Darwin, Interrupted

I cant really comment on this with any depth, because I'm working from a book review, but it seems to be another case of the woefully ignorant building castles of smoke and mirrors.

Gregory Clark is an economic historian who has written a book explaining the distribution of rich and poor in terms -- yep, you guessed it -- of Darwinism. (snicker). To wit:

n “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the “survival of the richest” propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought. (A lacuna in the argument is that Clark never says just how prevalent this Darwinian process made the traits he has in mind. Would an increase from, say 0.05 percent of the population to 0.50 percent have mattered much?)

Of course, he doesn't seem to mention that it is the poor who have more children, both within a society and across societies -- birthrates in Africa and South America are astronomical compared to Europe and the US, while within the US, the birthrate among the wealthy is paltry compared to that among the poor.

I have serious reservations toward looking at culture and societies in evolutionary terms -- "survival of the fittest" simply doesn't apply, and it annoys the hell out of me when people who obviously do not understand the mechanisms of evolution try to apply them inappropriately.

The heart of Clark’s analysis consists of a detailed examination of births, deaths, income and wealth in England between 1250 and 1800, as evidenced primarily by wills. Although the records are scant, he finds that on average richer people were more likely to marry than poorer people, they married at earlier ages, they lived longer once they were married, they bore more children per year of marriage, and their children were more likely to survive and to bear children themselves. The result was centuries of downward mobility, in which the offspring of richer families continually moved into the lower rungs of society. Along the way, their behavioral traits and attitudes became ever more dominant.

Point: until the nineteenth century, poor people mostly didn't bother with formal marriage -- they simply moved in together, announced that they were married, and all the neighbors said "Fine." Poor people seldom left wills -- they generally did not own much in the way of property, were more likely to be tenants than freeholders, and thus they had little to leave their children. Depending on circumstances, there might be baptismal records -- and there might not be, particularly in rural areas, which was where the poor were concentrated. The whole data base is suspect, simply because formal marriage was essentially a contract dealing with the disposition of property. Those who didn't have any property didn't bother.

To cast an argument like this in evolutionary terms really misses the point. Evolution operates through a combination of chance and necessity: the creation of offspring is, initially, a matter of the random combination of the two genetic heritages of the parents (and within the set of available genetic material, it is really random). Survival is a matter of the viability of that combination against the necessities of environmental demands. Cultures tend to follow a pattern of growth and decay, but there's no evidence that any sort of "evolutionary" mechanism is at work there, except in a metaphorical sense, and using "evolution" as a metaphor is dangerous, at the very least. In this case, it seems to misrepresent both evolution and the development of culture. (If you want to go whole-hog Richard Dawkins sociobiologist on the issue, I suppose there might be the possibility that evolution is a valid paradigm to describe cultural development. I can deal with the idea that Beethoven's Ninth is the product of biochemistry, but what operates on an individual level doesn't necessarily operate on a larger level and vice-versa -- Beethoven does not equal nineteenth-century Vienna. I think the random factors become too overwhelming to accept that idea without severe scrutiny. This, however, seems much more to be "Oh, look! Development equals evolution!" Not.)

One thing that seems to be missing here is the idea that the transmission of culture, one of humanity's strong points, assumes, given the fact that people have brains and some of us even tend to use them, that we build on what we inherit. That's not the same as evolving, which is the replacement of not-quite-optimum organisms by those that are closer to optimum for a given environment. We simply took Euclid and came up with engineering.

Frankly, from the review the book sounds like the kind of thing I don't even want to review myself any more because I hate wasting my time on garbage, and this looks to be one step short of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This sort of nails it down:

One frustrating aspect of Clark’s argument is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic. “Just as people were shaping economies,” he writes in a typical formulation, “the economy of the preindustrial era was shaping people, at least culturally and perhaps also genetically” (emphasis added). Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term.

Q.E.D.

Brought to us by the staggeringly uncritical Andrew Sullivan.

By the way, if you want a very clear if slightly technical exposition of what evolutionary theory says and how it works, I recommend Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is. Probably the best one-volume description available.