Did Agriculture render tribes and cities unequal?

Cochran and Harpending write, “The assumption that more recent expansions are all driven by cultural factors is based on the notion that modern humans everywhere have essentially the same abilities. That’s a logical consequence of human evolutionary stasis: If humans have not undergone a significant amount of biological change since the expansion out of Africa, then people everywhere would have essentially the same potentials, and no group would have a biological advantage over its neighbors. But as we never tire of pointing out, there has been significant biological change during that period—tremendous amounts of change, particularly in those populations that have practiced agriculture for a long time. Therefore, the biological equality of human races and ethnic groups is not inevitable: In fact it’s about as likely as a fistful of silver dollars all landing on edge when dropped. There are important, well-understood examples of human biological inequality: Some populations can (on average) deal far more effectively with certain situations than others. [from The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (p. 156-157). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The Human Genome has been available for study only since 2003, a mere 9 years after Popper died. But a good deal was known before 2003. Cavalli-Sforza, father and son, published in 1995 wrote, The Great Human Diasporas, the History of Diversity and Evolution. On page 138 they write, “Our theory contradicted the prevailing views, particularly in Britain and the United States, where archaeologists had rejected the theory of expansion and migration in favor of the idea that population composition changed very little, and that only ideas and artifacts circulated. . . We called the two explanations demic, implying the spread of populations (ours – a very special type of migrationist hypothesis, in which a technological innovation determines a population explosion followed by migration, and hence expansion), and cultural, the classical indigenist one (implying the transfer of ideas, technologies, and artifacts).

Sticking just to this matter of agriculture, and the “migration” and “expansion” that followed, Cochran and Harpending state an obvious conclusion: “Early adopters ought to be better at agriculture than late-comes: They should be better adjusted to the new diet, tougher against the new diseases, and better at tolerating crowding and hierarchy.”

And “populations with a biological advantage, more often than not, should have won the wars. They would have been able to generate more young warriors than their neighbors. They would have been able to afford to fight more often and recover faster from defeat. If the expanding group’s success depended upon some improved tactic or weapon, the defenders could have copied it. But they couldn’t copy a gene. It’s hard to fight biological superiority, and expansions based on such superiority could have gone on far longer than ones based upon cultural advantages, which are ephemeral.

Cochran, Gregory; Henry Harpending (2009-01-27). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (p. 158). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Comment: We can’t see differences in personalities by looking at DNA, yet, but differences have been deduced. Attempts to introduce agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies such as the Pygmies in Africa have not gone well. The farmer knows things are often going to be tight right before planting season. His family may be hungry but he needs to keep planting seed available for planting. He needs to keep his breeding stock available for breeding. The hunter-gatherers, so Cochran and Harpending wrote some place, would get hungry and eat their goats.

Which causes me to wonder whether this advantage, the advantage of practicing agriculture for longer than their neighbors gave Rome an advantage over its neighbors for longer than if those neighbors had been farmers and not merely herders.

The contestants in the American Civil war were both Agricultural; so neither side had an advantage in terms of war-making ability. But it is a perfect test to separate a people for 15000 years and then have them come together, and see how the non-agriculturalists (the Amerindians – or the Australian Aborigines for that matter who were separated even longer) fair against the agriculturalists. We see that the mere presence of the Agriculturalists is enough to kill off the majority of the non-Agriculturalists through the diseases the Agriculturalists have become immune to, but still transmit, and the non-Agriculturalists who die as a result.

How infectious diseases helped the Old world conquer the new

Here are a few paragraphs from Cochran and Harpending in regard to the ease with which the Spanish conquered the Amerindians of America: 

“The Amerindians migrated from Northeast Asia some 15,000 years ago. They did not carry with them crowd diseases that arose after the birth of agriculture, nor did they carry the genetic defenses that later developed against those diseases. Since their path to the New World went through frigid landscapes like Siberia and Alaska, they left behind some of the ancient infectious diseases that were vectorborne or had complex life cycles—malaria and Guinea worm, for example. . .”

“Although Amerindians did develop agriculture independently—a very effective agriculture that included some of the world’s most important crops, such as maize and potatoes—they domesticated few animals, mostly because they had already wiped out most of the species suited to domestication. . .”

“. . . infectious disease was so unimportant among Amerindians, selection most likely favored weaker immune systems, because people with weaker immune systems would be better able to avoid autoimmune disorders, in which the immune system misfires and attacks some organ or tissue. Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin, and multiple sclerosis, where it attacks the myelin sheaths of the central nervous system, are well-known examples—both are rare among Amerindians. A less vigorous immune system would have been an advantage under those conditions.

This Amerindian vulnerability was a primary reason for European success in the Americas. Epidemic disease, particularly smallpox, interfered with armed resistance by Amerindians and thus played an important part in the early Spanish conquests. In Mexico, where Hernán Cortés and his troops had made the Aztec emperor their puppet, the Aztecs rose against them, killing Moctezuma II and two-thirds of the Spanish force in the famous “Noche Triste.” The Aztecs probably would have utterly destroyed the invaders, were it not for the smallpox epidemic under way at the same time. The leader of the Aztec defense died in the epidemic, and Cortés and his men conquered the Aztec Empire. It is hard to see how Cortés could have won without those microscopic allies, since he was trying to conquer an empire of millions with a few hundred men.

Cochran, Gregory; Henry Harpending (2009-01-27). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution . . .. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Comment:  We’ve known about the conquering of the Amerindians by the Conquistadors for a great many years, but what we didn’t know until scientists began working with the human genome (completed in 2003) was that the Amerindians didn’t have the diversified HLA systems.  In the Old World with all its years of agriculture since 8,000 BC, humans were subjected to a variety of diseases from animals, poor hygiene, and the close proximity they were to each other in cities.  Having different HLA alleles expands the range of pathogens that our immune systems can deal with.  Amerindians didn’t have that diversity.  Many tribes had only a single HLA allele.  

This also explains why the British had such an easy time colonizing North America.  The Amerindians had been decimated by disease.  The New World was largely empty. 

How Civilization accelerated Human Evolution

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 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

On peopling the British Isles

Well, yes, Oppenheimer refers to controversy, but the advantage of his book is that he is attempting to look at all the most recent data, recheck the various conclusions and draw new ones if necessary. The advantage of studying the British Isles is that during the LGM (the coldest part of the last ice age) the Isles were either covered by Ice or an uninhabitable icy desert. In other places there was continuity, but not on these islands. At some point people came from some place and colonized them. The ideas scoffed at by Sellar and Yeatman are old and abandoned my most scholars. Genetic studies have pretty much convinced everyone that Romans, Jutes, Frisians, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and Normans were not as big a deal as was once thought. A "foundation stock" was already there, perhaps as early as 12,000 bc and it stayed there and flourished during all the famous invasions. When in recorded history these invasions took place, some of them were of the same stock as the people who were already there. Here is Oppenheimer:

"At the time of the great post-LGM European expansion of 15,000 years ago, there was no North Sea. Instead, there was a flat grassy plain stretching all the way from Poland and the southern Baltic, through southern Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Frisia and Holland across the North Sea and into eastern England (Figure 3.3). In fact, had they wished, our forebears could have walked in a straight line all the way from Berlin to Belfast, although in practice they seemed to prefer wandering along beaches. If it still existed today, the North Sea Plain would be in the centre of the Ingert distribution (Figure 3.8). Ingert dates overall in Europe to 21,000 years and may have originated in a Balkan Ice Age refuge (see below).59 Three British founding clusters from Ingert (I1c-1, 2 and 3) date to around 13,000, 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, respectively.60 This suggests a pre-Younger Dryas (i.e. Late Upper Palaeolithic) spread for at least part of the Ingert branch. While Ingert is present at a low rate of about 3.3% throughout the British Isles, this figure rises to over 10% on parts of the English north-east coastal region, in particular York and Norfolk. Given this distribution, the age of Ingert in the British Isles,61 and the fact that he is no more common on the neighbouring Continent, the chances are that this represents the echo of an ancient intrusion. To me this is the first of a series of specific, dated, early British genetic intrusions from the Continent which tend to mitigate claims of a later Anglo-Saxon genocide." [Oppenheimer, Stephen (2012-03-01). The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (Kindle Locations 2422-2430). Constable Robinson. Kindle Edition.]

Some place Oppenheimer said that during the Younger Dryas the sea dropped something like 127 feet. That apparently permitted the North Sea area to become the plains he refers to. So while I'm not willing to read all the books that Oppenheimer did, his argument seems persuasive that after the Younger Dryas receded and temperatures warmed, southern parts of Britain, Wales, and Ireland (which during the Younger Dryas had land extended much further south than it does today), enabling groups to walk across the North Sea Plain as early 12,000 bc forming the foundation stock that spread north as the ice receded.

Except . . . there are apparently two famous "refuges" where people clustered during the Younger Dryas, the Basque and the Balkan. The first people to people the British Isles, in Oppenheimer's opinion came from the Basque refuge. Those people moved north peopling the Western Area of Europe which included crossing the grassy plain which is now the North Sea. The earlier view was that this peopling was done from the Balkan refuge, spreading people across central Europe and then to the British Isles.

I do wonder about the names various scholars assign to genetic markers, "Ingert" for example. There is some sort of fame involved, like naming a mountain or a feature on Mars. Do scholars acknowledge other scholars marker names? Some time ago I read Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, the genetic roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes. He assigns a number of names represented by genetic markers, but I don't find those names in Oppenheimer's book. Since Sykes wrote his book in 2006 and Oppenheimer in 2012 perhaps Oppenheimer is using more recently identified genetic markers. However, I thought that only the discoverer of these markers got to name them and I hadn't the impression that Oppenheimer was doing research that extended to the identification of markers. That worries me a little, for if he is renaming other researchers' markers, how will the casual reader ever keep track?

On linguistic and genetic uncertainty

I’ve been reading The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by Stephen Oppenheimer, in Kindle, and ran across a comment that may pertain to something someone said a while back – I only recall the strangeness of the comment, something along the lines of a statement or an argument must mean one thing and one thing only.  No doubt I misunderstood the context (now that I think more about it, I suspect the context may have had to do with philosophy and not linguistics), but I believe the opposite of that, that almost everything is ambiguous and probably means something different to everyone who reads or hears it – not utterly different in most cases, but marginally so, that is “not quite what the speaker intended.” 

Oppenheimer in location 1656 writes, “There are basic differences between the disciplines of archaeology and linguistics on the one hand, and sciences such as geology and biology on the other.  In their attitude to the scientific method, some linguists seem to misunderstand the meaning or, or are unable to accept, uncertainty.  They interpret the scientific method as implying authority, rigour and certainty, while scientists accept that, in many situations, comparisons have to be made using measurements that have some degree of error and theories of classification with a degree of uncertainty.  A statistical approach has to be used to handle such uncertainty.  Unlike disagreements between academic authorities, there are standard methods of dealing with sources of observational error and of uncertainty.  Archaeologists, in contrast to linguists, have learnt through experience that if a method such as carbon dating gives inaccurate results at first, it should not be thrown out of the window, but attempts should be made to sort out the problems of error and improve it. 

Comment:  The context of Oppenheimer’s comment was in regard to dating celtic-language splits.  The mathematical approach to language diversity is called lexico-statistics and the dating method glottochronology, and as one might suspect disagreements amongst the archeologists, linguists, geneticists, and geologists are rife. 

I was hoping for a bit more certainty than I’ve found in Oppenheimer thus far.  I mentioned some place that I had my DNA checked on Ancestry.com a couple of years ago.  Interestingly, though a DNA check sounds scientific; my results have changed over time.  Instead of something like 60% British Isles and 20% Scandinavian (probably from the Viking colonies in Britain) I am now something like 60% Western European and 20% Irish.  No Irish has ever been mentioned or seen in my family tree (begun by one of my grandfathers). 

In the Ancestry.com definitions, one can find British (which I find in my genealogic tree) under Western Europe and Scottish (also in my genealogic tree) under Irish.  And that ambiguity can be found in recent studies such as Oppenheimer’s; so perhaps the Ancestry people are updating results as new arguments are advanced.  There is no consensus on the reasons for the difference between the Scots and the Irish, for example, or whether they originally came from central Europe as many have believed or through Southern France and Spain as Oppenheimer and later scholars now believe. 

Having read Collingwood and Gadamer I am used to and accepting of ambiguity in written and spoken language, but like the linguists Oppenheimer complains of I have difficulty with so much ambiguity in (primarily) genetics.

Parmele on the British Empire’s South African Colony

On page 70 of A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland, copyrighted in 1898, 1900 and 1906, Mary Platt Parmele assesses Britain’s war with the Boers:

“The sympathy of foreign states was strongly with the Boers; and in England itself the cause evoked a languid enthusiasm, until aroused by disaster, and until the pride of the nation was touched by loss of prestige. The danger, the enormous difficulties to be overcome, the privations and suffering of their boys, these were the things which awoke the dormant enthusiasm in the heart of the nation. And when the only son of Lord Roberts had been offered as a sacrifice, and then a son of Lord Dufferin, and then, Prince Victor, October 29, 1900, grandson of the Queen herself, the cause had become sacred, and one for which any loyal Briton would be willing to die. By September 1, 1900, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had been formally proclaimed by Lord Roberts, "Colonies of British Empire." This was the beginning of the end, and when the victorious commander (December 2, 1900) arrived in England amid the plaudits of a grateful nation, the victory was practically won, and the time was at hand when not far from twenty thousand British soldiers would be lying under the sod six thousand miles away, in a land, which no longer disputed the sovereignty of England! We have yet to see whether the South African colonial possessions have been paid for too dearly, with nine fierce Kaffir wars (another threatening as this is written), and the blood of princes, peers, and commoners poured as if it were water into the African soil. Is England richer or poorer for this outpouring of blood and treasure? Has she risen or fallen in the estimation of the world, as she uncovers her stores of gold and diamonds among those valiant but defeated Boers, sullenly brooding over the past, with no love in their hearts.”

Comment:  I have recently taken offense at historians who didn’t provide references for their conclusions and opinions (pertaining to the American Civil War) but have yet to take offense at anything Parmele has written.  The above comment on the Boer War may be typical.  She is clearly an Anglophile and yet when British leaders do something dumb or something she thinks is unjust she is quick to say so.  And in the above case she also asks the interesting question about whether Britain gained or lost by means of their South African accomplishment.  She considers the loss of British lives (around 20,000) and the loss of respect from other nations, but after the Second World War we also wonder about the economic loss.  Spain clearly became a powerful empire as the result of robbing its colonies of their gold.  When Parmele wrote her book, British miners were apparently digging out South African gold and diamonds, but Britain could not get away with mere robbery as Spain did, even if the British people would tolerate it; which they wouldn’t.  There were laws in effect that British miners had to comply with; so the economic benefit to Britain was not as great as a similar extraction of wealth from the Aztecs and Incans was for Spain.  Eventually (sometime around 1949 if I remember correctly) the cost of maintaining an army and navy in foreign enterprises became too great for this once Empire and it gave it up (with a little help from its friends).

Empires, Liberal Democracies, and Core States

Various “assertions” have been made alleging that the U.S. is an empire, but I’ve seen no “arguments” in the sense that you produce evidence and then draw a conclusion from the evidence that comprises the end point of an argument; ergo the U.S. is an empire.   I think of Niall Ferguson asserting that the U.S. is an empire, just not a very good one since it doesn't do any of the things that earlier empires did allows him to get away with a very soft definition, something along the lines of “the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world therefore it is an empire.”  To assert as some do that “empires operate differently nowadays” is an assertion in search of an argument. 

To put it another way, if Rome, Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands were at one time empires but the U.S. is “a different sort of empire,” then where do we find in this a definition of what an empire is?  And if you reply that the new definition is merely whatever the U.S. happens to be, then how is that a definition of “empire”? 

For the above reasons and many others, those who think about the modern era in mega-terms, especially Fukuyama and Huntington do not apply the term “empire” to the U.S.  Fukuyama doesn’t see the U.S. as being unique, merely the best example of a Liberal Democracy.  He sees all nations becoming Liberal Democracies in the future.  A state needs to become on if it is to succeed economically.  In fact, the most successful nations already are, either wholly or partly.  Think of the nations which aren’t successful today and the common explanation for why they are not is that they are not Liberal Democracies and do not have modern economies that participate in the “world economy.”  

Huntington, without addressing economies, as I recall, argued that wars will continue between Civilizations (using the common definition of “civilization” which he references in Clash of Civilizations) occurring along “fault lines,” those being the borders where a nation of one civilization is up against that of another, as in the case of Pakistan and India for example.  He also uses the term “core state.”  Within most civilizations there is a “core state.”  The U.S. is the “core state” in the “West” civilization.  Russia is the “core state” within the Eastern Orthodox civilization.  In Huntington’s terms, the U.S. is the most powerful nation in “the West.”   Things have indeed changed, and there are no more empires in the sense that Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands were empires up until WWII the end of WWII.  Now you have “core states” and spheres of influence.  The problem with the Middle East isn’t that their states aren’t in the world economy as Liberal Democracies; it is that they don’t have a “core state.”