A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

by Nicholas Wade

  Social Behavior and History

  The purpose of the pages that follow is to demystify the genetic basis of race and to ask what recent human evolution reveals about history and the nature of human societies. If fear of racism can be overcome sufficiently for researchers to accept that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional, a number of critical issues in history and economics may be laid open for exploration. Race may be a troublesome inheritance, but better to explore and understand its bearing on human nature and history than to pretend for reasons of political convenience that it has no evolutionary basis.

  It’s social behavior that is of relevance for understanding pivotal—and otherwise imperfectly explained—events in history and economics. Although the emotional and intellectual differences between the world’s peoples as individuals are slight enough, even a small shift in social behavior can generate a very different kind of society. Tribal societies, for instance, are organized on the basis of kinship and differ from modern states chiefly in that people’s radius of trust does not extend too far beyond the family and tribe. But in this small variation is rooted the vast difference in political and economic structures between tribal and modern societies. Variations in another genetically based behavior, the readiness to punish those who violate social rules, may explain why some societies are more conformist than others.

  Social structure is the point at which human evolution intersects with history. Vast changes have occurred in human social structure in all three major races within the past 15,000 years. That is the period in which people first started to switch from the nomadic life of hunter-gatherer bands to settled existence in much larger communities. This wrenching shift required living in a hierarchical society instead of an egalitarian one and the temperament to get on with many strangers instead of just a few close kin. Given that this change took so long to occur—modern humans first appear in the archaeological record 200,000 years ago, yet it took them 185,000 years to settle down in fixed communities—it is tempting to assume that a substantial genetic change in social behavior was required and that it took this long to evolve. Moreover, this evolutionary process took place independently in the populations of Europe, East Asia, the Americas and Africa, which had separated long before the first settlements emerged.

  The forager-settler transition is unlikely to have been the only evolutionary change in human social behavior. Probably from the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, most people have lived on the edge of starvation. After each new increase in productivity, more babies were born, the extra mouths ate up the surplus and within a generation everyone was back to a state of scarcity little better than before.

  This situation was accurately described by the Reverend Thomas Malthus with his analysis that population was always kept in check by misery and vice. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the idea of natural selection. Under conditions of the fierce struggle for existence that Malthus described, favorable variations would be preserved, Darwin perceived, and unfavorable ones destroyed, leading eventually to the formation of new species.

  Given that the human population supplied Malthus with the observations that led Darwin to the concept of natural selection, there is every reason to suppose that people living in agrarian societies were subject to intense forces of natural selection. But what traits were being selected for during the long agrarian past? Evidence described in chapter 7 indicates that it was human social nature that changed. Until the great demographic transition that followed industrialization, the wealthy had more surviving children than the poor. As many of the children of the rich fell in status, they would have spread throughout the population the genes that support the behaviors useful in accumulating wealth. This ratchet of wealth provides a general mechanism for making a specific set of behaviors—those required for economic success—more general and, generation after generation, gradually changing a society’s nature. The mechanism has so far been documented only for a population for which unusually precise records exist, that of England from 1200 to 1800. But given the strong human propensity for investing in one’s children’s success, the ratchet may well have operated in all societies in which there have been gradations of wealth.

  The narratives constructed by historians describe many forms of change, whether political, military, economic or social. One factor almost always assumed to be constant is human nature. Yet if human social nature, and therefore the nature of human societies, has changed in the recent past, a new variable is available to help explain major turning points in history. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, marked a profound change in the productivity of human societies, one that took almost 15,000 years to emerge after the first settlements. Could this too have required the evolution of a difference in human social behavior, as significant as the one that accompanied the transition from foraging to settled life?

  There are other significant turning points in history for which scholars have proposed a clutch of possible causes but no compelling explanation. China created the first modern state and enjoyed the most advanced civilization until around 1800 AD, when it slid into puzzling decline. The Islamic world in 1500 AD surpassed the West in most respects, reaching a high tide of its expansion in the siege of Vienna in 1529 AD by the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Then, after almost a thousand years of relentless conquest, the house of Islam entered a long and painful retreat, also for reasons that defy scholarly consensus.

  The counterpart of Chinese and Islamic decline is the unexpected rise of the West. Europe, feudal and semitribal in 1000 AD, had become a vigorous exponent of learning and exploration by 1500 AD. From this basis, Western nations seized the lead in geographical expansion, in military preeminence, in economic prosperity and in science and technology.

  Economists and historians have described many factors that contributed to Europe’s awakening. One that is seldom considered is the possibility of an evolutionary change, that the European population, in adapting to its particular local circumstances, happened to evolve a kind of society that was highly favorable to innovation.

  Economic Disparities

  Explanation is also lacking for many important features of even today’s world. Why are some countries rich and others persistently poor? Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark? Africa has absorbed billions of dollars in aid over the past half century and yet, until a recent spurt of growth, its standard of living has stagnated for decades. South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, almost as poor at the start of the period, have enjoyed an economic resurgence. Why have these countries been able to modernize so rapidly while others have found it much harder?

  Economists and historians attribute the major disparities between countries to factors such as resources or geography or cultural differences. But many countries with no resources, like Japan or Singapore, are very rich, while richly endowed countries like Nigeria tend to be quite poor. Iceland, covered mostly in glaciers and frigid deserts, might seem less favorably situated than Haiti, but Icelanders are wealthy and Haitians beset by persistent poverty and corruption. True, culture provides a compelling and sufficient explanation for many such differences. In the natural experiment provided by the two Koreas, the people are the same in both countries, so it must surely be bad institutions that keep North Koreans poor and good ones that make South Koreans prosperous.

  But in situations where culture and political institutions can flow freely across borders, long enduring disparities are harder to explain. The brisk and continuing pace of human evolution suggests a new possibility: that at the root of each civilization is a particular set of evolved social behaviors that sustains it, and these behaviors are reflected in the society’s institutions. Institutions are not just sets of arbitrary rules. Rather, they grow out of instinctual social behaviors,
such as the propensity to trust others, to follow rules and punish those who don’t, to engage in reciprocity and trade, or to take up arms against neighboring groups. Because these behaviors vary slightly from one society to the next as the result of evolutionary pressures, so too may the institutions that depend on them.

  This would explain why it is so hard to transfer institutions from one society to another. American institutions cannot be successfully implanted in Iraq, for instance, because Iraqis have different social behaviors, including a base in tribalism and a well-founded distrust of central government, just as it would be impossible to import Iraqi tribal politics into the United States.

  With the advent of fast and cheap methods for decoding the sequence of DNA units in the human genome, the genetic variations that underlie human races can be explored for the first time. The evolutionary paths that have generated differences between races are of great interest to researchers and many are described in the pages that follow. But the broader significance of the worldwide variations in DNA is not the differences but the similarities. Nowhere is the essential unity of humankind more clearly and indelibly written than in the human genome.

  • • •

  Since much of the material that follows may be new or unfamiliar to the general reader, a guide to its evidentiary status may be helpful. Chapters 4 and 5, which explore the genetics of race, are probably the most securely based. Although they put the reader on the forefront of current research, and frontier science is always more prone to upset than that in the textbooks, the findings reported here draw from a large body of research by leading experts in the field and seem unlikely to be revised in any serious way. Readers can probably take the facts in these chapters as reasonably solid and the interpretations as being in general well supported.

  The discussion of the roots of human social behavior in chapter 3 also rests on substantial research, in this case mostly studies of human and animal behavior. But the genetic underpinnings of human social behavior are for the most part still unknown. There is therefore considerable room for disagreement as to exactly which social behaviors have a genetic basis and how strongly any such behaviors may be genetically defined. Moreover the whole field of research into human social behavior is both young and overshadowed by the paradigm still influential among social scientists that all human behavior is purely cultural.

  Readers should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution. Because the existence of race has long been ignored or denied by many researchers, there is a dearth of factual information as to how race impinges on human society. The conclusions presented in these chapters fall far short of proof. However plausible (or otherwise) they may seem, many are speculative. There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.

  2

  PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE

  Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin had been talking about pigeons, but the imperialists saw no reason why his theories should not apply to men.

  —RICHARD HOFSTADTER1

  Ideas about race, many of them generated by biologists, have been exploited to justify slavery, to sterilize people deemed unfit and, in Hitler’s Germany, to conduct murderous campaigns against innocent and defenseless segments of society such as Gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill children. Most chilling of all was the horrific fusion of eugenic ideas with notions of racial purity that drove the National Socialists to slaughter some 6 million Jews in the territories under their control.

  Because there could be no more serious caution for any who would inquire into the nature of race, the errors that lured people and governments down these mistaken paths need first to be understood.

  Racism is a surprisingly modern concept, the word first appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary only in 1910. Before that, ethnic prejudice existed in profusion and still does. The ancient Greeks applied the word barbarian to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. China has long called itself the Central Kingdom, regarding as barbarians all who live outside its borders. The click-speaking bushmen of the Kalahari Desert divide the world into Ju|’hoansi, or “real people,” such as themselves, and !ohm, a category that includes other Africans, Europeans and inedible animals such as predators. Europeans link nationality with edibility in devising derogatory names for one another. Thus the French refer to the English as les rosbifs (“roast beefs”), while the English call the French frogs (as in frogs’ legs, a French delicacy) and Germans krauts (from sauerkraut, or fermented cabbage).

  The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities.

  Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. The notion of inherent superiority, which is generally absent from mere ethnic prejudice, is held to justify unlimited abuse of races held to be inferior, from social discrimination to annihilation. “The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are imagined to share physical, mental and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that they cannot change these traits individually,” writes the historian Benjamin Isaac.2

  It’s not surprising that the notion of racial superiority emerged in the 19th century, after European nations had established colonies in much of the world and sought a theoretical justification of their dominion over others.

  At least two other strands of thought fed into modern ideologies of racism. One was the effort by scientists to classify the many human populations that European explorers were able to describe. The other was that of Social Darwinism and eugenics.

  Classifying Human Races

  In the 18th century Linnaeus, the great classifier of the world’s organisms, recognized four races, based principally on geography and skin color. He named them Homo americanus (Native Americans), Homo europaeus (Europeans), Homo asiaticus (East Asians) and Homo afer (Africans). Linnaeus did not perceive a hierarchy of races, and he listed people alongside the rest of nature.

  In a 1795 treatise called On the Natural Variety of Mankind, the anthropologist Johann Blumenbach described five races based on skull type. He added a Malay race, essentially people of Malaya and Indonesia, to Linnaeus’s four, and he invented the useful word Caucasian to denote the peoples of Europe, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The origin of the name was due in part to his belief that the people of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, were the most beautiful and in part to the then prevailing view that Noah’s ark had set down on Mount Ararat in the Caucasus, making the region the homeland of the first people to colonize the earth.

  Blumenbach has been unjustly tarred with the supremacist beliefs of his successors. In fact he opposed the idea that some races were superior to others, and he conceded that his appraisal of Caucasian comeliness was subjective.3 His views on Caucasian beauty can more reasonably be ascribed to ethnic prejudice than to racism. Moreover Blumenbach insisted that all humans belonged to the same species, as against the view then emerging that the human races were so different from one another as to constitute different spec
ies.

  Up until Blumenbach, the study of human races was a reasonably scientific attempt to understand and explain human variation. The more dubious turn taken in the 19th century was exemplified by Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s book An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published in 1853–55. Gobineau was a French aristocrat and diplomat, not a scientist, and a friend and correspondent of de Tocqueville. His book was a philosophical attempt to explain the rise and fall of nations, based essentially on the idea of racial purity. He assumed there were three races recognized by the skin colors of white, yellow and black. A pure race might conquer its neighbors, but as it interbred with them, it would lose its edge and risk being conquered in turn. The reason, Gobineau supposed, was that interbreeding leads to degeneracy.

  The superior race, Gobineau wrote, was that of the Indo-Europeans, or Aryans, and their continuance in the Greek, Roman and European empires. Contrary to what might be expected from Hitler’s exploitation of his works, Gobineau greatly admired Jews, whom he described as “a people that succeeded in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people, and one which, before it lost, sword in hand, the name of an independent nation, had given as many learned men to the world as it had merchants.”

  Gobineau’s ambitious theory of history was built on sand. There is no factual basis for his notions of racial purity or racial degeneration through interbreeding. His ideas would doubtless have been forgotten but for the pernicious theme of an Aryan master race. Hitler adopted this worthless concept while ignoring Gobineau’s considerably more defensible observations about Jews.