeans became adapted to theirs.

  Psychologists who study the behaviors characteristic of European and East Asian populations usually ascribe everything solely to culture. From an evolutionary perspective, this is implausible. A society’s social behavior is central to its survival. Social behavior would have been as closely tailored to prevailing conditions as are the observable features of difference among races such as skin or hair color.

  The institutions that characterize a society are a mix of culturally determined and genetically influenced behaviors. The cultural component can be recognized because it has a generally higher rate of change, despite the conservatism of many cultural institutions. Warfare, for instance, is an institution of all human societies, but whether this genetically shaped propensity is exercised depends on culture and circumstances. Germany and Japan developed highly militaristic societies before and during the Second World War but both are now determinedly pacific. This is a cultural change, one far too quick to be genetic. There can be little doubt that both nations retain the propensity for warfare and would exercise it if they needed to do so.

  A distinctive feature of genetically shaped behaviors is that they persist unchanged over many generations. The presence of a genetic anchor would explain why expatriate English populations throughout the world have behaved like one another and like their source population over many centuries, and why the same is true of the Chinese abroad. A genetic basis for these groups’ social behavior also explains why it is so hard for other populations to copy their desirable features. The Malay, Thai or Indonesian populations who have prosperous Chinese populations in their midst might envy the Chinese success but are strangely unable to copy it. People are highly imitative, and if Chinese business success were purely cultural, everyone would find it easy to adopt the same methods. This is not the case because social behavior, of Chinese and others, is genetically shaped.

  The genetic basis of human social behavior is still largely opaque, and it’s hard to tell exactly how the neural rules that influence behavior are written. There is clearly a genetic propensity to avoid incest, for example. But it’s very unlikely that the genetic rule is written in exactly those terms. Marriage records from Israeli kibbutzim and Chinese families in Taiwan suggest that in practice the incest taboo is driven by an aversion to marrying partners whom one knew intimately in childhood. So the neural rule is probably something like “If you grew up under the same roof with this person, they are not a suitable marriage partner.”

  Do Europeans carry genes that favor open societies and the rule of law? Is there a gene for respecting property rights or restraining the absolutism of rulers? Obviously this is unlikely to be the case. No one can yet say exactly what patte
rns in the neural circuitry predispose European populations to prefer open societies and the rule of law to autocracies, or Chinese to be drawn to a system of family obligations, political hierarchy and conformity. But there is no reason to doubt that evolution is capable of framing subtle solutions to complex problems of social adaptation.

  There is almost certainly a genetic propensity for following society’s rules and punishing those who violate them, as noted in chapter 3. If Europeans were slightly less inclined to punish violators and Chinese more so, that could explain why European societies are more tolerant of dissenters and innovators, and Chinese societies less so. Because the genes that govern rule following and punishment of violators have not yet been identified, it is not yet known if these do in fact vary in European and Chinese populations in the way suggested. Nature has many dials to twist in setting the intensities of the various human social behaviors and many different ways of arriving at the same solution.

  The rise of the West was not some cultural accident. It was the direct result of the evolution of European populations as they adapted to the geographic and military conditions of their particular ecological habitat. That European societies have turned out to be more innovative and productive than others, at least under present circumstances, does not of course mean that Europeans are superior to others—a meaningless term in any case from the evolutionary perspective. Europeans are much like everyone else except for minor differences in their social behavior. But these minor differences, for the most part invisible in an individual, have major consequences at the level of a society. European institutions, a blend of both culture and European adaptive social behavior, are the reason that Europeans have constructed innovative, open and productive societies. The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.

  10

  EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON RACE

  Imagine that you, if an English speaker of European descent, are standing on a hill with someone from East Asia and another from Africa. Through a slip in the space-time continuum, you suddenly find that you are holding your mother’s hand, and she your grandmother’s, and so on through a long line of ancestors that stretches down the hill. The same living ancestors have appeared beside the East Asian and the African, and the three lines of women holding hands snake down the hillside to the valley below.

  You let go of your mother’s hand and walk down the hill to review the three lineages. The women holding one another’s hands are standing 3 feet apart. The average generation time through most of history has been around 25 years, meaning there have been four generations per century. So every 12 feet you walk encompasses a century of ancestresses, and every 120 feet a thousand years.

  You pass by your ancestors in wonder but cannot communicate with them; the shifting languages they speak are now far ancestral to English. Their faces soon lose their distinctively European features, although their skin is still pale. After you have walked 3,600 feet, just over two thirds of a mile, a strange thing happens. A woman is standing between your line of ancestresses and those of the East Asian and at her position the two lines merge into one. She is holding in one hand the hands of her two daughters, one of whom is first in the European line and the other the first in the East Asian line.

  As you continue down the hill, you are reviewing just two lineages, the now joint European–East Asian line and that of Africans. The people in the joint line grow steadily darker in complexion, since they lived before humans expanded to extreme northern latitudes and developed pale skin. Then, after you’ve been walking just over a mile, it is the turn of these two lineages to converge into one. There stands a woman holding the hands of two daughters, one of whom stayed in Africa and the other joined the small hunter-gatherer band that left the ancestral homeland some 50,000 years ago. In a walk of some 22 minutes, the human species has been reunified before your eyes.

  Had you continued walking for another hour, all of it along African ancestors, you would have reached the 200,000 year mark, the earliest known appearance of modern humans. Three quarters of modern human existence has been spent in Africa, only the last quarter outside it. Today’s races hold three quarters of their history in common, only one quarter apart.1

  From an evolutionary perspective, the human races are all very similar variations of the same gene pool. The question that looms over all the social sciences, unanswered and largely unaddressed, is how to explain the paradox that people as individuals are so similar yet human societies differ so conspicuously in their cultural and economic attainments.

  The argument presented in the pages above is that these differences do not spring from any great disparity between the individual members of the various races. Rather, they stem from the quite minor variations in human social behavior, whether of trust, conformity, aggressiveness or other traits, that have evolved within each race during its geographical and historical experience. These variations have set the framework for social institutions of significantly different character. It is because of their institutions—which are largely cultural edifices resting on a base of genetically shaped social behaviors—that the societies of the West and of East Asia are so different, that tribal societies are so unlike modern states, and that rich countries are rich and poor countries deprived.

  The consensus explanation of almost all social scientists is that human societies differ only in their culture, with the implicit premise that evolution has played no role in the differences between populations. But the all-culture explanation is implausible for several reasons.

  First, it is of course a conjecture. No one can at present say what precise mix of genetics and culture underlies the differences between human societies, and the assertion that evolution plays no role is merely a surmise.

  Second, the all-culture position was formulated largely by the anthropologist Franz Boas as an antiracist position, which may be laudable in motive, but political ideology of any kind has no proper place in science. Moreover Boas wrote at a time before it was known that human evolution had not halted in the distant past.

  Third, the all-culture conjecture does not satisfactorily explain why the differences between human societies are as deep-rooted as seems to be the case. If the differences between a tribal society and a modern state were purely cultural, it should be easy to modernize a tribal society by importing Western institutions. American experience in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan generally suggests otherwise. Culture undeniably explains many important differences between societies. The issue is whether it is a sufficient explanation for all such differences.

  Fourth, the all-culture conjecture is severely lacking in proper care and maintenance. Its adherents have failed to update it to take account of the new discovery that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional. Their hypothesis must assume, against all the evidence that has accumulated over the past 30 years, that the mind is a blank slate, born immaculately bereft of any innate behavior, and that the importance of social behavior for survival is too trivial to have been molded by natural selection. Or, if they allow that social behavior does have a genetic basis, they must explain how it could have remained unchanged in all races, despite the vast changes in human social structure over the past 15,000 years, when many other traits are now known to have evolved independently in each race, transforming some 14% of the human genome.

  The thesis presented here assumes, to the contrary, that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations.

  Like the all-culture position, this thesis is unproven, but it rests on several premises that are plausible in the light of new knowled
ge.

  The first is that the social structures of primates, humans included, are based on genetically shaped behaviors. Chimpanzees inherited a genetic template for operation of their distinctive societies from their joint ancestor with humans. The joint ancestor would have bequeathed the same template to the human lineage, which then evolved to support the distinctive features of human social structure, from the pair bonding that emerged some 1.7 million years ago to the emergence of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes. It is hard to see why humans, as an intensely social species, should ever have lost the genetic template for the suite of social behaviors on which their society depends, or why the template should not have continued to evolve during the most dramatic of all its transformations, the shift that enabled the size of human societies to expand from a maximum of 150 in the hunter-gatherer group to vast cities teeming with tens of millions of inhabitants. This transformation, it should be noted, had to evolve independently in the major races since it occurred after they split apart.

  A variety of data, including experiments with very young children, points to innate social propensities for cooperativeness, helping others, obeying rules, punishing those who don’t, trusting others selectively and a sense of fairness. The genes that direct the neural circuitry for such behaviors are for the most part unknown. But it is plausible that they exist, and genetic systems involving the control of the enzyme MAO-A, associated with aggression, and the hormone oxytocin, a modulator of trust, are already known.

  A second premise is that these genetically shaped social behaviors undergird the institutions around which human societies are constructed. Given that such behaviors exist, it seems uncontroversial that institutions should depend on them, and the proposition is endorsed by authorities such as the economist Douglass North and the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, both of whom see institutions as founded in the genetics of human behavior.