The Rhythm of the West: A Biohistory of the Modern Era AD 1600 to the Present

205 Pages·2017·1.13 MB·English

by  Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie et al.

THE RHYTHM
OF THE WEST:
A BIOHISTORY OF THE MODERN ERA
AD 1600 TO THE PRESENT

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie
Aurelio José Figueredo
Matthew Alexandar Sarraf
Steven Hertler
Heitor Barcellos Ferreira Fernandes
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre
THE RHYTHM OF THE WEST:
A BIOHISTORY OF THE MODERN ERA
AD 1600 TO THE PRESENT

by

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie*

Aurelio José Figueredo*

Matthew Alexandar Sarraf†

Steven Hertler†

Heitor Barcellos Ferreira Fernandes

Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre

Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies
Monograph Series
Volume 37

The Council for Social and Economic Studies
Washington, D.C.

*Joint first author
†Joint second author
The Rhythm of the West:
A Biohistory of the Modern Era
AD 1600 to the Present

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie
Aurelio José Figueredo
Matthew Alexandar Sarraf
Steven Hertler
Heitor Barcellos Ferreira Fernandes
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre

Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies
Monograph No. 37
© Council for Social and Economic Studies, 2017

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941818
ISBN Casebound: 978-1-878465-50-4
ISBN Paperback : 978-1-878465-49-8

Council for Social and Economic Studies
P.O. Box 34143, Washington D.C. 20043
Tel [phone] Fax [phone]
Email [email protected]
www.jspes.org
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 Introduction — 1
1.1 Background and Overview: Biological Pessimism and Optimism — 1
1.1.1 Malthus
1.1.2 Galton
1.1.3 Connecting Malthus and Galton
1.1.4 Rejection of Malthus
1.1.5 Rejection of Galton
1.1.6 Superseded
1.1.7 Flynn Effect as Exemplar
1.1.8 Breaks in the Narrative
1.1.9 Neo-Declinism
1.1.10 The Present Study
1.2 Meta-Theoretical Foundations — 24
1.2.1 Life history theory
1.2.2 The evolution of general intelligence (g)
1.2.3 Multi-level selection theory
1.2.4 The eugenic phase: Group conflict and the role of eminent
individuals in promoting group-level fitness
1.2.5 The dysgenic phase: The breakdown of group selection and the
onset of individual selection for lower heritable general
intelligence (g.h)
1.2.6 The relation between slowing life history speed and social
“progress”
1.2.7 The relation between social “progress” and mutation
accumulation
1.2.8 The co-occurrence model
1.3 Empirical Foundations — 47
1.3.1 The dysgenesis syndrome
1.3.2 Elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs)
1.3.3 WM measures
1.3.4 Conventional psychometric measures
1.3.5 Historiometric data: Macro-innovation rates and eminent
individuals
1.3.6 Flynn effect indicators
2.0 The Nexus 200 Analysis — 57
2.1 The Nexus 200 Methods — 58
2.1.1 Measures
2.1.1.1 Heritable general intelligence (g.h)
2.1.1.1.1 RTs
2.1.1.1.2 WM
2.1.1.1.3 High-difficulty vocabulary item usage
2.1.1.1.4 Per capita macro-innovation rates
2.1.1.1.5 Descent of Man altruism words
2.1.1.2 Specialized abilities (s.e)
2.1.1.2.1 Short-term memory (STM)
2.1.1.2.2 Low-difficulty vocabulary item usage
2.1.1.2.3 Psycholinguistic easy words
2.1.1.2.4 Concretization in language use
2.1.1.2.5 Micro-innovation rate (GDP per capita)
2.1.1.3 Somatic modification (s.m)
2.1.1.3.1 Male Fluctuating Asymmetry (FA)
2.1.1.3.2 Sinistrality Prevalence
2.1.1.3.3 Body Mass Index (BMI)
2.1.1.3.4 Height
2.1.1.3.5 Brain Mass
2.1.2 Data Aggregation
2.1.2.1 Chronometric aggregation of common factors underlying
temporal covariation
2.1.2.1.1 Psychometric Data Aggregation
2.1.2.1.2 Meta-Analytic Aggregation
2.1.2.1.3 Chronometric Data Aggregation
2.2 Nexus 200 Results — 68
2.2.1 Nested MLM comparisons
3.0 The Nexus 400 Analysis — 74
3.1 The Nexus 400 Methods — 76
3.1.1 Measures
3.1.1.1 Mean global temperatures
3.1.1.2 The Altruism Words
3.1.1.3 Data on war fatalities
3.1.1.4 Estimate of the Britannic proportion of the world
population
3.2 Nexus 400 Results — 77
3.2.1 Measurement Models
3.2.2 Structural Models
4.0 General Discussion — 84
4.1 The Nexus 200 Discussion — 84
4.1.1 Nexus 200 Limitations
4.2 The Nexus 400 Discussion — 91
4.2.1 Nexus 400 Limitations
5.0 General Conclusion — 95
5.1 Rudyard Kipling and Queen Victoria’s Paternalistic Empire — 96
5.2 Broader Implications of the Nexus 200 and Nexus 400 Results — 98
Appendix I: Losing Lamarck and the Left — 103
Appendix II: Life History Evolution — 107
Appendix III: Multi-Level Selection Theory — 110
Endnotes — 117
References — 120
Index — 165
Data Supplement — 170
1

1.0 Introduction
“The wisdom that was borne out of the West was forsaken. Kings
made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living, childless
lords sat in high halls counting the long names of their ancestors
more dear than the names of their sons, or in high cold towers
asking questions of the stars. The line of Kings failed, the White
Tree withered, and the rule of Gondor fell to lesser men.”
— Gandalf the White (© The Return of the King)

1.1 Background and Overview: Biological Pessimism
and Optimism
Compared to preceding and succeeding centuries, the 19th
Century was quite different in its folkways, communications,
and religiosity. In few ways, however, was this century as
distinct as in its intellectual tradition (Collini, Winch &
Burrow, 1983). The 19th Century was colored by a reaction to
the Enlightenment (Gay, 1995; 1996), an era of cosmopolitan
science and political progress, often understood as bounded
between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution.
In contrast, the 19th Century coincided with the Romantic Age,
which celebrated impenetrable wholeness, obscurantism,
mysticism, and Napoleonic nationalism (Berlin, 2013). It was
an era that denounced the deistic writings of Thomas Paine
and indulged in the religious fervor of the second great
awakening, and that exchanged the tightly balanced classicism
of Mozart’s Magic Flute for the effusively epic innovation of
Beethoven’s Eroica (Berlin, 1996; 1997).
Although Romanticism is characterized as exalting
emotion above reason, scientific pursuits continued on
through the 19th Century, though with a different and
decidedly more dismal turn when contrasted with the
optimistic Enlightenment or even the latter phase of late
modernity (the Late Modern Era spans AD 1750 to the
present). In the 19th Century, there was an unambiguous break
with progressive views of human nature — i.e. those positing
that humans are perfectible or at least have the potential for
radical enhancement through environmental amelioration —
which Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1836), and Jean
2 The Rhythm of the West

Jacques Rousseau, in his Emile (1979), espoused. Similarly,
doubt was cast on Diderot’s ideas of “inevitable progress,”
Condillac’s faith in “progressive becoming,” and Condorcet’s
conviction that “man’s perfectibility is truly infinite, that the
progress of this perfectibility, freed henceforth from any
power that would stop it, has no limit” (Brewer, 2008, pp. 49-
50). The sanguinity of French philosophe Claude Adrien
Helvétius belonged to a bygone era that emphasized extreme
environmental determinism (Dobzhansky, 1964), and the
faith in change and progress that came of it. Helvétius averred
that all mankind had equal intellectual capacities, that the
human mind was born free of natural dispositions, that
inequality was exclusively environmental in origin, and that
improvement of the human condition was only bounded by
the quality of social programming (1759).
Intellectuals of the 19th Century largely rejected all of these
views. Looming large at the center of these hundred years was
the theory of evolution by natural selection, a new
foundational principle that rendered biology a truly
explanatory science and thereby transformed the European
intellectual landscape. Evolutionists were not content with
Linnaean taxonomy or proximate explanation, offering
instead a theory that promised to illuminate the variety and
nature of earthly life forms. The ripple of selectionist
evolutionary theory was then felt within some social sciences
such as economics and demography. Insofar as selectionist
evolutionary theory showed that human nature is more
biologically determined, and thus significantly less malleable,
than previously believed, it indirectly eroded the optimism
characteristic of the Enlightenment.
Contemporaneously, there were factors directly reducing
such optimism. The Long 19th Century (AD 1780-1914)
(Lambert & Lester, 2006; Blackbourn, 2002) opened with the
bloody repudiation of applied philosophical principles like
liberty, equality, and fraternity after the French Revolutionary
Republic imploded in internecine conflict, which, in turn,
resulted in more or less continuous inter-state conflict
between the Bonapartist usurpation and the AD 1815 Treaty
of Paris (Carlyle, 1915; Lefebvre & Palmer, 1948; Dunn, 1999).
Following this, deeper into the century, European forests
3

continued to be cleared (Mather, 2001; Williams, 2003), the
commons were increasingly closed (Brody, 2000),
dispossession of lands was augmenting, and the demographic
transition was beginning to restrict upper-class procreation
even as general population growth steeply inclined (Soloway,
2014). These demographic and environmental developments
provoked anxieties among the more prescient elements of
European societies, given, inter alia, that the demands of
survival and reproduction induce conflict when land and other
natural resources are too scarce to support a population at a
particular size. Moreover, industrialization, beginning in
Britain in the early to mid-19th Century, inverted the previously
positive association between socioeconomic status and fertility,
such that mounting population pressure was emanating
chiefly from the lower end of the social hierarchy: from those
whom many of the intelligentsia condemned as shiftless,
immoral, and unintelligent. In the light of Darwin’s
evolutionary theory, some understood this reproductive
windfall for the underclasses to constitute biological
degradation of European populations, which threatened to
eventually undo the technological and economic progress of
industrialization. This, then, was the source of some
intellectuals’ conviction that the 19th Century marked the
onset of European civilizational declension.
Two men’s life work, and posthumous influence are
uniquely representative of this vein of intellectual history, with
its great relevance to questions of nature and nurture,
optimism and pessimism, progress and decline. The first is
Thomas Robert Malthus (AD 1766-1834), an intellectual
predecessor of Darwin and foundational figure in human
demography; the second is Sir Francis Galton (AD 1822-1911),
an intellectual successor of Darwin who applied evolutionary
theory so as to understand the composition of human
populations.

1.1.1 Malthus
Long before Malthus, John Graunt (1973), in his Natural
and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality,
had systematically studied population demography. Again
before Malthus, Enlightenment polymath Benjamin Franklin
4 The Rhythm of the West

(1751) studied marriage age and birth rates, enabling his
accurate prediction of colonials rapidly overtaking Britons in
population. Whereas Graunt applied demography to
insurance actuarial tables and Franklin emphasized
demography in terms of between-group competition,
Malthus’s contribution was to starkly contrast food production
with population growth, noting that the geometric growth of
the former could easily be overwhelmed by the exponential
growth of the latter. These predecessors had an interest in
applied and theoretical demography, but it was uniquely
Malthus who sounded the tocsin of overpopulation far ahead
of the threat. Later, the term Malthusian Trap would come to
describe a cycle of demographic decline: a population bust
that followed a boom. Such Malthusian Traps had in fact
ensnared many earlier civilizations (Gat, 2006, p. 514). Also
supportive of Malthusian fears, many early anthropological
commentaries suggest that resource competition, in, for
example, Africa and the Americas, was perpetual (Harcourt,
2012, p. 208). Infanticide was a common practice when
twinning occurred in the context of scarce resources (Hill &
Hurtado, 2011; Hausfater & Hrdy, 2008). Then there was the
example of Easter Island, rediscovered in the 1700s by various
Europeans who found monolithic sculptures of what appeared
to be an extinct civilization. This extinction of indigenous or
early colonizing persons (Basener & Ross, 2004) is often
attributed to war, secondarily to resource scarcity (Nagarajan,
2006), such that it is now common to point to Easter Island as
an example of a nascent civilization felled by a Malthusian
Trap (Brander & Taylor, 1998; Diamond, 2007), even while
dissenting views exist (Mieth & Bork, 2010). Examining the
past, and extrapolating to the future, it was natural, then, that
Malthus feared the demographic boom that was just beginning
to escalate in his lifetime. From his clairvoyant anxiety was
born a kind of scientifically informed eschatology, with the
rapid population growth of industrialization auguring social
chaos and mass death (Weiss, 2007).
Nevertheless, Malthus hoped that civilizational collapse
could be avoided via adoption of the right social policies.
Notably, the policy prescriptions that followed reasonably
from Malthusian science are chiefly responsible for its now
5

common perception as a grim view of human demography.
Malthus (1992, p. 92) wrote against alms and similar schemes
for redistribution “giving to the poorer classes a command of
food so much greater than their degree of skill and industry
entitled them to.” “Hard as it may appear in individual
instances,” Malthus (1992, p. 101) continued, “dependent
poverty ought to be held disgraceful. Such a stimulus seems to
be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great
mass of mankind; and every general attempt to weaken this
stimulus, however benevolent its apparent intention, will
always defeat its own purpose.”

1.1.2 Galton
Sharing Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather, Francis Galton
was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin and thus of the eminent
stock that he would later study in his 1869 book, Hereditary
Genius. The writings of his accomplished family members
immensely influenced Galton and spurred him to contemplate
the lineal transmission of eminence, culminating in his
articulation of the theory of eugenics for which he is perhaps
best known.
Galton had an intellectually rigorous Victorian upbringing
in the cast of John Stuart Mill, capped by studies at King
Edward’s School, King’s College and, thereafter, Trinity
College, Cambridge. He was enriched by an atypically non-
Western variety of the Grand Tour, personally directed
readings, and experience with scientific experimentation. He
rejected Lockean notions of extreme environmental
determinism, favoring instead a vision of innate differences
wherein virtues were inborn not inculcated. Yet these were
merely Galton’s intuitions. To test his ideas, he proceeded to
amass relevant evidence through a number of endeavors,
including founding the Eugenics Record Office in 1904
(becoming the Galton Laboratory in 1907), which supported
research into human heredity (Paul & Moore, 2010). But it was
in the late 19th Century, from the 1880s to 1890s, that Galton
performed his most important data collection in his
Kensington Laboratory. There he gathered data on finger
length, head shape and size, fingerprints, height, eye color,
genetic disease, simple reaction times, and many other human