At Our Wits' End, page 12
This brings us back to the issue of group selection, which you will recall from earlier. There are different means by which you can pass on your genes. Firstly, there is doing so directly. If you have a child it will carry 50% of your genes and so it makes sense, genetically, for you to look after this child and help it to pass on its own genes. However, there are indirect ways of passing on your genes as well. This ‘indirect breeding’ model was pioneered by the English biologist William Hamilton (1936–2000).[15] Hamilton was born in Egypt to New Zealander parents, his father being an engineer and his mother a doctor. When evacuated to Edinburgh during World War II, he became fascinated by natural history and at university, at Cambridge, became so obsessed with reading about natural selection that he neglected his degree studies. His ideas had a huge influence on evolutionary psychology. Always a pioneer, he travelled to the Congo in an attempt to understand the origins of HIV and died soon after his return, possibly because of an ulcer caused by the anti-Malaria medicine taken on his expedition.[16]
Hamilton articulated the idea of ‘inclusive fitness’—that you can pass on your genes through means other than having direct descendants. You can follow a process of ‘kin selection’ where you invest in nephews and nieces (25% of your genes), cousins (12.5% of your genes), and so on. This is why many a spinster auntie will be inclined to spoil rotten her sibling’s children. She is aiding her kin and so indirectly perpetuating her own genes. For this reason, in some circumstances, it would make sense, in terms of inclusive fitness, to lay down your life if a large number of your cousins were under mortal threat, especially if you had already had children yourself. According to Hamilton, people will act altruistically if the benefit to their inclusive fitness is greater than the fitness cost of the act. Thus, it would make sense for a menopausal mother to lay down her life to save her only child. This would not make so much sense if the mother, aged 21, was told to make a choice between her child’s life and her own, because she could go on to have many more children.
The idea of kin selection can be logically extended to group selection. It has been established that ethnic groups are genetic clusters. The average Englishman is highly genetically similar to the next average Englishman relative to the average Dane, based on genetic assay data. The Australian political psychologist Frank Salter has calculated that if the world were divided between only English and Danes, then two average English people would have a kinship coefficient of 0.0021, whereas it would be zero for an Englishman and a Dane. This coefficient would be the equivalent of sharing a set of 6 x great grandparents; that is being 7th cousins. So, from a genetic perspective, it would be adaptive for an Englishman to fight to protect his ethnic group from Danes, even if it risked him having no children at all. If his actions saved enough of his people, this would more than compensate for the lack of direct breeding.[17] The soldier, who laid down his life in this way, would be operating at the level of group selection. Indeed, computer models have shown that the more ethnocentric group—the group whose members are more inclined to repel outsiders and make sacrifices for the good of the group—always eventually dominates in between-group competition, all else being equal.[18] Thus, the successful group will produce more people—though not too many —who are prepared to shun individual and even kin selection in favour of a group selection strategy.
Building on an idea first proposed by William Hamilton,[19] it has been proposed that geniuses can be understood to operate precisely this kind of strategy.[20]. Their inventions do not benefit themselves or even their families (Gregory Clark has documented many cases of geniuses being cheated out of the credit for their inventions—which nevertheless went on to change the world) but they benefit the group to which the genius belongs. The inventions which kicked off the Industrial Revolution, for example, allowed the British population to soar in size and wealth and to expand around much of the globe. Clearly, then, a successful society needs to maintain an optimum but relatively low number of geniuses. The number cannot be too many, because a society full of uncooperative, impractical dreamers will be dominated by a more internally cooperative and practical one. And it cannot be too few, or the society will be dominated by one which has the appropriate number of geniuses to allow the necessary level of innovation.
Geniuses will be formed—to the extent that genius is genetic—by chance but possible combinations of genes, which will stay in the population (and are often concentrated in certain family lines) precisely because they occasionally produce genius and this is outweighed by the negative which those genes in slightly different combinations can produce. This negative is people of low intelligence and high psychoticism—in other words, those who may be criminally prone. Recall that although the bulk of the genetics of intelligence involve genes with additive, or small and incremental, effects, there is also a role played by rarer genes with large effects and also epistasis, or gene–gene interactions, not just among genes responsible for intelligence, but involving personality and other traits as well. It is these rare genetic factors that play the biggest role in the genetics of extreme talent and genius.[21] It has been noted that both geniuses and criminals are antisocial risk-takers, though geniuses are more intelligent.[22]
For geniuses to happen, the available gene pool cannot be too small —otherwise geniuses will be too unlikely to be produced (the odds of getting precisely the right interactions among genes are very small). Thus, the genius is likely to be born to parents who are within the normal range of intelligence and have normal personalities and this genius is likely to have siblings who are much more like his or her parents. However, the genius will be very different. As discussed, the genius will be an outlier not just in terms of intelligence, but also in terms of creativity and personality.
The Growth of Genius
The genius, then, is one of the most significant people society has to offer at any given time, as they combine super-high intelligence with the optimum level of moderately high psychoticism which, within the context of a particular society, allows scientific and technological breakthroughs to be made. We can imagine that the inventor of the wheel, or the boat—people whose names are lost to history—would have been this kind of person, in comparison to the rest of their society. As the intelligence of the society increases, so the scarcity of genius would decrease, and as the society becomes more complex—coming into conflict with other groups—so the need for genius would increase. We have already traced the rise—via a series of proxies—of the intelligence of European societies up until the 18th century. This rise should be paralleled by an on-going increase in more and more significant technological breakthroughs as society’s geniuses become more and more prevalent. As we have already seen, scientific and technological achievement is associated with intelligence at the individual level.
A number of researchers have shown that rates of innovation do indeed climb as we reach the 18th century. Jonathan Huebner, an American physicist, published a paper in 2005 in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change in which he showed precisely this.[23] He drew upon a list of 8,583 important events in the history of science and technology, agreed to be highly significant by scientists, from the Stone Age up until 2004. Huebner limited this to the most recent 7,198 events, those since 1450. He noted down the year in which each event happened. Huebner then worked out what the world population was in each year, meaning he could track the per capita level of innovation. He found that scientific innovation rates per capita increased four-fold between 1450 and 1870. This can be seen in Figure 6 below.
The American political scientist Charles Murray, in his 2003 book Human Accomplishment, showed that it was not only significant innovations that were increasing between the Middle Ages and the mid-19th century, but (unsurprisingly) the eminent individuals responsible for them (i.e. geniuses) were increasing too.[24] There were humps and bumps, of course. Innovation was reduced during periods of war and famine for example. But we can see there is a dramatic rise and then, as of about 1873, a fall.
Michael A. Woodley of Menie developed Huebner’s model.[25] Huebner drew upon a particular inventory compiled by two scientists so, to avoid subjective bias, Woodley of Menie tested to see how well it correlated with other, similar, inventories. For example, he compared it to an index of significant scientific breakthroughs between 1400 and 1950 compiled by Murray.[26] In each case, the correlation was over 0.8, showing that the inventory was not merely subjective. Woodley of Menie used a number of sources to calculate the average intelligence of the population in each year charted by Huebner. He showed that the simplest explanation for Huebner’s findings was that intelligence was increasing between 1455 and about 1850 and then decreasing after that. This is what best fitted all these data.
Figure 6. Per capita rates of significant innovation from 1450 to 2004, fitted to a third-order polynomial curve.[27]
1 Studies have shown that science students, when compared to humanities and social science students, are, on average, more intelligent and higher in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. See: De Fruyt, F. & Mervielde, I. (1996) Personality and interests as predictors of educational streaming and achievement, European Journal of Personality, 10, pp. 405–425; Lievens, F., Coetsier, P., de Fruyt, F. & de Maesneer, J. (2002) Medical students’ personality characteristics and academic performance: A five factor perspective, Medical Education, 36, pp. 1050–1105; and Dutton, E. & Lynn, R. (2014) Intelligence and religious and political differences among members of the U.S. academic elite, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 10, pp. 1–29.
2 Simonton, D. (1988) Genius, Creativity and Leadership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3 Simonton, D. (1988) Genius, Creativity and Leadership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Eysenck, H. (1995) Genius: The Natural History of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4 See: Dutton, E. & Van der Linden, D. (2015) Who are the ‘Clever Sillies’? The intelligence, personality, and motives of clever silly originators and those who follow them, Intelligence, 49, pp. 57–65.
5 Eysenck, H. (1995) Genius: The Natural History of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Feist, G. (1998) A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity, Personality & Social Psychology Review, 2, pp. 290–309.
6 Simonton, D. (1988) Genius, Creativity and Leadership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7 Dutton, E. & Charlton, B. (2015) The Genius Famine, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, pp. 123–124.
8 Westfall, R. (1983) Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9 Dutton, E. & Charlton, B. (2015) The Genius Famine, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, p. 79.
10 Crick, F. (1990) What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic Books; Ridley, M. (2006) Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, Ashland, OH: Atlas Books.
11 Spearman, C. (1927) Abilities of Man: Their Nature and Measurement, New York: Macmillan.
12 Woodley, M.A. (2012) The social and scientific temporal correlates of genotypic intelligence and the Flynn Effect, Intelligence, 40, pp. 189–204.
13 Hoffmann, B. (1972) Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel, London: Hart-Davis. Noted in Dutton, E. & Charlton, B. (2014) The Genius Famine, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, p. 111.
14 Simonton, D.K. (2003) Exceptional creativity across the life span: The emergence and manifestation of creative genius, in Shavinina. L.V. (ed.) The International Handbook of Innovation, pp. 293–308, New York: Pergamon Press.
15 See: Hamilton, W. (1996) The Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hamilton, W.D. (1964) The genetical evolution of social behavior. I and II, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, pp. 1–52.
16 BBC website (2010) ECU Ruling: Great Lives, BBC Radio 4, 2 February 2010, [Online], http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/ecu_greatlive s_wdhamilton.
17 Salter, F. (2007) On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
18 E.g. Hammond, R. & Axelrod, R. (2006) The evolution of ethnocentric behaviour, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50, pp. 1–11.
19 Hamilton, W.D. (2000) A review of Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Annals of Human Genetics, 64, pp. 363–374.
20 Woodley, M.A. & Figueredo, A.J. (2013) Historical Variability in Heritable General Intelligence: It’s Evolutionary Origins and Sociocultural Consequences, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press.
21 Jensen, A.R. (1997) The puzzle of nongenetic variance, in Sternberg, R.J. & Grigorenko, E.L. (eds.) Heredity, Intelligence, and Environment, pp. 42–88, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22 Kanazawa, S. (2003) Why productivity fades with age: The crime–genius connection, Journal of Personality, 37, pp. 257–272.
23 Huebner, J. (2005) A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 72, pp. 980–986.
24 Murray, C. (2006) Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, New York: Harper Collins.
25 Woodley, M.A. (2012) The social and scientific temporal correlates of genotypic intelligence and the Flynn Effect, Intelligence, 40, pp. 189–204.
26 Murray, C. (2006) Human Accomplishment, New York: Free Press.
27 Plotted using data from Huebner, J. (2005) A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 72, pp. 980–986. We would like to thank Jonathan Huebner for giving us his data for secondary analysis.
Seven
How Did Selection for Intelligence Go Into Reverse?
So, intelligence was increasing up until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution due to selection. This meant there was a process of ‘Survival of the Richest’ and, by extension, selection, each generation, for the most intelligent. This process was coupled with group selection and colonial expansion, fuelled by the fruits of genius, which culminated in the Industrial Revolution; an explosion of technological innovation the like of which the world had never seen before and has never seen since.
It is, perhaps, difficult for us to get our heads around the pace of the change during the Industrial Revolution because it would have been so dramatic. Someone born in 1770 would have grown up in a world little different from 1470. Transport would be via horse and almost everything had to be done by hand. Production was already beginning to mechanise, because James Hargreaves had invented the Spinning Jenny in 1764.[1] An early steam engine had already been forged, but it hadn’t yet caught on. However, if that person had lived until just 1804, they would have seen the invention of the electric telegraph, the steam ship, the submarine, the circular saw, the steam roller, a reliable clock, the bicycle, the battery, and the steam-powered locomotive. The world of 1804 would have been dramatically different from that of 1770 or 1470.
If this person had lived until 1870, until the age of 100, they would have seen the electric light (1809), the steam train and the first photograph (1827), the electro-magnet, the typewriter (1829), the sewing machine, the electric dynamo, the calculator, the propeller, the revolver, the telegraph, rubber tyres, the washing machine, and, in 1858, the internal combustion engine. Then there was plastic and dynamite and we reach the year 1870. The extent and speed of change over a lifetime like that, compared to those for hundreds of years before, would have been astonishing.
And this new technology assisted numerous scientific breakthroughs, especially in the realm of public health and medicine. In the pre-industrial world, there was a very limited understanding of the causes of illness and, therefore, illness selected against the least healthy. But this began to change. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, for example.[2] There were also many other improvements in public health, such as better sanitation. And the simplest explanation for why all this was able to happen was that, for so long, we had been selected for intelligence by the rigours of natural, sexual, and social selection.
Scientists Who Predicted Intelligence Would Decline
However, by the 1860s, some people were beginning to notice something alarming, alarming for them anyway, and it had happened, in part, as a direct consequence of these breakthroughs in public health.[3] The first person to write about it was a French physician, and early psychiatrist, called Benedict Morel (1809–1863). In 1857, Morel published a book in which he pointed out that the infant and child mortality rates in France were clearly in decline.[4] They were in decline, he argued, because various improvements in public health in the preceding 50 years meant that many infants who would have died were now surviving into adulthood. It may sound callous, but there was a clear logic to the argument which followed. This increased survival rate, and consequent reproduction, would necessarily mean that the population would have a higher percentage of members who lacked whatever partly hereditary qualities were necessary for survival before these improvements in public health took place. Morel regarded the most important qualities as ‘health’, ‘moral character’ (by which he meant, essentially, high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness), and ‘intelligence’. He was of the view that these qualities were transmitted within families, from parents to children, through a combination of (what would later be called) genetic and environmental processes. He argued that there was what he called a ‘degenerate class’, an ‘underclass’ of prostitutes, criminals, and the desperately poor, and that these people—albeit in his subjective experience as a physician and psychiatrist—seemed to have particularly high fertility. So, Morel predicted that these two processes—the reduction in child mortality as a check on the fertility of the ‘underclass’ and the, apparent, greater fertility of the underclass—would necessarily lead to the population of France gradually becoming less intelligent. In addition, they would also become—he predicted—more genetically sick.
