A third premise is that the evolution of social behavior has continued during the past 50,000 years and throughout the historical period. This phase of evolution has necessarily occurred independently and in parallel in the three major races after they split apart and each made the transition from hunting and gathering to settled life. Evidence in the genome that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional provides general support for this thesis, unless any reason can be shown why social behavior should have been exempt from natural selection.
The best possible proof of the premise would be identification of the genes that shape the neural circuitry for social behaviors, and demonstration that they have been under natural selection in each race. No such test is yet available because the genes that underlie social behavior are largely unknown. But brain genes of unknown duties are among the genes found to have been under recent selective pressure in the three principal races, proving that the genes for neural function are not exempt from recent evolutionary change. In addition, the MAO-A gene, which influences aggressivity, varies substantially among races and ethnicities in a way that suggests, though does not prove, that the gene has been under evolutionary pressure.
A fourth premise is that evolved social behavior can in fact be observed in today’s various populations. The behavioral changes documented in the English population during the 600 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution include a decline in violence and increases in literacy, the propensity to work and the propensity to save. The same evolutionary shift presumably occurred in the other agrarian populations of Europe and East Asia before they entered their own industrial revolutions. Another behavioral change is evident in the Jewish population as it adapted over the centuries first to educational demands and then to exacting professional niches.
A fifth premise is that the significant differences are those between human societies, not their individual members. Human nature is essentially the same worldwide. But minor variations in social behavior, though barely perceptible, if at all, in an individual, combine to create societies of very different character. These evolutionary differences between societies on the various continents may underlie major and otherwise imperfectly explained turning points in history such as the rise of the West and the decline of the Islamic world and China, as well as the economic disparities that began to emerge in the past few centuries.
To assert that evolution has played some role in human history does not mean that that role is necessarily prominent, let alone decisive. Culture is a mighty force, and people are not slaves to innate propensities, which in any case only prompt the mind in a certain direction. But if all individuals in a society have similar propensities, however slight, toward greater or less social trust, say, or greater or lesser conformity, then the society will tend to act in that direction and to differ from societies that lack such propensities.
History as If Evolution Mattered
How might historians write if they believed that evolution were relevant to their concerns? They would surely pay greater attention to the evolutionary role of forces like demography and warfare in shaping human societies. Population growth seems to have been the driving force that compelled societies to devise more complex structures, both in order to organize larger numbers of people and for defense against neighbors who were also expanding in numbers and territory. Under the pressure of war, chiefdoms coalesced into archaic states and states into empires. But this sanguinary process faltered if populations were too sparse or people could escape elsewhere.
The forces of natural selection that work within a society have been equally significant. Agrarian economies have kept people striving at the edge of starvation for millennia, the condition in which Darwin perceived that natural selection would favor even the slightest survival advantage. Under these Malthusian conditions, the ratchet of wealth—the ability of the rich to raise more surviving children—slowly diffused the social behaviors required for modern prosperity into the wider society.
These forces have worked independently on the populations in each continent, driving them along paths that were parallel to a large extent but ultimately diverged. Early states arose in East Asia, Europe, Africa and the two Americas. In Australia, however, population numbers and climate remained too adverse to induce the development of agriculture or social structures more elaborate than that of hunter-gatherers.
Human societies of distinctive character arose on all five continents and some became the basis for major civilizations. Historians reject thinking in racial categories for understandable reasons. But it is an error to exclude any possible role for evolution in history. The major civilizations occur within the two main races of East Asians and Caucasians, as distinguished by genetics. Within the East Asian race arose the civilizations of China, Korea and Japan, as well as Siberian steppe cultures such as the Mongols. Within the Caucasian group are the civilizations of India, Russia, the West, South America and the Islamic world.
A primary effect of genetics is to add a substantial degree of inertia or stability to the social behavior and hence to the institutions of each society. Rapid change must be due to culture, not genetics, but if the core social behaviors of each civilization have an evolutionary foundation, as argued in the previous chapter, then the rate of change in their relationships is likely to be constrained. The slow march of evolution, in other words, exerts an unseen collar on the pace of history.
This constraint has considerable bearing on issues such as whether the West will continue its dominance or enter into decline. “What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance. This time the Eastern challenger is for real,” the historian Niall Ferguson wrote in 2011.2 Ferguson’s basic argument is that empires have always risen and fallen, therefore the United States too will be eclipsed, and the most likely successor on the horizon is China. But the rise and fall of civilizations is in fact vastly slower than that of empires. In Europe, the empires of Charlemagne, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon and Hitler all rose and fell, without having any significant effect on the rise of Western civilization. Dynasties have changed in China, some of them led by invaders like the Mongols or Manchus, without altering the essential character of Chinese social behavior. Empires are an epiphenomenon upon the surface of the stronger, slower tides of evolution.
Of greater moment are the clashes between the world’s civilizations. War was the mechanism that welded early human societies into the first primitive states and has been a constant shaper of state organization ever since. There is no clear reason why continued militarism should not have culminated in a single worldwide empire as soon as transport and communications permitted. The Mongol imperium, a rapacious and highly destructive society that stretched from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan, was a prototype of such a universal empire. The Mongol sack of Baghdad destroyed the leading center of Islamic culture. The capitals of Europe nearly suffered the same fate: if the Mongol army that conquered Poland and Hungary had continued its march to the Atlantic coast, as was its plan, the rise of the West would have been aborted or at the least substantially delayed.
Western civilization was certainly expansionary, but after a comparatively brief colonial phase it has refocused on the trade and productive investment that drove its expansion in the first place. It seems a fortunate outcome that the world’s dominant military power has turned out to be the West, with a system of international trade and law that offers benefits to all participants, and not a purely predatory and militaristic state like that of the Mongols or Ottomans, as might have been expected, or even a civilized but autocratic one like that of China.
From an evolutionary perspective, an imminent decline of the West seems unlikely. Western social behavior, the source of the open society and open economy with their rewards to innovation, has been shaped by evolution as well as by culture and history and is unlikely to change anytime soon. The West was more exploratory and innovative than other civiliza
tions in 1500 and it is the same way now. Neither Japan nor China has yet seriously challenged the West’s preeminence in science and technology despite ample investments and a large body of educated and capable scientists. Well-performing institutions don’t guarantee the West’s permanent dominance but the social behavior that underlies them is an asset that is likely to persist for many generations, barring some major setback. East Asian societies seem too authoritarian and conformist, despite the high abilities of their citizens, to challenge the innovation of the West, a fact implicitly acknowledged in the Chinese state’s intense efforts to steal Western technical and commercial secrets.
But the success of the West, even if long lasting, is necessarily provisional. The framework of social behavior at the root of the West’s critical institutions may be frailer than it seems and vulnerable to being overwhelmed by adverse cultural forces such as political stasis, class warfare or a failure of social cohesion. Western societies are well adapted to present economic conditions, which they have in large measure created. In different conditions, the West’s advantage might disappear. If the present climatic regime should change substantially, for instance in the global cooling that will precede the inevitable onset of the next ice age, more authoritarian societies like those of East Asia could be better positioned to endure harsh stresses. By evolution’s criterion of success, East Asians are already the most successful human population: the Han Chinese are the world’s most numerous ethnic group. By another biological criterion, the population of Africa is the most important, since it harbors the most genetic diversity and hence a larger share of the human genetic patrimony than any other race.
The various races and ethnicities into which humans have evolved represent a grand experiment in which nature has tested out some of the variations inherent in the human genome. The experiment is not being conducted in our interests—it has no purpose or goal—yet it offers considerable benefits. Instead of there being a single type of human society, there are many, creating a rich diversity of cultures whose more promising features can be adopted and improved on by others. Without Western production efficiencies, the countries of East Asia might still be locked in stagnant autocracies. Within the West, the success of Jews has benefited every economy in which they worked and contributed immeasurably to the arts and sciences. The strong cultures of East Asia may yet find ways to surpass the West, as they have done for most of their previous history.
Understanding Race
The idea that human populations are genetically different from one another has been actively ignored by academics and policy makers for fear that such inquiry might promote racism. The argument offered here is that people the world over are highly similar as individuals but that societies differ widely because of evolutionary differences in social behavior. It would be better to take account of evolutionary differences than to continue to ignore them.
Moreover, fears that the evolutionary understanding of race will promote a new phase of racism or imperialism are surely exaggerated. The lessons of past abuses are still vivid enough. Science may be an autonomous body of knowledge, but its interpretation depends strongly on the intellectual climate of the time. In the 19th century, a period of vigorous European expansion, people looked to Social Darwinism to justify dominion over others and deny welfare to the poor. This interpretation of Darwinism has been so thoroughly repudiated that it is hard to conceive of any circumstance in which it could be successfully resurrected.
But is it not a form of racism to link the success of the West to the genetics of Westerners? For several reasons, this is not the case. First, there is no assertion of superiority, which is the essence of racism, and in any case the success of the West is provisional. Its economies are an open book, free for all others to copy, as they are doing, and to improve on. As everyone understands, China is a rising power whose role in the world has yet to be defined. Nations are compared on metrics such as economic or military power, which are constantly shifting and allow none the right or reason to claim permanent dominance, let alone inherent superiority.
Second, a society’s achievements, whether in economics or the arts or military preparedness, rests in the first place on its institutions, which are largely cultural in essence. Genes may nudge social behavior in one direction or another, thus affecting the nature of a society’s institutions on the timescale of the generations and setting the framework within which culture operates, but this is a long-term effect that leaves ample room for culture to play a major role.
Third, all human races are variations on a common theme. There is no basis from an evolutionary perspective, or any other, for declaring any one variation superior to any other.
One reason why discussion of genetics is so fraught is because of the assumption that genes are immutable and that to say a person or group of people carries a disadvantageous gene puts them beyond remedy. This is at best a partial truth.
The genes whose effects cannot be changed, like those that direct the color of skin or hair or the proportions of the body, are or should be of no relevance to the success of a modern economy. The important genes, at least in terms of the differences between civilizations, are those that influence social behavior.
But the genes that govern human behavior seldom issue imperatives. They operate by setting mere inclinations, of which even the strongest can be overridden. There are almost certainly genes that predispose people to regard incest as abhorrent, yet cases of incest are far from rare because those neural prohibitions can be ignored. Because the prompting of behavioral genes can be resisted, ingrained social behavior may be subject to a variety of manipulations, ranging from education and social pressure to tax incentives. In short, many social behaviors are modifiable and this is probably the case even if they are genetically influenced. Where behavior is concerned, genetic does not mean immutable.
Many forms of new knowledge are potentially dangerous, the energy of the atom being a preeminent example. But instead of curtailing inquiry Western societies have in general assumed that the better policy is to continue exploration in confidence that the rewards can be reaped and the risks managed. It is hard to see why exploration of the human genome and its racial variations should be made an exception to this principle, even though researchers and their audience must first develop the words and concepts to discuss a dangerous subject objectively.
Knowledge is usually considered a better basis for policy than ignorance. This book has been an attempt, undoubtedly imperfect, to dispel the fear of racism that overhangs discussion of human group differences and to begin to explore the far-reaching implications of the discovery that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, like its predecessor The Faith Instinct, grew out of Before the Dawn, an account of human evolution in the past 50,000 years.
The Faith Instinct examined the evolutionary role of religion as a cohesive force in human societies. This book explores new data from the human genome that has shed light on the emergence of the various races of humankind. Both religion and race are essential but strangely unexplored aspects of the human experience. Like everything else in biology, they make no sense except in the light of evolution.
I thank Peter Matson of Sterling Lord Literistic for guiding the initial focus of the book. I am most grateful to Scott Moyers of Penguin Press for thoroughly critiquing the book and guiding it past many perilous shoals with unswerving editorial skill.
I owe a great debt to friends who read early drafts and saved me from many errors of fact and judgment, including Nicholas W. Fisher of the University of Aberdeen, Jeremy J. Stone of Catalytic Diplomacy, Richard L. Tapper of the London School of Oriental and African Studies and my son Alexander Wade of Doctors Without Borders.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: EVOLUTION, RACE AND HISTORY
1.Joshua M. Akey, “Constructing Genomic Maps of Positive Selection in Humans: W
here Do We Go from Here?” Genome Research 19 (2009): 711–22.
2.Xin Yi et al., “Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude,” Science 329, no. 5987 (July 2, 2010): 75–78.
3.Emmanuel Milot et al., “Evidence for Evolution in Response to Natural Selection in a Contemporary Human Population,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 17040–45.
4.Stephen C. Stearns et al., “Measuring Selection in Contemporary Human Populations,” Nature Reviews Genetics 11, no. 9 (Sept. 2010): 1–13.
5.American Anthropological Association, “Race: A Public Education Project,” www.aaanet.org/resources/A-Public-Education-Program.cfm.
6.Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones, Race: Are We So Different? (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association 2012), 2.
7.American Sociological Association, “The Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientific Research on Race,” (Washington, DC: American Sociological Association, 2003), www2.asanet.org/media/asa_race_statement.pdf.
8.Christopher F. Chabris et al., “Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives,” Psychological Science 20, no. 10 (Sept. 24, 2012): 1–10.
9.David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (New York: Current, 2013), 176.
CHAPTER 2: PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE
1.Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 171.
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History Page 25