A Genetic Explanation for the Industrial Revolution

Could the Industrial Revolution’s explosion in affluence have been made possible in Great Britain by genetic changes in human nature? That’s the controversial theory of Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis. As described by the New York Times, Davis shows that, from 1200 to 1800, the English were "locked in […]

FactoryCould the Industrial Revolution's explosion in affluence have been made possible in Great Britain by genetic changes in human nature?

That's the controversial theory of Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis.

As described by the New York Times, Davis shows that, from 1200 to 1800, the English were "locked in a Malthusian trap," with each advance in production quickly offset by population growth that devoured the surplus wealth. As a result, the average English person ate fewer calories in 1790 than a hunter-g atherer a millennia before. But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, productivity increases outpaced population growth and average incomes rose. The origins of the jump have perplexed historians.

Clark developed his theory while testing Jared Diamond's argument that British success was rooted in their evolution of disease resistance. He combed through ancient wills, looking for a relationship between wealth and offspring, and found that the rich consistently had more surviving children than the poor.

That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,”
he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped. [...]

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

I do think that, at least in its portrayal by the
Times, Clark is attributing too much to a reductionist view of genetics and underestimating the importance of social and cultural institutions in shaping behavior trans-generationally. Not for nothing did William
Golding's "Lord of the Flies" suggest that pre-industrial barbarity lurked close to the surface in the heart of man.

Clark also seems dismiss institutional causes by reference to the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund. He's right in likening them to "prescientific physicians who prescribed bloodletting for ailments they did not understand," but they represent only one possible institutional approach," but they represent only one possible institutional approach.

But for all that, it's a delightful idea, and very much in keeping with the Wired Science zeitgeist. We've written here before about changes in human nature -- at the level of individuals and broader, superorganismal interaction -- driving and being driven down the path to civilization.
Maybe Clark and Bert Hoelldobler could get together....

In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence [New York Times]

Image: Glasgow Digital Library*