Understanding Human History: the book

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ARTICLE BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE
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September 24, 2007

Magical Thinking on I.Q.
Thinking.

By John Derbyshire

I can never think about the topic of I.Q. without recalling the late Willard Espy’s immortal “I-ku haiku.” From memory:

I ku; you ku; he, she, or it ku;
We ku; you ku; they ku.
Than ku.

Espy’s lines don’t make much sense, but they make more sense than a lot of the stuff that gets written about I.Q. Case in point: David Brooks’s remarkably lame-brained piece in the New York Times the other day. I say “remarkably” because David is a very smart guy, and people that smart do not often sign their names to such unmitigated twaddle.

The wittiest comments on David’s piece came from the Anglosphere’s best living human-sciences journalist, Steve Sailer. Steve supplies the full text of the Brooks piece for good measure (with his comments at the end). Alex at the Gene Expression website conducted a point-by-point demolition of the Brooks piece, with linked bibliographical references — I counted 23. No doubt there have been other critiques around the web from people WHO ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT PSYCHOMETRICS.

The Brooks piece caught my attention because I had just finished reading Michael Hart’s book Understanding Human History. Hart’s aim is to do for the history of our species what Lynn and Vanhanen did for economics: to bring forward intelligence — the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function — as an important factor. Not the only factor, of course, but an important factor.

History on the grand scale is about different human populations interacting via war, trade, migration, or religious proselytizing. The Proto-Indo-Europeans occupied Europe; Phoenician traders established Carthage; Dravidian-speakers swept in over the aborigines of India, and were swept over in turn by Indo-European speakers; the Roman Empire fell to German pagans, the Meso-American ones to Spanish Christians; Polynesians colonized the Pacific; black African slaves were shipped to Arabia and the Americas, while white European ones where shipped to North Africa; Jews from the Middle East scattered into Europe to form merchant communities; the Mongol Horde came and went; Buddhism spread throughout southeast Asia; the East India Company morphed into British India, and so on.

Different populations, descended from different small founder groups, and evolved through hundreds of generations in different homelands under different selection pressures, emerged from those homelands at the end of the Neolithic and began these historic exchanges — began to trade, fight, conquer, enslave, settle, convert. If it is the case that intelligence — the ability to comprehend and manipulate the world, including the social world (which includes the military and political worlds) — if it is the case that intelligence is differently distributed in different populations, that fact must have had great consequences for history. And if not, then obviously, not.

On the premise that it is the case, Hart works his way through history taking intelligence as one of the determinants for events. He tells the story of the earliest human migrations, paralleling the account in Nicholas Wade’s fine book. He comes up with novel explanations for some puzzling facts — e.g. that successful north-to-south invasions are much more common than south-to-norths. He gives a good critique of Jared Diamond’s thesis that, to put it in the smallest possible nutshell, natural selection came to a screeching halt 50,000 years ago — that the laws of biology were suspended back in the paleolithic in order that 21st-century Western liberals should not be plagued by thoughts that are unpleasant (Diamond’s actual adjective is “loathsome”) or unpopular.

Hart is not obsessive or dogmatic about the I.Q. factor in history, and freely admits that population differences in intelligence may have played no part, or an unknowable part, in some big events.

In a discussion of possible causes for the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, he includes, as possible cause number 8, that the decline of Rome may have been due in part to “the deterioration of the Roman gene pool, caused by interbreeding with conquered peoples and slaves who, on average, possessed lower native intelligence than the Romans.” His final conclusion, though, is a balanced and agnostic one:

Conclusion: The cause of the drastic decline and eventual collapse of Rome is still an undecided question. The most likely explanation is probably some combination of the social-decay hypotheses described above. However, the possibility that climate change played a major role — perhaps even the central role — cannot be ruled out.

(Just for the record, Hart’s other possibles are:

1. Loss of faith in the traditional national religion.
2. Loss of nationalist/patriotic feelings.
3. Increased corruption.
4. Impoverishment of the peasantry.
5. Lack of plunder.
6. Foreign attacks.
7. Depopulation due to major epidemics.

9. Lead poisoning.
10. Climate change in Western Europe.)

Hart’s science is sound so far as I can judge. (He has a bachelor’s in math, a Ph.D. in astronomy, and two masters — in physics and computer science.) It’s in the nature of the topic that much of what he writes is speculative, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Speculation based on sound science is interesting. When science has told us that X, Y, and Z are the case, an inquisitive commentator can say: “Well, then, X, Y, and Z being so, it may be that when we have inquired more deeply and gathered more data, A, B, and C will follow, since they do not contradict X, Y, and Z. Or possibly not; perhaps P, Q, and R — which likewise do not contradict the known facts — will turn out to be the case.” This is all a normal part of the imaginative and intellectual to-ing and fro-ing that inspires new research programs, from which in turn new knowledge emerges.

As interesting as all this population-genetics stuff is to us science geeks, what is just as interesting, though in a different way, is the tremendous resistance to it all on the part of non-science intellectuals like David Brooks.

IQ score either does, or does not, measure some real aspect of the human personality. Human populations who underwent the latest stages of their evolution in higher latitudes either do, or do not, have I.Q. distributions with higher means than those of lower-latitude groups. A people’s I.Q. profile either is, or is not, a determinant of its economic or military success, or cultural prominence. Let’s gather the data and crunch the numbers and see if we can get clear answers, shall we? (With the understanding, as always in the sciences, and most especially in the human sciences, that clear answers may not be forthcoming from the datasets we have been able to gather.)

No, say the Brookses, let’s not. There was that book a dozen or so years ago, the one that created such a fuss in the political-literary magazines that I and all my friends read. Well, that’s quite enough of that. Didn’t those guys turn out to be some kind of racists? Euiw! Let’s not think about it any more.

And so on... ending up with the highly peculiar spectacle of thoughtful, well-educated conservatives clinging fearfully to the skirts of the late Stephen Jay Gould and the extant Richard Lewontin — both declared Marxists! Anything, any place, any refuge, any companions, anything in the world but be forced to face unwelcome truths — be forced to abandon the warm comfort of wishful thinking and the smiling approval of our social peers.

Knowing that I lean to the nature side of most nature-nurture controversies, readers occasionally e-mail in with something from the newspapers offering evidence for nurturism. My stock response is: “All nurturist claims in the general press must be read with the understanding that there is terrific psychic & social pressure on any commentator or researcher who wants to keep his job and his friends to make as much as possible of any nurturist evidence, and as little as possible of any naturist evidence. You should apply an appropriate bias-correcting discount to all you read.”

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.

When the magical (I wish this to be so: Therefore it is so!) and the religious (we are all one! brotherhood of man!) and the social (this is what all good citizens believe!) come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can unhinge even the best minds. David Brooks’s embarrassing little venture into psychometry is only the latest illustration of this melancholy truth.

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Book review in American Renaissance, by Thomas Jackson

2007-11-28T18:16:00.000-08:00

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BOOK REVIEW BY THOMAS JACKSON
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December 2007

Making Sense of the Past : Thomas Jackson reviews Understanding Human History, by Prof. Michael Hart, a phenomenal study of the history and progress of human societies from the days of antiquity to the present. As Mr. Jackson notes, “What sets Dr. Hart apart in his analysis of history is the light of racial differences in intelligence.”

Book review by Jerry Pournelle: Chaos Manor Reviews

2007-11-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

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"THE BOOK OF THE MONTH"
BOOK REVIEW BY JERRY E. POURNELLE
http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-327-c.php

October 30, 2007

The book of the month is Understanding Human History, by Michael H. Hart. This is a very Politically Incorrect book. Hart’s central thesis is that one must take evolution seriously, and evolution happens fairly quickly. His corollary is that history is best understood as a contest won by the most intelligent peoples; and that those who evolved in cold climates evolved the most intelligence. Living in cold climates requires skinning animals, making clothes, building fires; developing sewing instruments; cooperation and language. Those who develop such techniques have offspring. Those who don’t die off without children. In tropical climates other factors (including resistance to diseases) are more important for having children. Since different races evolved in different places, Hart explicitly ranks the races of man by intelligence. Needless to say this is not a popular view.

Hart explicitly discusses Jarred Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as an alternate theory of human history, and confronts Diamond directly. He also addresses the Flynn Effect.

Understanding Human History covers the entire sweep of human history in 480 pages including footnotes, bibliography, and index. The entire history of Rome from founding to Fall takes only fifteen pages. Needless to say this is not a book rich in details. It’s not an intellectual or military or even economic history of the world. It does attempt to assess the contributions of various civilizations and peoples to modern civilization. You may or may not agree with the assessments. It is certain that academia will disagree violently with just about every aspect of Hart’s thesis.

If you’re wondering what all the shouting about IQ and History is over, this is a readable way to find out what a strict evolutionist makes of the development of human civilization.

Book review by Steve Sailer: Vdare and iSteve

2007-11-24T20:31:00.000-08:00

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BOOK REVIEW BY STEVE SAILER
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August 12, 2007

A Real Diamond: Michael Hart’s Understanding Human History

By Steve Sailer

The ambitious History of Everything book has been an important genre at least since Sir Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World.

The most popular example of recent years: Jared Diamond's 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempted to explain the always-interesting question of who conquered whom over the last 13,000 years without mentioning differences in average intelligence among human groups—a factor that he ruled out, a priori, as too "racist" and "loathsome" even to think about.

Now, there's another entry in this genre: Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History: An analysis including the effects of geography and differential evolution (Washington Summit Publishers, pp. 484, $24.95).

Hart's book serves as a comprehensive refutation of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s an impressive and insightful attempt to provide a more careful and powerful answer to Diamond's question about why some peoples came to rule other peoples.

Unlike Diamond, Hart is also interested in a second, less bloodthirsty question: who gave what to the entire human race in terms of science, technology, and the arts.

This is a fascinating topic—but one that the Diamonds of the world shy away from, since measuring contributions rather than conquests don't present an opportunity for the competitive moralism, the public white-guilt breast-beating afforded by the European expansion of 1400-1900.

Over the same period, as everyone knows deep down, virtually every advance that is now the shared patrimony of humanity was made by Europeans or their offshoots. These days, that’s a rather inconvenient truth.

Hart sums up:

"The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between human groups (in particular, differences in average native intelligence) have been an important factor in human history."

Hart is a polymath: a rocket scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who worked at NASA and was a physics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Along the way, he picked up a law degree.

Every decade or two, Hart publishes a book for a general audience. His best-known: 1978's The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.

(Hart’s top six, by the way, were Muhammad, Newton, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and St. Paul. I'm sure your ranking would differ, but that was the fun of Hart’s book: it was a great argument-starter. His complete list is here.)

Now, in Understanding Human History, Hart changes his focus from individuals to racial groups. He begins with a quick (130 pages) but close to state-of-the-art overview of the human sciences relevant to history—physical anthropology , linguistics, population genetics and psychometrics. This section alone would be worth the price of the book. Hart has mastered the scientific literature through at least 2005. For instance, Hart, who is Jewish, devotes three pages to the fascinating theory published two years ago by genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending and physicist turned evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran that European Jews evolved their higher IQs just over the last millennium.

After reviewing the human sciences, Hart moves on to perhaps the most concise history of the world from the Stone Age to the late 20th Century imaginable.

Many of the famous "big histories," such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, and Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence are suffused with their authors' personalities. But Hart almost never stops for a self-indulgent aside, which allows him to race through in fewer than 500 pages. The one personal touch I noticed:

"Individuals differ widely in their behavior. Some writers have conjectured that all such differences are due entirely to differences in training, upbringing, and conditioning. Those of us who have reared more than one child usually think otherwise."

Hart's judgment, while laconic, is generally quite sound.

In Guns, Germs, & Steel, Diamond purported to explain why Europeans were able to conquer the New World so easily by emphasizing differences between the New and Old Worlds. Thus, Diamond pointed out that Europeans benefited from more exposure (and thus more immunity) to disease; from metal-working technology; from having more species of domesticable animals; and from the broad East-West orientation of Eurasia, allowing Old World crops like Turkey's wheat to spread faster than New World crops like Mexico's corn, which had only been finally adapted to the much shorter growing season of Massachusetts shortly before the Pilgrims arrived.

Unfortunately, Diamond's reasoning, while clever, was ad hoc. It was clearly whipped up to explain away a politically incorrect reality. A real contribution to our comprehension of history could only come from a set of insights that would apply more globally than Diamond's. And that's exactly what Hart attempts.

Diamond's celebrated factors are reasonably plausible for explaining the spectacular Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century. But they fail to shed much light on famous subjugations within the Old World, such as the various invasions of India and China or the 19th century European imperialization of Africa. Refuting Diamond, Hart points out that sub-Saharan Africans, being part of the Old World, were more privileged than New World Indians in terms of the factors that Diamond emphasizes.

In contrast to Mesoamerican Indians, Sub-Saharan Africans had more disease-resistance than Europeans (for example, they had genetic adaptations for surviving malaria). Plus they could make iron; possessed domestic cattle, sheep, and goats; had been exposed to literacy on their northern edge in places like Timbuktu; and possessed a continent that is 4,500 miles wide from Senegal to Somalia—not that much narrower than Eurasia's 6,200 miles.

And yet, Africans didn't build anything close to comparable to the hidden city of Machu Picchu (Incan) or the pyramids of Chichen Itza (Mayan) and Teotihuacán (Central Mexican).

The fundamental problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is one I pointed out in my 1997 review:

"Diamond sets out to reaffirm the equality of humanity by showing the inequality of the continents. … 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."

Diamond's millions of fans no doubt assume that evolution couldn't work fast enough to diversify human behavioral tendencies, since modern humans (presumably) emerged from Africa only about 60,000 years ago. But the disingenuous Diamond knows that's not true—evolution can work rather quickly.

In 2002, Diamond and I were pleasantly chatting after his keynote address at junk bond legend Michael Milken's annual confab when I brought this up.

Diamond immediately grabbed his things and half-jogged out of the room.

Diamond has made a lot of money pandering to current intellectual fashions. Hart has followed a lonelier road. For example, he has long been a regular at Jared Taylor's controversial IQ and race-oriented American Renaissance conferences. As he rightly says:

"This book does not contain any suggestions as to what policies should be adopted—with the sole exception that we should attempt to ascertain the facts before deciding on questions of policy."

One important fact that Hart has ascertained:

"Throughout history, most of the instances of people from one region attacking and conquering substantial portions of another region have involved 'northerners' invading more southerly lands."

(The biggest exception: the Arabs of the 7th Century A.D. And the Romans conquered in all directions.)

This overall pattern of north conquering south has long been apparent from the historical record—even though northern lands are generally less populous, due to shorter growing seasons.

For example, mighty China, a vast empire with a competent bureaucracy chosen by meritocratic tests, was never much threatened by southerners, but it built the vast Great Wall to keep out its much less numerous northern neighbors. Nonetheless, China was twice fully conquered by northerners—the Mongols in the 13th century and the Manchus in the 17th century. And its northern half was conquered by the Manchurian Jurchens in the 12th century.

Likewise, the vastly populous Indian subcontinent was seldom a threat to its northern neighbors, but was frequently overrun from the northwest.

This pattern has been validated by recent DNA studies. (Hart fails to mention this, which is surprising considering how otherwise up to date he is on the human sciences.) In populations of mixed background, the male line of descent (as seen in the Y-chromosome) tends to derive from north of the homeland of the female line of descent (as seen in the mitochondrial DNA). Implication: men from the north more frequently overcame the men from the south and took their women.

Examples: Latin Americans (white fathers and Indian or black mothers), African-Americans (whites and blacks), Asian Indians (Aryans and Dravidians), and Icelanders (Vikings and Celts). Similarly, the Han Chinese, the world's largest ethnic group, are more likely to be descended from northern Chinese men and southern Chinese women than vice-versa.

Likewise, the man who left the largest footprint yet found on the Y-chromosomes of humanity was Genghis Khan from cold Mongolia. He left roughly 800,000 times more descendants in the direct male line than the average man alive at the time.

The Manchu founder of the Qing dynasty that ruled China from 1644-1911 shows up as another of history's most fecund forefathers.

The pattern is even true in England. The main outside infusion of male Y-chromosomes in historic times apparently came from the Vikings.

Hart offers a simple, deliberately reductionist model for explaining this (and much else): Foresight is needed to survive cold winters. So harsher, more northerly climates select for higher average intelligence. And intelligence is useful in war.

Indeed, there is a positive correlation between latitude and the average intelligence of modern countries, as summarized in Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. (Here's my table listing their data.) In 2006, Lynn found a substantial r = 0.67 correlation between national average IQ and the absolute value of latitude. Similarly, the correlation between IQ and average temperature is r = -0.63.

On the other hand, within continents there often aren't obvious latitude-related IQ disparities. For instance, the IQ differences among most European countries are too small to worry about.

Northerners have tended to be better at organizing on a large scale. This could be related to intelligence, but doesn't have to be. During WWII, for example, according to military historian John Keegan the Italians were probably the worst soldiers in Europe and the Finns the best. But Finland's average IQ isn't higher than Italy's.

No doubt other factors contribute to the long history of Northern military successes. For example, the ease of raising horses on the Eurasian steppe, varying family structures—and of course the ancient moral explanation, going back to the Roman historian Tacitus, that contrasts northern hardiness, self-sacrifice, and motivation with southern decadence, backstabbing, and enervation.

Nor is climate the only factor determining intelligence—or the Eskimos would be the smartest people on Earth. (They are, however, probably the smartest hunter-gatherers.)

Enough about conquest. What about contributions?

The most productive centers of cultural innovation have tended to move north over the millennia, for example, from the Fertile Crescent to Ancient Greece to Renaissance Northern Italy to Enlightenment Northern Europe. Hart attributes this to agriculture tending to arise first in low-to-medium latitude locations with long growing seasons then spreading northward. In hunter-gatherer economies, every man must hunt. But in farming economies, enough food can be produced to support urban sophisticates.

Hart’s position is likely to accumulate still more scientific support. There are several forthcoming papers that will offer even newer insights into evolution's impact on recent human history.

For example, Hart assumes, not unreasonably, that higher intelligence has been evolving steadily upward since modern humans first spread out from Africa about 60,000 years ago, under the Darwinian selective pressure of surviving cold winters. But Greg Cochran is now proposing that evolution for intelligence and other behavioral traits useful in the modern world is actually accelerating.

Cochran reasons that a large population is more conducive to increases in intelligence than a small population—the more people in a breeding pool, the higher the chance of favorable mutations. Thus, the combination of temperate climates and large populations in Northeast Asia and Europe would explain the high average IQs, and consequent economic dominance, of those two regions. Conversely, while the Arctic climate likely selects strongly for cleverness, the inevitably limited number of Eskimos means they have fewer gene variations to select from.

Reflecting this notion that evolution speeding up, Nicholas Wade of the New York Times reported last week on the new book A Farewell To Alms by economist Greg Clark on the historic changes in behavior and attitude that enabled the English to start the Industrial Revolution:

"Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. 'Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,' he writes. And, 'The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.'"[ In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence, August 7, 2007]

Understanding Human History brings new clarity to the vast sweep of human history.

I predict, therefore, that it will make only a tiny fraction as much money as Guns, Germs, and Steel.

But in the long run, it will likely matter more.

[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.]

Book review by Larry Auster: View from the Right

2007-11-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

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