From the authors of the forthcoming Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: Biology for the Bookish
via Arts & Letters Daily

The prospect of staying alive through time via future generations is the motivation underlying sex, love, and indeed everything in the organic world. ….

In justifying [the society of Orwell’s 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People are immensely malleable, more so, in all likelihood, than any other species. But infinitely? Absolutely not.

….

Denial of love, of genuine sex (which is to say, difficult, but also gratifying), of reproductive opportunity, of individuality are all denials of our organic humanness.

….

Despite the inherently depressing plot lines of most dystopias, they persist in their fundamental popularity. The Handmaid’s Tale, a modern feminist classic by Margaret Atwood, warns of a future in which “love is not the point.” And neither, of course, is motherhood or child rearing. Ironically, the novel was intended as a criticism of evolutionary thinking, which Atwood interprets as oppressing women by enshrining reproduction as their sole biological and cultural “role.” Notwithstanding her distrust of sociobiology, it is Atwood’s paradoxically acute grasp of evolutionary realities — especially the centrality of reproduction — that makes The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as her most recent work, Oryx and Crake, such a powerful dystopian story.

….

Just as Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which cheap, artificial entertainment substitutes for the “real thing,” the phenomenally popular movie The Matrix describes a vision that is even more nightmarish: a computer-generated cyberworld in which human beings, deceived as to their true situation, believe that they are living genuine lives. But they aren’t. Most are victimized by a vast network of machines, their bodies preyed upon while their minds wander, misled, in a virtual “matrix” in which strings of code give the illusion that protein gruel is really champagne and steak. By contrast, DNA, our own, genuinely biological code, gives us actual champagne and steak — pleasuring our taste buds while fueling our organic metabolism. The Matrix, a prime example of a life-denying, biology-perverting dystopia, envisions a world that is literally drained of its physicality.

Perhaps one reason The Matrix (at least, the first episode) is so resonant is that organic genuineness has become less accessible to us all. “The ordinary city-dweller,” wrote philosopher Susanne Langer, “knows nothing of the earth’s productivity. He does not know the sunrise and rarely notices when the sun sets … His realities are the motors that run elevators, subway trains, and cars. … Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more.”

Posted by jeet at 08:15 PM

While cognizant that this post feeds the conspiracy minded, I did find it interesting that Ukranian Presidential contender Viktor Yushchenko has been battling a mystery illness, which:

Yushchenko’s doctors in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, said they had determined that “chemicals not of a food origin” had triggered the illness.

Is this illness the result of directed poisoning, similar to the Ricin unbrella attack that befell Georgi Markov, something out of the Russian Chemical Weapons research program or something, while still unsolved, of a much less sinister origin?

Time Magazine reports that Putin is very keen on a Yanukovych victory:

There’s also the risk a wayward Ukraine could damage relations between Moscow and the West. During the campaign, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not hide his sympathies: he visited Ukraine twice to broadcast his support for Yanukovych. Political consultants and media specialists close to the Kremlin played a major role in shaping both the strategy and the message of the Yanukovych campaign, and according to specialists like the Carnegie Endowment’s Anders Aslund, Russia pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into his election bid. On Monday, Putin was the first world leader to congratulate the Prime Minister on his victory, a full two days before the Electoral Commission declared him President-elect. Sources well briefed on Kremlin affairs tell TIME that as protests in Kiev gathered momentum, Putin urged the much-discredited outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, eager to secure a safe retirement amid charges of corruption and political violence, to declare Yanukovych the winner. The sources say Putin made it clear that Moscow would not accept a Yushchenko victory. Posted by TangoMan at 01:24 AM

Kevin Drum continues his stirring of the hornet’s nest, this time linking to Alex Taborrok’s post on a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Bruce Sacerdote that examined the outcomes of Korean children who were randomly assigned to adoptive families back in the the 70’s. Jane Galt also picks up the item. We should compare and contrast how the readership of these two different blogs reacts to the research.

Sacerdote pretty much supports the thesis put forward by Judith Rich Harris in her book, The Nurture Assumption which boils down to the fact that parenting doesn’t matter all that much in determining how well the children do later in life. (Sailer’s review and Harris’ shorter version published in Psychological Review and Jason Malloy’s review of the Harris-Kagan dispute.) What does emerge from the paper is that genetics does matter and the causality arrow for the high income or college educated mother may actually start at the genetic level rather than at the environmental level.

Sacerdote finds that family income had no effect on the eventual incomes of the adoptive children but did influence the biological children. Also, he found that college graduation rates, height and obesity all have stronger correlations for biological children than for the adoptive children.

The tide continues to roll in.

Posted by TangoMan at 12:59 PM

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great piece called “Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Utopias” that I’m sure all of you will find interesting. The primary focus of the article is a common unifying them in most dystopian literature, mainly the “denial of biology.”

Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply made unattainable.

…

In justifying this nightmare society [in George Orwell’s 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”

Sound familiar? In this age where 1984 and Brave New World are constantly cited by left-wing opponents of such things as the PATRIOT Act, it’s good to see some authors out there pointing out things that these very same critics might otherwise ignore because it contradicts their ideology. I had completely forgotten that O’Brien quote, but I’m sure a great many individuals on the left would agree with him (not all, mind you).

So check it out! Also, I’ll be posting a great essay by a political scientist that applies sociobiology to international relations theory soon, so keep a look out on this site for it! Wait until you see how this guy’s opponents start citing Gould and Lewontin…

Posted by arcane at 11:32 PM

Extrapolating current bandwidth needs, I’ll probably have to move the blog to another host around the new year. This means more costs and more hours of my short life devoted to the ignoble task of weblog administration. Please consider following one of the Amazon links on the sidebar if you are buying books as presents during the holidays-doesn’t cost you anything extra.

By the way, multiple copies of Robert Trivers’ Natural Selection and Social Theory are available for $10, though the list price is $50! There is a telling anecdote about Richard Lewontin in the introduction to his reciprocal altruism paper….

Update: In response to David Boxenhorn’s suggestion I hacked up a trivial script which will take a conventional AMAZON url and spit back another one which is formatted so GNXP gets a kickback if you follow the link and purchase. All these books are saved so others can see what readers buy. Anyway, whether it works is up to you. The link will be under the heading Books for the holidays in the sidebar.

Update II: OK, made some changes to the code. Here is the file with the HTML stuff, and the class code. It’s all pretty self-evident.

Posted by razib at 10:03 PM

A few weeks ago there were reports of a possible ’gene for homosexuality’ on the X-chromosome, which produced a higher incidence of homosexuality in males but increased fertility in females. In comments on the subject I suggested that a gene on the X-chromosome would tend to promote the reproductive fitness of females at the expense of males (up to a limit of twice the advantage to females) since an X-chromosome spends on average twice as long in females as it does in males.

While making this comment I had qualms that the argument might be fallacious, so I have tried to think it through properly. My post on the X-chromosome waltz analysed what was meant by saying that an X-chromosome spends twice as long in females as it does in males. I also discovered while re-reading Matt Ridley’s Genome that none other than Robert Trivers had already put forward essentially the same proposal: ‘Trivers argued that, because an X chromosome spends twice as much time in women as it does in men, a sexually antagonistic gene that benefited female fertility could survive even if it had twice as large a deleterious effect on male fertility’. [Note 1].

So the argument can’t be fallacious….. can it?

………… Well, not exactly, but it is tricky. Not for the first time, I wish I hadn’t got caught up in the problem! The complication is that in a sexually reproducing population, with equal numbers of males and females, the average reproductive fitness (number of offspring per individual) must be the same for males and females. A particular gene may promote greater fitness among females than in males (or vice versa), but any difference in fitness is constrained by the overall equality of fitness of males and females in the population. This is not a serious constraint when the gene is rare, but if the gene becomes common this factor needs to be taken into account. As the gene approaches fixation its fitness among both males and females must approach the population average (which assuming a stable population must be around two offspring per parent surviving to maturity).

The exact pattern of evolution of the gene in males and females will depend on the details of relative fitness (including considerations of genetic dominance, etc). For further discussion see Note 2. (It’s tedious, but I include it on the off-chance that someone may want to check the assumptions and workings.) On the assumption that the gene has constant fitness relative to its rival alleles in the same sex, the general outcome is that:

a. a gene favouring fertility in females at the expense of males can survive if and only if the advantage in females is more than half the disadvantage in males

b. provided the advantage in females is more than half the disadvantage in males, the gene will either go to fixation or settle at an equilibrium short of fixation, depending on the balance of advantage and disadvantage. No matter how great the advantage in females, there can still be an equilibrium frequency if the countervailing disadvantage in males is strong enough. Conversely, no matter how small the advantage, the gene could still go to fixation if the disadvantage in males is also sufficiently small. For more on the conditions for equilibrium, see Note 2.

The theoretical possibility of a balanced equilibrium frequency is consistent with the observation of a persistent non-zero incidence of homosexuality in modern populations, though there may of course be other reasons for this, and homosexuality may not have a genetic basis at all (or there may be both genetic and environmental causes). It is also consistent with the quoted comment of Trivers, which refers to a gene ’surviving’, but not necessarily changing in frequency.

On the face of it, a fitness advantage among females of at least half the disadvantage to males is a fairly modest requirement, so one might expect such genes on the X-chromosome to be common. One might also expect there to be cases where the disadvantage to males is so small (relative to the female advantage) that the gene would go to fixation. So it may seem a puzzle that such genes have not often been detected. One explanation may be that once the gene has gone to fixation its effects on male bearers would be ’invisible’ because there would be no male non-bearers to compare them with. As pointed out earlier, the average reproductive fitness of males in the population as a whole is necessarily the same as that of females, so the effects would not be evident in differential reproduction. The effect of the gene on males would only manifest itself in traits such as general health and longevity. Since males do tend to have shorter lives than females, this might be due in part to such ’invisible’ fitness disadvantages. (But note that in some organisms, e.g. birds and butterflies, males are the homogametic sex.)

On the other hand, such genes may be difficult to find because in practice it is not so easy to increase female fitness at the expense of males. The factors which make females more fertile, such as efficient use of nutrition, are probably in general good for males too. Factors which make females more attractive to males may be an exception to this rule – which is why ‘genes for homosexuality’ are a plausible example – but attractiveness to males is not usually a major constraint on female fertility.

I dare say that most of the above points have been made somewhere in the literature, but I don’t recall seeing them.

Note 1
Matt Ridley, Genome, 1999, page 118. Ridley does not give a reference for the comment by Trivers.

Note 2
In a population of N females and N males there are 2N X-chromosomes in females and N in males. Suppose an allele A on the X-chromosome promotes the fitness of females while damaging that of males. If we call all the other alleles at the same locus B, there will be two relevant genotypes, AY and BY, among males, and three genotypes, AA, AB, and BB, among females. Let the frequency of the A gene in the population be p, so that there are pN copies of A among males and p2N among females.

It is reasonable to suppose that each genotype has a constant fitness relative to other genotypes in the same sex. (This would not always be the case, e.g. if there is frequency-dependent selection, but we ignore that possibility.) In males there are only two genotypes, so the matter is relatively simple. We may assume that BY has fitness x (where x is the average number of offspring surviving to maturity per individual BY male), while AY has fitness (1-c)x, with c representing the disadvantage or ’cost’ of the A gene in males (note that c cannot be greater than 1, since fitness cannot be less than zero). In a stable population with N males the total number of offspring surviving to maturity will be 2N. The frequency of AY is p, and of BY is 1-p, so we have pN(1-c)x + (1-p)Nx = 2N, which gives x = 2/(1-cp). The fitness of AY is therefore 2(1-c)/(1-cp), and there will be 2Np(1-c)/(1-cp) offspring of AY males in the next generation. (For simplicity I assume discrete generations.) Since each offspring of an AY male has a ½ probability of receiving an A gene, the total number of A genes in the offspring of males will be Np(1-c)/(1-cp). (All the offspring with an X-chromosome will of course be female, but that is not relevant for the present purpose.) The reduction in the number of A genes in the population due to the disadvantage of the A gene among males is therefore Np – Np(1-c)/(1-cp), which simplifies to Npc(1-p)/(1-cp).

The position among females is more complicated, because there are three genotypes to consider. The simplest assumption is that gene effects are additive, so that the heterozygote AB has fitness half-way between that of AA and BB. We may therefore assume that BB has fitness x, AB has fitness (1+b)x, and AA has fitness (1+2b)x, with b representing the fitne
ss ’benefit’ of the A gene among females. We assume that these relative fitnesses are constant. Unfortunately the size of x depends also on the proportions of the different genotypes in the population. If we assume random mating, resulting in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the proportions are p^2, 2p(1-p), and (1-p)^2 for AA, AB, and BB respectively. Assuming a total of 2N offspring, this gives x = 2/(1+2bp), so the fitness of AA is 2(1+2b)/(1+2bp), and of AB is 2(1+b)/(1+2bp). The AA females have collectively 2Np^2(1+2b)/(1+2bp) offspring, while the AB females have 4Np(1-p)(1+b)/(1+2bp) offspring. Since each AA female has two A genes, the expected number of A genes passed on by AA females is ½ x 2 x 2Np^2(1+2b)/(1+2bp), whereas the number of A genes passed on by AB females is ½ x 4Np(1-p)(1+b)/(1+2bp). Adding and simplifying we get the total number of A genes passed on by females as 2Np(1+b+bp)/(1+2bp). Since there were 2Np copies of A among females in the first generation, the increase due to the advantage of the A gene among females is 2Np(1+b+bp)/(1+2bp) – 2Np = 2Npb(1-p)/(1+2bp).

It should be noted that with increasing p, the fitness of the female genotypes AA and AB falls, as the numerator is constant while the denominator 1+2bp rises. Conversely, among males the fitness of the genotype AY rises, as the value of the denominator 1-cp falls. An intuitive way of understanding this is that as A becomes more common, it is increasingly competing against itself rather than the alternative B, which is weaker than A among females but stronger than A among males. So as p increases, the competition gets stronger for females but weaker for males.

We are finally in a position to compare the increase in A genes due to the advantage among females with the decrease due to the disadvantage among males:

Increase: 2Npb(1-p)/(1+2bp)
Decrease: Npc(1-p)/(1-cp).

One point that may be noted is that if b equals exactly ½ c, the decrease (for any non-zero p) is necessarily greater than the increase. No matter how small the frequency of the A gene in the population, it would to some extent be competing against itself, and this is sufficient in principle to tip the balance of advantage against A. With b = ½ c, the number of A genes must therefore gradually decline to zero. This may seem to conflict with the statement ascribed to Trivers, that such a gene could ‘survive even if it had twice as large a deleterious effect on male fertility’. This statement is true if the fitness disadvantage takes the form of a constant ratio in the number of offspring between the two sexes, rather than between competing alleles in the same sex. But this is not realistic unless the gene is rare; if it is common, the overall equality of fitness of males and females in the population must compress any fitness differential between male and female bearers of the A gene.

For values of b greater than ½ c, the main point of interest is whether the A gene will go to fixation or settle at some equilibrium value of p. An equilibrium will be reached if the increase due to the advantage among females exactly equals the decrease due to the disadvantage among males, that is, if 2Npb(1-p)/(1+2bp) – Npc(1-p)/(1-cp) = 0. A little algebraic manipulation shows that for values of p such that 1>p>0 this condition is satisfied if and only if 2b – c – 4bcp = 0. If we fix any two of the variables we can solve the equation for the third: e.g. for p = ¾ and b = 2/3 we get c = 4/9. It is also useful to put the equation in the form p = (2b-c)/4bc. It is evident that for any value of b, it is possible to find values of c so small that p would be greater than 1, indicating that for these values A would go to fixation. Perhaps less obviously, for any value of c it is possible to find values of b such that 1>p>0, i.e. an equilibrium short of fixation. If we take values of b converging from above towards ½ c, 2b-c will converge to 0 while 4bc converges to 2c^2, therefore (2b-c)/4bc must beyond some point in the convergence take on values between 0 and 1. So whatever the value of c, an equilibrium value of p can always be found with some value of b.

This has all assumed that gene effects are additive. I have not worked out the effect of non-additive fitness in detail, but I presume that if the fitness advantage of the homozygote AA (relative to BB) is less than twice that of AB, the equilibrium level of p would be lower than with additive gene effects, since AA homozygotes, which become more common as p increases, would add less to total female fitness than if the effects were additive, whereas the countervailing fitness disadvantage to AY males would be unaffected.

Posted by David B at 04:09 AM

Long time readers of this blog know that I love to employ Paul Krugman as a coalitional stress inducer in dialogues. Left-of-center individuals who might otherwise accept the conventional wisdom about the glory of Stephen Jay Gould (the late literate Left-of-center intellectual) are far more likely to stop and reconsider their assumptions if offered a quote from someone who shares their partisan sympathies. This has peeved some right-wing readers, but as I prioritize scientific fidelity over political purity I don’t really particularly care and feel no compunction about using this somewhat sneaky method to spread the gospel of Smith & Hamilton far & wide (“Go, therefore, to all nations and make them my disciples”). The quote that I have used before can be found in this Slate article, and if you haven’t read it, click & control-f Gould (my personal experience is that the force of this quote is strong enough to transform partisan screeching to genuine consideration pretty quickly).

In any case, I found another Krugman gem, RICARDO’S DIFFICULT IDEA, a piece bemoaning the difficulty of communicating comparative advantage to the general public (the article itself is worth reading, though I doubt it will surprise anyone in its specifics no matter what your opinion of comparative advantage is). The anecdotes that Krugam recounts makes me very grateful that the general public takes less interest in biology than economics. In any case, juicey quotes to use as weapons in online debates below, since G.W. Bush has been reelected we can be assured that Krugman will be one of the Left’s favorite intellectuals for years to come, so we might as well use his opinions to help clarify evolutionary thinking and dispel naive obscurantisms….

Old ideas are viewed as boring, even if few people have heard of them; new ideas, even if they are probably wrong and not terribly important, are far more attractive. And books that say (or seem to say) that the experts have all been wrong are far more likely to attract a wide audience than books that explain why the experts are probably right. Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life (Gould 1989) which to many readers seemed to say that recent discoveries refute Darwinian orthodoxy, attracted far more attention than Richard Dawkins’ equally well-written The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986), which explained the astonishing implications of that orthodoxy. . (See Dennett for an eye-opening discussion of Gould)…..

The article received wide attention, even though it was fairly unclear exactly how Reich proposed to go beyond free trade (there is a certain similarity between Reich and Gould in this respect: they make a great show of offering new ideas, but it is quite hard to pin down just what those new ideas really are)….

Ask a working biologist who is the greatest living evolutionary thinker, and he or she will probably answer John Maynard Smith (with nods to George Williams and William Hamilton). Maynard Smith not only has a name that should have made him an economist; he writes and thinks like an economist, representing evolutionary issues with stylized mathematical models that are sometimes confronted with data, sometimes simulated on the computer, but always serve as the true structure informing the verbal argument. A textbook like his Evolutionary Genetics (1989) feels remarkably comfortable for an academic economist: the style is familiar, and even a good bit of the content looks like things economists do too. But ask intellectuals in general for a great evolutionary thinker and they will surely name Stephen Jay Gould — who receives one brief, dismissive reference in Maynard Smith (1989)….

What does Gould have that Maynard Smith does not? He is a more accessible writer — but evolutionary theory is, to a far greater extent than economics, blessed with excellent popularizers: writers like Dawkins (1989) or Ridley (1993), who provide beautifully written expositions of what researchers have learned. (Writers like Gould or Reich are not, in the proper sense, popularizers: a popularizer reports on the work of a community of scholars, whereas these writers argue for their own, heterodox points of view). No, what makes Gould so popular with intellectuals is not merely the quality of his writing but the fact that, unlike Dawkins or Ridley, he is not trying to explain the essentially mathematical logic of modern evolutionary theory. It’s not just that there are no equations or simulations in his books; he doesn’t even think in terms of the mathematical models that inform the work of writers like Dawkins. That is what makes his work so appealing. The problem, of course, is that evolutionary theory — the real thing — is based on mathematical models; indeed, increasingly it is based on computer simulation. And so the very aversion to mathematics that makes Gould so appealing to his audience means that his books, while they may seem to his readers to contain deep ideas, seem to people who actually know the field to be mere literary confections with little serious intellectual content, and much of that simply wrong. In particular, readers whose ideas of evolution are formed by reading Gould’s work get no sense of the power and reach of the theory of natural selection — if anything, they come away with a sense that modern thought has shown that theory to be inadequate.

[my emphasis]

Posted by razib at 06:07 PM

Crossposted from GeneticFuture.org. Trawled from Genetic Kit to Pick Sports Stars The West Australian.

Want to know whether you’re better suited to endurance sports like marathons, or “sprint-power” sports like Judo or short-distance swimming? You could spend some time swimming and running and see which one feels more natural…

… or, you could just send $110AU to the Genetic Technologies Corporation in Melbourne Australia. Why sweat and expend all that unnecessary effort to figure out which athletic events are your forté? Instead, just swab your cheek, sign a check, lick a stamp, and spend 2-3 weeks on the couch while you wait for your genetic screening results.

The science behind this test doesn’t seem totally unreasonable. The company tested 300 “elite athletes” for the R577X variant of ACTN3 gene. This genetic variant determines whether or not the alpha-actinin-3 protein will be present in fast-twitch muscle fibers. It makes sense that this study found a correlation between the absence/presence of this gene and sprinting versus endurance sports.

So what’s the problem here? Genetic Technologies Corporation isn’t engaging in any serious breach of ethics here. It’s not like they’re offering you a home kit to modify your sperm so you can pick whether your future child will be a Bruce Lee or Abebe Bikila. But what, exactly, are they offering you that can’t be determined without this miracle of modern technology? A fundamental part of living life is figuring out your aptitudes. Being guided by statistics towards one sport or another doesn’t save you time — it just robs you of the opportunity to beat the statistics and be a marathon runner who has an abundance of fast-twitch muscle fibers.

What I would really like to see is a genetic test that screens for succeptibility to fall for science-based scams that encourage you spend $110AU for no good reason. Now that would be interesting!

Posted by canton at 05:25 PM

An in-press paper by two dutch psychologists, Jan te Nijenhuis and Henk van der Flier, explores why Dutch immigrants are lagging behind the majority population in work-related measures.

78 immigrants (their composition in terms of country of origin is not mentioned, but the authors do state that their research focuses primarily on people from Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Morocco, and Turkey) and 78 majority group members applying for a truck-driving position were given the GATB 1002 B (General Aptitude Test Battery), attentional-ability, perceptual-motor-ability tests (the ADM, CADM, DTG and CDTG respectively) and driver training.

Continue reading on Ultradarwinian

Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 02:30 PM

Lot of hating on Jared Diamond at GNXP lately, but his book Guns, Germs and Steel does put forward an interesting and readable “…history on the continental level” as Steve Sailer says. A more appropriate title might have been “Germs, Seeds and Hooves”, since Mr. Diamond says almost nothing about imperialism or industrialization, other than exploring how diseases moving along the Silk Road meridian became (inadvertently) the weapon with the largest body count once Europeans sailed to the Americas, Australia, and other isolated areas. Although I liked reading what he had explained, it seemed to me that in the book Mr. Diamond goes only halfway toward his stated goal of answering “Yali’s Question” which was; why do Europeans have so much “Cargo” (Technological Tools/Goods).

I was not satisfied with leaving the story there, at the continental level, so I went in search of historical/anthropological books that filled the gap Mr. Diamond had left. This posting is a review of The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. Very briefly, Prof. Pomeranz, writing in a text book style, draws on studies and archives from Europe, China, Japan, and in his opinion incomplete documentation for India, to make a case that up until 1750 there was little divergence between the most developed regions of the Eurasian continent. The book is primarily a refutation of other proposed reasons for the rise of the west. When he does discuss what caused the west to rise, he believes that European style colonies, coal usage and scientific culture were telling factors, along with Chinese monetary policy.

On an “easy to read” scale, “The Great Divergence” (henceforth GD) trails “Guns, Germs and Steel” (henceforth GGS) by a significant margin. It’s fit to be a text book and as such is mostly a very dry recitation of items from archival data or other people’s research of archival data. Also, the majority of the book (five of the six chapters, or 233 pages) is spent refuting proposed differences between selected areas of Europe, China, and Japan with occasional references to what is presently know about India in the same era. I had no trouble continuing to read it though, since here and there fascinating snippets of economic/technological history would be presented. If you can read the whole of such a book I strongly recommend it to you. If not, but you get your hands on it, reading the introduction, first chapter and sixth chapter will give you a concentrated discussion of what Prof. Pomeranz believes did happen, while only touching apon what he contends did not happen.

Prof. Pomeranz is insistent that the developed regions of Eurasia are not equivalent to their modern nation-state boundaries. The three regions he presents as near equals are Northwestern Europe to include Southern England, the Netherlands, France and some adjacent territories, the Lower Yangzi river region (China), and the Kanto and Kinai region (Japan). Rough equivalence, through 1750, of these regions is demonstrated in Life expectancy and productivity of labor. The Yangzi and Kanto regions had superior population densities to Northwestern Europe, in fact European cities through 1750 were smaller than counterparts worldwide if you also compare the Aztec and Inca cities before European contact. This demonstrates that agriculture outside of Europe had a higher yield per capita making the support of denser urban areas possible. NW Europe in 1750 did lead the world in the quality of the guns their craftsmen made, as well as clocks, waterwheels and other mechanical technologies.

Prof. Pomeranz goes on, discussing at length the similarities in market economies, consumption, investment, and ecological constraints to growth between these three regions and India and Southeast Asia as well. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable in these areas to take issue with any of his points. His arguments seem very well made to me, but I’d need to spend months in college libraries to challenge any of them.

More interesting to me is the scenario that Prof. Pomeranz proposes for how Northwestern Europe did indeed pull ahead. The points he makes are scattered throughout the book, although the first and sixth chapters present or summarize most of them. For this review I will present them in a time line. The topics were made known to me by reading GD, although I looked up some dates in other sources:

— — —

1125 AD: Until this time, Northern China, around Beijing, had led the world technologically. They had a steel industry with rates of production that would not be equaled in Northwestern Europe until after 1700. They refined coal into coke for greater efficiency. However. in this year the Jurchen tribes attack Northern China and conquer most of it, in retaliation for the Chinese empire not following through with a promise to grant them all the taxes from the Liao territory as tribute. This is the beginning of string of disasters, natural and otherwise in Northern China, culminating in 1214 when Genghis Khan captures Beijing. All these troubles scatter the artisans and craftsmen of the Chinese Steel and Coal industries throughout China as a whole. But the exploitable coal mines are in Northern China, and Chinese coal mines are dry, the greatest danger is from sparks creating fires in the mines, and so it proves expensive to transport the coal any long distance. The century from 1125 through 1214 sees the loss of the first Chinese coal industry.

1415: the Grand Canal is re-opened in China. It is the most visible line in a very well developed cargo transport system, linking the Lower Yangzi region to Northern China. With this canal system in place, the Chinese move rice and other cargo very cheaply. Northern Europe would not match this transport capacity until the first railroads are put into service in the 1840s.

~1450: Severe inflation undermines the value of Ming paper money (as little as one percent of it’s face value). The solution eventually reached, a property tax in silver. This continued through the fall of the Ming and into the Manchu dynasty, so that the effect was that China had made a monetarized silver the foundation of it’s economy.

1492: Columbus first voyage.

1500: In China, building a ship with more than two masts is a capital offense. Between 1403 and 1440 Chinese ships had sailed extensively in the Indian Ocean, but the above mentioned inflation along with the general dissolution of the Ming dynasty brought any further ocean going activity to a halt. If it had been otherwise, China might have challenged the Portuguese and Spanish in the early days of the European Age of Exploration. As it actually was, China ceded control of the oceans to other powers.

1521: Cortes assumes control of (formerly Aztec) Mexico

1532: Pizarro conquers (formerly Inca) Peru.

1540 – 1640: During this period, one unit of gold was worth six units of silver in China. During the same period in India one unit of gold was worth eight units of silver and in Europe the same unit of gold was worth twelve units of silver. Most of the silver came from mines in Japan and the Cerro Rico mountain in Peru, which overlooks the town of Potosi. Vast amounts of silver were unearthed from this mountain. It is not an exaduration to say that China, with it’s monetary policy, financed the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Willing to trade it’s silks and other products for the silver, China provided huge profits to any trader willing to pay in silver while producing a boom in proto-industries on the Yangzi river. As the single largest provider of silver in the world, Spanish Peru produced immense profits to the Spanish cro
wn and nobility.
A short paper with more details is here

~1550: In southern England, coal becomes cheaper than wood for home heating, leading to increased mining. As they become familiar with it, the English find ways to use coal in other pursuits, such as glass-making, smelting of non-ferrous metals, etc.
Coal in England link

1655: The British take Jamaica. Desperate to find their own treasures in the Americas, the British and French had rushed to colonize and exploit whatever was left, but found nothing to compare with the precious metals flowing from Spanish possessions. What they eventually did was hit apon “drug-food” crops: Sugar, Tobacco, Coffee and Chocolate. These (except Tobacco) could not be cultivated in Europe and thus had to be grown in the Americas and imported. Demand proved resilient, making the growers and the English (and French?) government (which applied tarrifs to the imports) rich. The boom in demand for these foodstuffs throughout Europe built up a self-expanding cycle, plantation owners would purchase land, cane fragments and slaves, sell a crop, and make enough profit to expand, buying more land, slaves to work it, etc. The colonies in North America grew up at first by selling basic supplies to the Caribbean plantations, allowing even more Caribbean land to be dedicated to tropical cash crops. The whole cycle is something a bit more complex than a triangle, since the primary exchange goods on the coast of Africa are cotton and other textiles from India. The English earn the most profit from these expanding markets, selling much of their imports to other nations of Europe.

1698: Tomas Savery’s Steam Pump first used to pump water out of English coal mines. English mines tend to flood, so some system to pump them dry was necessary for increased production. Steam Engines were an excellent fit for English mines, since small bits of coal, unsaleable on the market could be disposed of by burning them in the engine. This way the mine owners essentially fueled their pumps for free. From this point on there will be a various improvements and changes until 1775 when James Watt increases the then current efficiency four fold. Till then the Steam Engine will fill only this niche, as a glorified mine water pump. It strikes me as more of a punctuated evolution than a history of invention.

1700 – 1750: A second period of silver arbitration occurs, although this time the differential is one gold to ten silver in China vs. one gold to fifteen silver in Europe. Also during this period the population of Han Chinese doubles, fed by increasing yields due to American origin crops (sweet potatoes, peanuts, and maize) in Chinese fields.

1757: Clive conquers Bengal for the British East India Company. (Prof. Pomeranz doesn’t mention this, I threw it in to cap the timeline)

— — —

So after about 1750, the British had an expanding overseas empire, and growing coal technology. After 1800 trains and steamboats went into commercial service, and then you need another, more detailed timeline to keep up with the innovations and changes.

Prof. Pomeranz mentions that Europe had scientific societies, and credits them with helping spread both the knowledge and the attitude for innovation. He is not willing to say that Europe had a monopoly on this type of activity, but he does grant them an advantage. He points to letters passed widely among Chinese scholars as a parallel if less efficient way to spread scientific inquiry.

Posted by jnutley at 06:46 PM