Is Darwin to be believed? Well yes, but only when convenient.
The world’s most genetically diverse countries (using their measure of what counts as genetically diverse) are in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the world’s poorest region. The least genetically diverse countries are in places like Bolivia, which have low incomes but not as low as in that region of Africa. There’s an intermediate level of genetic diversity among the residents of the middle-income and rich countries in Asia, Europe and North America.
Genetic diversity arises from migratory distance of populations from East Africa. Countries in east Africa have the highest genetic diversity because this is where humans evolved. Populations that settled in other parts of the world descend from various subgroups of people who left Africa at different times. Thus, these groups are less varied in their genetic profiles.
Ashraf and Galor put this together and argued that this is "reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity." Their argument was that a little bit of genetic diversity is a good thing because "a wider spectrum of traits is more likely to be complementary to the development and successful implementation of advanced technological paradigms," but if a country is too genetically diverse, its economy will suffer from "reduced cooperation and efficiency." Thus, they wrote, "the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of those regions."
| Gets one to thinking of three bowls of porridge... |
When the paper by Ashraf and Galor came out, I criticzed it from a statistical perspective, questioning what I considered its overreach in making counterfactual causal claims such as:
The mind-worm will die, but only if you stop reading NOW !
| As someone who works with geneticists and who (tries to do) does genetics a little himself, it's more than a bit of a stretch to blame the differences between Africa, Europe and Bolivia all on genetics. There's a couple thousand years of culture to account for, and we know the environment modifies genetics (that's a whole field of 'epigenetics', and it's real). So my retort to this is that it's culture, environment, genetics, and human behavior all wrapped together, and good luck trying to sort out the relative contributions of each. Focusing on one part exclusively means one ignores the contributions of the other parts; and that's going to be a major error. |
