3. Dysgenics
We have already noted evidence that certain genes appear to be connected to ethnocentrism as well as evidence from computer modelling that ethnocentrism is very likely to be selected for when two distinct ethnic groups come into conflict. The conditions followed in these computer models replicate — in a simplified form — the conditions operating under Natural Selection. Under these harsh conditions, the organism — and more broadly the ethnic group of which it is a part — will adapt physically and psychologically to its particular ecology. As we have already seen, this process leads to modal racial and ethnic differences in morphology and in psychological traits. Each generation, many offspring will be born with mutant genes. These will almost always be damaging, meaning that the offspring will almost always be less adapted to the environment because of them, something that will manifest itself in poorer health and general psychological deficiencies. A combination of natural and sexual selection will ensure that those who carry these mutant genes will either not breed at all — often because they will die in childhood — or will not be particularly fertile even if they do breed, having even less healthy offspring with an even higher mutational load. Accordingly, each generation, the brutal process of Natural Selection ensured the Darwinian ‘Survival of the Fittest’ and, until the Industrial Revolution, around 50% of those born across Europe would not reach adulthood. These unfortunate children would, in general, be those who had poor immune systems, meaning they were not strong enough to fight off childhood diseases, or those who carried mutant genes leading to assorted disorders. In addition, work by Clark (2007) has shown that pre-Industrial society also selected for intelligence insomuch as this predicted socioeconomic status and this in turn predicted completed fertility with the richer 50% of the population enjoying a 40% fertility advantage over the poorer 50%.
Richard Lynn (2011a) has documented the way in which the Industrial Revolution halted and then reversed this process of Natural Selection in a phenomenon known as ‘Dysgenics’. The Industrial Revolution can be understood to have considerably weakened Natural Selection by, in numerous respects, reducing natural harshness. Its achievements have included inoculation against childhood diseases, ever-improving standards of medical science, hugely improved sanitation and living conditions for most people, considerably cheaper nutritious food, the ability of the same land area to support a much larger population due to mechanization and improvements in agriculture, the safety net of the welfare state, and even treatment to help those who are infertile have children. The consequence of this is that close to all children who are born will reach an age where they will be able to have children and if some dysgenic effect means that they cannot have them naturally then processes such as IVF can, in many cases, assist them. Though there is still some sexual and natural selection against those who have extremely poor genetic fitness, in general, most people who desire to have children are able to have them. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, in 1750, the British population was around 6 million. This was the country’s carrying capacity at that time and famine was an on-going problem. Now it is around 65 million. Clearly, under conditions of pre-Industrial selection, the population would be around 6 million, meaning that over 90% of the current population would either be dead, or, in most cases, would never have been born, because child mortality would have been about 50% every generation all the way back to the Industrial Revolution.
Lynn (2011a) has shown that the modern British population can be understood as a genetically sick population which has been subject to many generations — around eight if we take thirty years to be a generation — of dysgenic fertility on health. This dysgenic effect is illustrated by roughly accurate predictions made in 1989 that in, in Western countries in the subsequent thirty years, there would a 26% increase in haemophilia, a 22% increase in Cystic Fibrosis, and a 300% increase in Phenylketonuria, all of them genetic disorders with the latter appearing relatively frequently be mutation. In addition, Lynn has demonstrated that Industrialization has led to a dysgenic effect on intelligence. Currently, among females in Western societies and to a lesser extent among males, IQ is weakly negatively associated with fertility, at around −0.2 in the case of females. The most intelligent females have no children at all while the least intelligent, within the normal IQ range, have the highest fertility.
Lynn suggests a number of reasons for this pattern. Firstly, pre-industrial conditions selected the most strongly against the poor, with a poverty being predicted by relatively low intelligence. Industrialization — due to inoculations, generally improved conditions and a relatively lavish welfare state — would remove this obstacle to the fertility of the less intelligent. It would also remove the need for anybody to have large numbers of children as children generally could be essentially guaranteed to survive. As such, large families would be a function of impulsive sexual behaviour, which would be predicted by low intelligence. Secondly, contraception, once developed, would be more efficiently used and more likely to be used by the more intelligent. Thirdly, the emancipation of women would mean that the more intelligent women would become educated and delay motherhood. They would then have a small number of children and would be more likely to find that they had left motherhood too late and had become infertile. Consequently, we would expect intelligence to have decreased between 1900 and now.
British psychologist Michael Woodley and his team (2014) have shown that this indeed the case. Using reaction times as a proxy for intelligence as they robustly correlate, they show that reactions times lengthened appreciably in Western countries between 1900 and the year 2000. They estimated that average IQ in Western countries in this period had fallen by around fifteen points. Woodley et al. also argued that this was congruous with a reduction in the per capita number of highly significant inventions over this period and even with a decline in the ability to distinguish between colours, this also being a function of intelligence (Woodley of Menie et al., 2016). The extent of the decline is likely to reflect dysgenic fertility.21
Following this line of research, it would seem very probable that there were other psychological characteristics, beyond intelligence, which would cease to be selected for upon the collapse and reversal of Natural Selection. Indeed, it could be argued that any psychological characteristic which might be understood to be essential to the survival of an individual, or group, would be likely to decline in terms of the percentage of the population carrying the genes which underpin it, as genes which do not lead to it would no longer be selected out. Religiousness may be one such example. As we have discussed, religiousness would be useful in pre-history because it would reduce stress at the prospect of mortality or due to other existential problems, and it would increase pro-sociality (helping the individual and group to survive). This would also help the individual and group to survive, especially in periods of conflict. In addition, at the group level, it would provide a strong motivator for self-sacrifice and give the entire group a sense of eternal certainty. In terms of sexual selection, religiousness would be an important marker of a cooperative personality. The benefits to religiousness are evidenced in the way that in modern societies it is still positively associated with fertility and negatively associated with mental health problems (Rowthorn et al., 2011). ‘Religiousness’ is positively associated with fertility in a linear way, such that the more religious — and religiously observant — have the highest fertility and intended fertility while the non-religious have the lowest (e.g. Frejka & Westoff, 2006; Hayford & Morgan, 2008). It is also around 0.4 genetic.
It may even be that religiousness is part of a bundle of ‘natural’ inclinations and abilities and that all of these are not selected for so strongly once Natural Selection ceases. This would explain why religiousness is associated with such vital instincts as the desire to have children and also with the ability to have children. In other words, religiousness may evidence a lower impact from damaging mutant genes which move
us away from the optimum level of adaptation to the pre-Industrial environment. Indeed, it is noted that older adults who frequently attend church have better immune systems than older adults who do not frequently attend church in the USA. It has been noted that there is no apparent environmental explanation for this finding, such as that the adults with better immune systems are physically more able to attend church or that the immune system is boosted by some psychological effect of attending church (Koenig et al., 1997). Thus, a possible explanation is that we are evolved to be religious over many generations and, accordingly, those who are religious simply have fewer mutant genes, something reflected in an optimally functioning nervous system. In this regard, Dutton et al. (2017) have argued that religiousness, which as noted is significantly genetic, was increasingly selected for in complex societies up until industrialization. Thus, with the degeneration of selection, they predicted that atheism would be associated with physical markers of genetic mutation, because physical and mental mutations tend to be comorbid and around 84% of the genome relates to the brain. Consistent with this, they showed that atheism, and generally not worshipping a god, is indeed associated with a variety of indicators of mutation: poor mental and physical health, left-handedness, autism, fluctuating asymmetry, and psycho-sexual problems. These are all signs of ‘developmental instability’ (the inability of an organism to produce a normal phenotype) and thus mutation. Their prevalence is increasing in Western countries and they are significantly genetic (Woodley of Menie et al., 2017). In that we are supposed to be right-handed, left-handedness reflects an asymmetrical brain and it is associated with many other signs of developmental instability, such as mental instability (Blanchard, 2008).
Prior to industrialization, children with mutant genes had poor physical health so they died young and didn’t reproduce. They would also, disproportionately, have had poor mental health and been lacking in adaptive instincts, such as religious belief or ethnocentrism. With industrialization, they survived and procreated, leading to a rise in atheism and the correlation between atheism and markers of mutational load. So, research by Dutton and his team demonstrates that atheism is a sign of mutation. It deviates from our evolved instincts (which kept us from becoming extinct under conditions of selection) and, consistent with this, atheists are relatively lacking in the desire to have children, another basic instinct (see Rowthorn et al., 2011). Religiousness is associated with good physical and mental health not because religion causes people to be healthier but because health and religiousness both reflect low mutational load. Thus, the length of time which Europe has been subject to industrialization — which would increase mutational load — would also reduce its religiousness and so its levels of ethnocentrism. This is in line with the ‘Social Epistasis’ model (Woodley of Menie et al., 2017) which we will discuss below.
We have already noted the parallels between religiousness and ethnocentrism. Thus, it would seem quite possible that there would be genes associated with aspects of ethnocentrism and that these would be carried by a diminishing proportion of the population as Natural Selection became weaker and weaker. Under conditions of Natural Selection, we would expect conflict between different groups for scarce resources. These would not just be between different ethnic groups, but between other genetic cleavages such as between different religious groups, different regional groups, and even between different clans. Those who behave — on average — in a more ethnocentric manner would be likely to survive this harsh group selection, causing genes which did not result in optimum, and relatively high, levels of ethnocentrism to be selected out as these carriers of these genes would be less successful at passing them on. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, we would expect this process of group selection to weaken and the standards of living would significantly rise for all members of a given a society, meaning that conflict over resources would have less of an impact on group fertility. It would then follow that selection for ethnocentrism — or against low ethnocentrism — would lessen and the ethnocentric portion of the population would shrink in parallel with shrinking religiousness.
Dutton (2014, p. 248) has shown that religious belief has declined in industrialized countries throughout the twentieth century. For example, according to UK Gallup polls, belief in God was 78% in 1957 but 70% in 1993. Much of this may be a consequence of improved living conditions and reduced stress. But, as we noted above, even in modern Western societies, religiousness predicts the desire to have children as well as actually having higher fertility (e.g. Rowthorn et al. 2011). So, we would expect that the percentage of the population who believed in God would decrease due to the enormous stress-reduction brought about by the Industrial Revolution, something which would also be sufficient to overwhelm any potential boost to religious belief brought about by dysgenics on intelligence. Religiousness would also not be so strongly selected for because those who lacked genes for religiousness would be less stressed by their natural environment than in the past and, in some cases, could be cured by mind-altering drugs if their stress levels did become too high. So, religiousness would be selected for to a much lesser extent, and life would be less stressful, making people less religious. But this could only be maintained up to a point. Three factors would bring about its reversal:
1. The societal group who remained religious even in spite of the low levels of stress, what we might call the congenitally religious, would have higher fertility than the non-religious, because religiousness predicts the desire to have and ability to have children.
2. The less intelligent would have higher fertility than the more intelligent and intelligence is negatively associated with religiousness.
3. The maintenance of civilization, and thus low stress, is underpinned by a society’s intelligence (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012). Accordingly, we would expect religiousness to decline due to the Industrial Revolution but then eventually rise from the grave, a point that has been statistically demonstrated by American psychologist Lee Ellis and his colleagues (Ellis et al., 2017).
Another relevant factor may simply be genetic diversity. Due to the weakening of Natural Selection, it would follow that populations are going to be more genetically diverse than they were before. Following Genetic Similarity Theory, and our discussion of cousin marriage, we would expect this to reduce levels of ethnocentrism. Put simply, the populations are less ‘families’ than they once were. Immigration from other ethnicities would make this even more pronounced and would also reduce trust levels even among Europeans. Indeed, it could be argued that this process has happened before, though it did not progress as far. Meisenberg (2007) has observed that when civilizations become advanced the standard of living among the higher classes increases to such an extent that their stress levels drop to a point where they start questioning their religiosity. He claims that this is what happened towards the end of Roman Civilization, and it likely helps to explain the low levels of ethnocentrism observed at this point in Rome’s history when foreigners were effectively permitted to take over the city. It was also noted as Greek civilization went into decline, observes Meisenberg. In addition to the environmental influence, there is also a degree to which selection would have become relaxed compared to its previous intensity, leading to spiteful mutations, such as atheism or lack of religious belief.
4. Mutational Meltdown in Mouse Utopia
The earlier Industrialization arrived in a country, all else being equal, the less ethnocentric we would thus expect the country to be, at least during a particular period in its history. Indeed, with very little Natural Selection we would eventually expect a situation where the majority of the population were physically and mentally ill, substantially lacking in any of the instincts or abilities necessary to survive in the pre-Industrial environment. Overwhelmed by harmful mutations, the population would experience mutational meltdown and would simply collapse, which would eventually mean the recreation of conditions of Natural Selection. If a population which had, until more rec
ently, been subject to Natural Selection began to compete with this sick population — before it collapsed — it would soon dominate it, not least due to it likely being more ethnocentric, more religious, fitter, and more fertile. The remnant dominated population would then be characterized, compared to the members who had not procreated, by lower intelligence and higher religiousness; these being the two factors that would predict fertility.
This collapse in the instincts which permit a group to survive has been documented in mice, though when drawing comparisons, it must be remembered that humans are not precisely the same as mice. American ethologist John Calhoun (1917–1995; Calhoun, 1973) performed a fascinating experiment on mice which he began in 1968 in a laboratory at the University of Maryland. In this laboratory he created the so-called ‘Mouse Utopia’. This was a veritable heaven for mice in which there would be (1) no emigration by lower-status mice to suboptimal habitats as there would be abundant replica habitats and the utopia would be impossible to escape from; (2) no resource shortage or inclement weather; (3) no disease epidemics (this was ensured by taking extreme precautions to ensure that no epidemics could develop); and (4) no predators.
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