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The Ten Thousand Year Explosion (2000)

by Gregory Cochran(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 5

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review 1: The old thinking is that, when cultural evolution took off, biological evolution stopped -- because instead of being shaped by our environment, we began shaping our environment to us. That idea always seemed reasonable to me, but this book has changed my mind. The authors contend that, on the contrary, evolution has sped up since the neolithic revolution. The social innovations associated with agriculture and civilization mean we have subjected ourselves to major new environmental pressures, and that has fueled rapid natural selection. Their idea is that cultural evolution interacts with biological evolution; the two drive each other. One of the book's points is that natural selection isn't as slow as is often believed, since altering just one gene or even one nucleotide c... morean sometimes result in important advantages. By examining evidence from the exploding field of population genetics, as well as other sources, the authors find indications of significant biological change in the past 10,000 years or so. Examples include differing disease resistance in response to local conditions, the development of lactose tolerance in dairy farmers, and selection for higher intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. Although I'd heard of some of these things before, I hadn't appreciated the impact on history. The authors make a convincing case that genetic factors can be decisive. I no longer think of biological evolution as something that stopped being important once modern humans came into existence.
review 2: 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. less

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