The 10000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Evolution, Anthropology, Biology, Genetics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 26, 2009

Reviews

[David Cain · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was seriously underwhelmed by this work. At a high level, I think it's great that there's a new publication that presents a case for the biological and genetic drivers of human evolution even during the recent historic period. I certainly agree with this perspective, and it adds a nice layer of evidence to other recent popular works dealing with human history in the Holocene. The devil is in the details, however, and this is where the book comes up short.

I was very frustrated by this book's orientation very firmly in the "popular science" genre rather than being more scientifically rigorous. There were far fewer citations than appropriate, and many claims were presented as fact without a shred of supporting evidence. Far too often, the authors (Cochran and Harpending) resorted to descriptions like "completely obvious" or "undoubtedly" to refer to their own arguments and "simply incorrect", etc. to diminish opposing viewpoints without actually exploring WHY their own ideas were correct and opposing ideas might not be accurate. The authors sometimes acknowledge contradictory arguments or evidence but never explore them in anything but the most cursory fashion.

One of my biggest problems is that most of this book presents one big straw man argument. The authors repeatedly assert that conventional wisdom stipulates that no evolution has occurred in recent human history, and that current anthropological thought indicates that all patterns and changes in the last 10,000 years may be ascribed to cultural or environmental forces rather than biological ones. I suspect they are primarily aiming their sights at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, & Steel" as well as selected works of Stephen Jay Gould. But really, this is not at all conventional wisdom in the scientific community, and there are plenty of books, papers, and people who will argue that a combination of cultural, environmental, and yes, biological and genetic factors have been important shapers of recent human destiny.

I'm not going to get up on my soapbox and impress myself with my own intelligence by detailing a catalogue of complaints about the specific arguments in this work, or expounding upon what I believe to be more compelling arguments. Suffice to say that I have advanced degrees in related areas and worked as a professional anthropologist/archaeologist for years, so I consider my perspective to be an informed one. Here are two examples that I would consider to be representative of the flawed logic, methods, and philosophy of the entire work:

Chapter two presents their conclusion that Homo sapiens must have exchanged genes with Homo neanderthalensis. Based on what new evidence that now proves this old idea, you might ask? NONE! It's a compelling theory, but as of yet there is no conclusive support. Among their claims? "We can only say that humans are known to have had sexual congress with [all sorts of things:]...any port in a storm", as well as "a gene that plays a role in speech was replaced by a new variant some 42,000 years ago...it is likely that the migrating humans picked it up from Neanderthals, since that's about the time they encountered them in their expansion out of Africa". These kind of unsupported and ridiculous leaps of faith do not have a logical link to Cochran and Harpending's ultimate conclusions, and it is irresponsible to reach such a firm and adamant conclusion when supported by such a weak foundation of evidence. Don't get me wrong, I agree that genetic admixture between these groups was possible (perhaps even likely). Just don't insult my intelligence by building such a poor case with such strong and decisive language.

The final chapter discusses the reasons why Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than everyone else. The whole idea of measuring intelligence is subject to a variety of biases and problems. Rather than building a case that the pattern they describe is indeed real and valid - by first systematically reviewing objections to the concept of IQ measurement - they breeze through these objections in a single paragraph. That is intellectually dishonest - let's see some systematic scientific arguments rather than ad hoc rationalization, please. Not to mention that they ignore the social implications of their perspective - namely, that this type of thinking can be used to support racism in all its pernicious guises. If some groups are smarter than others, it follows that other groups would be dumber than average, and it is a slippery slope from this kind of thinking to arguing for institutionalized discrimination, eugenics, etc.

In short, this work leaves much to be desired. The style is unscientific and many of the conclusions are non sequiturs based on weak presentation of evidence and avoidance of opposing views. I would suggest skipping this one for something less partisan and more soundly scientific.

[Marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like challenging views of people who go against the grain and dare to knock down sacred houses. Cochran and Harpending are clearly of this caliber. To begin with, their book is a frontal attack on the existing consensus in the (social) sciences regarding the biological and cultural evolution of man. They accuse those sciences of remaining blind to the fact that human, biological evolution is also determined by cultural factors, and not only by environment. They confront the reader with a veritable bombardment of theses about three defining periods in which this would be visible: the 'jump' in the cognitive capabilities of Homo sapiens through the introduction of Neanderthal genes about 40,000 BP, the enormous genetic changes resulting from the agrarian revolution about 10,000 BP and finally the extraordinary increase of intellectual powers among Azkhenazim Jews in the period between 800 and 1600 of our era.

Cochran and Harpending support their argument with numerous references to existing genetic and biological studies, but only in a third of the cases do they add names and valid scientific references. Moreover, their text is full of twists and turns like “it could be”, “it is very well possible”, “there are hints that”, “there's reason to think that”, etc. In other words, we are fully in the domain of speculation.

Now I think well-founded speculation certainly has its place in the scientific process. Scientific practice is always accompanied by some degree of hypothetical thinking, based on reasonable and rational arguments. Thus, even without empirical evidence, theories are certainly valuable (theoretical physics is full of them), as long as they are soundly grounded and sufficiently explain certain phenomena (until proof to the contrary). To a certain extent this also involves an element of intuitive thinking, as is apparent from the work of Stephen Hawking, for example. And the results can be ground-breaking.

Evidently, Cochran and Harpending are convinced that their hypotheses are ground-breaking. But they fail to substantiate this in a scientifically sound manner. The arrogant tone they regularly use towards other scientists therefore is all the more offensive. I am not making any statement about the potential plausibility of their speculations. For example, in the case of the possible interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens their claim has been proven in retrospect, through sound genetic research. So, that's to their merit. But it is typical that they go one step further and conclude that the input of those 'foreign' genes has brought the cognitive development of modern humans to a much higher level. With this statement, and many others, they are entering very dangerous territory, with the possibility of refounding racial theories.
More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember, back when I was in college, participating in one of those classic college-style drunken debates with some friends about whether evolution was speeding up or slowing down. I argued, no doubt with some slurring of words, that that the increase in the complexity of life meant that there were more and more things for evolution to operate on, and that therefore evolution was speeding up. They argued the opposite, that evolution was fastest back when organisms were simple, and a change in allele frequency would have been proportionately larger as a percentage of the gene pool.

Obviously from the sober light of day years later this was an argument over semantics, how we were defining the base unit of comparison, but I still sometimes encounter the equivalent opinion that evolution for humans has either slowed or stopped, backed by the contention that humans in particular are now somehow beyond the laws of natural selection governing the lesser inhabitants of the earth. Cochran and Harpending have a fairly slim popular science book that takes aim at that same misconception that bothered me, but while I agree wholeheartedly with their thesis that humans are not somehow exempt from evolution, I have a few qualms with the book.

For the most part it reads like a counterpart to the frequently-cited Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, in that while Diamond spent a lot of time talking about how Europeans benefited from having more and better domesticatable plants and animals and the like, he did not concentrate as much as he could have on how much of a two-way street that was, meaning the symbiotic nature of the evolutionary pressures humans were putting on those plants and animals. Put crudely, ancient humans spent a lot of time domesticating things like horses or corn, and since doing that gave groups which were successful advantages over other groups that weren't, you could look at that domesticating process as not only selecting future horses and corn, but also future humans who were better at at the domesticating process itself. Once humanity realized that it had the power to manipulate its environment, that unleashed a self-reinforcing cascade of selective forces, which are not only still operating today, but could very well be speeding up.

I agree wholeheartedly with this basic idea, and for the most part C & H do a solid if somewhat breezy job of explicating it. Their main sin (which of course is also a virtue in the popular science market) is that they are so confident in their theory of accelerating anthropogenic selection pressures that they seemingly incapable of devoting more than a few dismissive sentences to previous research or competing views. It makes the book livelier and more readable, but you can't help but be a little suspicious of the result. So you will have controversial sections like the opening one on possible interbreeding between ancient homo sapiens and Neanderthals that are very interesting and seem to make compelling logical sense, yet to a layman deliver an impression of either non-engagement with or the passing over of broad swathes of scientific work. That comes with the pop-sci territory though, and since I'm not a genetic historian, I will give them a pass on the question of accuracy.

At its core, this book is about the self-domestication of society, a process which has been going on for several thousand years, but over the past few millennia (and the past few centuries in particular) had dramatic effects on human behavior. Scientists like Steven Jay Gould have assumed that humans have been mostly unchanged for the past few thousand years, but Cochran and Harpending strongly disagree, using analogies like the rapid changes in species like dogs and data on specific subgroups of humans with unique selection pressures (more on that later). It's impossible to overstate the dramatic effect that the invention of agriculture had on homo sapiens. It was a complete game-changer in terms of sustenance, culture, warfare, and our relationship to the environment. There's a good discussion of subtleties in the Malthusian trap, the theory whereby any increase in food production is quickly eaten up by the resulting increase in population. This is true in broad terms, but the quantitative and qualitative difference in lifestyle that agriculture provides is the catalyst for an immense speedup in the churn of genes. It upsets the balance between deaths from conflict, disease, and starvation (pestilence, war, and famine, if you want to get Biblical about it), which matters from a selection standpoint. Groups of humans that master agriculture will not only be better fed, but they will have enough surplus to devote to increasing the complexity of their civilization as well as having different immune systems due to contact with livestock and other animals. C & H speculate that the dramatic expansion of Proto-Indo-European-speaking tribes might be due to the advantages conferred by lactose tolerance, and there's also the familiar example of the contrast between European colonization of the Americas thanks to diseases like smallpox and the failure of the same (except in South Africa) due to lack of resistance to malaria.

Where the book gets the most controversial is in claiming that this process of adaptation is having effects within several human generations, aiming squarely at Gould's contention in books like The Mismeasure of Man that the basic hardware of humanity hasn't changed much in the past few tens of thousands of years. I can certainly agree that it seems like there's been an increase in traits favoring abstract reasoning since the Bronze Age. The human environment we find ourselves in today is simply not like the small scattered settlements of a few thousand years ago, and as witnessed by the dramatic explosion in diversity of species like dogs that undergo rapid, determined selection pressures, it's perfectly possible that we have been consciously or unconsciously breeding ourselves in particular directions that favor success in modern society. Modern society might also create many avenues for misusing those traits of abstract reasoning and logical deduction (endless fan-wiki pages on obscure TV shows are a good example of these faculties gone awry - this is on a surface level identical to doing real knowledge work, but is completely sterile), however it seems reasonable to say that, Idiocracy aside, smarter people might have a definite reproductive advantage in environments that reward cleverness over the long haul.

Does that mean that we could see groups of people today who are measurably smarter than others? To be as blunt as the final chapter, are groups like Ashkenazi Jews or East Asians simply smarter than "generic" Caucasians, as seen by their greater average IQ scores and disproportionate success in fields that demand high cognitive complexity? To be even blunter, by that same reasoning does that imply that groups like sub-Saharan Africans or aboriginal Australians simply less smart than "generic" Caucasians? Cochran and Harpending, to their credit, present this contention with as positive a spin as you could expect, casting this investigation into potential genetic differences between groups as an opportunity for more research and possible positive gene therapy rather than as justification for something like apartheid or a Brave New World society. Certainly nothing in an acknowledgement that some groups might have a higher mean IQ than others implies any kind of justification for racist policies any more than acknowledging that an individual might have a higher IQ than another does. But given the high temperatures that accompany any research that even glancingly appears to support eugenics or racial determinism (witness the shameful "Wilson, you're all wet" treatment that E. O. Wilson received), plus all of the well-known historical failures of pseudo-scientific intelligence testing, I'd like for further studies and for books that don't seem so flippant. I don't believe we have anything to fear from further research into the genetic basis of human intelligence - far from it. Let's just make sure we proceed with a little more rigor than I did as a drunken undergraduate.

[Sense of History]

“This is a new picture of recent human evolution. It implies that humans have changed not just culturally, but genetically, over the course of recorded history, and that we must allow for such changes when we try to understand historical events.” I guess, when you read the above quotation, your automatic reaction will be: “I can agree with that”, and you’re right. A lot of what Gregory Cochran (°1953) and Henry Harpending (1944-2016) present looks like common sense. And still, I have to label this book as utterly controversial, and that’s an understatement.

Cochran and Harpending firmly claim that the scientific consensus on the earliest human development is completely wrong, entrenched as it is in conservative ways of thinking. This concerns the mainstream thesis that about 50-40,000 years ago the biological development of mankind transitioned into a cultural development, and that biological evolution simply stopped. In other words, the Darwinian process of adaptation to the environment became subordinate to the cultural one, whereby mankind adapted his environment and not the other way around.

Cochran and Harpending take a different approach: “Not only are there strong reasons to believe that significant human (genetic) evolution over the past 50,000 years is theoretically possible, and in fact likely, but it's completely obvious that it has taken place, since people look different. This is especially true of populations separated by great distances and geographical barriers.” In other words, biological evolution has continued, visible in phenomena like lactose tolerance, different skin color, and so on.

Now, it's not quite right when the authors claim that the (social) sciences deny this: some biological adaptation is recognized by almost everyone, and that makes sense. So they are targeting the wrong enemy. Moreover, Cochran and Harpending go more than a few steps further: according to them, cultural practices (in a particular area) are also genetically anchored and passed on; even more: they are even the driving force behind the biological evolution of man in the last 10,000 years, “an endless dance between biological and cultural change”, in which especially the transition to an agricultural way of life has led to far-reaching genetic changes.

It is a challenging thesis, indeed, and in itself worth exploring. To a certain extent, Cochran and Harpending seem to correspond to the Lamarckian view of human evolution, after the French botanist who formulated the principle at the beginning of the 19th century – before Darwin – that acquired properties could be passed on hereditary, within one generation. Modern biology has rejected this thesis (in favour of the Darwinian slow-moving natural selection-principle), although Lamarckian voices are resurfacing with clockwork regularity. To be clear: Cochran and Harpending are not on the Lamarckian line (for them the selection through cultural pressure is decisive, which is different from individually acquired traits).

However, some of their positions are heading in that direction, since the most revolutionary aspect of their theory is that genetic changes in the last 10.000 years took place in a very limited time, sometimes in a few centuries at most. At a certain point in the book, they claim that biological evolution even goes 100 times faster than before, due to the cultural impetus, after the agrarian and sedentary revolution. An interesting and enticing claim, but their arguments to back this are mostly circumstantial and speculative, and they are only fragmentary referring to the research it is based on. That's a big problem.

In addition, Cochran and Harpending venture onto another slippery slope: references to racial differences regularly appear in their texts, putting them on controversial territory. After all, they seem to suggest that certain populations have become more intelligent or more labour-active than other ones due to genetically anchored cultural practices. Those statements have provoked a lot of criticism from established figures within the biological sciences, because they pretty much smell like a reaffirmation of old, racial theories. Moreover, after the publication of this book, the late Henry Harpending has ventured down this path a bit more, in such a way that he is sometimes quoted by white supremacist and alt-right circles (there's still a debate going on what the position of Harpending really was).

Now, in the last decade, after the publication of this book, genetics and especially paleo-genetics have really taken off. And the preliminary results of these studies don't seem to confirm Cochran's and Harpending's statements. Because the picture that constantly emerges from genetic studies is that the human population underwent a continuous mix, due to large and small migration flows, and you can therefore hardly speak of clearly defined, distinct populations. At the same time, I have to say that a leading paleogeneticist like David Reich remains very cautious. In his seminal Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past he clearly distances himself of Cochran, but there is a curious chapter in this book in which he does not exclude that an empirical confirmation of distinct populations is possible in the future. And then, of course, there is the endless discussion on epigenetics, which bypasses the question of real genetic change.

I'm not an expert in genetics, so I'm not going to venture into statements about the validity of what Cochran and Harpending are claiming. I can only conclude that their propositions are very speculative, go in different directions and are formulated in a too firm, even arrogant way. And in my experience, then it's better to be on your guard, all the more as they don't substantiate their theories with proper references.

[Lou Schuler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was recommended by a friend of mine, an archaeologist. It came out of our mutual dislike of the notion, promoted by some advocates of the paleo diet, that humans of the late stone age were perfectly adapted to their environment, and thus stopped evolving. By that logic, agriculture (and everything that followed) was a huge mistake.

Except, as it turns out, agriculture was a force for rapid and continued evolution. Lactose tolerance was a huge advantage to the first people who developed it. Same with the adaptations that allowed humans to thrive on grains as a staple of the diet.

And although the authors don't say it -- and probably weren't even thinking it at the time they wrote it -- the book ends with what may turn out to be an instructive look at how our current society is evolving.

The final chapter is called "Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews Got their Smarts." This particular group, who originally settled in what are now Germany and Poland, are known for high intelligence (with an average IQ 12-15% above the norm) and for devastating genetic disorders. My guess is that they're also an example of assortative mating: the most intelligent people of a group marry each other and have even more intelligent kids, who go on to marry the children of other intelligent parents.

Now we're seeing something similar, with dual-career couples of highly educated professionals living around and associating almost exclusively with similarly accomplished couples. This is happening at a time when the economic system has shifted toward increasing rewards for cognitive skill.

But with this push toward the outer edges of human potential comes an otherwise inexplicable rise in autistic-spectrum disorders. It may turn out that there's no link between the two and I'm completely off base. But it would seem to follow the same pattern described by the authors.

I read this book right before reading The Sports Gene, by David Epstein, which follows the same threads to help explain why extraordinary athletes seem to cluster in certain populations. The two books together give us a fascinating -- if still speculative -- look at the speed of human evolution in the right circumstances.

[Rev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I felt that this book was lacking in scientific soundness. Where there needed to be citations, there were not. The authors failed to systematically go through objections or proofs for a ton of their claims. The almost-condescending tone that the authors adopted at times was unwarranted, especially in light of their failure to provide sufficient viable resources. As for the chapter about Ashkenazi Jews, I was left asking, "So what?", along with a feeling of great apprehension due to discussions about correlations between race/ethnicity and IQ. Too many neglected implications. However, it wasn't all completely bad news; I did learn a few things based on some interesting information (read: not unverified claims) they presented.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, is the work of two professors, one a physicist and the other an anthropologist; it's about the idea that human evolution has not only not ceased, but it has even gotten faster recently. The fact that Cochran is listed as "a physicist and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology" gives a hint at the boundary-crossing nature of this book's point of view.

Not so long ago (still today, in some cases) textbooks and other expert sources would say that human evolution had basically stopped once we acquired the rudiments of technology, or at any rate was too slow to have made any change in us since then. There is a more recent school of thought which asserts just the opposite: we are still evolving, and are doing so at a faster rate than ever.

There are a few cases that are now fairly well documented, such as lactose tolerance. In the U.S. we think of lactose intolerance (the inability to digest milk after early childhood) as being the abnormality, but in fact it is lactose tolerance that is the recent oddity, still a minority among the world's population. In a few places, though, such as northern Europe and eastern Africa, lactose tolerance is the norm. These places are, not surprisingly, the ones where cattle have been kept for a long time.

But not that long. If the few thousand years that humanity has kept domesticated cattle is long enough to evolve a major change to how we digest food, then evolution is not necessarily always so slow as we had thought. For that matter, we know that things like skin color have evolved in the time since some humans left Africa (and others stayed behind), so one begins to wonder why scientists ever thought that there was no difference in the genetics of modern humans and those of 50,000 years ago.

Not long into "The 10,000 Year Explosion", we are reminded why. Once you admit that we may be significantly different, genetically, than our ancestors of 50,000 years ago, we have the disquieting possibility that different races might not be the same. Of course, in one sense this is a tautology; if they were genetically the same, we wouldn't call them different races. But, assertions of one race or another being more highly evolved had a nasty history of popping up on behalf of whoever had military and political power in the 19th and early 20th century, and most scientists have steered clear of the idea since then.

It's been a couple generations since this kind of thing, however, and Cochran and Harpending are ready to Go There. They do so, however, in a politically circumspect way, by looking at the elevated IQ's of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. The theory is that, because of religious strictures against intermarriage with Gentiles, the Ashkenazi Jews were a reproductively distinct group for nearly two thousand years. They also had a distinctly IQ-based lifestyle for nearly a thousand years, from about 800 A.D. to about 1650 A.D., with frequent massacres and other persecutions to provide the brutal selection against the less successful, along with the basic fact that pre-modern life resulted in a lot of starvation if you weren't a farmer, and also weren't financially successful. Cochran and Harpending assert that this unique "environment" led to a relatively rapid evolution in favor of higher IQ among this one group, relative to the rest of us. Hey, maybe.

The larger point of recent evolution also includes less controversial examples, like the fact that Europeans had been living in large cities, and thus acquiring disease resistance, far longer than the New World civilizations they came into contact with, and conquered. On the other hand, when the white man went into areas with malaria, they often found their guns mattered less than mosquitoes; France's failed attempt to reconquer Haiti is one of many examples where the (genetic, and recently evolved) resistance to malaria of native populations gave them the ability to throw off colonial empires. Surely it's no coincidence that the people whose ancestors had long lived with the threat of those diseases were able to fight them off better.

But, if evolution is being sped up by cultural innovations like keeping cattle for milk, or living in large cities; and if (as I think we would all accept) the pace of change in the last few centuries has been even faster, does this mean our own evolution is speeding up even faster as well? And is this a good thing, on balance, or bad? It is, of a certainty, a thing worth pondering.

[Tracy Black · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it a little over the half-way mark before setting this one down. The writing style is easy to read and there are a few good ideas in there. Here are the problems though.
1. It's dumbed down and watered down. The authors assume the read is an idiot and doesn't know any history at all, and so give broad, watered-down histories. Like the history of agriculture in two pages. It's absolutely no help to someone unfamiliar with it, and frustratingly oversimplified to someone who is.
2. Very few claims were supported with actual facts. One claim at the end of Ch.5 was that the problem solving abilities and scientific thinking in Europe were genetic, and this is what spawned the industrial and scientific revolutions. They demonstrated how this benefited society, but didn't even attempt to show how these traits could have made the "scientists" more fit, in that they would have more offspring. A gene can't become more common in a population any other way. They also didn't attempt to show that Europeans had some gene related to problem solving that other populations don't have. Personally, I like the idea of coffee replacing alcohol as the popular beverage sparking the scientific revolution. There's absolutely no support for it having a genetic basis, and plenty for it having a cultural basis.

Maybe it gets better in the second half, but my reading queue is to full to waste any more time on it.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

In retrospect, John Derbyshire doing the blurb on the back might have tipped me off, but I'd spotted the book in the Museum of Natural History bookshop and this is the first time they've steered me wrong...

Not good science, plain and simple. Saying something is 'completely obvious' or brushing a countering argument aside as 'incorrect' may sound authoritative, but means nothing if not backed up by evidence. And often, the evidence is lacking. For example, the authors would have us believe that science shows that modern humans crossbred with Neanderthals. Unfortunately, they present no evidence. Does it make sense that humans probably got it on with Neanderthals? Certainly. Do the authors present evidence for successful cross-species reproduction? No.

But that's not the only problem. The authors are eager to attribute things to genetics that have no obvious connection to reproductive fitness (again with little or no evidence) and do more than just flirt with discredited notions of racial intelligence. I had started to feel uncomfortable with the direction the authors were going- Europeans are the most evolved, Australian aboriginals and African bushmen the least- well before I noticed the title of the last chapter- which purports to be about why Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other groups. Based on IQ tests, which the authors accept as reasonable measures of intelligence unaffected by socioeconomic factors, and a number of prominent Jewish scientists. That's the point at which I quit. If I wanted to read racist pseudoscience, I would look up something from 1930s Germany.

In short, this book is a waste of time. With so many other books on my to-read list, I could have used that time on something worthwhile.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provocative and very entertaining read. The main thesis is that human genetic evolution has been ongoing (if not accelerating) over the last 10000 years (which on a typical evolutionary scale is an insignificant timeframe). And the main mechanism facilitating such development is a rapidly changing culture. For example the shift from hunter-gatherers to agriculture had profound consequences at genetic level. Mixing of modern humans (coming north from Africa) with Neanderthals was another boost for increased gene flow and of course just your plain increase in population combined with expansions/colonization expedited gene swapping significantly.

All sorts of interesting arguments are made from relatively uncontroversial lactose intolerance to more controversial theories of dominance of Indo-European language group, IQ prowess of Ashkenazi Jews and evolutionary selection for long-term planning. Whether you buy those arguments or not they make for a fascinating and overall rather compelling read.

My main criticism is authors’ neglect of epigenetics or Gould’s punctuated equilibrium. Both are highly relevant to the topic at hand and can either tank or enhance authors’ arguments. For example punctuated equilibrium may help explain recent “sudden” genetic acceleration from a different angle.

Much more interesting is gene-environment interaction from epigenetics perspective. Authors’ argument still heavily relies on Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” that puts DNA front-and-center of any evolutionary process. But what has been becoming increasingly clear is that gene regulation and specifically gene transcription factors play a massive role in gene expression - in other words the same gene can be expressed very (sometimes drastically) differently depending on transcription factors/promoters involved. And transcription factors can be (and often are) triggered by environment! So then one can argue that many changes in species are not the result of genetic changes but rather environmental changes that trigger different transcription mechanisms. Yet one has to be careful with gene regulators which are themselves coded for by DNA and so the evolution of a regulator can be just as important (if not more) than evolution of the gene itself. Anyway it gets complicated but completely ignored by the authors that heavily bias their on analysis on good old gene-level mutations and classic Darwinian selection.

Ps for a pretty strong argument against gene-centric view see this excellent article http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-i...
For a more middle-ground reconciling approach see Sapolsky’s bit here http://aeon.co/magazine/science/an-ex...

[James Caterino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a long held interest in evolution and anthropology. Beyond an interest actually. More like an endless fascination. Some would even say obsession. I am a the the Tea Party/GOP's worst nightmare. I cannot be bullied into falling into the current line of thinking that the earth is 6000 years old. I know better.

Enough about fables and delusions and on to science and The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

As soon as I opened up this book and started to read, I could not stop. I devoured it. Then I read it again. It is utterly fascinating. The book is about exactly what the title says, how the last 10,000 years human evolution is rapidly accelerating due to the adaptions of civilization. We change phyically to adapt to changes from geography, climate, diet, but these are not slow mutations that occur over millions or even hundreds of thousands of years as they have been throughout most of the planet's evolutionary history. These are now rapid changes at the genetic level involving alterations at the chromosomal level called alleles. They can occur in as little as several generations, and the rate of change is increasing dramtically.

The authors go back beyond 10,000 years ago to indentify the time when this explosion of acceleration first began 30,000 years ago. They indentify the exact event. For me this was best part of the book because it something that I always believed and the authors make a strong case to back up their somewhat irrevereant theory. I will not give it away here. It would be akin to giving a away a major spoiler to a novel. But anyone with an interest in anthropology or evolution of human history will find it facinating.

My only problem I had with this book is the use of of the term "ape-like". It is a pet peeve of mine and scientists should know better. Humans ARE great apes so referring to a non-human behavior as "ape-like" is a contradiction.

In many ways The 10,000 Year Explosion reads like the anthropolgy equivilant to a Michio Kaku physics book. That makes perfect sense since one of the authors is a physicist. Overall, this book is a pop science masterwork with some terrific insights and revoltionary theories. Together with Guns, Germs, and Steel, it makes for the perfect new wave evolution double feature.

[Terence · Rating 2 out of 5]

The basic argument of The 10,000 Year Explosion (10KYE) is two-fold. The first assertion is that biological evolution still affects the human species, which is evident within historic memory. The second half of the argument is that evolution has accelerated since the Agricultural Revolution c. 12,000 years ago. The authors look at four turning points in human development: (1) the displacement of the Neanderthal c. 40,000 years ago by modern humans, (2) the Agricultural Revolutions (more properly, “revolutions” as farming was discovered several times in several places), (3) Indo-European expansion c. 5,000 years ago, and (4) the cognitive development of Ashkenazi Jews in Medieval Europe.

The second half of the argument is essentially one of numbers. Agriculture permitted an enormous increase in population and density. More genes allowed for more mutations, for good or ill. Beyond the absolute numbers, lies another fact: Humans were now living in environments radically different from those their hunting-gathering ancestors wandered in. Selective pressures fell (are falling) on different genes, and better adapted populations expanded at the expense of less well adapted. I think the evidence is becoming quite clear that this part of Cochran and Harpending’s (C/H) argument is certain. The details of why and what adaptations developed are still matters of controversy. The most infamous evidence for this is Old World humans’ resistance to epidemic diseases like small pox. This adaptation New World humans lacked, and they paid a horrific price.* The first part of the authors’ argument is more tendentious, at least in regards to points (1) and (4), so I’ll deal with (2) and (3) first:

Point 2 – the consequences of agriculture:

1. Old World humans developed resistance to a variety of infectious diseases that became common or evolved in the relatively close-packed, sedentary communities of post-farming humanity.

2. Expansion into more northerly latitudes tended to favor lighter skin color. It’s interesting that the genes that activate this trait are different in East Asian populations vs. European ones. A difference that suggests different evolutionary pressures were working on these groups. Another interesting point the authors make is that the European gene (or complex of genes) has had the most visible consequences – Europeans show the greatest variety of hair, eye and skin color.

3. Human skeletons have become more gracile, and skull volume has decreased.

4. The acceleration of genetic mutations has resulted in an abnormally high (compared to other species) rate of miscarriage.

5. A large number of mutations are found in genes that control human cognition and the nervous system. C/H suggest some of these mutations are the results of trade offs between muscle and brain power. Other mutations point to changes in the ear, which may be related to language development.

It’s instructive to read this section in light of my recent perusals of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and The Humans Who Went Extinct Why Neanderthals died out and we survived. Jaynes would agree that humans haven’t always thought the same way but it doesn’t require belief in Jaynes’ theories to accept the fact that our ancestors could have thought in profoundly different ways than we do. Finlayson supports the opposite view, apparently – human cognition hasn’t significantly changed in a quarter of a million years (which, I think, is too extreme a position).

6. Farming cultures were always on the edge of starvation since populations expands more rapidly than food supply (the Malthusian trap). This had the interesting consequence that the better off were reproductively more successful than the poor. Thus, if there were any biological basis for their success, the wealthier passed on their genes to future generations while the poors’ were lost. (This, too, flies in the face of Finlayson’s belief that marginal populations are the more successful in evolutionary crises.)

7. As a species, humans became more tractable (i.e., tamed). Aggressive behavior (particularly among males) may have had an evolutionary advantage in a scattered, hunter-gathering economy but in the new agricultural communities, its utility was reduced and could be downright disadvantageous. As a consequence, nicer, less aggressive humans became more successful. We may decry our modern propensity to follow the herd but without it, modern life would be impossible.

Here, C/H make one of their more controversial and, IMO, more specious arguments: That in nonagricultural populations one will find less submissive individuals, indicated by their unwillingness to be enslaved. They point to the absence of Native American slaves in European colonies as evidence for this, ignoring their earlier contention that New World humans couldn’t easily live with Old Worlders because of the disease issue and ignoring the historical record. I think this is a case of carrying biological determinism too far. Biologically there were any number of reasons that Old and New World humans couldn’t mix easily but that one was the uncontrollable aggression of New World captives seems far fetched. Among themselves Native Americans were more than happy to enslave each other, and I’m sure that had they been less susceptible to disease would have been better represented on Spanish haciendas and American plantations.

8. So-called bourgeois virtues – hard work, deferred gratification, property (biologically – securing resources necessary for successful procreation) and selfishness – became advantageous and were pressured for selection.

9. Agriculture selected for cognitive traits that made trade and long-range planning easier.

Here again the authors make another of their ill-supported, poorly integrated claims: Modern-day nonagricultural societies may have an evolutionary disadvantage in adopting and adapting to modern society above and beyond any barriers erected by colonialist policies, racism and corrupt politicians because their brains aren’t as capable of thinking in a “farming” mode as long-established agricultural societies. This is another example, IMO, of biological determinism run amok. You don’t have to invoke biology to understand why so many countries worldwide are still “developing” after centuries of supposed aid, or to explain Western domination of the modern era.

I like point (3). Here’s an example where a biological basis for the observed history has some foundation. About 5,000 years ago, a group of tribes spread out from a common homeland (probably south Russia/Ukraine between the Black and Caspian seas) to overrun earlier tribes from the Atlantic to India. Their dominance is reflected today in the fact that half the planet still speaks languages descended from these Indo-Europeans. What contributed to Indo-European success has confounded historians and archaeologists for years. The authors point out that arguments from technological superiority or social organization falter in the fact that these traits (esp. the technical ones) are easily copied. They might have explained initial success but can’t account for the continued success of Indo-European expansion over the course of several millennia. C/H contend that the secret of their success was their lactose tolerance. Because Indo-Europeans were able to more efficiently utilize their cattle, they had reproductive advantages that drove them on to overwhelm their less efficient neighbors.

It’s an intriguing hypothesis that I find moderately persuasive.

Now we return to points (1) and (4).

Point (1): Around 40,000 BC, a profound change in the material culture of modern humans expanding into the Middle East and Europe took place. This is most spectacularly represented in the cave art of southern France and northern Spain. C/H lay the emergence of these innovations squarely at the feet of the Neanderthal, who contributed genes by mating with incoming moderns.

To begin with, the assertion that our ancestors successfully mated with Neanderthals is far from settled. From my reading, there’s no clear evidence that H. neanderthalensis contributed anything to our genome but the science is still in its infancy and I remain, and the authors should have remained, agnostic on the subject. Or at least provided greater evidence for it. If it becomes obvious that my great-to-the-Nth-degree grandfather Skrag the Hunter was a Neanderthal, I’ll happily accept him at the next family reunion.**

Again, it’s instructive to read Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, where he points out that the timing is all wrong for a material-cultural explosion and our encounters with Neanderthals, and that the cave paintings are unique to France and Spain. Nowhere else do we find a culture that expressed itself in the same way. Indeed, the art of the earliest sites is clearly from a different tradition than that of later sites (which are separated by 20 millennia). And – if the preceding weren’t enough – material culture is rarely preserved. We are in no position to make generalizations based on the evidence we have.

The authors’ fourth example of recent evolutionary change is the most sensitive in this day and age: The Ashkenazi Jews of Central Europe evolved measurably greater cognitive abilities reflected in their disproportionate representation in finance and the sciences. This difference from their neighbors arose because of centuries of reproductive isolation and inbreeding (a cultural consequence of Christian anti-Semitism). I don’t find the idea that such isolation may have selected for a particular genetic expression. European Jews were genetically isolated and forced into occupations that Christians wouldn’t or were forbidden to do (i.e., banking) to a much greater extent than outside of Europe. But I’m not convinced that it has a biological basis, or a significant one at any rate. C/H claim that the successful Ashkenazi foetus was selected for skill in mathematics and critical-thinking skills but they base their conclusions on the efficacy of modern IQ testing and a belief in the inheritability of success on those tests – again, propositions that are still contentious and, again, best to remain agnostic about. The truth of their claims may have to wait for a millennia or two – Since the 19th century, the artificial barriers to greater Ashkenazi admixture with Gentiles have come down both in the bedroom and the workplace. If there’s truth in Ashkenazi cognitive superiority and it’s an advantageous mutation, then we can look forward to all of our descendants being just a little bit smarter.

I have wavered between two and three stars for this book. This subject is of immense interest to me and defaults to the “I like” rating unless there’s some serious deficiency in the writing or argument. In the end, I’ve decided to give it 2.5 stars for two reasons: One is that it’s too short. C/H don’t give their arguments proper support and give contrary evidence short shrift, often dismissing it with a snarky, off-hand remark as illustrated in the note below. The second reason is purely an aesthetic one. I hope that it will be a passing trend but this is another mainstream book on science that adopts a faux folksy idiom totally inappropriate to the subject matter and annoying to boot.

This is an interesting book and despite my caveats well worth the time to study. If nothing else, the book points up the fact that we still have an enormous amount to learn about human evolution and its role in our history – about learning who we are, who we were and who we may become.

* C/H make the interesting point that New World humans may have been doubly cursed because not only were they unprepared for infectious diseases but their immune systems were fundamentally weaker than Old Worlders’ since they were descended from a single gene complex, and would explain why the complex urban, manifestly farming civilizations of the Aztecs and Inca were just as vulnerable as the unfortunate Taino of Hispaniola.

** It’s unfortunate, and a serious flaw of the book, that the authors’ typical reply to counter arguments is specious. In the case of Neanderthal introgression, their response is essentially, “Humans will f**k anything”: “As for the idea that people just wouldn’t have wanted to mate with creatures that were so different, we can only say that humans are known to have had sexual congress with vacuum cleaners, inflatable dolls, horses, and the Indus river dolphin. Any port in the storm, as it were” (p. 37).

[Wout Mertens · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real eye opener. The book shows how, contrary to popular thought, humans are still evolving their genome in a process that has accelerated in the past 10,000 years instead of slowing down in the past 40,000.

As a layman I was thoroughly convinced of the validity of their arguments. All the reasoning is are well-referenced. I learned very interesting things about genetics and our history, like how fast a positive mutation can become part of a population and how evolution probably shaped the European invasions of the Americas and Africa.

Faults to the book are minor; I would have liked a more thorough introduction to the mechanisms in human genetics but Wikipedia helped me out on chromosomes and meiosis. Furthermore the book stops where it gets really interesting, namely present day. It would be great to read about the possible effects of modern medicine and low birthrate in the affluent/successful on our future genome. Another good subject would be the possibility of using gene therapy to apply positive mutations to live persons and/or their offspring.

A very rewarding and engaging read.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conventional wisdom holds that genetic evolution takes place over extremely long periods of time--thousands of years--so that, in the 10K years since the beginning of agriculture, humans' gene-culture coevolution has been overwhelmingly dominated by the cultural component. The book The 10,000 Year Explosion will cure you of that misconception.

Genetic innovation follows the same S-shaped adoption curve as cultural or technological innovation, maybe with similar "crossing the chasm" obstacles. The authors point out that the rate of group innovation (whether biological or cultural) is a function of three variables: the individual innovation rate, the number of individuals, and the diffusion rate. As human populations have grown exponentially, so too have the mutations that provide fodder for natural selection. The diffusion rate depends on several factors, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusio...
most importantly innovation advantage and communication rate. Modern technologies provide far more frequent contact and rapid transport, which poses a serious threat from new diseases but a wonderful opportunity for advantageous human mutations.

[Marc Brackett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of most interesting books that I have read in a very long time. Not only is this book most politically incorrect it also has a number of disturbing implications.

One of the current most treasured beliefs in society is that we are all equal. We all know this really isn't true as some of us will become nuclear chemists, Olympic athletes, and most of us will just be average people trying to get through life.

Another of the core tenants of our understanding is that genetics and environment are equal determinants when it comes to outcomes. It sounds really nice as it provides most of us the hope we can work really hard and overcome the genetic roll of the dice we started with.

It however appears that our genetics play a bigger role than previously thought and that this change happens far faster. Examples of the speed with which these genetic changes can happen are shown with blue eyes (only 6,000 years old) and lactose tolerance (maybe 8,000 years old). These genes are not found in older DNA samples and gave specific advantages to the people who possessed them in certain environments.

There's also evidence that just as farmers select stock best suited for the local environment and market, that societies select individuals in the same manner. Medieval kings had little tolerance for peasant uprisings or disruptive individuals, these societies require individuals that possess a certain personality. In contrast hunter/gather societies have different elements that can make an individual more successful.

Some good examples would be self-control and the ability to delay self-gratification, for example rather than eating the seed wheat in the spring when the food is running short the wheat is planted instead to produce another crop. Not only is a delay in self-gratification needed, but also qualities like the ability to make long range plans and possessiveness (not sharing your wheat with neighbors). The hunter/gather individual needs a far greater fight or flight mechanism, when the elephant is killed you share and eat (otherwise it goes to waste), and there's a far greater need to make numerous short term decisions.

Either set of genetics has specialized and is best suited for certain environments. Having a hair trigger that results in violent outbursts at the five star restaurant staff in Paris is different when the same energy is directed at the neighboring tribe who has invaded your tribes hunting grounds in the Amazon.

In short some people have genetics that make them more suitable for what we consider civilization. The author didn't go here but Afghanistan would be an ideal place to study this (provided the researcher survived). Few places have been the recipient of such brutal and sustained warfare. There have been numerous incidents whereby the area has been depopulated by nearly 90% as the resistance encountered has required such extreme measures as part of pacifying the region. It would seem gentle subservient pacifists would fail to make much of a genetic contribution, perhaps over time contributing to the areas inability to establish a functional or modern governing structure.

The book also touched on the biggest taboo of all and made a very convincing case (intelligence and genetics- in particular the intelligence of Jews). Prior to the past 700 some years the intelligence of Jews was given no special notice, aside from some religious works there was no significant Jewish intellectual contribution. The significant contributions over the past 700 some years have also been restricted to a particular tribe/group of Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews, who are associated with Europe.

The Ashkenazi Jews as they migrated out of the Middle East into Europe face extreme social and economic discrimination. In nearly all cases they were banned from owning property, intermarriage with natives, and limited to practicing a few trades (finance and trade). These restrictions require some special abilities if one is going to survive, throw in the frequent pogrom and it really does become a survival of the fittest program.

On average Ashkenazi Jews will score 10 points higher on IQ tests than the population they are residing with, even other Jews. It should be noted that the other Jewish populations while facing discrimination were not subjected to nearly the same restrictions and were not forced into such a narrow range of occupations, the lower trades were open to them, you could be a street sweeper and survive.

Today one only has to look at the numbers to see the enormous contribution the Ashkenazi Jews have made to the world. Twenty-five percent of the Noble Prize winners are Ashkenazi Jews and are only 1/600th of the world population, still think it's a Jewish conspiracy? Half of the world chess champions are Ashkenazi Jews. More than 20% of all Ivy League college students and business CEO's are Ashkenazi Jews while representing less than 3% of the US population.

There are specific genes that are unique to this population that were not present in the past. The Ashkenazi Jews also are afflicted with a number of genetic disorders which are associated with extra neurons, the gift comes with a curse.

None of this is say that an Ashkenazi Jew couldn't also be a long distance runner that could outperform the Kenyans in the marathon as every population will have outliers, but it's a long shot.

I think the missed underlying message in this book might be that one size will not fit all. Perhaps Germans are well suited for democracy while Afghans are not, there might be more than just culture and religion at work here. Dogs are a good comparison as they have been domesticated nearly as long as the changes in humans this book talks about. All dogs have a common ancestor- wolves. Yet there is nearly as much difference between wolves and dogs today as there is between breeds of dogs. Border collies tap into the predator instinct to control livestock (while not killing them), chihuahuas are very different (not quite sure what they do beside bark a lot), dobermans are excellent guard animals, while labs are beloved companions. Each breed has a particular use it is best suited for and very clear advantages in certain environments. No are better than the other just special and different in all the right ways.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Around this time a year ago, I was having a conversation with Shane and Alex at Beverly's house about Civilization, an ever-fertile topic. We knew that domestication had severely altered the personalities and physiologies of our plant and animal familiars. And it was axiomatic to us that agriculture had “domesticated” humans too—corn gets as much or more from us as we get from it. But was this actually genetic, or merely cultural? Or, to put it another way, if a Jurassic Park-type experiment were to clone DNA from early agricultural sites and introduce the products into society seamlessly, how would they fare? We looked for the answer, and Peter Wilson's The Domestication of the Human Species seemed promising (it treated a cultural, rather than genetic, history, however, which was disappointing). Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee treated the subject only fleetingly (though it provided a host of other insights into the same subject of great interest). Apparently, and somewhat ironically, though, there was a book being written about precisely this subject at very nearly the same time we were discussing it: The 10,000 Year Explosion.

That this book needed to be written is rather odd. It makes most of its conclusions by combining two pieces of conventional wisdom in the context of a new paradigm. It was long held that, as Darwin put it, “not one of the external differences between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him.” The fact that scientists hadn't the techniques to discern genetic differences between populations, combined with racical history theory's ignoble history of, well, racism, kept legitimate investigation of the recent genetic story of the human race off the table. On the other hand, however, many genetic varations among the races are well-established and frankly, obvious. Genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia's evolution as an adaptation to malaria, and the various physiological adaptations to high-altitude air are good examples. Thus, most of Harpending and Cochran's work has been done for them. They seem to merely be the first ones to illustrate, in a popular context at least, the role genetic change has played in human history.

This makes the whole book seem very familiar, and this is perhaps one reason it reads so quickly. It was noteworthy to me how many reviewers claimed to have read it in one sitting: that is not necessarily typical of 200+ page nonfiction books. It's also written in a very conversational prose, its topic is engrossing, and its arguments are put togetherly simply and elegantly (there is nothing not easily understood by the lay intellectual). I was inspired to go back to Diamond's explanation of the Great Leap Forward in the Third Chipmanzee for some context there, however.

The book reads a lot like Diamond, and the authors quote him with some frequency. It could be an extended appendix to Guns, Germs, and Steel, telling the subplot genes had in the stories Diamond explains so well already. Diamond avoids genetics fairly assiduously, from what I remember, and GGS is in some sense the epitome of the environmental perspective's victory over the racial perspective. In this much more scientific context, history is very deterministic. The value of 10,000 Year Explosion is to reintroduce the very real role of genetic change into the deterministic story. Thus, while Cochran and Harpending's conclusions do imply that humans are not “created equal,” they realize full well that this is, just as in everything else, the fault of the environment and random chance: not any inherent value difference between the races.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the late nineteenth century, Darwin's thoughts on evolution were appropriated by many to show that the evolution of homo sapiens had resulted in the ascendancy of white peoples. This "scientific" evidence of white superiority was used to justify all types of outrages committed against "less evolved" forms of humans. The scientific community, horrified by the misuse of evolution, stressed that homo sapiens were all the same and race was not a means of ranking people. To support this position, many asserted that human evolution had more or less halted prior to racial differentiation.

The authors, two U of U anthropology professors, looked at the evidence and decided that not only had human evolution not stopped, but that it was picking up speed, largely because of the large increase in population and therefore increased number of random mutations that might impact the species. They are not preaching eugenics or white supremacy, but they do point out that certain genetic traits do give an advantage to their possessors in certain situations and that those genes are therefore more likely to be passed on. Most of the genes they discuss have to do with disease resistance or lactose tolerance.

Somewhere out there may be a crackpot who will interpret this book to mean that goat-milk drinkers are responsible for all human progress and therefore should be ruling the world. However, I would hope that, as a species, we have put such insanity behind us and can appreciate the authors' observations as a contribution to their discipline.

[Bill Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preface
- "Since the social sciences - anthropology in particular - haven't exactly covered themselves with glory, we have decided to take a new tack in writing this book, one that takes the implications of evolutionary theory seriously while cheerfully discarding unproven anthropological doctrines."

1 - Conventional Wisdom
- scientists have long felt that the "great leap forward" 50,000 YA marked the end of significant biological evolution, with development of culture freeing humans from the pressures of natural selection
- Stephen Jay Gould felt that 50,000 years was too short a period for significant evolution
- counter examples include the change in dogs since domestication 15,000 YA, the development of corn from teosinte in 7000 years, and creosote bush specific insects over 11,000 years
- over 50,000 years, human races have evolved to look quite different - some believe the changes have only been external, but there is no reason to believe that the changes are not distributed over the whole body - skeletons differ slightly among the races
- HAPMAP is a database of human genetic variation with data on individuals from Nigeria, Tokyo, Beijing and European Americans
- haplotypes are patterns of variation in the gene
- haplotypes get shuffled in each generation - 1-3 changes per chromosome
- by comparing the amount of reshuffling, the changes can be dated
- overall, the rate of change over the last few thousand years is on the order of 100 times greater than over the past few million years
- the authors suggest that genetic changes led to an increased ability to innovate

2 - The Neanderthal Within
- modern humans displaced N. in just 10,000 years - there are a number of theories as to why
- one idea is that modern humans had projectile weapons, allowing smaller more efficient humans to hunt well at a lower cost
- another idea is that advanced language capabilities allowed knowledge to be transferred between individuals and generations
- modern humans had trade, while there is no evidence from the remains of N.
- another possibility is that modern humans carried diseases that destroyed N.
- the Upper Paleolithic, when modern humans displace N. 40,000 YA, shows a "great leap forward" in art, tools, weapons, trade and culture - a dramatic increase is evident in human ability to create and invent
- the authors postulate that genetic change allowed this advancement
- further, the authors postulate that the rapid genetic change was generated through introgression - the transfer of alleles from the N.
- as of yet, no sign of N. genes has been found in humans
- skeletal evidence of admixture is inconclusive, especially when the the possibility of convergent evolution is considered

3 - Agriculture, The Big Change
- agriculture led to a vast population explosion - this alone resulted in a large population pool increasing the number of genetic changes, leading to new ideas and innovation
- population estimates are 0.5 M 100,000 YA (including H. erectus and N.), 6 M at the end of the ice age 10,000 YA
- from the start of agriculture at 10,000 BC to AD 1, the population increased 40 - 170 times
- the rise of agriculture resulted in a change from a meat diet to a carb diet
- as hunters get vitamin D from meat, light skin did not arise until the rise of agriculture
- populations that have not farmed or just recently moved to farming are poorly adapted to modern diet - e.g. high incidence of diabetes in aboriginal people
- production of alcohol accompanied agriculture - therefore agricultural peoples are less susceptible to the adverse effects
- DNA studies of N Europe show that lactose tolerance genes were not present 7000 YA, reached 25% 3000 YA, and are at 80% today

4 - Consequences of Agriculture
- agriculture resulted in larger, more concentrated populations - this lead to greater disease and more parasites, as transmission improved
- adaptation to disease has been evolving in agricultural populations
- adaptations to malaria have terrible side effects, such as sickle cell anemia - the authors postulate that this is because the adaptation is recent
- the genetic changes for lactose intolerance and light skin differ between N Europe and N Asia
- only in Europe is lighter skin accompanied by variety in hair and eye color
- the skeletal record shows that the human skeleton has changed over the past 10,000 years, becoming more lightly built - skull volume has actually decreased by 10% from 20,000 YA - some Bronze Age skeletons (3000 YA) still had brow ridges
- random musings on agriculture and the implications and effects of the move to an agrarian society

5 - Gene Flow
- a favorable allele can sweep through the population
- in the Italian village of Limone Sulgarda, a mutation occurred that makes HDL much more effective at clearing cholesterol from arteries - the authors project that it could sweep the human population in 6000 years, assuming good mixture (the village, however, is relatively isolated) - it increased from 1 individual to 43 in 10 generations
- the authors calculate that in the 400 generations since the birth of agriculture, a favorable gene (5% advantage) could move out 600 miles - however, in reality they seem to do better than that
- physical barriers such as mountains and oceans slow gene flow
- trade enhanced gene flow, as did colonization and conquest
- the allele for blue eyes appeared 6 - 10,000 YA - the authors speculate on it's spread via the various barbaric tribes of Europe, probably the Vandals who arose in Sweden

6 - Expansions
- historical expansions of one group at the expense of another may have bee due to chance, but were frequently due to an advantage in terms of tools, skills or culture
- when humans moved from Asia to America, 15,000 YA, they brought few diseases and parasites - America was relatively clean
- HLA genes are important to the immune system - while most populations show great diversity in HLA genes, the AmerIndians do not - apparently the clean environment provided little basis for driving diversity
- therefore when Europeans arrived with disease, AmerIndians were especially vulnerable
- smallpox killed 30% of Europeans, but 90% of the Indian population
- the opposite occurred when Europeans first went into Africa - they were devastated by tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness and yellow fever
- the Indo-Europeans spread in one of the largest expansions leading to a family of languages now found in Europe, Asia and India
- something is known of the I-E from the roots of the languages, but it is not known when and where they lived
- the authors postulate that their success was due to the gene for lactose tolerance which allowed them to be dairymen - this provided large food supplies from a smaller land area and allowed them to be mobile
- the I-E appeared to practise dominance rather than replacement of conquered societies as they made a low contribution to the European gene pool even though their language dominated
- lactose tolerance arose three times - with the I-E, in the region of the upper Nile, and on the Arabian peninsula in the case of domestication of camels

7 - How the Ashkenazi Jews Got Their Smarts
- the AJ are essentially German Jews
- the AJ have an outstanding record of achievement - this can be quantified in the sciences where they have won a disproportionate number of Nobel and other prizes - 3% of the US population, but have won 27% of the US Nobel prizes
- their IQ is about 3/4 of a SD above the average European
- there is no sign of exceptional intelligence in their earliest years, unlike the Greeks
- the AJ eventually became traders, then moneylenders
- AJ were discouraged by their religious leaders from studying "philosophy", emphasizing Talmudic analysis, and were isolated from areas where science was developing
- the first prominent AJ scientists appear in the first half of the nineteenth century
- the AJ are affected by a disproportionate number of genetic diseases
- these diseases are clustered around two biological subsystems - sphingolipid storage disorders and DNA repair disorders
- one possible explanation is a past population bottleneck, the results of which correspond to statistical analysis of AJ genes - however, a bottleneck would not increase a population's intelligence
- the changes around sphingolipid storage may be associated with improved signal transmission in neural tissues and may case the growth of more neural connections
- the mutations appear to be the result of natural selection where the prosperous AJ had more children than average, where the AJ did cognitively demanding work, and intelligence is significantly heritable
- the effects of low admixture during the Middle Ages are apparent from genetic analysis - this was probably due to internal rules against intermarriage combined with external prejudice

Conclusion
- biological change has been a key factor driving history

[Heather Fryling · Rating 1 out of 5]

It started out promising. I thought I was going to get evidence that humans have, in fact, evolved over the past 10,000 years. We may have become civilized, but civilization has its own selective pressures, doesn't it? Well, I got the examples of lactose tolerance (0-90+% of Europeans in 3,000 years) and blue eyes about 6,000 year ago. Ok. So far, so good, but then the 10,000 Year Explosion went completely off the rails, starting with hypotheses based on existing facts (ok so far), then extrapolating hypotheses on top of those and continuing on a train of reasoning with slim to know factual support to arrive at... overt racism! And as an added bonus, there's a little digression into the Rousseauian notion that women should evolve to be independent, so men can live their lives without the burden of paternal investment. Guys, it's not women who would need to be independent in that scenario. It's children. And since children are not going to be independent any time soon, let's just agree that both sexes should invest in their offspring.

[Jonathan Sargent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few throw away sections. Worth it for the last chapter alone.

[Paul R. Fleischman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book about human genetics argues for the hypothesis that human biological evolution remains important. It argues against the more popularly accepted hypothesis, championed by the late Steven Jay Gould, that “Everything we call culture and civilization we built with the same body and brain.” Gould wanted us to believe that cultural flexibility eliminated the need for biological adaptation and evolution in humans. Therefore, this book, which believes that biological evolution is continuing, or even speeding up, is argumentative, important, controversial, and stirring.
The idea that culture has made humans so flexible that we can respond to environmental pressures at the societal and individual level, without any need for genetic selection, has become the dominant belief among social scientists and many biological scientists. That dominant belief is also comforting, since it is based upon the idea that all human gene pools form one essential entity, and that there are no important genetic group differences among us. Cochran and Harpending challenge this dominant belief system, and use a mixture of advanced genetic thinking, well thought out case studies, expansive hypothesis formation, and overgeneralization to build their case. This book is thrilling to read because its authors have the courage to take on the establishment, but this book is eerie to read because it mixes facts with probability statements, and because it opens a door to some shadowy and even dangerous innuendo.
The chapters of this book circle around population genetics case studies, some of which convincingly show that at least some biological evolution sometimes remains important. For example, there is no question that natural selection in cold, dark environments, such as Northern Europe, led to skin color change in our African derived species that was once entirely dark skinned. Light skinned people are adaptive mutants. Similarly, there is no question that most human beings lacked the ability to digest cow’s milk, or any milk after infancy, but that the adaptive advantage of being able to absorb nutrient rich milk led to the natural selection of lactose tolerant populations where milk was available. Milk drinkers are adaptive mutants. So far so good. Why shouldn’t many other important changes in human populations rest upon natural selection of genetic advantages? It only seems common sense to anyone who has recently watched a basketball game or a football game, that genetic differences in height, weight, reflex speed, coordination, and even psychological aspects of sport like concentration, determination, are all heavily genetically based, and also show distinct population group distributions.
However, some of the other examples in this book reveal weaknesses in the authors’ central argument. For example, Cochran and Harpending write that they believe the few Neanderthal genes, that have recently been proven to exist in European populations, conferred an adaptive advantage on the people who were products of Neanderthal mating with Homo sapiens. Since when does a science book argue based upon the idea “we believe”? The authors believe that the sudden burst of innovation that followed the expansion of modern humans out of Africa was due to the genetic enrichment secondary to interbreeding, but they cannot and do not prove that this correlation in time is a causal relationship.
In their thought-provoking chapter on agriculture, the authors argue that it not only changed our sustenance, but that it changed our characters, due to natural selection that favored deferred gratification (harvesting a crop takes a lot more time than killing an animal), patience, self control, advance planning, group cooperation, and many other changes. However, the eerie shadow of their argument is that over time agriculture increased “ant-like behavior” in people and “selection for submission to authority” that sounds “unnervingly like domestication.” The implication is that human populations may have been selected over time biologically for obedience rather than for problem solving. The authors extend their argument, (on page 127): “Science either does not exist or is appallingly feeble in the majority of the world’s populations…Science does not exist in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Islamic world today.” They further quote Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist, as saying, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”
In what ways do these arguments rest upon proof? Are the authors providing evidence or simply scathing speculation? How do these observations refute Gould’s hypothesis that all the observable differences are culturally based? The authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion continuously imply that large-scale differences in large population groups are genetic rather than cultural, and they base their implications upon circumscribed case examples, temporal correlations and innuendo.
In another chapter, the authors argue that the large number of Nobel prizes and other signs of high intelligence seen in Jews of Eastern European descent derived from adaptation to the conditions under which Eastern European Jews existed for a period of about 1,000 years. This chapter is based on a previous and more thoroughly scientific article that they published in The Journal of Biological Science in 2005.
Cochran and Harpending seem to be peeking into, tiptoeing around, or implying racial and ethnic advantages, disadvantages, and differences in core biological features such as intelligence, in a manner that is daring and dangerous. Many of their arguments are subtle, and important. For example they show that an entire group does not have to genetically evolve in order for the group to nevertheless show significant advantage or disadvantage in particular traits when compared to other groups, because a small shift in the statistical mean will also create a significant shift in the tail of the normal curve, a phenomenon which they summarize as, “outliers are important.” Group advantage may not be conferred on every individual in the group, but may derive from a threshold effect at population extremes. It takes only a hundred brilliant outliers of high intelligence to create a population that will dazzle the world with one hundred new brilliant inventions or discoveries. “A modest difference in the mean of some traits can have a tremendous effect on the frequency with which members of the group exceed a high threshold…Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Charles Darwin made larger intellectual contributions as individuals than other entire civilizations did over a period of centuries.” Newton, Maxwell, and Darwin, all from the British Isles, radically altered human history by founding physics and biology, and they represent intellectual exceptions even within their own white, male, population base, yet they can be understood to represent a statistically probable group of outliers. However, this conjunction of talent could also be statistical artifact, like three coin tosses that all show up heads; or, better yet, it could be understood as the product of empire, power, and wealth compounded by historical situation.
Few books have evoked in me more internal thought and argument. Because of this book, I found the issue of human genetic group differences, which had been slumbering peacefully on my mind, awakened and in tumult. The 10,000 Year Explosion, deserves and requires many readers and many critics.

Review by Paul R. Fleischman author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.

[Book Shark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 10,000 Year Explosion by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

The 10,000 Year Explosion is a fascinating book about human evolution. It's main focus is to illustrate how humans have evolved much more recently than most scientists believed. This interesting book also reveals what factors lead to human evolution. The book is composed of following seven chapters: 1. Overview: Conventional Wisdom, 2. The Neanderthal Within, 3. Agriculture: The Big Change, 4. Consequences of Agriculture, 5. Gene Flow, 6. Expansions, 7. Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews Got Their Smarts.

Positives:
1. Fun, enjoyable, well written, interesting book about human evolution suited for the masses.
2. So much interesting knowledge throughout this wonderful book. Did you know that elephants shrank dramatically over the past 5,000 years, from an original height of 12 feet to as little as 3 feet. You do now.
3. The book provides many excellent examples of proof of recent human evolution.
4. Evolutionary genetics presented in a practical accessible manner. I'm in awe of human evolution, fascinating!
5. You don't need to believe in human evolution but you will most certainly have to accept it!
6. Great illustrations in the book. I understand you don't buy a book about evolution for the pictures but it is always refreshing to break up the monotony once in a while with a topic-appropriate illustration.
7. Some of the suggestions made in this book have actually been supported with even more concrete evidence by recent findings, such as our Neanderthal ancestry.
8. Interesting facts and tidbits about dogs.
9. The notion "of you are what you eat"...is taken to overdrive in this book. The advent of agriculture propelled human evolution, not to mention a huge population boom.
10. It's amazing how DNA captures our ancestry. Researchers use mtDNA and Y-chromosome data to make determinations about our ancestry. Genetic history has never been this accessible.
11. I learned so much about genetics. I wish I can go back and change my major. There is a great topic on how gene flows.
12. Languages in Europe and India had a common origin, who knew? I do now.
13. Milk it does a body good...
14. Also a very interesting topic on the intellectual prominence of Ashkenazi Jews.
15. If you enjoy this book half as much as I did, you will have enjoyed it indeed.

Negatives:
1. Some comments made in the book appear to be more speculative more than scientific. As an example, I find the notion that many scientists believe that human evolution has come to a halt, too speculative with no real data to substantiate it. Socially caused evolution also appears to be somewhat speculative in spite of the fact that I tend to agree with the hypothesis. More scientific backing would be warranted.

In summary, "The 10,000 Year Explosion" is an excellent, accessible book for the human evolutionist, in all of us. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, it was fun and educational. I also recommend the following books on evolution: "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry Coyne (my favorite book on this topic), "Your Inner Fish..." by Neil Shubin, "The Making of the Fittest" by Sean B. Carroll, "What Evolution Is" by Ernst Mayr, "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution" by Nick Lane and of course you have your pick of books from the master Richard Dawkins his most recent book on evolution is "The Greatest Show on Earth".

[David Merrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this book 3 1/3 stars, so it was a debate to go high or low with the rating. It would have been easily 5 stars for the information in the book, but the writing style really gets in the way. Snarky judgements and comments throughout the book, I'm guessing to make the book more accessible to a broader audience, for me just put the authors' scholarship into question. This weakened their theories and arguments. It's a shame because these comments were such a small part of the text. The book would have been greatly improved by better judgement on the editor's part.

That said, the theories presented here are incredibly important to our current world view as a species. I think most people are under the impression that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution and that we're done evolving. This book gives good argument that our evolution continues as I write this. Our fossil record shows the massive changes that occur over time, but not the small incremental changes that occur to get to those massive changes. It made me think about what it is that puts organisms into a different sub-species and I found it can be significant (not necessarily large) physical changes or behavioral changes, like the differences in behavior from one type of honeybee to another.

If we expand that thought to human beings we start to see the potential for two or more different sub-species of human beings operating in the world today. Could human beings who work and support the behavior found in large corporations be another sub-species of Homo Sapiens that operate in a hive-like environment created by them? Before you answer this question, check out Michael O'Malley's The Wisdom Of Bees: What the Hive Can Teach Business About Leadership. Efficiency and Growth.

This book will really get you thinking about the world we live in and how we're adapting to it. It made me think about whether ADD is an illness or simply an adaptation to our faster and faster paced media barrage. In just 60 years we've gone from television with three channels and radio to having thousands of channels, the internet, radio, sound bites, multiple viewing devices, video billboards, cell phones and text messaging. Does it seem unreasonable to think we'd be adapting to these changes in our environment? And if we accept ADD as a natural adaptation to this environment, what would it mean we would have to do in handling ADD? Maybe it would mean we'd have to develop methods of teaching that would enhance and utilize the ADD adaptation for for learning rather than drug everyone into thinking the way we did 100 years ago so our schools will still work. I'm no expert on any of these subjects, but it does seem to be something we need to look at.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a book written for the layman about new ideas in genetic research, _The 10,000 Year Explosion_ is an important book. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, two professors at the University of Utah (physics and genetics, respectively), are basically saying in their theories that it is our genetic make up that determined our ancestors' fate, and it will determine ours too.

While I accept that different races are composed differently of genetic codes, resulting in different eye and skin colors and responses to different foods, etc. (for example, as an Asian, it is not unusual for me to be lactose-intolerant), I don't find it useful to think that any race is genetically pre-determined to have a higher IQ than others. Cochran and Harpending are saying that culture and education do not matter, as we are pre-programmed by our genes. This is profoundly dangerous and grim, as it may lead us back to destructive racism.

When used properly, we can apply our new knowledge of genetics research constructively to help create proper medical treatment for personalized medicine that would be most suitable for each individual. But taken the wrong way, this information can potentially harm any specific race.

I find that much of the book is unsubstantiated theory that would be impossible to prove or disprove directly because it would simply be too unethical to carry out such experiments. Too much is being attributed to genetics.

What bothers me most about this book is the way it is written. I feel that the two professors are so in love with their own theories that they are not heeding the responsibility they have to humanity. I can't help but think of the Puritan idea of predestination as I read this book. They're saying that you're screwed because you're born this way. Your children may mutate though.

[Jaclynn (JackieReadsAlot) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it because of the occasional tidbit mentioned that I hadn't heard of before but it's very basic and lacks sufficient citations and evidence for the less modest claims. Lactose tolerance (0-90+% of Europeans in 3,000 years) and blue eyes about 6,000 year ago, great! Then towards the end it went off the rails. Take it with a grain of salt and read it for a different perspective but don't necessarily believe everything presented.

[David Shimm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book about how human evolution has proceeded, and even accelerated, during the recent time period.

[Paul Clark · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book rejects the view that race is primarily a social construct and proposes five hypotheses about genetic differences between ethnic groups. The first two, lactose tolerance and resistance to pathogens, are physiological and uncontroversial. The same cannot be said of the other three: that interbreeding between Eurasians and Neanderthals increased Eurasian intelligence, that long-term exposure to agriculture leads to a greater predisposition to the ‘bourgeois’ values of hard work and restraint, and that medieval restrictions on Ashkenazi Jews raised their intelligence. This review will focus on these three hypotheses.

THE NEANDERTHAL ADVANTAGE

Homo sapiens first encountered Neanderthals after leaving Africa 40,000 years ago. Cochran and Harpending speculate that interbreeding between the two species raised Eurasian intelligence, triggering the Upper Palaeolithic revolution in technology, symbolic behaviour and socio-economic organisation. Quite how sub-Saharan Africans later managed the same transition to modern behaviour without the benefit of Neanderthal DNA, the authors do not say.

In any case, many archaeologists favour non-genetic explanations for the transition. Others argue that it occurred in Africa much earlier, citing discoveries like a large 70,000 year-old settlement in Sudan and sophisticated 44,000 year-old southern African artefacts. If critics of the Upper Palaeolithic model turn out to be correct, Cochran and Harpending’s highly speculative hypothesis would be falsified.

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BOURGEOIS VALUES

The authors claim that the development of agriculture led to the spread of genes for hard work and restraint among those populations in the Middle East, East Asia and Europe that have been exposed to agriculture for longest.

Whilst superficially convincing, their account has serious flaws. The most glaring is the claim that ADHD has been bred out of China, where it actually affects up to 5% of schoolchildren. Other claims presented as facts are in reality matters of dispute. Agriculture might have arisen in sub-Saharan Africa 1,000 years earlier than the authors state, and their claim that Australian Aborigines never developed agriculture is contested.
In most pre-capitalist societies, hard work did not have the significance the authors give it because any attempt to rise above your station was seen as sinful and peasants generally did as little work as they could get away with. The way people accumulated wealth was to squeeze it out of someone else as a warlord, a landlord or the holder of a sinecure that enabled them to milk others.

Traders who acquired wealth through hard work dreamed of turning it into land, finding an impoverished noble family to marry into and putting their feet up. The only ones unable to do this were religious minorities like Armenians, Jews, Lebanese and Parsees. Cochran and Harpending claim that bourgeois genes made these communities successful middlemen when in fact it was their minority religion that trapped them in this niche.

Similarly dubious is the claim that a lack of bourgeois genes fuels opposition to neo-liberalism in Latin America. Surely the growth of the industrial working class is a better explanation for the influence of socialism there.

The authors contrast farmers who refrain from eating their seed corn with hunter gatherers who scupper efforts to turn them into herders by eating all their goats. But are hunter gatherers really so stupid? Or is this a case of a top-down innovation deliberately sabotaged by a community that never wanted it?

The claim that aggression has been bred out of those populations longest exposed to agriculture is undermined by Cohen and Nisbett’s famous study that found startling differences in levels of aggression between genetically indistinguishable people from different cultures.

THE INTELLIGENCE OF AHKANAZI JEWS

Cochran and Harpending’s third controversial hypothesis concerns the high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews, allegedly 12-15 points above other Europeans. They favour the theory that this is genetically determined because medieval north European Jews were restricted to white-collar occupations, particularly money lending, in which only intelligent people could succeed, giving them greater reproductive success in a community where marrying out was forbidden.

However, the data they present is superficial. The influence of heritability on IQ shifts during a person’s life, rising dramatically as children grow to adulthood. But the authors never give the ages of the people in their statistics, making them impossible to assess.

Their claim that 80% of economically active medieval Ashkenazim were full-time moneylenders is unconvincing, since Jews were confined to ghettoes with separate micro-economies, and rules forbidding the ‘improper subordination’ of Christians by Jews would probably have created the need for a Jewish servant class.

Despite these caveats, this hypothesis is credible if unproven. There is no a priori reason why the heritable intelligence of every ethnic group should be the same and the Ashkenazim are a genetically closed community with a unique history.

CONCLUSIONS

The 10,000 Year Explosion makes noteworthy points about physiological differences between the races and asks an interesting question about the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews without quite supplying the answer. But it has conspicuously failed to demonstrate any other link between race and either intelligence or character. Cochran and Harpending’s Neanderthal hypothesis is highly speculative, and their claims about bourgeois values and agriculture rest on questionable evidence and a willingness to ignore simpler and more obvious explanations.

Please see my website for a longer and fully sourced version of this review.

[KQ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supremely accessible and not without the occasional comic relief that is characteristic of Cochran. A refreshing and surprisingly succinct read for those wanting a general outlook on how human evolution has been "galloping madly in different directions" since our expansion out of Africa, the Upper Paleolithic, and the Agricultural revolution. The authors present a compelling theoretical framework and a wide range of evidence and speculation (some of which have turned out to be remarkably spot-on since it was published in 2009.)

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was one of the worst things I have ever read. It was actually painful to finish, but I did make it through. I think the only decent part of this book is the title.

First off, this book is horribly written. To me the entire book reads like a bunch of badly connected and poorly written undergraduate essays. As others have pointed out, this book is also very schizophrenic in its inability to decide whether it should be too simplistic or overly detail oriented.

The authors also do not appear to understand how an argument works. In general, if you want to explain why you are correct and someone else is wrong, you first say their idea, then why it is incorrect and then your idea and why it is the right one. None of the arguments in this are formulated correctly. It seems as if they generally decided to use phrases like "simply incorrect" in regards to others and "completely obvious" to their point of view, without ANY evidence for either.

Throughout the book the authors state that conventional wisdom is that humans stopped evolving some 40,000-50,000 years ago and that they are some of the first to say otherwise. This is untrue. I suspect they are mostly referring to Jared Diamond (who isn't actually an Anthropologist or Evolutionary Biologist) and a small quote from Stephen Jay Gould in regards to this statement. In fact, this is not the conventional wisdom of the scientific community and there are MANY papers, books and people who say that we are still evolving by a combination of culture AND biology. Of course none of these are referenced in this book. Most of the book is speculation and theory without any REAL evidence, although it does exist but if they used any of those sources they would have to acknowledge that this is not an original work. I think another HUGE gripe I have with this book is that NONE of the evidence throughout the book is from the authors. The only time they use their own work is at the very end.

Before moving on to this next paragraph, I must stress that I am not anti-Semitic. I am not a believer in eugenics in any way, shape or form. That being said this brings me to my next point, which is what I believe this book was written for. The last chapter is about how European Jews (Ashkenazi Jews) are more evolved and smarter then EVERYONE else in the world. The main evidence for this? They score higher on IQ tests. IQ tests are known to be biased, and saying "look they have higher IQ scores and these are some theories (without evidence) as to why" is not science. The entire chapter is written like a pro Jewish eugenics argument, about how everyone else is genetically inferior to them. This is the kind of thinking used to support racist arguments all the time, and is exactly opposite of what the Nazi's used during the Holocaust. This is not okay.

The authors flat out say that those of Middle Eastern, African and other decent are genetically inferior. They even say that European Jews are better than any other Jews. There are going to be vast IQ differences between many small groups, throughout the world. The IQ of a group, however, does not place them higher on the genetics

Overall this is an unscientific piece of rubbish, and is frankly not even worth the paper it's printed on. It can't even be called "pop science". In this day and age, no one who thinks of themselves as an Anthropologist or scientist (of any kind) should actively suggest that one group is genetically superior to another. This is what lead to institutionalized slavery, genocide, and the ongoing hatred of women, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, people of African descent, and any other minority group. The authors, publisher, and the editor should be ashamed of themselves for clouding the minds of their readers and feebly attempting to pass this off as legitimate science.

[Steven]

Apparently I never marked this as read.

The older I get, and the fuller a picture of the world I develop, the more I see biologists as colossal moral failures for ever allowing that Gould nonsense to go on. Nobody should've ever believed the 10,000ya muh savanna nonsense. Especially not when accessible books like this exist.

If you're new to these ideas, this book is worth reading, and it isn't very long so it's easy to get through.