Bandit with traditional tattoos (source). In premodern China, who enjoyed the most reproductive success? The thrifty hardworking farmer? Or the local bandit/warlord?
In my last post, I asked how well the Clark-Unz model of selection applied to Japan and Korea (Unz, 2013). Let me now ask a more obvious question. How well did it apply to China? After all, if such ruthless selection had been going on for so long, the Chinese would surely be super-geniuses by now.
Perhaps there is an upper limit to mean intelligence. Above a certain level, the disadvantages may start to crowd out the advantages, especially if tradeoffs exist between high intelligence and other, no less valuable traits.
Or perhaps this model of selection did not operate continuously. More to the point, whenever it ceased to operate, other selection pressures took over and began to favor a different psychological profile. Remember, this model depends on the existence of a State that can monopolize the use of violence and pacify social relationships. Only then does natural selection favor individuals who get ahead by working hard, being thrifty, and planning for the long term.
This point is discussed by Feichtinger et al. (1996) who see Chinese history as a shifting equilibrium between farmers, bandits, and the State: "Farmers who produce a good, bandits who steal this good, and rulers fighting against banditry and taxing farmers." When the State weakened, as it often did, farmers had to placate bandits as best they could. Banditry may have then surpassed farming as the best way to accumulate wealth, prestige, access to women and, ultimately, reproductive success.
About ten years ago, a Chinese scholar, invited to spend his holidays in Haute-Provence, was worried: "There aren't too many bandits there?" As an emigrant settled in France since the revolution, he continued—and to this day continues—to associate the countryside with banditry as a matter of course. For a rich family like his own (otherwise he would not have become a scholar), the obsessive fear of a bandit raid, of being taken away or of extortion was constant. The landowners maintained private militias who could at least stand up to the small gangs, and their sons avoided venturing too far away for fear of being kidnapped. The oldest son especially was the most valued prey because the family would have to rush to pay a high ransom to ensure the continuity of their lineage and appease the spirits of their ancestors.
[…] on some rail lines of southern China, the train almost never reached its destination without being attacked at least once [by bandits]. In the province of Yunnan, highwaymen controlled most of the roads, stopped and ransomed travelers, and those merchants who persisted in pursuing their occupation, since commercial traffic ended up being choked off or became more selective.
We forget, especially the libertarians among us, how awful things were before the State pacified social relations. It was this pacification that made free and open societies possible. It especially made the market economy possible. Ironically, when the Communists wiped out banditry—something no previous regime had managed to do—they also laid the basis for their country's future economic takeoff.
Lucien, B. (1991). Compte rendu de Phil Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China, Annales. Économies, societies, civilisations, 46, 126-127.
Does the Clark-Unz model apply to Japan and Korea?
Syngman Rhee in 1905 and later South Korea's first president (1948-1960). Though born into a rural family of modest means, he was of yangban and even royal lineage (source).
Why is mean IQ higher in East Asia than elsewhere? Ron Unz (2013) sees the key cause in a scarcity of land and women that continually condemned the lower classes to reproductive extinction, particularly among the farmers who made up most of China's population. If a lineage remained poor for two generations in a row, it would die out and be replaced by downwardly mobile individuals from higher up on the social ladder. There was thus strong selection for men with enough business smarts to avoid poverty and amass enough assets to get married and have a family.
Both the Japanese and the Koreans have done remarkably well in their economic and technological advancement, and also as small immigrant racial minorities in America and elsewhere. However, there is no evidence that rural life in either country had any of the major features possibly so significant for Chinese history, such as a total lack of feudal caste structure, an exceptionally commercialized system of agricultural production and land tenure, and the massive universal downward mobility due to equal division of property among male heirs.
1. Class differences that reflect differences in intellectual performance.
2. A higher level of reproductive success in higher social classes than in lower ones.
3. No barriers to downward social mobility. The lower classes are thus gradually replaced by people of higher social origin.
But surely these three factors prevail everywhere? No, not at all. Hunter-gatherers and simple agricultural societies have little or no social stratification. Other societies are stratified but have no State that can monopolize the use of violence. Upward mobility is thus an ongoing free-for-all that selects for other psychological characteristics, i.e., ruthlessness, charisma, and ability to mobilize gangs of young men. Finally, still other societies are so stratified that downward mobility is impossible. This is the case with the caste system in India, where the shame of "losing caste" deters downward mobility. In addition, the lowest castes can afford to reproduce because certain stigmatized kinds of work are reserved for them, so there is no need to replenish their ranks with people of higher social origin.
How do Japan and Korea fit into this picture? Before the 19th century, both were feudal aristocracies where the elites monopolized the use of violence. For the bulk of the population, there was thus little selection for "Big Men", as is the case in societies where State formation is weaker. The question then remains whether Japan and Korea were caste societies. Did the lowest classes reproduce essentially on their own? Or were they replaced by a steady infusion of downwardly mobile individuals?
Among the Japanese lower classes, the Burakumin were the only real caste, in the sense of a group that lost few members through upward mobility and gained few through downward mobility. It is probably for this reason that the Burakumin differ so much from other Japanese in terms of behavior, personality traits, and intellectual performance. They seem to have preserved the mental and behavioral predispositions that were dominant in the Japanese population five hundred to a thousand years ago (see previous post).
A similar situation seems to have prevailed in Korea, even though the yangban were theoretically guaranteed a privileged status by virtue of their high birth or success on civil service exams. Moon (1992, p. 204) describes impoverished yangban living alongside peasants and commoners as fellow tenants. Breen (2004) likewise describes numbers of yangban sinking into poverty without hope of gaining a government office.
Breen, M. (2004). The Koreans. Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, St. Martin's Press.
Moon, O. (1992) Confucianism and gender segregation in Japan and Korea, in R. Goodman & K. Refsing. (eds) Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan, Routledge.
Mean IQ is unusually high in East Asia, averaging around 106 among Han Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese (Rushton & Jensen, 2005). It falls off as one moves outward from the core area of East Asia, being lower even among the nearby and closely related natives of Mongolia (Lynn, 2007). This 'IQ plateau' must therefore have a relatively recent origin, certainly after the advent of agriculture and probably after the rise of State-pacified societies—where most people expected to succeed through work and trade, and not loot and plunder.
Is this 'IQ plateau' due to cultural and family values that are specific to East Asian societies? Not likely. Higher mean IQ is observed in East Asian individuals who were adopted at an early age into white American or European families (Clark & Hanisee, 1982; Frydman & Lynn, 1989; Winick, Meyer, & Harris, 1975). It also correlates with better performance at more fundamental mental tasks, like reaction times (Rushton & Jensen, 2005). It seems to be genetically determined.
Another factor may have been the imperial examination: "in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result." But Unz later backs off from this possible cause, noting that only one percent of the population attained the top rank of chin-shih or the lesser rank of chu-jen—too small a percentage to have much evolutionary impact. True, but those two ranks were only the top of a much larger population pyramid. Success at a lower level, such as at the district or provincial levels, still brought some benefits and prestige, and the beneficiaries were a much larger pool of people (Frost, 2011).
All of this sounds much like the model that Gregory Clark put forward to describe the demographic, behavioral and, perhaps, genetic evolution of the English people. According to this model, the English middle class expanded slowly but steadily from the 12th century onward, thereby gradually raising the population mean for predispositions to non-violence, pleasure deferment, and other future-oriented behavior. Although this social class was initially very small in medieval England, its descendants grew in number and gradually replaced the lower classes through downward mobility. By the 1800s, its lineages accounted for most of the English population (Clark, 2007).
Did Ron Unz steal his idea from Gregory Clark? A casual reader might think so. Buried in the footnotes, however, is a mention of a similar paper that a younger Ron Unz had written back in 1983 while a student at Harvard. But at that time few people were thinking along the same lines. In the history of ideas, Ron's experience is depressingly similar to that of Patrick Matthew, the Scottish scholar who developed a theory of evolution by natural selection a quarter century before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Let's hope this article will give Ron a second hearing in the court of academic opinion. Let's also hope his article will inspire further research, particularly by Chinese geneticists, historians, and social scientists.
Clark, E.A., and J. Hanisee. (1982). Intellectual and adaptive performance of Asian children in adoptive American settings. Developmental Psychology, 18, 595–599.
Frydman, M., and R. Lynn. (1989). The intelligence of Korean children adopted in Belgium. Personality and Individual Differences, 10, 1323–1326.
Lynn, R. (2007). IQ of Mongolians, Mankind Quarterly, 47, 91-97.
Rushton, J.P. and A.R. Jensen. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294.
Unz, R. (1983). Preliminary notes on the possible sociobiological implications of the rural Chinese political economy, unpublished paper.
Winick, M., K.K. Meyer, and R.C. Harris. (1975, December 19). Malnutrition and environmental enrichment by early adoption. Science, 190, 1173–1175.
My last post described a Chinese project to identify the many genes that contribute to normal variation in human intelligence. If successful, it will simply demonstrate what we already know, i.e., genes are largely responsible for the differences in intelligence we see among normal individuals.
A key problem is funding. Intellectuals on today's review panels 'came to consciousness' in a climate when intelligence testing was thought to be wrong and invalid. Very few scientists are open to new ideas […] So it often takes a generational turn-over before there is a swing back to a fresh look at intelligence.
I doubt things will change much when the old guard dies off. In some ways, the academic environment was more open-minded two decades ago, when there were still people, often in key positions, who had entered academia before the 1960s. Change will probably come when new evidence manages to bypass the gatekeepers, and this will most likely happen where the marketplace of ideas is less controlled, like in China. Yes, the same country we like to scold for not being sufficiently free and democratic.
1) Investigate individual differences in cognitive abilities in other animal models. a) create a reliable scale. b) establish whether a g factor emerges in other mammals. c) find out the correlates of such a g factor (phenotypic and genetic)- which would be uncontaminated by SES and therefore lay to rest many controversies that arise in humans studies. [Disclaimer, I have started on this with dogs (60 dogs, all one breed, all farm living and am actively seeking funding to continue the project].
2) Investigate the correlates (particularly fitness-relevant correlates of intelligence in populations of hunter-gatherers. Not to examine mean differences between populations - but to test evolutionary hypotheses. Is intelligence associated with offspring number? Social status? Health? Life expectancy? We do not know the fitness optima for intelligence in any human population.
As for myself, I would want to determine whether the Visual Word Form Area is a product of nature or nurture. This could be done by following the same methodology that Zhu et al. (2009) used to prove that our ability to recognize faces is largely hardwired. If the same is true, or even partly true, for our ability to recognize strings of letters, i.e., words, we would have a compelling argument for gene-culture co-evolution.
I would also want to see whether Tay-Sachs carriers, i.e., heterozygotes, really do have a higher mean intelligence than people without this allele (Frost, 2011). Such a study would be a cinch to do, yet no one has bothered. How come?
Finally, as with hbd* chick, my eyes glaze over when discussion focuses too long on IQ or SAT scores. We need to go beyond intelligence and look at genetic differences that may underlie variation in personality traits, regulation of emotions, time orientation, and so forth. There is more to being human than just intelligence.
Frost, P. (2011) Five years later … still no study, February 4, Evo and Proud.
Zhu, Q., Y. Song, S. Hu, X. Li, M. Tian, Z. Zhen, Q. Dong, N. Kanwisher, and J. Liu. (2009). Heritability of the specific cognitive ability of face perception, Current Biology, 20, 137-142.
Studies show that at least half of the variation in intelligence quotient, or IQ, is inherited. But while scientists have identified some genes that can significantly lower IQ—in people afflicted with mental retardation, for example—truly important genes that affect normal IQ variation have yet to be pinned down.
The head of the team, Zhao Bowen, believes this question has not been resolved because it is too controversial. "People have chosen to ignore the genetics of intelligence for a long time," said Mr. Zhao, who hopes to publish his team's initial findings this summer. "People believe it's a controversial topic, especially in the West. That's not the case in China" (Naik, 2013).
Failing to find genes for intelligence has, in itself, been very instructive for Plomin. Twin studies continue to persuade him that the genes exist. "There is ultimately DNA variation responsible for it," he says. But each of the variations detected so far only makes a tiny contribution to differences in intelligence. "I think nobody thought that the biggest effects would account for less than 1 percent," Plomin points out.
I read that perhaps half our genes are expressed in the brain. If half of our segregating genes are too (the 0.1% on which humans are estimated to differ), that's still 1.5 million base pairs or "SNPs" (of 3 billion total).
This indicates the challenge, even if we ignore other important genomic differences (e.g., number of times a given segment of the chromosome is repeated, like a stutter).
Zimmer, C. (2008). The search for intelligence. Scientific American, October, pp. 68-75.