I’m currently reading this book about how evolution has occurred over the past 10,000 years since ‘civilization’ occured. It talks about the genetic selection that has taken place since the advent of agriculture. And how culture has effected evolution. I think in opposition to SJ Gould and others’ claim that not much human evolution has occurred in about 40,000 - 100,000 years.
One scary chapter, but a relevant one, is how agriculture came with the rise of statism. And how people wwere selected for and bred like crops and livestock. This included cutting down on natural competition, much like how cows and plants are not competitive in farms.
He gives all kinds of evidence for differences in skeletal structure and brain sizes since then. (Much of the book is like Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel.) And even has some interesting theories about introgression between Humans and neanderthals that may have caused us to pick up language ability. Each of us probably has some neanderthal in them.
Of course, there are many other excellent point in this book. I don’t know if he is sympathetic to primitivism (like many who talk about pre-agriculture), but he sure seems to be sympathetic to anarchism. Speaking of the state in a way that describes them as the sadists and human farmers they are. (particularly around page 110). He says the first states lowered standards of living for most. Just as agriculture probably made people sicker than they were under hunting and gathering, because of diets we weren’t genetically used to (but later become more so). Over time people became more genetically ‘tame’ and also displayed neoteny (prolonged obedience usually limited to youth).
There is also a lot of talk about time preferences and how they change with the rise of property.
I still have much left to read, but it is a good book so far.
As always, I have the book on scribd for any who would like to read it.
Wow, thanks for posting a link! I have been looking for something like this for some time. The view that evolution has been negligible for the last 40-100 millenia is on the way out. I recommend the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, it is a fascinating look into evolutionary psychology and what it has to tell us about how the human brain, language and complex social behavior evolved. It’s short but it really blew my mind over and over.
I got to half. I can only say that theirs must be the lamest excuse for the rise of the state I’ve ever heard of. The state emerged because it could?! And that’s it?!
I agree that he’s not looking for an excuse, but his explanation I find lacking nonetheless. Perhaps later on he does come up with something else, but up to now all I’ve seen is “since with agriculture things could be stolen, then a parasitic class could develop. It did because it could.” Basically like an Austrian holding that the division of labor per se begets the state. But again, perhaps I’m speaking to soon.
Just read the book in the last two hours. Some thoughts: how does more recent technology select for certain characteristics? Technology has certainly causes demographic and genetic changes, he concluded.
It seems that with birth control (see Human Action somewhere around pp. 600-700’s), more industrialized nations will have below replacement birth rates.
In the same way, due to lower time cost of children for women, less industrialized nations have less use of birth control.
Does that mean industrialized society is going demographically to die, so long as free movement across borders prevents productivity and standard of living equilibrium?
That means that the capital stock of the west is falling by the day, and hence the optimal population level is likewise falling. Societies with falling capital stock tend to die. Its as simple as that.
Capital stock is increasing in industrial societies (but still less than it could be due to waste during business cycles), causing greater labour productivity causing greater wage (most importantly, for women).
Women can either move forward in careers or expend time on children, foregoing wage or greater specialization, etc., etc., or at least income which must be spent on children.
They choose: # kids vs. # hours working.
If they want to work more, but have sex, they use the pill. Mises summarized 60+ years ago the modern opinion (attached to Gary Becker’s name since the 1980’s, for some reason): its not merely that there are more methods of birth control–there are–but only the fact that people today actually resort to them more often (paraphrase that section of Human Action).
Current situation, then:
On the other hand, capital stock in less industrialized societies is not increasing so much, so they have more children; but this causes those societies to demographically press on our societies for lack of free flow of capital and barriers to capital accumilation there to stabilize population growth (and after that, there still remains population momentum for several generations!).
I cannot agree. Do you mean that 130 years of welfare states, 30%+ tax rates and double digit annual monetary increase rates have left Ithe stock of capital unchanged or even increasing?
First, wages rates tell us nothing, as they do not take into account inflation. Second, even if the standard of living has not decreased it could well be due to people consuming the capital stock. And as long as there is capital to consume, this will be sustainable. Well, sorts of. Debt per capital is a good measure of this: it’s soaring throughout the west, as far as I know.
The optimal population model has been developed by Mises in HA, and a very simple application tells us that, in , the capital stock stopped growing the late ’70 (now Thatcher’s policies start to make sense, from a statist point of view). Now its all downhill. The way the crash is going to materialize is though sovereign debt default.
Third world countries on the other hand, are pursuing some interesting policies. Add the outflow of capital that is trying to leave the west, and you get an increasing capital stock. Of course they are going to multiply like rabbits.
Romans knew of contraceptive substances in their days, and made liberal use of them (to the point of driving the plant concerned to extinction), and yet population growth was positive until the economic fabric of the Empire was dissolved. You see, contraception has nothing to do with population growth.
It not cultural, its not “the woman in career” thing. Its really very simple: the west has lost to the east the game of economic development. Politician will try to “cultural differences” their way out of the truth, and yet the truth is clear, and I see no way around that.
The Ten Thousand Year Explosion is less about political science and more about how civilization has had an effect upon human evolution. It’s useful for rebutting liberals who claim thousands of years is not enough time for humans to evolve non-superficial genetic differences (I think the author mentions variants of DBA1 as a good example, but there are numerous others).
GG&S is absolute garbage. It passes over research on racial differences in intelligence, dismissing them as ‘loathesome’ without even bothering to explain what, if anything, is wrong with the methodology. I also laughed at his explanation that ‘China lacked a convoluted coastline for dissidents to hide out in’, hence the authoritarian nature of successive Chinese dynasties.
A convoluted coastline would make trade much less costly though. If you take a look at the coastline of Europe, it’s insane. The whole continent is just crying “trade here!”.
I recommend this book. It is not even tangentially connected to economics, but I think many participants on this forum would be interested to read it anyway. It tells how humans are the most internally differentiated species after dogs and how human evolution in the last 10,000 years has been far, far speedier than at any time before. This for a variety of factors, including increase in population size (benefitial mutations occur rarely, but spread easily even among huge populations once they occur).
I think it is useful as a corrective to some of the things you will hear primal eating people say. I have a lot of time for them and are pretty much convinced by their arguments, but I do not think they are aware that when they say stuff like ‘grain has only been around for the last 10,000 years of hundreds of thousands years of human evolution’ their argument isn’t as nearly as strong as they think it is, as the speed of evolution has not been anything like constant. We have in fact adapted to grain (witness four times lower diabetes rates among grain munching Europeans compared to among Navajo when grain munching) albeit perhaps not to the extent we would have liked.
I disagree that human evolution has increased in the rate of increase. I think it is going at the same rate it always has but as the environment gets more complicated, evolution is influenced by these external factors, which appears like it is speeding up. I have not completed the book yet, just replying to the original post.
For example man might have spent 4000 years trying to adapt to cold northernly climates. Only to invent advanced heating and thermal housing and no longer require those attributes caused by cold climates. This could contribute to a change in environment that could cause an evolutionary change over the next 100s of years. Not that this has occured I was just making up an example.
I also disagree that agriculture necessarily had anything to do with the rise of statism. Man could have been practicing agriculture for 100s or 1000s of years in some regions before statism took hold there.
Does it seem weird that memmetics isn’t being discussed in this thread? The reason why I ask the question is the fact that I think one could easily see Statism in all its forms as a kind of meme or a collection of memes which reinforce each other. So, in reality it’s not a matter of humans engineering humans, rather memes engineering humans for memes (not literally or consciously). Just food for thought.
