A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2 page)

In the first place, opposition to racism is now well entrenched, at least in the Western world. It is hard to conceive of any circumstance that would reverse or weaken this judgment, particularly any scientific evidence. Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. Science is about what is, not what ought to be. Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.

Academics, who are obsessed with intelligence, fear the discovery of a gene that will prove one major race is more intelligent than another. But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Although
intelligence has a genetic basis, no genetic variants that enhance intelligence have yet been found. The reason, almost certainly, is that there are a great many such genes, each of which has too small an effect to be detectable with present methods.
⁸
If researchers should one day find a gene that enhances intelligence in East Asians, say, they can hardly argue on that basis that East Asians are more intelligent than other races, because hundreds of similar genes remain to be discovered in Europeans and Africans.

Even if all the intelligence-enhancing variants in each race had been identified, no one would try to compute intelligence on the basis of genetic information: it would be far easier just to apply an intelligence test. But IQ tests already exist, for what they may be worth.

Even if it were proved that one race were genetically more intelligent than another, what consequence would follow? In fact, not much of one. East Asians score around 105 on intelligence tests, an average above that of Europeans, whose score is 100. A higher IQ score doesn’t make East Asians morally superior to other races. East Asian societies have many virtues but are not necessarily more successful than European societies in meeting their members’ needs.

The notion that any race has the right to dominate others or is superior in any absolute sense can be firmly rejected as a matter of principle and, being rooted in principle, is unassailable by science. Nonetheless, races being different, it is inevitable that science will establish relative advantages in some traits. Because of genetic variants, Tibetans and Andean highlanders are better than others at living at high altitudes. At every Olympic games since 1980, every finalist in the men’s 100-meter race has had West African ancestry.
⁹
It would be no surprise if some genetic factor were found to contribute to such athleticism.

Study of the genetics of race will inevitably reveal differences, some of which will show, for those who may be interested, that one race has some slight edge over another in a specified trait. But this
kind of inquiry will also establish a wider and more important truth, that all differences between races are variations on a common theme.

To discover that genetics plays some role in the differences between the major human societies does not mean that that role is dominant. Genes do not determine human behavior; they merely predispose people to act in certain ways. Genes explain a lot, probably far more than is at present understood or acknowledged. But their influence in most situations is or can be overwhelmed by learned behavior, or culture. To say that genes explain everything about human social behavior would be as absurd as to assume that they explain nothing.

Social scientists often write as if they believe that culture explains everything and race nothing, and that all cultures are of equal value. The emerging truth is more complicated. Human nature is very similar throughout the world. But though people are much the same, their societies differ greatly in their structure, their institutions and their achievements. Contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more than other cultures in many significant spheres and has done so because Europeans, probably for reasons of both evolution and history, have been able to create open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human arrangements of tribalism or autocracy. People being so similar, no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race. But some societies have achieved much more than others, perhaps through minor differences in social behavior. A question to be explored below is whether such differences have been shaped by evolution.

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.

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.