A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (21 page)

A much praised inquiry into the nature of national poverty is the recent book
Why Nations Fail,
by Daron Acemog˘lu, an economist, and James Robinson, a political scientist. As noted earlier in this chapter, they agree with Fukuyama in regarding institutions as critical to understanding how human societies work. And they arrive at this conclusion by an independent route. Fukuyama identifies the role of institutions largely through historical patterns; Acemog˘lu and Robinson emphasize political and economic analysis.

Most of the inequality between the countries of the world has emerged since the Industrial Revolution, Acemog˘lu and Robinson note, before which time standards of living were almost uniformly low for almost everyone except for the handful of people in each nation’s ruling class. A list of the 30 richest countries today would include Britain and the countries to which the Industrial Revolution quickly spread—Western Europe and the initially British settlements
of the United States, Canada and Australia—and Japan, Singapore and South Korea. The 30 poorest countries would be mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, joined by Afghanistan, Haiti and Nepal. Going back a century, the list of countries in the top and bottom 30 would be much the same, save that Singapore and South Korea hadn’t joined the ranks of the richest.

Surely economists, historians or other social scientists must have devised some convincing explanation for this substantial and enduring inequality? “Not so,” say Acemog˘lu and Robinson: “Most hypotheses that social scientists have proposed for the origins of poverty and prosperity just don’t work and fail to convincingly explain the lay of the land.”
⁴⁷

Their thesis is that there are bad and good institutions or, as they term them, extractive and inclusive institutions. The bad, extractive institutions are those in which a small elite extorts the most it can from a society’s productive resources and keeps almost everything for itself. The elite opposes technological change because it is disruptive of the political and economic order required to maintain their position. Through its own greed, the elite impoverishes everyone else and prevents progress. A permanent vicious circle between the society’s extractive political and economic institutions maintains continual stagnation.

Good, inclusive institutions, by contrast, are those in which political and economic power is widely shared. The rule of law and property rights reward endeavor. No sector of society is powerful enough to block economic change. A virtuous circle between politics and economics maintains increasing prosperity.

The archetype of inclusive institutions, in Acemog˘lu and Robinson’s view, was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which England replaced its French-leaning king, James II, with his son-in-law William of Orange, a switch that consolidated Parliament’s control over the king. Both political and economic institutions became more
inclusive, creating incentives for entrepreneurs and laying the basis for the Industrial Revolution.

This shift to inclusive institutions was so decisive, in Acemog˘lu and Robinson’s view, that it is in fact the only condition that distinguishes rich countries from poor ones. Comparing England and Ethiopia, one of the world’s richest countries and one of the poorest, they assert that “the reason Ethiopia is where it is today is that, unlike in England, in Ethiopia absolutism persisted until the recent past.”
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They concede that absolutist regimes can generate prosperity for a while, for instance by switching manpower from agriculture to industry. But these one-off expedients were temporary in the case of the Soviet Union; and in China too, political repression will also, they predict, cause the Chinese economy to falter unless it makes its political institutions more inclusive.

If inclusive institutions are the only thing that matters in achieving prosperity, it follows that foreign aid is useless unless it begins with institutional reform. But this is almost never the case, because such conditions are resisted by the ruling elites whose interests would be imperiled by the reforms. As Acemog˘lu and Robinson explain, “Countries need inclusive economic and political institutions to break out of the cycle of poverty. Foreign aid can typically do little in this respect, and certainly not with the way that it is currently organized.”
⁴⁹

As a description of the current state of affairs, Acemog˘lu and Robinson’s thesis seems reasonably satisfying. But the authors have great difficulty explaining how good institutions arise or how they can be established in a country that doesn’t have them. “The honest answer of course is that there is no recipe for building such institutions,” they admit.

They have no recipe to offer because they believe that good institutions have emerged as a matter of chance, as random ripples on the inexplicable tides of history. They argue that institutions change
because of “institutional drift,” a phenomenon they explicitly compare to the random process of genetic drift. They think that institutions are shaped by history but that history moves in a “contingent path,” meaning that it is a succession of accidents. Even the Glorious Revolution was not inevitable, since its emergence “was in part a consequence of the contingent path of history.”
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Acemog˘lu and Robinson argue that bad institutions get replaced with good ones, as in England’s Glorious Revolution or Japan’s Meiji Restoration, because of “critical junctures” in history combined with “propitious existing institutions.” They assert, “In addition some luck is key, because history always unfolds in a contingent way.”
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Luck is an explanation? Not divine providence, or some sign of the zodiac? The authors are driven to reach for such unsatisfying explanations because they have ruled out the obvious possibility that variations in human behavior are the cause of good or bad institutions. They are thus forced back on nonexplanations like luck and the contingent path of history.

The wealth of human societies has not followed some random path over the past millennium, but rather, as Acemog˘lu and Robinson observe, a part of the world has grown steadily and vastly richer over the past 300 years. This is not an accident or luck, and a reasonable explanation is available in terms of human evolution.

The explanation is that there has been an evolutionary change in human social behavior that has facilitated the new, post-tribal social structure on which modern societies are based. Rich countries have non-tribal, trust-based economies and favorable institutions. Poor countries are those that have not fully escaped from tribalism and
labor under extractive institutions that reflect their limited radius of trust.

The present world situation is analogous to the mixed social structures that prevailed during the Mesolithic Age, which lasted from about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago in Europe. People using the new farming technologies had begun to invade Europe from the Near East. The hunter-gatherer people who then occupied Europe were either killed or adopted into the new farming communities. The hunter-gatherers used an old kit of stone tools, which archaeologists refer to as Paleolithic, in contrast to the new kit used by the farmers, known as Neolithic. The transition period from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, during which the settled behavior became increasingly dominant in Europe, is therefore known as the in-between or Mesolithic Age.

The world is at present in a similar transition period, in which some populations have emerged from the shaping forces of Malthusian agriculture and others are still in the throes of the process. The Meso-Industrial Age, as it might be called, is the period during which the rest of the world, principally the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, makes the evolutionary transition to the social behaviors needed to support modern economies. No doubt the process requires some adaptation and a change in institutions. But given the speed of evolution and the rapidity of cultural change in today’s world, the Meso-Industrial Age may be over in far fewer generations than might be expected.

It is now time to consider a special population that for many centuries lacked a homeland of its own. Jewish culture is as distinctive as that of many other groups but, because of its particular nature, a strong case can be made that in important respects its culture has genetic roots.

JEWISH ADAPTATIONS

Surely . . . Judaism is more than the history of anti-semitism. Surely Jews deserve to be defined—and are in fact defined, by others as well as by themselves—by those qualities of faith, lineage, sacred texts and moral teachings that have enabled them to endure through centuries of persecution.

—G
ERTRUDE
H
IMMELFARB
¹

I
n many spheres of life, Jews have made contributions that are far larger than might be expected from their numbers. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world’s population, but won 14% of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, despite social discrimination and the Holocaust, and 29% in the second. As of 2007, Jews had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century.
²

Jews have excelled not only in science but also in music (Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg), in painting (Pissarro, Modigliani, Rothko), and in philosophy (Maimonides, Bergson, Wittgenstein). Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.
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Such achievement requires an explanation, and the best and simplest is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. 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. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is more likely that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.

Until the era of rapid DNA sequencing, it could be surmised that Jews were a distinct population because of religious laws that frowned on marriage outside Judaism. But no one knew for certain because in the absence of genetic evidence it was impossible to estimate the amount of intermarriage that might nevertheless have occurred throughout history. DNA analysis shows that Jews are a definable set of populations and that Ashkenazi Jews, at least, can be distinguished genetically from other Europeans. With each Jewish community, there has been some intermarriage with local populations but at a very slow rate. This neatly explains the observation by Jewish anthropologists that Jews from all over the world resemble one another yet also resemble their host populations.

The basis of the common resemblance is that Jews originated in Israel and carry shared inheritance from the Semitic population of the region. As recently as 3,000 years ago, a date that marks the probable beginning of the Jewish religion, Jews were no different
from anyone else: they were part of the general Near East population from which today’s Arabs, Turks and Armenians are also descended. But as soon as their religion started forbidding members to marry nonmembers, the Jewish population would have entered into reproductive isolation, much as if it had been placed on a remote island. Some large degree of reproductive isolation is the necessary condition for a population to take its own evolutionary path.

As to European Jews, or Ashkenazim, genetics show that there has been a 5% to 8% admixture with Europeans since the founding of the Ashkenazi population in about 900
AD,
which is equivalent to 0.05% per generation.
⁴
Researchers using a SNP chip that tests the genome at 550,000 sites report that they were able to distinguish with complete accuracy between Ashkenazim and non-Jewish Europeans. This is a test applicable to populations, not individuals, since it depends on seeing how individuals cluster together in terms of statistical differences in their genome sequences. Still, it shows that Ashkenazim are a distinctive population and therefore could have been subjected to forces of natural selection different from those acting on other Europeans.

Ashkenazim probably differ genetically from other Europeans because of the Near Eastern component in their ancestry. “It is clear that the genomes of individuals with full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry carry an unambiguous signature of their Jewish heritage, and this seems more likely to be due to their specific Middle Eastern ancestry than to inbreeding,” the researchers say.
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The rate of admixture with host populations has probably been similar among the other two main Jewish populations. These are the Sephardim and the Oriental Jews or Mizrahim. The Sephardim are Jews who had long lived in Spain and Portugal but were expelled from those countries in 1492 and 1497. They then dispersed around the Mediterranean to places like North Africa and the Ottoman empire. Many Sephardim also settled in Holland. Oriental Jews are those who have long lived in Arab countries and Iran. The origin of
the Sephardim is still obscure but there are genetic hints that both they and the Ashkenazim may be offshoots of the large Jewish community that lived in Rome during the early Roman empire.

On genetic maps of the world’s population, the three Jewish groups cluster together, sandwiched between the Middle Eastern populations with whom they share joint ancestry and the European populations with which the Ashkenazim and Sephardim are admixed.

Given this degree of genetic separation, it is perfectly possible for Jewish populations to have followed a slightly different evolutionary path from Europeans as they adapted to the special circumstances of their history and developed unusual cognitive abilities.

Yet the idea that there could be meaningful genetic differences between human groups is fiercely resisted by many researchers. They cling to the idea that the mind is a blank slate on which only culture, not genetics, can write, and dismiss the possibility that evolution could have effected any recent change in the human mind. They reject the proposal that any human behavior, let alone intelligence, has a genetic basis. They make accusations of racism against anyone who suggests that cognitive capacities might differ between human population groups. All these positions are shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma, not by science. Nonetheless, most scholars will not enter this territory from lively fear of being demonized by their fellow academics.

A more substantive objection to exploring this issue has to do with sensitivities of the Jewish community. As with the Chinese immigrant communities in Asia, hard work and success has too often provoked the envy and enmity of their host populations, leading to discrimination, expulsions and massacres. Discussion of Jewish intelligence carries the risk of stirring up hostility. But the days of pogroms are past, and to ignore every difficult subject would serve only the forces of obscurantism.

The only serious recent attempt by researchers to delve into the
links between Jewish genetics and intelligence is an extended essay by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah. Their report was submitted to several journal editors in the United States, all of whom said it was fascinating but that they could not publish it. The authors eventually secured publication in England, in the
Journal of Biosocial Science.
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The essence of the Utah team’s argument is to assert a causal connection between two unusual and otherwise unexplained facts. The first is that Ashkenazi Jews, in addition to their cultural achievements, have a high IQ—generally measured at between 110 and 115, which is the highest average of any ethnic group. The second is that Ashkenazim have a strange pattern of so-called Mendelian diseases, those that are caused by a mutation in a single gene.

The Utah researchers note first that Ashkenazi IQ, besides being high, has an unusual structure. Of the components of IQ tests, Ashkenazim do well on verbal and mathematical questions but score lower than average on visuospatial questions. In most people, these two kinds of ability are highly correlated. This suggests that some specific force has been at work in shaping the nature of Ashkenazi intelligence, as if the population were being adapted not to hunting, which requires excellent visuospatial skills, but to more urban occupations served by the ability to manipulate words and numerals.

So it’s striking to find that Ashkenazim, almost from the moment their appearance in Europe was first recorded, around 900
AD
, were heavily engaged in moneylending. This was the principal occupation of Jews in England, France and Germany. The trade required a variety of high level skills, including the ability to read and write contracts and to do arithmetic. Literacy was a rare ability in medieval Europe. As late as 1500, only 10% of the population of most European countries was literate, whereas almost all Jews were.
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As for arithmetic, it may be simple enough with the Arabic numerals in use today. But Arabic numerals did not become
widespread in Europe until the mid-16th century. Before that, people used Roman numerals, a notation system that has no zero. Calculating interest rates and currency swaps without the use of zero is not a straightforward computation.

There were no banks in those days, and moneylenders were essential for those who wished to buy on credit or engage in long-distance trade. The moneylender had to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers, appraise collateral, understand local contract law, and stay on good terms with the authorities who would enforce it. For those engaged in long-distance trade, in which physical transfer of money was generally avoided because of the danger, it was necessary to arrange credit with reliable partners in faraway cities.

So it’s easy enough to accept the Utah team’s first premise, that Ashkenazi Jews of the Middle Ages were engaged in a cognitively demanding occupation. The second point is that this occupation, though highly risky, was also highly rewarding. In all the European countries in which they settled, Jews enjoyed high standards of living. Between 1239 and 1260, taxes paid by Jews contributed between one sixth and one fifth of royal revenues, even though Jews constituted 0.01% of the population. In 1241 Jews in Germany paid 12% of the entire imperial tax revenue.
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The wealth was important because it enabled Jews to secure a considerable degree of reproductive success. Before the Industrial Revolution and the escape from the Malthusian trap, the rich had more surviving children, being able to provide better nutrition and warmer houses. The Ashkenazi population had grown from almost nothing in 900
AD
to about 500,000 people by 1500
AD
, and had reached 14.3 million by 1939.
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From about 900
AD
to 1700
AD,
Ashkenazim were concentrated in a few professions, notably moneylending and later tax farming (give the prince his money up front, then extract the taxes due from his subjects). Because of the strong heritability of intelligence, the
Utah team calculates that 20 generations, a mere 500 years, would be sufficient for Ashkenazim to have developed an extra 16 points of IQ above that of Europeans. The Utah team assumes that the heritability of intelligence is 0.8, meaning that 80% of the variance, the spread between high and low values in a population, is due to genetics. If the parents of each generation have an IQ of just 1 point above the mean, then average IQ increases by 0.8% per generation. If the average human generation time in the Middle Ages was 25 years, then in 20 human generations, or 500 years, Ashkenazi IQ would increase by 20 × 0.8 = 16 IQ points.

There were of course Christian moneylenders who required the same cognitive skills as Ashkenazim. But the Christians married into a much larger community that included people in many other occupations. Natural selection may have been raising the intelligence of urban populations in general during the Middle Ages but exerted a much stronger effect on the smaller Jewish population. This was because any intelligence-enhancing genes that arose in a family in the general population would be diluted in the next generation, but could accumulate in the Jewish community because marriage to outsiders was deterred. This selective effect could not operate on Oriental Jews—those under Muslim rule—because their rulers for the most part confined them to unpopular occupations like tanning or butchery which required no particular intellectual skills. Oriental Jews and Sephardim are not overrepresented in cognitively demanding occupations and both have IQs comparable to Europeans, the Utah team says.

The Utah researchers give short shrift to the other explanations that have been proposed for enhanced Jewish intelligence. One is that the series of massacres and expulsions that began at the time of the First Crusade in 1096 constituted a selective effect that only the more intelligent were able to survive. But the massacres and expulsions
affected the whole Ashkenazi population and seem unlikely to have selected the more intelligent nearly as precisely as did the skills required for moneylending.

Jewish folklore holds that marriages between the children of rabbis and rich merchants were the driver of enhanced intelligence. Talmudic academies, writes the anthropologist Melvin Konner, “culled the best minds in every generation of Jews for more than a thousand years. Rising stars among these bright young men would board with successful merchants, and matches would be made between them and the merchants’ daughters. Thus the smartest, most studious boys would join the wealthiest families.”
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Without any data as to how often such matches were made, this seems more like a scholar’s fantasy than a common arrangement. Rich merchants may have been more likely to see another merchant’s son as a more promising son-in-law than a poor rabbinical student. But even if such marriages did sometimes occur, there were not enough rabbis in the population—a mere 1%—to make a genetically significant difference, the Utah team says.