Africa and the Malthusian Wringer

Nicholas Wade is in trouble for trying to bring up the topic of the selection pressures felt by Africans in Africa. That's not a topic we are supposed to think about. Instead, we are supposed to nod along as T-N Coates informs us that the reason African-Americans have lower property values than white Americans is solely because of bad things done by white Americans since 1619 so white must pay reparations. No history from before 1619 is imaginable. 

But as Wade wrote in The Spectator:

More specific evidence that evolution has shaped human social behaviour in the recent past comes from a third major social transition, from agrarian to modern economies. 

This transition is usually known as the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone in agrarian economies but the rich lived near the edge of starvation. Whenever any improvement in farming technology raised productivity, more children were born, the extra mouths ate up the surplus and semi-starvation soon reigned again. This harsh regime is known as a Malthusian economy after the Revd Thomas Malthus, who described it in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’. As it happened, the Malthusian regime was nearing an end at the very time Malthus was writing because of the vast increase in productivity that was the essence of the Industrial Revolution. 

The cause of the Industrial Revolution is the central issue of economic history, yet economic historians have arrived at no consensus as to what that cause or causes may have been. Their preferred candidates are institutions of various kinds, or access to resources. For a quite different explanation, step back to Malthus for a moment. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the idea of natural selection. 

Darwin perceived that if people were struggling on the edge of existence, as Malthus described, then a person with the slightest advantage would have more children and bequeath this advantage to them. ‘Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work,’ Darwin wrote in his autobiography. 

If the English population provided the example from which Darwin intuited the idea of natural selection, that population was surely being subjected to the same force. The question then is what traits were being selected for. The economic historian Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, has documented four behavioural changes in the English population between 1200 and 1800 AD. 

The level of violence declined, literacy increased, and so did work hours and the propensity to save. The effect of these changes, Clark notes in his 2009 book Farewell to Alms, was to transform the violent peasant population of 1200 into the disciplined workforce of 1800. Because the nature of the people had changed, productivity soared, and for the first time an increase in population failed to drag down the standard of living. 

Clark not only documents the behavioural change in English society but also provides a plausible mechanism of hereditary transmission. From the study of wills he finds that the well-off had more surviving children than the poor. Since the size of the English population remained fairly constant, many children of the rich must have dropped in social status, diffusing the genes and values that had made their parents wealthy into the wider-population. 

The same process presumably occurred in other agrarian populations, which is why the Industrial Revolution spread so easily to other European countries and later, after political obstacles had been removed, to the countries of East Asia. 

With all three transitions, an evolutionary change is plausible but remains a hypothesis nonetheless: proof awaits discovery of the relevant genes. ...

Persistently poor countries, particularly those that are still tribally organised, have not been through the Malthusian wringer experienced by agrarian populations and may therefore find the transition to a modern state that much harder. 

Jared Diamond made a lot of money off his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel documenting how different the environment was in Africa than in Eurasia. But when in 2002 during a previously congenial conversation I brought up the obvious implication of his book, as I put it in my 1997 review in National Review: "Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection," his face fell, he gathered his things and hustled out of the auditorium. Diamond isn't dumb.

The lack of a Malthusian Trap in most of Africa during most of pre-history is a central theme in the best book I've read on Africa, John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent. The concept of a Malthusian Trap is hard enough to grasp, so it's particularly braintwisting to come to grips with the implications of the lack of a Malthusian Trap. So, please allow me to repeat what I blogged in 2010:

Reader writes on p. 249:

The human population of Africa has never approached the size that the continent seems capable of supporting. ... An FAO survey published in 1991 reported that only 22 percent of land in Africa suitable for agriculture was actually in production (the comparable figure for south-east Asia is 92 per cent).

Reader offers a long list of discouraging factors, such as disease burden, poor soil, and wild beasts, especially elephants. We think elephants are cute, but they're huge and thus quite capable of eating a farmer's crop. Africa tended to be populated in a patchwork fashion. In some regions, enough people could be concentrated to drive off elephants, while other areas were conceded to elephants until enough human numbers could be assembled. Somewhat similarly, stronger herding tribes would tend to drive farming tribes (who use less land per person) into refuges in the mountains or islands. 

So, intensive agricultural use of land was rare, which meant that men didn't have to work terribly hard at farm work as long as they had women hoeing weeds for them. 

Reader writes:

From the time that Europeans first set foot in Africa, travelers have commented upon what they saw as an excessive interest in sex among Africans.

Think of this from the perspective of the Malthusian Trap. Europeans already tended to voluntarily keep their populations below Malthusian limits by practicing the moral restraint that the Rev. Malthus famously advised in 1798. From 1200-1800, the average age of first marriage for an Englishwoman was 24-26. Rich women tended to marry at younger ages, poor women at older. Illegitimacy rates were in the lower single digits. 

Thus, due to this sexual restraint, Europeans tended to be in a less Malthusian situation than, say, the Chinese, who tended to marry younger. Consequently, Europeans tended to be richer while working less hard than the Chinese. If the European population didn't grow as fast during good times as the Chinese population did, they didn't experience quite as many vast die-offs from famine during times when good government broke down (e.g., as recently as the early 1960s during Mao's crazy Great Leap Forward). England, for example, hasn't had a major famine in over 600 years.

So, Europeans developed cultural forms that attempted to sublimate sexual urges in more restrained and refined directions. Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example.

In Africa, however, conditions of life were such that the Malthusian Trap was not an active worry. More people were needed, so African culture -- dance, song, and so forth -- tended to encourage mating now rather than to encourage delay. Listening to Top 40 radio today, this pattern seems to have carried over from Africa.