Darwin’s unexploded bomb

‘This book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.’ So writes Nicholas Wade, the British-born science editor of The New York Times, in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance.

For some time the post-War view of human nature as being largely culturally-formed has been under attack just as surely as the biblical explanation of mankind’s creation began to face pressure in the early 19th century. What Steven Pinker called the blank slate view of our species, whereby humans are products of social conditions and therefore possible to mould and to perfect through reform, has been undermined by scientific discoveries in various areas.

But the most sensitive, and potentially troubling to the modern psyche, is the difference between human population groups that have evolved over the past 50,000 years. As Wade writes: ‘The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.’

The political objections are a reaction to the horrific things done in the name of race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Final Solution, after which the UN’s Ashley Montagu made the influential declaration that race was to all intents and purposes a fiction. Before that, anthropologist Franz Boas had popularised the idea that we are entirely products of culture.

This has remained the conventional view, indeed the only one that academics could safely hold; yet a number of inconsistencies have begun to crack away at this noble idea.

Among them is the recent knowledge that evolution can take place far quicker than people once thought. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, in their book The 10,000 Year Explosion, argued that human evolution had sped up since the advent of the first cities. The drastic changes in our ancestors’ environment created new evolutionary pressures; among them were selection for qualities that were beneficial in our larger communities, such as lower levels of aggression, deferred gratification (vital for farmers), a greater willingness to trust people outside of close kin group, and the qualities required for craftsmanship, finance and various other complex skills. Thus civilisation had increased the rate of evolution, and was continuing to do so.

Their research was solid, yet as Wade says, ‘Scientific enquiry thus runs into potential conflict with the public policy interest of not generating possibly invidious comparisons that might foment racism’.

Among the areas explored by Cochran and Harpending, along with another academic, Jason Hardy, has been Ashkenazi intelligence, and yet a previous paper, despite being considered ‘fascinating’ by editors, could not be published in the United States.

It is obviously understandable why Jewish intelligence and success, the subject of extreme and violent jealousies through the ages, makes people nervous. But the outsized contribution of Jews to almost all fields must surely interest all but the dullest of minds: just 0.2 per cent of the world population, Jews accounted for 29 per cent of Nobel Prizes in the late 20th century, and 32 per cent so far in 21st century. That tiny, remarkable country Israel recently won its fifth Chemistry Prize in a decade.

One can admire Jewish culture and the Jewish work ethic, but the idea that this enormous level of achievement is purely cultural, while possible, certainly does not pass the Occam’s razor test. As Wade says, ‘People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it.’ They haven’t.

The same is true of the Chinese, who across Asia and now the rest of the world have formed highly successful business communities and, like the Jews, have suffered attacks from jealous neighbours: ‘If Chinese business success were purely cultural, everyone should find it easy to adopt the same methods. This is not the case because social behaviour, of Chinese and others, is genetically shaped.’

As he says: ‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’

The implications of this will trouble many people, seeing as it suggests that certain traits differ on average among population groups. He cites the MAO-A enzyme; people with only 2 copies (rather than 3, 4 or 5) have a much higher level of delinquency. And ‘if individuals can differ in the genetic structure of their MAO-A gene and its controls, is the same also true of races and ethnicities? The answer is yes.’ A team in Haifa looked at people from seven ethnicities and found 41 variations in the portions of the genes they decoded, with ‘substantial differentiation between populations’.

So why do so many people confidently argue that there is no such thing as race, because there are ‘no clear distinct racial boundaries’. This he calls ‘verbal subterfuge’, arguing: ‘When a distinct boundary develops between races, they are no longer races but separate species. So to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.’

Wade is critical of leading biologists, economists and psychologists who have simply dismissed possible non-cultural explanations as racist, or who pin their hopes in geographic determinism, or shy away from recent evolution because of the political implications. This, he says, has nothing to do with its scientific validity but the ‘political dangers’ that researchers face in ‘pursuing the truth too far’.

The political dangers are very real; various academics have lost their jobs or faced quite extreme harassment for voicing the belief that differences in group IQ scores are partly hereditary, despite there being solid evidence that intelligence is under genetic control.

And yet these ‘accusations of racism against anyone who suggests that cognitive capacities might differ between human populations groups… are shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma, not by science.’ He says: ‘The common sense conclusion – that race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences – has also eluded’ much of academia.

This book’s ideas are indeed fraught but beyond carefully explaining the dangers of misusing science, the consequences are not for scientists to ponder, but rather lawmakers and others of influence; they can choose either to consider the evidence and make things work as best as they can, using what knowledge we have, or they can continue to ignore the ticking of Darwin’s unexploded bomb, punishing anyone who raises the subject.

This hostility faced by those with troublesome ideas is, of course, itself explained by evolution. As Wade mentions earlier on, we are social creatures, and we have evolved behaviours to live as such: ‘One is a tendency to criticise, and if necessary punish, those who do not follow the agreed norms.’ That is partly why, as a species, we find it easier to talk about how the world should be, rather than how it is.

I said nothing about variable sizes of brains of existing people. Since I said nothing about that,

You said: "a smaller brain is not a disadvantage for survival". We can see that all kinds of people live around us. It isn't an Darwinian revelation.

Over the last 10,000 years, the human brain has shrunk about 10% in size.

I see. Those cave men needed big brains for spear-chucking, while small brains are the order of the day in our modern world full of modern medicine, high literacy, mathematics, astonishing engineering feats, etc etc.

Previously you said that a larger brain "little as a century or so ago was a death sentence for both mother and child" and now you say that 10,000 years ago people had larger brains. Did they also have advanced medicine? Maybe they worked on elliptic curves and classifying finite simple groups when they weren't using their big brains to chuck spears.

Or rather than postulate more tiresome Darwinian stories in an attempt to reconcile this contradiction, we can instead conclude that Darwinism is false, and your stories are not true.

the brain uses ~20% of the body's total energy intake. Under periods of starvation... a distinct survival disadvantage.

You're talking about a 10 percent difference in brain size, which amounts to 2% of energy intake. And this 2% is spread out over, as you say, 10,000 years, which at any time amounts to an imperceptible fraction of a percent. And you say it's a "distinct survival disadvantage". I don't believe your story.

I seriously doubt you've ever taken vector physics,

You may be right, I've long been hampered with the evolutionary disadvantage of not having a small brain. If only it were smaller, whole vistas of modern intellectual fields would become accessible to me: mathematics, medicine, computer programming... Maybe I would even do my own taxes too and not have to hire a small-brained accountant to help me.

the progress of evolution over time is very analogous to the movement of an object subjected to many forces, whose trajectory and speed is determined by the vector total of the applied forces. Many selective pressures act on a species, and the characteristics of that species reflect the vector total effect of all the selective pressures.

That's a really beautiful story. I can sit down and imagine all those pointy vectors. It reminds me of another really beautiful picture: Ptolemy's solar system, with all those lovely epicycles and the equant point and all that. Except for this very important difference: there were, at least back then, some good reasons to believe what Ptolemy was saying.

they compare science to religion in order to "bring down" science tells me that they have a very low opinion of religion,

How about comparing Darwinism to Marxism or some other psychotic 19th century ideology? Would you have less of a problem with that?

You said: "a smaller brain is not a disadvantage for survival". We can see that all kinds of people live around us. It isn't an Darwinian revelation.

You really did not do well in reading comprehension in school, did you? I already explained in some depth about this: reread my post #59 and get back to me when you can demonstrate that you actually understand it.

I see that you know very little about how pre-historic humans survived. They had survival challenges that modern humans cannot imagine. Compared to many of the predators and the prey that filled their world, they were small, weak, and had no built-in weapons--soft nails, tiny teeth. They had to survive by making weapons and by outwitting other animals. If they couldn't outwit predators, they became food. If they couldn't outwit prey, they starved. They were nomadic, so they had to be observant and remember where to go and how to get there from season to season. And so on. They had survival challenges that most modern people cannot even imagine--and most modern people would not survive in that environment.

It looks like you are as unaware of the fact that women commonly died from childbirth complications prior to modern medicine as you are unaware of the survival challenges of prehistoric humans. As with many evolutionary traits, there are opposing forces at play here. In the prehistoric environment, the smarter children--those with larger brains--were more likely to survive and pass their genes to their offspring. But if the brain size of those offspring was too large, they would not be able to exit the birth canal, and both mother and child would die. So survival was a balancing act between big enough and not too big. The specific survival disadvantage of large brain size was only recently negated through modern medicine.

Or rather than postulate more tiresome Darwinian stories in an attempt to reconcile this contradiction, we can instead conclude that Darwinism is false, and your stories are not true.

Still trying to denigrate science by comparing it to something which you hold equally contemptible, religion? Tsk, tsk. I already know you dislike science, but do you have any respect for the institution of religion at all?

BTW, your inability to understand that multiple forces are at play and that the final outcome is the result of the vector total of those forces does not negate any scientific observation. These vector forces affect everything we do--they are hardly unique to evolutionary biology. For example, your kids want to go to the amusement park every day and you say no, because chores need to be done and you can't afford daily visits, so you compromise with one visit per month: that is an example of vector forces at play.

You don't strike me as the type who enjoys intellectual activity, and you have already demonstrated a distinct dislike of science, but here is a nicely written article that explains many of the factors influencing brain size. Brain shrinkage did not result only from the switch to a civilized life style, other forces were also at play. Remember, evolutionary change is the result of vector forces. Remember, too, that evolution works at the level of population, not individuals, and that 10,000 years is a really short time when considering evolutionary time scales. BTW, your inability to understand concepts does not invalidate them.

Let's see... you just stated that you have to hire someone to do your taxes for you, presumably because you have no desire to devote brain resources to understanding the tax code yourself. Lucky for you, someone else has devoted *their* brain resources to understanding it, so you still get the benefit of that knowledge.

Obviously, in the absence of survival challenges, we have plenty of brain-power to spare to devote to specialization. I doubt I would survive long left on my own in the savannah, but I can certainly survive in my present environment--with the pay I earn from doing scientific research, I buy everything I need to survive.

How about comparing Darwinism to Marxism or some other psychotic 19th century ideology? Would you have less of a problem with that?

*You* are trying to pass science off as a religion, not me. That comparison of science to religion (to try to make science look bad) comes straight from the creationism literature--which you appear to know quite well. No, you don't actually have to quote reams of nonsense from Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, or any of the other crackpot creationism websites for me to recognize their influence on your discussion. Since I have no reason to denigrate the scientific profession, I have no need to compare it to something I find despicable--which would *not* be my religious faith, in any case.

In closing, let me say that no matter how much you claim to be incapable of understanding the complexities of biological science, or how many times you profess not to "believe" scientific evidence, that evidence won't go away. Your belief is irrelevant to scientific progress, and trying to convince a scientist (me) that science isn't real has absolutely no effect whatsoever. Science *will* keep advancing, just as it always has.

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