[lit-ideas] How Civilization accelerated Human Evolution
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 May 2014 06:47:45 -0700
I read The 10,000 Year Explosion, How Civilization Accelerated Human
Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, 2009.
If "natural selection" isn't at work raising intelligence and adapting us to
new technology then it is something very like it. Cochran and Harpending
marshal a number of evidences demonstrating key evolutionary advances. Our
becoming lactose tolerant for example enabled our ancestors to raise cows
for milk giving them a 5 to 1 advantage over those who raised cattle for
food.
The "10,000 year explosion" in their title refers to agriculture. When our
ancestors could stop wandering about with herds of cattle and settle down in
fixed locations to farm, this necessitated the creation of 'elites' needed
to guard their property, govern disputes and assemble them in order to fight
groups of intruders bent on robbing them of their property and women. But
towns centered on clusters of farms had advantages over wandering tribes of
herders - eventually. Attila and his Huns were herders rather than farmers,
but the potential was there for farmers to produce larger armies.
An increase in intelligence was required in order for homo sapiens to learn
how to farm. And then further increases as well as other evolutionary
changes were required in order to learn how to reduce disease, adapt to
eating foods that were not significant when they wandered as
hunter-gatherers or herders.
Cochran and Harpending end with a discussion of the Ashkenazi Jew. Evidence
exists, they argue, that their intelligence (and peculiar diseases) were not
created by "bottlenecks" but by natural selection. These Jews (as opposed
to Jews living in Muslim countries for example) worked in "white collar"
activities as money lenders and in more modern times especially starting in
the 19th century in science and mathematics, excelled. They began doing
this about 800 years ago; then in the early 1800s when many of them opened
up to enlightenment ways of thinking, their money-lending intelligence
enabled them to excel in mathematics and science.
Cochran and Harpending allude to the possibility that Israel being a
cross-road to a number of invasions and a lot of traffic may have benefitted
from increased genetic variation, but they find no indication that Jews 2000
years ago were smarter than the norm for that time. Perhaps that is why
they didn't draw a parallel to the modern-day U.S. We have had an influx
of the brightest people from all over the world especially after World War
II. Hasn't the resultant genetic variability enhanced intelligence in a
significant few? American entrepreneurs do seem to be developing new
technology at a greater rate than other nations. Could the reason for this
be to some extent due to so many bright people having moved to the U.S. in
the 20th century?
And I also wondered about the heritability of things learned. The Ashkenazi
Jews learned money lending and this enabled them to become leading
scientists and mathematicians in the 20th century. Cochran and Harpending
don't go beyond "natural selection" to account for the reasons for this.
Somehow in the past 800 years the smarter Ashkenazi Jews had more children
than the dumber ones and thus were able to produce Einstein-level brilliance
by the 20th century. And yet Cochran and Harpending describe some serious
illnesses that are also found in the Ashkenazi Jews which would seem to
argue against inordinately larger families for these Jews than the norm.
Everyone on this forum knows that if we study a subject a lot and then keep
on studying it; eventually we will know more about it than almost anyone we
know - assuming we start our study with adequate intelligence. This seems
to me what the Ashkenazi Jews started doing 800 years ago. But is natural
selection an adequate explanation for what happened in the 20th century, for
Einstein for example? We know there are genetic "triggers" of various
sorts; mightn't the intense study needed for mastering money-lending have
triggered an intellectual benefit that was to some extent heritable? Maybe
not, but it doesn't seem as though there were enough generations for natural
selection to explain those results.
Lawrence
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