The Economist On Evolution: Survival Of The Unfit To Print


The
centerpiece of

The Economist
magazine`s year-end double issue
(Dec. 24, 2005 to Jan. 6, 2006) is a 12 page survey
entitled The
story of man
.”
The

cover cartoon
showing human evolution from the
knuckle-dragging ape to the apparent

ultimate in human perfection
—which the magazine`s
artist seems to conceive of as starlet

Scarlett Johanson
in a little

black New Year`s Eve party dress
holding a champagne
flute. (I can`t say I disagree…)

But when he turns to race in his
otherwise well-done essay, The Economist`s
science editor Geoffrey Carr can`t keep his story
straight even on the same page.

Thus at the

bottom of p. 11
of the survey, Carr commends the

theory
of how the high average intelligence of
Ashkenazi Jews might have evolved over just the last
millennium, which was

published in 2005
by

Gregory Cochran
(Carr compares him to

Darwin
!) and

Henry Harpending
.

Carr explains:

“Until
a century or two ago, the Ashkenazim—the Jews of
Europe—were often restricted by local laws to
professions such as banking, which happened to require
high intelligence. This is the sort of culturally
created pressure that might drive one of Dr.

[Terrence] Deacon`s feedback loops for mental
abilities … If Ashkenazi Jews need to be more
intelligent than others, such genes will spread, even if
they sometimes cause disease.”

(Bear in mind that this theory
hasn`t been proven—Cochran and Harpending have proposed
an empirical test for it, but it hasn`t been carried out
yet. Scientifically, though, it`s at least possible for
important traits like intelligence to evolve that fast,
as the celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist

Steven Pinker
has recently

acknowledged
.)

Yet, earlier on the same
page,
Carr enunciates one of the sillier versions of
the “Race Is Only Skin Deep”

smokescreen
that I`ve seen recently:

“…

geneticists
have failed to find anything in humans
that would pass muster as geographical races in any
other species….The only `racial` difference that has a
well-established function is skin color. … As to other
physical differences, they may be the result of founder
effects
[i.e., caused by random variation among the
handful of progenitors of a group] or possibly of
sexual selection, which can sometimes pick up and
amplify arbitrary features.”

This is absurd. It`s obviously
contradictory for Carr to write both that

  • During just 1,200 years,
    natural selection may well have brought about higher
    mean IQs among Jews than among their

    gentile neighbors
    in Central Europe.

 

  • But during more than 50,000
    years, natural selection probably didn`t lead to any
    differences, other than in skin color, among
    races of different continents!

And it`s also simply not true, as
John Goodrum`s Race
FAQ
has exhaustively shown.

You would think that some editor
would notice this glaring conflict and ask his writer to
resolve it. But the topic of race routinely induces

Brain Shutdown Mode
even among smart journalists.

In his Economist essay, Carr
says:

“In
fact, one of the striking things about Homo sapiens
compared with, say, the chimpanzee is the genetic
uniformity of the species.”

Here, The Economist appears
to be falling prey to the

common confusion
between neutral (a.k.a., “junk”)
genes that don`t do anything and functional genes.
Chimpanzees are much older as a species than modern
humans. So they`ve had millions of years to accumulate
random mutations of DNA that serve little purpose.

But humans in fact show an
extraordinary range of physical diversity for a single
species—probably due to our colonizing so many different
continents. Prominent Berkeley molecular anthropologist
Vincent Sarich

concludes
:

“I am
not aware of any other mammalian species where the
constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in
ours… except those few races heavily modified by recent
human selection; in particular,

dogs
.”

Embarrassingly for The Economist,
two days before Christmas came a landmark paper by
Robert Moyzis, Eric Wang, et al. entitled “Global
landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for
Homo sapiens
” [PDF]. It lists 1,800 genes that
have been under varying selection pressure in

Africa
,

Europe
, or

East Asia
over no more than the last 50,000 years.

University of Wisconsin
anthropologist John Hawks

writes
in his blog:

“It
would be hard for me to overstate how important this
paper is… it brings home the vast importance of
adaptive change during the most recent parts of human
evolution.”

Bob Holmes writes in Britain`s

New Scientist
(December 19):

“A
detailed look at human DNA has shown that a significant
percentage of our genes have been shaped by natural
selection in the past 50,000 years, probably in response
to aspects of modern human culture such as the emergence
of agriculture and the shift towards living in densely
populated settlements…

“This
analysis suggested that around 1800 genes, or roughly 7%
of the total in the human genome, have changed under the
influence of natural selection within the past 50,000
years… That is roughly the same proportion of genes that
were altered in maize
[corn] when humans
domesticated it from its wild ancestors. Moyzis
speculates that we may have similarly `domesticated`
ourselves with the emergence of modern civilization.

“`One
of the major things that has happened in the last 50,000
years is the development of culture,` he says. By so
radically and rapidly changing our environment through
our culture, we`ve put new kinds of selection

[pressures] on ourselves.`”

The classic example of these
“new kinds of selection pressures”
: the cultural
practice of milking domesticated animals resulted over
the

last ten thousand years
in a selection for lactose
tolerance in adults. This drove the frequency of the
gene variant for the ability to digest milk from close
to zero to over 90 percent in Northern Europe—versus no
more than ten percent in modern

East Asia
. In turn, this new genetic capability had
a big impact on Northern Europe`s cultural traits,
including

population density
, economy, lifestyle, and

cuisine
.

The New Scientist`s Holmes
explains:

“Genes
that aid protein metabolism—perhaps related to a change
in diet with the dawn of agriculture—turn up unusually
often in Moyzis`s list of recently selected genes. So do
genes involved in resisting infections, which would be
important in a species settling into more densely
populated villages where diseases would spread more
easily. Other selected genes include those involved in
brain function, which could be important in the
development of culture.”

Greg Cochran, who has been
reviewing Moyzis`s database, tells me that right now we
only have a vague idea what most of these 1,800 genes
do. It will take years to figure out the uses of each
one.

But, he notes, there is certainly
no reason to assume that the varying demands of natural
selection in

different parts of the world
have ignored genes that
impact cognition and personality.

Cochran also says this list of
1,800 genes is just the start. More refined
methodologies should uncover more in the future.

The conventional wisdom on
virtually all sides of the political spectrum demonizes
anyone who tries to talk about the new DNA research. The
reigning intellectuals fear that their ideologies will
be shattered by the new knowledge—with catastrophic
results, certainly for

their own careers
, but

possibly for all humanity.

And yet, is this scientific
knowledge truly as terrifying as the conventional wisdom
assumes? Don`t we already know that both people and
peoples

tend to be somewhat different?
And don`t we deal
with these realities every day, generally in a
constructive manner?

For example, if you have

more than one child
, you`ve no doubt noticed that
they are surprisingly different genetically. And yet
that doesn`t plunge you into despair. (Well, sure,
sometimes your kids` squabbles over their different
tastes get on your nerves, but you survive.)

Meanwhile, other families might
notice common characteristics shared among you and your
children that they themselves don`t possess.

But that doesn`t mean your family
and their families are doomed to a war of annihilation.

The same is true for racial groups,
which are simply

extended families that have attained some degree of
coherence due to partial inbreeding
.

And, while this virulent campaign
in favor of ignorance can slow

scientific research
, it can`t make it go away.

Even more importantly, it can`t
make the underlying reality of

human diversity
disappear.

What the human race needs is a new
perspective that assimilates the latest genetic
discoveries into a sensible, humane, practical-minded,
and realistically optimistic whole.

But we`re not going to get that
from the purveyors of the conventional wisdom—which, for
all its merits, here includes The Economist,

not for the first time
.


[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and


movie critic
for


The American Conservative
.
His website


www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily
blog.]