tdaxp

It was only eighteen months ago that I wrote a post titled "The implication of evolution after the dawn of agriculture." At the time, I was startled by the idea that there may have been evolutionary change within the human population in the last four centuries. Also at the time I was highly impressed by Evolutionary Psychology evolutionary functional analysis, and the concept of the Era of Evolutionary Adaption.

Since that time I have learned more about how biology informs the social sciences. It appears that evolution is faster than I thought, and Evolutionary Psychology is weaker than I assumed.



Up until recently, the theoretical maximum speed for one gene to replace all other variations was one every 300 generations. It now appears the rate among humans is 2 every year. If this result holds up, this has important implications.

Two dynamics appear to be driving the acceleration of natural selection among humans: larger population size (more mutations are given a chance to rise up) and the even quicker evolution of culture (preventing the establishment of an equilibrium optimal genetic state).

Evolutionary Psychology is wrong because there is no species-wide "Era of Evolutionary Adaption." Indeed, one wonders if the term "Era of Evolutionary Adaption" even makes sense. If it does, are EEAs of populations that had possessed agriculture for a very long time (say, the peoples of the fertile crescent, and Chinese and Indians of the great river valleys) far more agrarian than the EEAs of traditionally hunter-gatherer societies?

Further, as both cultural complexity and breeding population (both in numbers in and genetic diversity) vary historically, might one say that the Era of Evolutionary Adaption of Australian Aborigines is tens of thousands of years deeper in time than that of Indus River Valley dwellers?

Both the population of man and the culture of man have been growing at faster and faster rates. The implication of this is clear.

The 19th century saw more natural selection in our species than any other century, ever.
The 20th century saw more natural selection in our species than any other century, ever.
The 21st century will see more natural selection in oru species than any other century, ever.

And that's not counting genetic engineering.

(Thanks to Sean, DMH, Fulwider, Doug, and others for not letting me get past this discovery without thinking it through.)

Evolution is the change in frequency of variations over time. The evolution of species by means of natural selection was first described by Charles Darwin.

With this in mind, Fabius Maximus's tak of a "Darwinian ratchet" makes no sense:

the success of Israel’s counter-insurgency strikes against Hamas and Hezbollah have resulted in a “Darwinian ratchet”.

Israel’s security services cull the ranks of the insurgency. This eliminates the slow and stupid, clearing space for the “best” to rise in authority. “Best” in the sense of those most able to survive, recruit, and train new ranks of insurgents. The more severe Israel’s efforts at exterminating the insurrection, the more ruthless the survivors.

Back to evolution. In terms of nature, evolution has no purpose, goal, or direction. Pace to the Nazis and the Stalinists, to the Social Darwinists and the Creationists, evolution is not directed toward rewarding the strong, the social, the smart, or the sinful. Evolution is merely the change in the frequency of variations of some aspect of things.

Evolution happens in the context of an environment. If the environment rewards those with high general intelligence with more offspring than those less gifted, one might see general intelligence vary upward in the next generation (perhaps at the cost of something else, such as short term memory). If the environment rewards those who are cautious and nervous, then presumably frequencies of neuroticisms might change.

Fabius appears to have a different notion of evolution. A "ratchet," of course, is a tool that turns only one way. A "Darwinian ratchet" implies that evolution is determined to maximize some quality or trait, so that each new generation possesses more of it than the one preceding. One assumes that Fabius is looking to evolution to maximize, again and again, effective violence against Western societies..

But of course, evolution does not work this way, because the environment is not static. Even if the outside world remains the same, the population subjected to evolutionary forces will change, and as the population is part of the evolutionary landscape, the environment thus changes.

Fabius is concerned that Western violence against enemies of the West will ratchet up the fitness of our enemies, giving us more and more effective enemies. But of course, all that happens is that our activities alter their fitness landscape, leading to different proportions of different types of them. Take three examples of anti-Western forces subjected to continuous Western assault

• The African National Congress
  
  The ANC began as a cookie-cutter Communist terrorist organization located in South Africa, aiming to bring down an economically productive yet antidemocratic ruling class. The South African government fought back, imprisoning the ANCs leaders, turning natural ANC allies against it, and generally engaging in Systems Administration duties. Fabius's "Darwinian ratchet" would lead us to expect that the ANC became more and more virulent, but what actually happened was that the removal of ANC members capable of conducting guerrilla campaigns morphed the ANC into a peaceful democratic movement. The fall of Apartheid and the ANC victory brought something completely unlike what the ANC founders envisioned, and ushered in a new South African regime roughly as compatible with Western goals as the Afrikaner state that preceded it.



• The Palestine Liberation Organization


"At first, we were refugees. Harmless. Now, we become fighters. Freedom fighters." So Yasser Arafat rallied his troops, aiming to liberate the Palestinian people from Jewish and Hashemite occupation in Israel and Jordan. Once again, the West responded, offering hostility and partnership to the PLO in a bewildering series of deadly assaults. Again, the concept of a "darwinian ratchet" would lead us to believe that the PLO is now on the verge of achieving its objectives. But by the late 1990s the PLO had evolved into a corrupt rentier syndicate, completely unable to wage war on either of its historic enemies. When it tried in the Second Intifada it lost what freedom of maneuvered it had. The PLO is now protected by its old enemies from a reform movement (Hamas), in a divide-and-conquer strategy that makes true Palestinian statehood farther away than ever.


• The Red Army Faction (Japan)
  
  But what if an enemy population adjusts to an increasingly hostile fitness landscape not by becoming soft and effective (the ANC), or soft and impotent (the PLO), but harsh and deadly? What if those reformists and crooks can be kept out, and the true believers are able to maintain power? Surely a "darwinian ratchet" will kick in then.

The radical wing of the RAF tried such a strategy, killing off the less radical half in a blood bath designed to weed out the disloyal. How it ends is predictable.

This is not to say that our enemies can't win. Of course they can. But pseudo-scientific talk of darwinian ratchets and other mechanisms that guarantee us ten-foot-tall enemies do not help matters. They do not clarify the strategic environment or accurately capture reality. They are tools for myopic, conceited schools of analysis which imagines that we are so important that our enemies very thought and desire is for our harm (rather than their benefit).

Also in the blogsophere: A.E. defends his take, while Sean ponders a law of evolution.

Elam Bend emails in a fascinating review of A Farewell to Alms. The review is by Nicholas Wade, he who wrote Before the Dawn, so you know it's worth your time. Farewell is derived from a study of England's population, which concludes that the contemporary English are descendants from the upper class of the Middle Ages. Further, Farewell argues that agricultural societies generally are biased to the well off, that that they feature downward-mobility, such that descendants of the incompetent can fill the ranks of the (genetically extinguished) ranks of the (starved and infertile) lower classes. Perhaps, Farewell proposes, the reason that the Industrial Revolution started in Europe was that natural selection had produced a generation or two of Europeans fit for revolutionizing industry.

The converse of this is that areas without this harsh selective environment -- say, those inhabited by comparatively well-fed hunter-gatherers -- would not so select their populations. Thus, the reason that some places (unspoken, but think Africa) have less culture, less wealth, less security, less safety, less happiness, and less peace than other places (unspoken, but think Europe) might be evolution.

I cannot comment on this, Farewell's most controversial claim. The issue is complex and there's good-but-circumstantial evidence both for and against. But it's clear that one day Farewell's claim will be testable.

Only the foolish should have views on human equality that rely on facts alone.

Humanity, like all species, evolves through changes in the frequency of genetic variants over time. Where there is less diversity -- less possible genetic variants to have their frequency varied -- there is less evolution. The aboriginies of Austarlia, for example, are dark skinned in spite of living at a mid-lattitute for thousands of years. This does not mean that there is some health advantage to being dark skinned at a mid latitute -- quite the opposite! Rather, there simple was not enough diversity in the the population of aborginies to enable evolution over that time frame.

Populations with greater diversity are able to evolve faster for their conditions. Thus, it is slightly horrifying than the region with the worst living conditions (where selection pressures are least like those of the developed world)

and the region with the highest birthrates:



is also the region with the most genetic diversity: Africa.

Extrapolating from other species, behavioral change from natural selection might occur in human beings in as little as 200 years. We are approximately fifty years into the Declonization of Africa, and the genocidal nightmare that unleasehd.

Forgetting about the actual human cost of this gappish hell, there is still time to be patient. There is time to let a plan work to shrink the gap.

But it must begin soon.

The front cover of New York Times-reporter Nicholas Wade's new book, Before the Dawn, contains a quote by E.O. Wilson: "By far the best book I have ever read on humanity's deep history." I couldn't agree more. Before the Dawn is more informative than Nature via Nurture, more readable than The Blank Slate, and proves (contra The Emperor's New Clothes) that popularizations of population genetics don't have to be deceitful and revolting.

Before the Dawn dwells on several major events in the human story: separation from chimpanzee-ancestors, the end of seperate sex hierarchies with the introduction of pair bonding, physically modern human, behaviorally modern human, and socially modern humans. From a founder population fo 150, the first behaviorally modern human beings who left Africa at the Gate of Grief would conquer three other human species (Neanderthals, Erecti, and Hobbits) and within fifty thousand years spread an African species all over the face of the world.

Every chapter in Before the Dawn is worth reading, but several stand out as some of the best in the history of scientific nonfiction: "Genetics & Genesis" outlines the author's plan of attack, "Genesis" describes mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam, "Exodus" tells of the seafaring conquest of the Coasts in the face of Erecti resistance to Australia, the second truly human continent, "Race" addresses the major family groupings of man, "Language" applies genetic technology to recovering the time and place for the first human tongue, and "Evolution" recaps the book and looks forward to the next human species.

Nick Wade is a science columnist for the New York Times, and his journalist touch is fully worked. I learned more about the Thomas Jefferson- Sally Hemmings twist than I did before, including that Sally his the half-sister of Tom's first wife. The unique haplotypes of Icelanders and Jews are discussed. and the interesting that the current races appear not to have existed 15,000 years ago give one much to chew on.

Before the Dawn is very up to date, and includes fair criticism of Evolutionary Psychology that comes from our increased understanding of genetics. When John Tooby and Leda Cosmides founded EP, it was reasonable to presuppose that substantive human evolution had ended by the late stone age. That assumption is no longer tenable. We are not modern humans with stone-aged minds. We are modern humans with modern minds.

This great book has already made a buzz. John Derbyshire of The National Review loves it, while Nature hates it.

Before the Dawn is available for $15.72 from Amazon.com, and for $19.96 from Barnes & Noble.

I believe, as Bjoyklund & Pellegrini (2002, 193) do, “that the evolution of the human species' unique intelligence was motivated by the need to deal with other members of our social group.” I think a large humanity's genetic inheritance – that which is universal to all people as well as that which is particular to one breeding population (that is, race) or another – is the result of the coevolution of genes and society.

Human-general adaptations are well described by the text. This species general social cognition (which the text describes as “cognition about social relationships and social phenomena” on page 193) include things such as social learning, a theory of mind, and cheater detection. Social learning, which ranges from local enhancement and mimicry to emulation and imitation (194-196) involves learning because of the actions of others. Some creatures are born with everything they need to survive, but humans need to be able to learn a culture to survive. The theory of mind assists in social learning by informing individuals that “other people have knowledge and desire that may be different from one's one” (203), and the mental processes this fact entails. Relatedly, cheater detection, or the ability to use “deontic reasoning, which is reasoning about what one may, should or out to do” (216) allows us to effortlessly discover those who have violated social rules.

For most of hominid evolution, newer meant bigger. Newer species had bigger brains than older ones, and later members of a species had bigger brains than earlier members (Rightmire, 2001). And for generations researchers have puzzled over the Neanderthal's quick demise (Hrdlicka, 1927), especially puzzling in light of apparently developed communicative abilities (Arsenburg, Tilier, Vandermeersch, Duday, Schepartz, & Rak, 1989) and the fact that some Neanderthals may be more closely related to humans than other members of their own species (Paablo, 2003). Yet fifteen thousand years ago the human brain began shrinking (Ridley, 2003). Though perhaps the decline is older than that – Neanderthals may have had larger brains than we do (Klein, 2003).

I do not know what this means. We know that “within primates the relative size of the neocortex is significantly correlated with group size” (Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002, 102). We like to think that our brains make us special, though apparently the seemingly-simpleminded purposes are large-brained as well (92). Additionally, considering that “brain size is correlated (negatively) with litter size” and that larger-brained “animals tend to have smaller litters and to give birth to infants at longer intervals” (97), this implies that modern humans are more expendable and less precious than our ancestors of fifteen thousand years ago, or even the ancient Neanderthals! Clearly humans are evolving, but how and why?

The question of group-level human variation has been a hot one. Some research argues for continental, race-like groupings in which there is more variation between groups than within them (Jorde, et al., 2000) and that self-identified race is a reliable predictor for one's genetic heritage Tang, et al,, 2005). Other research suggests while there is group-level genetic variation, it exists within a gradation of populations and not a small number of historically isolate draces (Serre & Paabo, 2004). While it is increasingly recognized that early scientific research, such as Lewtonin 1970, which denied any meaningful group-level variation was overly simplistic (Edwards, 2003). Though studies which look at only a few phenotypes continue to find little intergroup variation (Relethford, 2002), broad studies find definite intergroup variation (Rosenberg, 2005) and intragroup similarity (Rosenberg, et al., 2006) Several portions of Bjorklund & Pellegrini's (2002) third chapter, History and Controversy, also hint at ways that human groups could be more different from each other than once thought.

One way that biological group level variation can increase is if experience can somehow be paseed from parent to child. For instance, even if two populations are genetically very similar, if they face different environments, and the effects of the environment can be passed down, you could have biologically-based differences in only one generation. This was once considered anathema to modern biology: Bjorklund & Pellegrini write that “Inheritance, and thus genetic variation, is found only within the germ line and is not influenced by experience” (47). However, i tis now recognized that “physical” and “behavioral” changes can be passed on (53). An early example of this was Jean Piaget's experiment with epigenetic snails (54). In contemporary jargon, we should say that “females pass on cytoplasm (i.e., the cell body) to their offspring [and so environmental] changes that induce chemical changes in the cytoplasm can thus be inherited through the motehr but not through the father” (56). On the same page, the authors note that while this cytoplasm is not itself genetic, “Cytoplasmic inheritance should not be thought of as nongenetic [because] it necessarily expressed its effect on the genes.”

I am very enthusiastic about Bjorklund & Pellegrini's 2002 text, Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. I am going to discuss four places I believe that the book's discussion can be extended, on ADD, domain generality, geological time, and group selection. While I feel the authors' work to be incomplete in these areas, I choose these areas because otherwise the book seems flawless.

On page 5, the authors mention mention that "natural selection has similarly shaped domain-general information processing mechanisms," and that "working memory" and "speed of processing" are examples of such domain-general mechanisms. I agree that these things exist, are important, and were shaped through evolution, though I do not know if they are "domain general."

This series is a companion to Biopsychological Development. While that series focused on my reaction to The Scientist in the Crib and The Emperor's New Clothes, this series centers on The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Of the three books assigned for the class, Origins is by far the most academic. It is a very competent synthesis of Cognitive Psychology's concepts of working memory, cognitive load, and the like with Evolutionary Psychology's era of evolutionary adaption, massive modularity, and such.

A theme that emerged while I wrote these reaction with group-level human genetic diversity. The idea is that humanity is composed of major breeding populations that differ in their frequencies of genetic variation. I had been skeptical of this polygenism for some time, but within the last year I upgraded the idea from "dubious" to "reasonable." I do not know if humanity is composed of races or clines, but advocatges group-level genetic diversity present good evidence that needs to be intellectual engaged. Unfortunately, (advocates mostly on) the Left concluded that if group-level human diversity exists, it implies that some humans are "better" than others. Therefore the hypothesis had to be rejected on ideological grounds, whatever the facts are. To these Marxists, the thought that we are all equal, regardless of our nationality or genetic predisposition, is apparently anathema.

I have to give special props to Steven Pinker, an author previously featured on tdaxp. Pinker is skeptical of group genetic diversity, and he has given better arguments in favor of his position than anyone else I have read. He also admits the possibility that he may be wrong, however, and his skepticism towards his skepticism helped provoke my self-reflection. The tone of the posts in this series tend to be pro-diversity, if only because (outside of Pinker) I am more impressed by the honest tone of the diversitarians than the monists. However, the best part of blogging is the very high-level of reader comments. Please readers, correct me, or tell me where my writing is lazy!

(Any in the meantime -- read up on Lewtonin's fallacy.)

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Evolutionary Cognitivism, a tdaxp series
1. Selection and Cognition
2. Epigentics and Diversity
3. Children and Civilization
4. The Implicit and the Explicit
5. Man Among Men
6. More Than Genes
7. Bibliography