Evolutionary changes played a crucial role in industrialization, study finds
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A recent study of centuries-old French-Canadian genealogical data by a Brown University economist revealed evidence that supports his own 17-year-old theory that natural selection played a pivotal role in the emergence of economic growth and industrialization.
Oded Galor, a professor of economics at Brown, and Marc Klemp, a visiting scholar in Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, together studied genealogical records from Quebec's Saint Lawrence Valley dating from 1608 to 1800. Focusing on changes in families' fecundity, or predisposition toward fertility, they found that in those centuries, those who were able to conceive a child shortly after marriage—a measure of fecundity—had more surviving children.
However, the study found, those who conceived months after marriage—a measure of more moderate fecundity—had fewer children but a larger number of surviving descendants in future generations, giving them the evolutionary upper hand. The researchers also noted that the population they studied became increasingly less predisposed toward high fertility over the course of those two centuries.
Galor says the study results, published on Monday, April 1, in Nature Ecology & Evolution , lend credence to what he and a colleague had surmised in a highly influential 2002 paper —that during the pre-industrial era, the natural selection of those who were genetically predisposed toward having fewer children was instrumental in spurring industrialization and sustained economic growth .
"The data suggest that over time, nature selected individuals who had a predisposition to invest in their children," Galor said. "This contributed to the transition from an epoch of stagnation to an era of sustained economic growth."
Before the Industrial Revolution began in North America in the mid-1700s, Galor explained, humanity lived in what he calls the Malthusian epoch. For thousands of years, humanity had a predisposition toward high fertility. Galor and Kemp's study shows that the pattern began to change in the pre-industrial era, when those with more moderate levels of fecundity began to gain an evolutionary advantage. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, their advantage had grown so large that the high-fecundity population became the minority, while those with moderate fecundity started to dominate the population.
Galor argues that this change created ideal conditions for economic growth during the Industrial Revolution. As evolution began to favor families who were less fertile and thus had fewer children, those families had more resources to devote to each child. Children who came from these families became more educated—an important trait, he says, in an era that demanded greater cognitive ability and creativity for technological advances. The population gradually became more educated, creating a "positive feedback loop" between education and technology and generating sustained economic growth.
"The fundamental building block in our hypothesis, that natural selection was critical for the emergence of economic growth, is now supported by the evidence," Galor said of the 2002 paper. "We show that although higher fecundity maximized the number of surviving children someone would have after one generation, moderate fecundity—and therefore greater predisposition toward child quality—generated higher reproductive success in the long run and was selected by nature in the pre-industrial period."
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Hmm. The Industrial Evolution...
fewer children, those families had more resources to devote to each child. Children who came from these families became more educated—an important trait,
this is very important to success. Spreading what you have too thin can drag things down for generations
I can see this happening.
Farm families tended to be larger because new kids meant more resources to man the farm. As we industrialized and people moved from family farms to work in urban areas, larger families were a financial burden with no back-end benefit. It certainly follows that parents with fewer kids would have more resources per child to enable each child to get a better education and thus a better career with more income.
That is really an interesting read. I have never heard of that hypothesis before.
I know that the industrial revolution broke up the extended family. It was the extended family that would help raise many kids. But in the city, you didn't need as many kids. It was an advantage not to have them.
The chain of events triggered by agricultural mechanization really kicked into gear just in time for civil rights. The mass migration of poor rural farm workers to industrial cities resulted in things like white flight, the debasement of urban tax bases, rapid racial integration and forced bussing the repercussions of which we are still dealing with. Some of that history was brutal, relatively recent and there are still raw feelings. For instance, it was not until about sixty years ago that pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers and the mechanical cotton picker finally freed millions of people from the arduous tasks involved in producing one necessary product, cotton. Some people migrated to cities of their own accords but many were actually forced from homes on land they had sharecropped for generations. The laws of unintended consequences are irrefutable...
I imagine it wasn't just a matter of education. A family with fewer mouths to feed could afford for each member to have more and better quality food, which could affect the future fertility of children. A family that wasn't cramped with too many people in a limited space would have been less likely to spread communicable diseases. A family that wasn't eager to launch superfluous children from the nest would have children who married later and were better able to have and support healthy children than a younger, poorer couple who hadn't physically matured themselves.
I can understand how a biological predisposition toward having fewer children would've been a plus for people occupying new evolutionary niches created by industrialization, if only because of the squalor and scarcity that was so prevalent for the working class in early industrial centers. Fewer mouths to feed would seem to be an obvious natural advantage in harsh environments, and if any word describes the conditions in early industrial towns, it's harsh. Hell, conditions are still pretty harsh today. I can't think of any industrialized region in the modern world where having lots and lots of children is considered economically advantageous. It seems capitalism selects for moderate fecundity, or even lower in some places, where certain populations are having difficulty reproducing even at replacement rates.
But what I want to know is what was going on with fecundity in the pre-industrial era that set populations up for evolutionary success in the soon-to-come industrial hellhole niches? What was making fewer children advantageous in the preceding, largely agrarian era when having more children really was supposed to be better? Could it have simply been pressure from overpopulation? Maybe in Europe, but in pre-industrial North America?
Scratch that last question. The genealogies they studied in Quebec very likely originated in Europe, so it might very well have been due to overpopulation, at least by the standards of feudal society and its much lower pre-industrial levels of productivity. Manorial agriculture and hand-made everything was only going to support so many on the limited land mass of Europe.
I found the paper this article is based on. It's new and behind a paywall for now, but if anyone is interested, I also found an older paper by the same authors and on the same subject from 2014:
Be Fruitful and Multiply? Moderate Fecundity and Long-Run Reproductive Success
There's no way of knowing what information is different or updated in the new paper without paying for it, but this one is free, detailed and full of charts explaining their reasoning.
While I was poking around I also came across another paper by these guys from 2017 that looks like it might be interesting:
Roots of Autocracy
Just FYI.
Ooooh, I just found another one from these guys that looks like it could be worth a read:
The Biocultural Origins of Human Capital Formation
Judging by the abstract, this one looks to be on a similar topic as their new paper and the subject of this seed.
Again, just FYI.