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The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution Paperback – Illustrated, October 19, 2010
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length305 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateOctober 19, 2010
- Grade level11 and up
- Reading age13 years and up
- Dimensions6.14 x 0.77 x 9.21 inches
- ISBN-100465020429
- ISBN-13978-0465020423
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Editorial Reviews
Review
There is much here to recommend…and their arguments are intriguing throughout…it's clear that this lively, informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly wonder.”
Wall Street Journal
Important and fascinating…the provocative ideas in The 10,000 Year Explosion must be taken seriously by anyone who wants to understand human origins and humanity's future.”
Seed
The 10,000 Year Explosion would be important even if it were only about population genetics and evolutionary biology, but Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending…have written something more. This book is a manifesto for and an example of a new kind of history, a biological history, and not just of the prehistoric era.”
New Scientist
The evidence the authors present builds an overwhelming case that natural selection has recently acted strongly on us and may be continuing unabated.”
John Derbyshire, author of Prime Obsession
"Did human evolution come to a screeching halt fifty thousand years ago when Homo sapiens emerged from Africa, thus ensuring the psychic unity of mankind? Don't be silly, say the authors of this latest addition to the fast-emerging discipline of Biohistory. In clear prose backed by a wealth of hard data, Cochran and Harpending add a biological dimension to the history of our species, and hammer another nail into the coffin lid of 'nothing but culture' anthropology."
Bruce G. Charlton, MD; Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, Editor in Chief of Medical Hypotheses
The 10,000 Year Explosion offers scientists and historians a new and fertile direction for future research, and provides the general public with a better explanation of the past, present, and future of human beings.... I was motivated to read the entire book in a single marathon session.”
John Hawks, author of Human Evolution
For years, human geneticists have been uncovering a picture of human evolution. But now, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending are encouraging us to 'fast forward' the discussion."
Booklist
A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that we're all the same.'"
About the Author
Henry Harpending holds the Thomas Chair as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A field anthropologist and population geneticist, he helped develop the "Out of Africa" theory of human origins. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's research has been featured in the New York Times, the Economist, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, Atlantic Monthly, Science, Seed, and more.
Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books; Illustrated edition (October 19, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 305 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0465020429
- ISBN-13 : 978-0465020423
- Reading age : 13 years and up
- Grade level : 11 and up
- Item Weight : 1.06 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.77 x 9.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #373,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #233 in Genetics (Books)
- #467 in Archaeology (Books)
- #580 in Ecology (Books)
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The traditional view among both natural and social scientists is that human evolution stopped before the advent of civilization and that all human progress in the millennia that followed was a result of cultural rather than physical evolution. The belief is that complex brains enable humans to create and harness the power of new technology, making biological evolution unnecessary. In order to fly, modern humans do not have to mutate and sprout wings, they can instead invent the airplane. Darwinian natural selection now is applied to ideas, technologies, and economic systems rather than to the human genome.
Cochran and Harpending take a very different view. Rather than make continued evolution unnecessary, civilization and its new innovations actually accelerated human evolution by increasing the rate of reproduction and creating new criteria for reproductive fitness and advantage. As the authors describe their approach,
"Conventional social sciences, such as history and anthropology, chiefly concern themselves with brain software, by which we mean cultural developments such as mores, mythology, or social structure. Genetic history addresses changes in the underlying hardware, changes in the body and brain, which also matter. If they didn't, dogs really could play poker."
Those early humans who were better adapted to a settled, agrarian lifestyle had more children survive than average and thus left a larger genetic "footprint" on the human race over the course of several generations. Over time, genes favored in a given cultural and economic environment spread to an ever-larger percentage of the population. One such example is lactose tolerance. Early humans were lactose intolerant. Those lucky enough to have developed the mutation that allowed them to drink animal milk well into adulthood were able to enjoy a higher-calorie diet at a lower cost (it's far cheaper per calorie to milk cows than to slaughter them for meat). The benefits of this are obvious. Healthier, stronger, and more energetic adults will be more economically productive and will have an advantage in military struggles as well. As a result, the lactose tolerant had a significantly higher fertility rate than the intolerant, and today lactose tolerance is the norm.
Other, more regional mutations are also obvious today. Sub-Saharan Africans developed a mutation that gave them strong genetic resistance to malaria. It's not hard to see how this mutation could spread quickly across a continent; resistance to such a deadly disease would obviously enable the first Africans who developed it to enjoy a much higher fertility rate and also a military advantage over their disease-weakened rivals. (Sickle-cell anemia, which is common among African Americans, is an unfortunate genetic side effect of the malaria-protection gene.) This beneficial mutation also kept Sub-Saharan Africans safe from outside invaders for centuries, until the British began mixing their gin with tonic water flavored with quinine--thus acquiring "medically" what native Africans were lucky to be born with.
Europeans, like Africans, also developed mutations that gave them resistance to certain diseases, such as smallpox. This, as Jared Diamond outlines in his excellent study Guns, Germs, and Steel , is what enabled a small band of Spanish conquistadors to conquer entire empires in the Americas. As a result, the Spanish and Portuguese were able to leave a cultural as well as genetic imprint that is far more significant than in other areas of European colonization.
Speeding Up Natural Selection
For those familiar with animal husbandry, none of this would be surprising. Horse and dog breeds have been created by nothing more than human tinkering. Selective pairing over the centuries (or in some cases, only decades) has given us breeds as diverse as Chihuahuas and Great Danes, to use the authors' examples.
Likewise, the Peruvian Paso Horse has been bred over the past 400 years for its distinctive high-step gait, considered by many to be the smoothest in the world. The Peruvian is one of the few horse breeds that walks with an even "1-2-3-4" hoof beat rather than the "2-2" trot common in most other breeds. This behavior is not learned; the horses are born with it. (I only know this because my wife is from a family of Peruvian horse breeders.)
This brings up interesting points for human behavior, although we wouldn't consider gait one of them. No one would say with a straight face that John Wayne's cowboy strut was a genetic phenomenon caused by selective breeding. (Although George W. Bush did defend his own distinct gait in his 2004 speech at the Republican convention by saying, "In Texas, we call that walking.") But could other human behaviors be introduced through breeding?
Cochran and Harpending suggest that Ashkenazi (Northern European) Jews were, quite literally, born to be bankers. Their existence in northern Europe for 1,200 years as an unassimilated subpopulation make them an interesting case study. Today, Ashkenazi Jews are measurably more intelligent on average that the overall human population, on the basis of IQ tests, Nobel prizes won, and representation in academia and among the upper echelons of the business and even entertainment worlds. As a tiny minority, their achievement is almost unbelievable.
It was not always that way, however. According to the authors, the Jews were considered to be of average intelligence in the classical and early medieval world; nothing more, nothing less. As a culture they certainly had nothing to match the body of scientific and philosophical work of their Greek contemporaries. So what changed?
The socioeconomic conditions in Northern Europe created unique selective pressures that had never before been reproduced in history and likely never will be again. The Ashkenazi Jews, due to their own religious prohibition against intermarriage and due to European bigotry against them, remained a relatively small, isolated community--and thus provided a perfect "laboratory" for natural selection.
The Ashkenazim were attracted to the profitable professions of trade and banking because, as a religious minority, they were exempt from the Catholic prohibitions on the charging of interest. Many times, they were excluded from landowning or from other trades as well, making finance one of the few career options available. What followed, in the view of Cochran and Harpending, was an acceleration of the natural selection process. Jews who had a natural talent for finance--including a high degree of literacy and mathematical and abstract thinking skills--were far more likely to have economic success. With economic success came better marriage prospects. (Even today, successful bankers are considered highly eligible bachelors.) Furthermore, with economic success came better nutrition and a higher percentage of surviving children. As a result, over the course of several generations, an increasing percentage of the Ashkenazim began to exhibit the traits that made for successful financiers. The less adept Ashkenazim had lower prospects for marriage and children--and thus gradually were weeded out of the gene pool.
So, due to a truly unique set of selective pressures, the Jews of Europe evolved into a measurably more intelligent subset of population over the course of 40 generations (roughly 1,000 years).
It's Good to Be King
We've written in the past about Gregory Clark's groundbreaking work A Farewell to Alms . Clark proposed an unorthodox theory for why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain and not elsewhere. Clark argues that the prevailing theories--that the UK industrialized first due to its relative political stability and traditions of liberty and property rights--do not hold water. He instead makes the case that the change was cultural, based on breeding. The upper and middle classes in medieval England had more surviving children than the national average. At the same time, primogeniture laws required that only the eldest son inherit the family estates. This left quite a few "second sons" to make their own fortune. The end result was what Clark called "downward mobility," i.e., upper and middle class Englishman were forced down the economic ladder. There is, after all, only so much room at the top. This situation caused "bourgeoisie" values, such as hard work, delayed gratification, and an appreciation for learning, to trickle down the economic rungs of society, which provided a fertile ground for the Industrial Revolution to take root.
Clark's theory is based on culture, not genetics. However, a genetic argument certainly can be made, and Cochran and Harpending do exactly that. Throughout much of human history, elites did reproduce themselves at much higher rates.
For example, Alexander the Great did more than just spread Greek culture; he also spread Greek genes. Today, distinctly Greek chromosomes can be found as far east as Afghanistan.
Implications for the Future
Today, in the post-WWII era of urban mass affluence, reproductive realities are far different. In all developed countries, birthrates have fallen to between 1 and 3 children per woman, and it is often the most educated and most successful economically who have the fewest children. A large family is now an economic burden, and having several children limits the time and monetary resources that can be dedicated to each child. Attempting to send six children to elite prep schools en route to Harvard would bankrupt all but the richest among us. Americans and Europeans have recreated a de facto system of primogeniture, except that rather than exclude younger children from their would-be inheritance the younger children are simply never born to begin with.
Those who do have large families tend to do so for religious reasons. Many evangelical Christians and Catholics take the Bible's command to "be fruitful and multiply" seriously, as do Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and devout Muslims.
This brings up several questions for the future. What will the world look like in a few generations? Demographer Philip Longman (whose work we highly recommend) wrote an insightful article in 2006 titled "The Return of Patriarchy." Longman, tracking birth trends, sees a cultural shift underway. Social conservatives tend to have more children than social liberals, and children more often than not tend to adopt the political and social views of their parents. All else equal, this points to a less libertine future, perhaps within our lifetime. This is not necessarily bad, of course. Societal views change over time. As we wrote in the April newsletter, summarizing the views of Thomas Sowell, social views on gender roles were actually more conservative in the 1950s than they were in the early 1900s. Views change and life goes on.
Of course, we see that this trend could be problematic in certain parts of the world, such as the Middle East. Barring significant immigration of socially liberal Jews from abroad, Israel will quickly become a more conservative country as more orthodox sects of Judaism have much higher birthrates than do secular Israelis. In a small country like Israel, the entire character of the state could change, for better or for worse.
Likewise, the elites of many Muslim states tend to be secular, but the majorities of their populations are not. As birthrates among the secular elite have fallen to Western levels and decreased levels of infant mortality have enabled more children of the poor to survive to adulthood, the balance of power inevitably will shift. A case in point is Turkey. The Turkish state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after WWI was militantly secular. Ataturk himself made a strong effort to "de-Islamify" the country as a way of pulling it into the Western sphere. Ataturk went so far as to officially drop Arabic script from written Turkish, moving the language to a Latin-based alphabet instead. (To appreciate how truly radical this was, imagine today being told by the U.S. government that henceforth, English will be written in Japanese characters or in the Greek alphabet. Wouldn't that be fun?)
It's hard to imagine a time when a guy won't be able to enjoy a drink overlooking the Bosphorus in Istanbul, but that day might come. Turkey is becoming more Islamic--not because of a shift in values among Turks but because devout families simply have more children.
Again, this is not to say that any of these trends are "bad" (unless you're a bar owner in Turkey). Unlike the biological changes described by Cochran and Harpending, these changes are cultural and thus more capable of quicker adaptation. Devout Turks may suddenly decide that big-city living is more to their liking. At any rate, these shifts in attitudes are what they are: another chapter in human history.
The idea that culture has made humans so flexible that we can respond to environmental pressures at the societal and individual level, without any need for genetic selection, has become the dominant belief among social scientists and many biological scientists. That dominant belief is also comforting, since it is based upon the idea that all human gene pools form one essential entity, and that there are no important genetic group differences among us. Cochran and Harpending challenge this dominant belief system, and use a mixture of advanced genetic thinking, well thought out case studies, expansive hypothesis formation, and overgeneralization to build their case. This book is thrilling to read because its authors have the courage to take on the establishment, but this book is eerie to read because it mixes facts with probability statements, and because it opens a door to some shadowy and even dangerous innuendo.
The chapters of this book circle around population genetics case studies, some of which convincingly show that at least some biological evolution sometimes remains important. For example, there is no question that natural selection in cold, dark environments, such as Northern Europe, led to skin color change in our African derived species that was once entirely dark skinned. Light skinned people are adaptive mutants. Similarly, there is no question that most human beings lacked the ability to digest cow’s milk, or any milk after infancy, but that the adaptive advantage of being able to absorb nutrient rich milk led to the natural selection of lactose tolerant populations where milk was available. Milk drinkers are adaptive mutants. So far so good. Why shouldn’t many other important changes in human populations rest upon natural selection of genetic advantages? It only seems common sense to anyone who has recently watched a basketball game or a football game, that genetic differences in height, weight, reflex speed, coordination, and even psychological aspects of sport like concentration, determination, are all heavily genetically based, and also show distinct population group distributions.
However, some of the other examples in this book reveal weaknesses in the authors’ central argument. For example, Cochran and Harpending write that they believe the few Neanderthal genes, that have recently been proven to exist in European populations, conferred an adaptive advantage on the people who were products of Neanderthal mating with Homo sapiens. Since when does a science book argue based upon the idea “we believe”? The authors believe that the sudden burst of innovation that followed the expansion of modern humans out of Africa was due to the genetic enrichment secondary to interbreeding, but they cannot and do not prove that this correlation in time is a causal relationship.
In their thought-provoking chapter on agriculture, the authors argue that it not only changed our sustenance, but that it changed our characters, due to natural selection that favored deferred gratification (harvesting a crop takes a lot more time than killing an animal), patience, self control, advance planning, group cooperation, and many other changes. However, the eerie shadow of their argument is that over time agriculture increased “ant-like behavior” in people and “selection for submission to authority” that sounds “unnervingly like domestication.” The implication is that human populations may have been selected over time biologically for obedience rather than for problem solving. The authors extend their argument, (on page 127): “Science either does not exist or is appallingly feeble in the majority of the world’s populations…Science does not exist in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Islamic world today.” They further quote Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist, as saying, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”
In what ways do these arguments rest upon proof? Are the authors providing evidence or simply scathing speculation? How do these observations refute Gould’s hypothesis that all the observable differences are culturally based? The authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion continuously imply that large-scale differences in large population groups are genetic rather than cultural, and they base their implications upon circumscribed case examples, temporal correlations and innuendo.
In another chapter, the authors argue that the large number of Nobel prizes and other signs of high intelligence seen in Jews of Eastern European descent derived from adaptation to the conditions under which Eastern European Jews existed for a period of about 1,000 years. This chapter is based on a previous and more thoroughly scientific article that they published in The Journal of Biological Science in 2005.
Cochran and Harpending seem to be peeking into, tiptoeing around, or implying racial and ethnic advantages, disadvantages, and differences in core biological features such as intelligence, in a manner that is daring and dangerous. Many of their arguments are subtle, and important. For example they show that an entire group does not have to genetically evolve in order for the group to nevertheless show significant advantage or disadvantage in particular traits when compared to other groups, because a small shift in the statistical mean will also create a significant shift in the tail of the normal curve, a phenomenon which they summarize as, “outliers are important.” Group advantage may not be conferred on every individual in the group, but may derive from a threshold effect at population extremes. It takes only a hundred brilliant outliers of high intelligence to create a population that will dazzle the world with one hundred new brilliant inventions or discoveries. “A modest difference in the mean of some traits can have a tremendous effect on the frequency with which members of the group exceed a high threshold…Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Charles Darwin made larger intellectual contributions as individuals than other entire civilizations did over a period of centuries.” Newton, Maxwell, and Darwin, all from the British Isles, radically altered human history by founding physics and biology, and they represent intellectual exceptions even within their own white, male, population base, yet they can be understood to represent a statistically probable group of outliers. However, this conjunction of talent could also be statistical artifact, like three coin tosses that all show up heads; or, better yet, it could be understood as the product of empire, power, and wealth compounded by historical situation.
Few books have evoked in me more internal thought and argument. Because of this book, I found the issue of human genetic group differences, which had been slumbering peacefully on my mind, awakened and in tumult. The 10,000 Year Explosion, deserves and requires many readers and many critics.
Review by Paul R. Fleischman author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.
Top reviews from other countries
Encore une fois dommage que ce livre ne soit pas traduit en français tout comme bien d'autres livres sur la psychologie évolutionnistes qui sont seulement disponibles en anglais. cela prive les non anglophone d'une importante littérature scientifique.
Auch der Prozess der Herausbildung von verschiedenen geistig-seelischen Profilen, inklusive unterschiedlicher Durchschnitts-Intelligenz-Quotienten, wird behandelt. Genau dieses Feld ist meinem Empfinden nach aber eher etwas zu kurz gekommen. Die Aussagen hierzu sind richtig und wissenschaftlich fundiert, aber angesichts der vielen Ewig-Gestrigen, die dem Menschen zumindest im geistig-seelischen Bereich keine biologisch-genetische Grundlage zubilligen wollen, sollte dieser Bereich noch viel deutlicher von den Basis-Argumenten her untermauert werden.
Auf jeden Fall ein höchst lesenswertes Buch, das hoffentlich auch bald ins Deutsche übersetzt wird.







