Part X. The Inheritance of Gregory Clark

Clark is deeply charmed by neo-Darwinian theories applied to society. He believes that the bourgeois-behaving unit of meaning, a “meme” as some of the theorists call it, spreads strictly from parents to children, like eye color. But the biological metaphor here is inapt. From the sixteenth-century on it gets inapter and inapter. As the economist Benjamin Friedman remarked in still another hostile review of Clark’s book, “If the traits to which Clark assigns primary importance in bringing about the Industrial Revolution are acquired traits, rather than inherited ones, there are many non-Darwinian mechanisms by which a society can impart them, ranging from schools and churches to legal institutions and informal social practices.”⁴² European publishing, for example, became cheap and less censored, especially in Holland. The historian Lawrence Stone spoke of an “educational revolution” 1540 to 1640, during which for example in 1612-1614 nearly half of 204 men committing capital crimes in Middlesex escaped the hangman by showing their literacy, the “benefit of clergy,” as the medieval custom was called.⁴³ In citing Stone the historical sociologist Jack Barbalet observes “the most literate of social groups were merchants and businessmen.”⁴⁴ It had always been so: after all, writing itself springs from accounting. A businessman was known proverbially for ink-stained fingers, and was portrayed in the new oil paintings of Holland and England as writing, writing, writing — with the counting of money left to his wife. The middle-class women whom Jan Vermeer painted in his small output are commonly reading. The grammar schools spread (thus William Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, son of a glover). So did the universities (thus Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, son of a saddler). High schools for young merchants proliferated. If solidly bourgeois behavior makes people rich you would think it would spread thus by imitation, across families, as from Defoe’s Essay Upon Projects (1697), which Benjamin Franklin cited as an influence, or from the hundreds of handbooks for youths in business from the sixteenth century on.

The research biologist and professor of theology Alistair McGrath notes that recent work on genome sequencing has shown that the very simplest forms of life do trade genes contemporaneously, and do not merely transmit them from mother cell to daughter cell. And so of course at the other end of complexity do human beings in their cultures, such as those inhabiting seventeenth century Europe. “If Darwinism is about copying the instructions,” writes McGrath, “Lamarckism is about copying the product. . . . It would seem that Lamarck, rather than Darwin, offers the better account of cultural evolution.”⁴⁵ Or as Nicolas Wade puts it, “organisms may acquire genes through borrowing as well as inheritance; bacteria, for instance.”⁴⁶ Or as Joel Mokyr noted in a comment on Clark’s book, “we don’t just learn from our parents . . . . [but] horizontally from other people, from peers, from masters in apprentice or servant relationships.”⁴⁷

To put it another way, the metaphor of the tree of life that Clark unreflectively applies to human culture is not apt. It should give way in such cases to a network of life. Languages are like that, sometimes. Among Australian Aborigines the mixing of peoples was such that “the family tree model of genetic relationship seems to be totally inappropriate. . . . There was much more diffusion from language to language . . . than is usually the case.”⁴⁸ Good products like wealth-producing behavior would spread in a greatly widened network of culture after the invention of printing, the Protestant Reformation, the fall of tyrants with 800-year old names. As some biologist recently put it in a survey of the experimental transfer of 246,045 genes to E. coli, “the phylogeny of [a primitive but extremely widespread form of] life seems better represented by a network than a tree.”⁴⁹ If this is true of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, all the more is it true of Parisians and Bostonians. People themselves could move, steadily easier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And more importantly, they could read, steadily better (silent reading is often said to be a modern accomplishment; though it has recently been argued that it was in fact commonplace in ancient times among the few literates⁵⁰ ). Newspapers were invented in Europe and its offshoots in the late seventeenth century. Ben Franklin’s older brother James started printing the cheeky New England Courant in Boston in 1721, which became at once an irritant to the British administration and the Puritan ayatollahs, and a model for more than his immediate family of printers. And so the ideas of bourgeois dignity and liberty could move. The memes moved more and more freely across families — and more and more and more — right down to our own worldwide echo-chamber of ideas.

But leave aside the actual, empirical stories of how values are made. Clark’s lack of curiosity about the exact content of bourgeois values (value which he and I join in admiring) leaves him with a mechanical version of neo-Darwinism in explaining how values get transmitted. Suppose his model is correct. Then a scientist of Clark’s quantitative imagination would have found it trivial to calculate, mechanically, what the higher rates of breeding would yield in bourgeois-minded but lower class people in the next generation. He didn’t.

The underlying problem is that Clark wants to tell a very long-run story, because in the style of growth theory in recent economics he has ambitions for its endogeneity, which is to say its historical materialism. He wants bourgeois values and the modern world to arise with slow-chapped pow’r out of a thousand years of English history. No dei ex machinis, thank you very much — by which he means short-run and therefore contemptible events in the realm of mere ideas such as the birth of English political liberty or the Protestant Reformation or the Scientific Revolution or the Bourgeois Revaluation.

The problem is that his long-run ambition does not fit his eugenic machinery. His mechanical model of the transmission of values works too quickly, on a scale not of ten centuries or so but of a century or so. Then it dissipates. Regression to the mean alone would limit the effect of bourgeois values pushed down the social scale in a family to a few generations. After all, we say “clogs to clogs” in merely three. As Francis Galton put it in making a similar calculation — Galton in 1901 got a good deal further in the calculation than Clark did in 2007 — high inherited height or intelligence or bourgeois virtue dissipates strongly in children and more in grandchildren, “owing to the combination of ancestral influences — which are generally mediocre — with the purely parental ones.”⁵¹ The fact accounts for the curious vocabulary in statistics of “regression” for the fitting of a curve to a scatter of points. Galton himself was part of Darwin’s family, first notable in Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin’s and Francis Galton’s joint grandfather. The family has continued to prosper down to the present, by careful selection of marriage partners. But how many such amazing families are there — one thinks of the Bachs and the Polanyis — as against hundreds of families that yield one genius and then regress to the mean? The evolutionary logic puts paid to Clark’s long-run story. As the economist Samuel Bowles put it in a hostile review of the book in Science:

if h² = 0.26 the correlation across 4 generations (great grandfather-great grandson) is 0.032. If we estimate h² from the observed intergenerational correlation of traits (r) as above, then the correlation of a genetically transmitted trait across n generations is just r/2^{n -2}. Thus the statistical association across generations becomes vanishingly small over the course of a single century, whether the trait is culturally or genetically transmitted.⁵²

Clark describes his central Chapter 6 as identifying “strong selective processes.”⁵³ That’s the problem: they are too strong for a slow story, as Bowles points out. So Clark’s own argument, were it true, would turn out to be one of the despised dei ex machinis that work on a scale of decades or a few generations or a century at most. If he had followed his rule of number and had tried to calculate the oomph of link A, Rich Breed More causing Rich People’s Values Spread, he would have caught the scientific oversight before announcing his finding to the world.

Consider for example one of the bourgeois values we can measure, and Clark does, again with his usual quantitative insight, literacy. Male literacy in England, Clark argues, was roughly in the Middle Ages the share of monks in the male population — thus the legal rule in pleading against a felony. Illiterate monks were not unknown, but rare (though among the secular clergy illiteracy was perhaps more common). Male literacy in England rose to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by the time national statistics start to be possible in the 1750s, comparable to Japan.

But think about it. If you are the parent of four children, and can read, what is the transition probability that all four of your children will read? It is extremely high, especially if you are the mother of the brood, at any rate in a society that for some reason values literacy. It is the value placed on literacy by the society, not sheer inheritance, that determines its transmittal. Thus in families today “going to college” is extremely inheritable, but in one generation. When it happens, it happen quickly, and permanently — and in Clark’s argument it must begin at once the regression to the mean of values that would apply if genetics, not surrounding social values, were explaining it. My father was the first in his family to go to university. All his three children did, both of my two did, and doubtless my two grandchildren will, too. Every one of the five children of my father’s brother did, and their children so far mostly have. Similarly looking back: unlike my Irish ancestors, my Norwegian ancestors on the Hardanger Fjord, according to records collected by the literate Norwegians (I can show them to you), were reading by the late sixteenth century, and never stopped. Why? Because of inheritance? No: clearly, they started and continued to read because of the surrounding social values attributable to the Protestant Reformation, a literal Deus, to which Clark in his book explaining modern Europe allots eight words. No religion, please: we’re demographic historical materialists. The impoverished Norwegians of rural Dimelsvik (no bourgeois virtues inherited there) learned to read, quickly. The habit in the first place spread across families. And once in a family it stayed there, not reverting to the mean, unlike biological inheritance. The inheritance within families is too quick and the “inheritance” across families too strong and the lack of regression to the mean too obvious for Clark’s intended story of a stately development over centuries of an English genetic Überlegenheid.

Clark becomes very cross when challenged on his materialism. Compare Marx in 1846 on Proudhon, whose writings he describes as “Hegelian trash. . . it is not history, it is not profane history — history of mankind, but sacred history — history of ideas.”⁵⁴ Clark replied to my claim that he exhibits, as he put it, an “aversion to literary sources”:

absolutely, because they are highly unreliable. What people say, what their explicit ideology is, often differs dramatically from how they behave. Doing economic history through analysis of written materials such as laws, political tracts, etc. is an invitation to error. Deirdre’s invitation to us to come wallow in the cultural mud is the guarantee that we will continue to go round in circles in economic history forever. Better to say something and be wrong than to say things that are just not subject to empirical test.⁵⁵

Clark has said something subject to empirical test, and it is wrong. So much is clear.

But he is also wrong to dismiss “wallowing in the cultural mud,” the lived life, the analyzed text, the salient image. Such a naïvely behaviorist and positivist ideology throws away half the evidence, much of it more decisive than a questionable “sample” of birth rates from East Anglia. (Jan de Vries noted of Clark’s book, “had this book been written by an historian its subtitle might have been: Some Findings from Suffolk Testators, 1620-1638.”⁵⁶ ) An historian cannot do his science well on numbers alone. Indeed, as econometricians like Charles Manski point out, and as Stephen Ziliak and I have emphasized, the identification of what is salient in the numbers never inheres in the numbers themselves. “Identification problems cannot be solved,” Manski writes, “by gathering more of the same kind of data.” They “can be alleviated only by invoking stronger assumption [based, say, on the lived life] or by initiating new sampling processes that yield different kinds of data [in, say, the analyzed text and the salient image].”⁵⁷ Or the economic historian Thomas Ashton said long ago, surely we will make more progress if we walk on both legs, numerical and verbal.⁵⁸ Clark is so hostile to the literary and philosophical side of his culture that he insists on hopping along, underidentified, on one leg.

So Clark’s socio-neo-Darwinianism which he picked up recently from articles on growth theory by some economic theorists has little to recommend it as history applicable to the past millennium.⁵⁹ The problem typifies modern growth theory in economics. It is mostly theory, and scant history; mostly mathematics, and scant measurement.⁶⁰ In a word, it is unscientific. The theorists who inspired Clark, though, were more reasonable than he is in using their argument. The argument, they wrote, “suggests that the time period between the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution [some 10,000 years] is sufficient for significant [biological] evolutionary changes.”⁶¹ That seems possible — lactose and alcohol tolerance, for example, do seem to have been evolved in such a range of years. After all, people whose ancestors did not milk animals now get sick from milk. But Clark proposes to apply the argument instead to the few centuries of what he characterizes as English peace (a “peace” covering the War of the Roses, the turbulent Tudors, the revolution-provoking Stuarts, the long century of struggle with France after 1692) — and strangely not to the 265 years of domestic and foreign peace in Tokugawa Japan (interrupted by scattered peasant revolts, easily put down⁶² ). Consider the numerous very long episodes of peace in China away from the frontiers, which according to Clark’s model should have resulted in a massive embourgeoisfication of the place. The average length of the thirteen “principal unified states” in the table of Chinese dynasties from the First Emperor in 221 B.C.E. until the Last in 1911 is 168 years. The three longest of the thirteen were all in the last (potentially innovative) millennium: the Song at 319 years, the Ming at 276, and the (final and in fact reactionary) Qing at 266.⁶³ The long dynasties were not without Revolts of the Three Feudatories or extremely bloody Taiping Rebellions. But on the whole they make the allegedly long “peace” of England look disturbed, and they make the condition of Europe generally (a geographical area and population comparable at the time to China’s) look positively chaotic.

The theorists, in the very footnote that inspired Clark (“the original hypothesis that sparked this study” as Clark writes in a paper with Hamilton), claim that “The theory is perfectly applicable for either social or genetic transmission of traits. [A] cultural transmission is likely to be more rapid.”⁶⁴ More rapid indeed. The theory of inheritance collapses, as I said, if “inheritance” happens across families, rapidly, as it did in a literate age, and as indeed it often did even along illiterate folk knapping arrow heads from a flint core. Humans talk to each other, and they imitate even if they don’t talk. Neither Clark nor his theorists recognize that the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in Europe saw changes in attitudes towards innovation that had little to do with returns to human capital — chiefly because most innovations were copied by precisely that cross-family inheritance, encouraged by the printing press and the new egalitarianism, and yielded little benefit to their inventors. Access to knowledge is crucial, the historian Philip Hoffman points out. ***Where is this citation? In Mokyr? The change was not genetic (as Clark argues) or psychological (as Weber argued) but sociological and political. Literacy, printing, a free press, and free conversation make technology available. It became, as we now say, open source. Long ago the economic historian Robert Allen made the point.⁶⁵ More recently the economic historian Paul David has theorized the development by the early eighteenth century of open source science.⁶⁶ But science was merely one of numerous cases: printed music was another, journalism after the 1690s still another (one of its origins being the open printing of daily prices on exchanges, information formerly traded by letter among merchants as secret and proprietary). Open source software is not inherited biologically from ones parents but socially from ones geeky and voluble friends.

An early version of Clark’s hypothesis may be examined in Galton’s Huxley Lecture to the Anthropological Institute in 1901, “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed Under Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment”:

The number and variety aptitudes, especially in dogs, is truly remarkable. . . . So it is with the various natural qualities that go towards the making of civic worth in man (p. 3). . . . The brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes (p. 11). . . . Dr. Farr, the eminent statistician, endeavored to estimate the money worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex laborer. . . . Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capitalized the value at the child’s birth . . . [It] was found to be £5. On a similar principle the worth of an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. . . . They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and light of the nation (pp. 11-12). . . . Many who are familiar with the habits of [the lowest class] do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit if all habitual criminals were . . . peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring (p. 20). . . . The possibility of improving the race of a national depends on the power of increasing its best stock (p. 24).⁶⁷

In 1901 eugenic reasoning such as Galton’s was fresh and new and plausible. It was still influential after the Great War. It yielded then in places like Norway, Sweden, and the United States programs of compulsory sterilization which survived even their methodical application in Germany, 1933-1945, coming to an end only during the 1970s — by then three generations of imbecilic if scientific social policy were enough.

But recently the eugenic idea has revived, as in the works of Steven Pinker and now Gregory Clark, greeted with enthusiasm by science journalists with a short historical memory and a weak grasp of social ethics. It introduces into the modern debate between status and contract a third possibility, genes. The eugenic reasoning declares that people are not what the society says they are (their status) or what they are able to arrange by persuading each other (their contract). People are what they were born to be, biologically speaking, like cocker spaniels. And then we can move to prenatal screening, for a gay gene, say. Uncritical worshippers of a politically partisan and just-so-story-admiring Science dote on such an argument. It is neat. It is formalizable. It is calculable (though, to repeat, Clark has not done the calculations that Galton pioneered). But it is scientifically wrong.

And for the historical question at hand it anyway doesn’t make a lot of sense. Beyond the difficulties already mentioned, Clark’s distinctive argument depends on measures of aptitudes that are, like height, influenced by more than inheritance and, unlike height, have no natural units invariant to social values. What made for riches in 1600 had little to do with what made for riches in 2000. A graceful way with sonnets and a good leg for bowing low to Gloriana are not similar to a Harvard MBA and a knack for computers. What mattered in modern economic growth was not a doubtfully measured change in the inherited abilities of English people. What mattered was a radical change 1600-1776, “measurable” in every play and pamphlet, in what English people wanted, paid for, revalued.

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42. [back] Friedman 2007.
43. [back] Stone 1964, pp. 42-43.
44. [back] Barbalet, p. 86.
45. [back] McGrath 2007, p. 127, his italics deleted and mine supplied; p.41 on genome sequencing; compare Collins 2007, pp. 89-90
46. [back] Wade 2006, p. 215.
47. [back] Mokyr 2007b.
48. [back] Lyovin 1997, p. 257.
49. [back] McInerney and Pisani 2007, p. 1391; and Sorek et al. 2007 on which their article is based. Compare Wade 2006, p. 215: "organisms may acquire genes through borrowing as well as inheritance; bacteria, for instance." Or the economist Herbert Gintis (2008, p. 5): "Similarly, alternative splicing, nuclear and messenger RNA editing, cellular protein modification and genomic imprinting, which are quite common quite undermine the standard view of the insular gene producing a single protein, and support the notion of genes having variable boundaries and having strongly context-dependent effects." Dagan et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008) found that fully 80 percent of 181 prokaryotes had had some borrowing. The reporter for Science remarked that "well-defined phylogenetic trees . . . become rather less clearly delineated when looked at over very long time periods" (Science 321 [8 Aug. 2008], p. 747). And in humans in the modern world the "long" period would be a couple of generations.
50. [back] Johnson 2000.
51. [back] Galton 1901, p. 15.
52. [back] Bowles 2007.
53. [back] Clark 2007, p. 183.
54. [back] Marx 1846.
55. [back] Clark 2007b, p.
56. [back] De Vries 2008, p. 1181.
57. [back] Manski 2008, p. 4. Ziliak and McCloskey 2008.
58. [back] Cite Ashton *** get in Nedge collection upstairs
59. [back] Galor and Moav 2002.
60. [back] Guinnane 2009 is devastating on these points.
61. [back] Galor and Moav 2002, p. 1181.
62. [back] Vlastos 1986.
63. [back] Winchester 2008, pp. 279-280.
64. [back] Clark and Hamilton 2006, p. 707; Galor and Moav 2002, p. 1180n4.
65. [back] Allen 2006, p. 3, referring to Allen 1983.
66. [back] David 2008.
67. [back] Galton 1901

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1. [...] McCloskey says Clark is way wrong, and I’m basically persuaded by McCloskey’s argument. Clark’s Farewell to Alms [...]

   Written by The Cause of the Industrial Revolution: Not Genes « William’s Continued Adventures on June 2nd, 2010.

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