Not a bio geek by any means, but: how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission? In psychology there's talk of things like class loyalty, where the social script expectations are learned from the close example of one's own family. I know a couple cases of people who got good enough genes to go to elite schools, but ended up settling for comfortable lives instead of working hard to meet high social expectations. With no example in their family culture to motivate them to try to leave a mark on the world, they quite rationally couldn't be bothered to.
> how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission?
Great question - they don't and can't. This is why Clark is careful to frame it as "social competence," rather than genetics specifically. I think he's also trying to avoid boo lights like "the rich are literally better than everyone else *genetically!!* which may send people into a tizzy.
But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,* such that each subsequent descendant optimizes and climbs a status and money making gradient in their local conditions.
In fact, this may BE *the key difference that separates lineages* by social competence! Imagine the top and bottom 10% of "drive to achieve families." Wouldn't that result in the exact same dynamics we see in Clark's data? Both high and low status persisting across generations and lineages?
Lineages without a strong "drive for achievement" naturally regress back to the mean quickly. Similarly for lineages who satisfice in mate selection - if somebody shrugs and says "eh, good enough," their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
That's part of why it was so amazing to me that these lineage statuses persists for hundreds to thousands of years - that's SO many generations without wastrels, and without lazy satisficers!
And as Polderman 2015 showed us, for any given trait, it's a good bet that it's highly heritable.
Nov 14·edited Nov 14Liked by Performative Bafflement
> Great question - they don't and can't.
Cool, in that case let me throw a lance for culture being a big part of it. No political axe to grind here, but I'm a fan of Joseph Henrich so I won't let cultural transmission be casually dismissed :)
> But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,*
I don't see how that is an argument for genetics; the fact that "drive for achievement" is a bit abstract, and its expression can change in time, doesn't preclude it from being a strongly transmitted component of a family-cultural package, does it?
Here's my argument for culture in this case: genetics are (AFAIK) relentlessly linear, and despite keeping the same family name for centuries, genes within a family get mixed to oblivion with whatever parts of society they're interbreeding with. So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
Cultural transmission, OTOH, has the cool property that it doesn't have to be linear, because our mind's responses are anything but. Ex. if your paternal family is teaching you to be 80% industrious, and your maternal one to be 85%, you will learn the virtue, and given the little difference, you might end up doing 85% to satisfy them both.
The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family. And indoctrination is powerful! Take religions for example, whole communities have been known to convert in a generation or two (so it can't be genetic!), and then it sticks for a millennium or two by the power of indoctrination and cultural transmission.
I'll also add that indoctrination is powerful, because there's a huge gaping hole at the center of our motivation systems, as the existentialists figured out. Beyond our most basic survival and hedonic needs, we have no inborn clue what we want! Hope to have made my case :)
> their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
LOL, this is the childless generation. There are no descendants for my examples.
> So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
You know, I think you're right. I just did some simple math, and there's quite a bit of regression to the mean over even 3-4 generations even with 90% accurate, 90% percentile matching, so there has to be a strong cultural component to it, and it has to be something like "trait fortification" where genetics and culture reinforce each other, to last for many hundreds of years.
So not only do you have to aim and execute extremely high on assortative mating for generations, you ALSO have to have a strong familial culture of achievement!
This honestly makes the accomplishments of high social competence families even more impressive, IMO - because I think matching via strict assortative mating is actually easier than coming up with and promulgating a high achieving culture that lasts for tens of generations.
> The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family.
I genuinely wonder if there's a difference in this in our current generations, because all the rich folks I know with kids are "losing" kids to hedonism and aimlessness and anomie at higher and higher rates. Given the low birth rates generally (to your point, and even for the rich, who might have 3-4 kids instead of the ~2 "regular" UMC people have, 3-4 is not really enough to carry on a family line and culture. The Victorian rich routinely had 6-8 kids, for example).
Why have our "indoctrination" and "cultural transmission" capabilities attenuated so much, is a question I'm really interested in learning more about.
Cool overview, Clark also affected my worldview a lot and you covered some stuff I hadn’t thought about before. Maybe a slightly elitist take, Clark himself thinks his research lends support to more redistribution to promote equality, I don’t think he’d want to promote guys status signalling with multiple wives or whatever.
One thing I still find confusing about all this is what is actually happening psychologically on the ground when people are picking partners with such a strong influence from assortative mating. Basic evo-psych suggests our mating instincts come from our hunter-gatherer past before there were strong social hierarchies in wealth/power. So people’s tendency to pair up on status genes probably can’t be an evolved instinct.
I’m slightly sceptical that there really is such strong assortative mating since it runs counter to our more basic instincts to select for hotness etc. And if there is, it’s probably socially constructed, not in our genes.
Two thoughts here - in the EEA, 80% of women had descendants but only 40% of men, indicating that hypergamy is a strong force for hundreds of thousands of years.
So although HG’s seem pretty egalitarian, there is definitely very strong empirical selection effects in terms of who is having offspring.
Second, a lot of that selection is probably “g” driven, and as we all know, “g” is positively correlated with just about every good thing (health, attractiveness, life satisfaction, etc.).
Geoffrey Miller makes a pretty decent argument that our brain size was nearly ENTIRELY driven by sexual selection vs "fitness selection."
You can see this because H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, and H Neanderthalis all had brain sizes the size of modern H Sap - but Erectus used lower paleolithic tool sets for ~2M years, and HH and Neanderthals similarly used much simpler lower Paleolithic toolsets for many hundreds of thousands of years, and all were globally distributed and successful the whole time.
And indeed, supportive of Miller, when ethnographies are surveyed, the high prestige / status leaders (and so the more reproductively successful) in HG societies are those who are “producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly.”
Those all seem fairly g-loaded, and seem like they'd correspond pretty well to later civilizational "social competence."
Not a bio geek by any means, but: how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission? In psychology there's talk of things like class loyalty, where the social script expectations are learned from the close example of one's own family. I know a couple cases of people who got good enough genes to go to elite schools, but ended up settling for comfortable lives instead of working hard to meet high social expectations. With no example in their family culture to motivate them to try to leave a mark on the world, they quite rationally couldn't be bothered to.
> how do these studies manage to distinguish genetic causes in inheriting a high social status, vs. cultural transmission?
Great question - they don't and can't. This is why Clark is careful to frame it as "social competence," rather than genetics specifically. I think he's also trying to avoid boo lights like "the rich are literally better than everyone else *genetically!!* which may send people into a tizzy.
But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,* such that each subsequent descendant optimizes and climbs a status and money making gradient in their local conditions.
In fact, this may BE *the key difference that separates lineages* by social competence! Imagine the top and bottom 10% of "drive to achieve families." Wouldn't that result in the exact same dynamics we see in Clark's data? Both high and low status persisting across generations and lineages?
Lineages without a strong "drive for achievement" naturally regress back to the mean quickly. Similarly for lineages who satisfice in mate selection - if somebody shrugs and says "eh, good enough," their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
That's part of why it was so amazing to me that these lineage statuses persists for hundreds to thousands of years - that's SO many generations without wastrels, and without lazy satisficers!
And as Polderman 2015 showed us, for any given trait, it's a good bet that it's highly heritable.
> Great question - they don't and can't.
Cool, in that case let me throw a lance for culture being a big part of it. No political axe to grind here, but I'm a fan of Joseph Henrich so I won't let cultural transmission be casually dismissed :)
> But I personally think it's genetics for the following reason: culture changes a lot, and what's high status or money-making in one generation can shift quite a bit between one generation and the next - but for a lineage to persist in high status for the hundreds to thousands of years that he analyzes, they must have a strong "ambition" or "drive for achievement" component *within the lineage,*
I don't see how that is an argument for genetics; the fact that "drive for achievement" is a bit abstract, and its expression can change in time, doesn't preclude it from being a strongly transmitted component of a family-cultural package, does it?
Here's my argument for culture in this case: genetics are (AFAIK) relentlessly linear, and despite keeping the same family name for centuries, genes within a family get mixed to oblivion with whatever parts of society they're interbreeding with. So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
Cultural transmission, OTOH, has the cool property that it doesn't have to be linear, because our mind's responses are anything but. Ex. if your paternal family is teaching you to be 80% industrious, and your maternal one to be 85%, you will learn the virtue, and given the little difference, you might end up doing 85% to satisfy them both.
The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family. And indoctrination is powerful! Take religions for example, whole communities have been known to convert in a generation or two (so it can't be genetic!), and then it sticks for a millennium or two by the power of indoctrination and cultural transmission.
I'll also add that indoctrination is powerful, because there's a huge gaping hole at the center of our motivation systems, as the existentialists figured out. Beyond our most basic survival and hedonic needs, we have no inborn clue what we want! Hope to have made my case :)
> their descendants too will regress back to the mean quickly. Your specific examples sound like examples of this to me.
LOL, this is the childless generation. There are no descendants for my examples.
> So unless you have strict separation like India's caste system, you need crazy levels of precision in your assortative mating to keep up an above-average value in any trait. If your evaluation of partner's character is only 90% precise, which should be well within margins of individual variation within a family, it would only take a few centuries for any advantage to be eroded by mixing.
You know, I think you're right. I just did some simple math, and there's quite a bit of regression to the mean over even 3-4 generations even with 90% accurate, 90% percentile matching, so there has to be a strong cultural component to it, and it has to be something like "trait fortification" where genetics and culture reinforce each other, to last for many hundreds of years.
So not only do you have to aim and execute extremely high on assortative mating for generations, you ALSO have to have a strong familial culture of achievement!
This honestly makes the accomplishments of high social competence families even more impressive, IMO - because I think matching via strict assortative mating is actually easier than coming up with and promulgating a high achieving culture that lasts for tens of generations.
> The other piece of evidence, is that I've repeatedly read that rich, established families positively breed their young to be worthy successors of their lineage, which means they get indoctrinated that they live for the family and, as you touch in the article, for the *future* of the family.
I genuinely wonder if there's a difference in this in our current generations, because all the rich folks I know with kids are "losing" kids to hedonism and aimlessness and anomie at higher and higher rates. Given the low birth rates generally (to your point, and even for the rich, who might have 3-4 kids instead of the ~2 "regular" UMC people have, 3-4 is not really enough to carry on a family line and culture. The Victorian rich routinely had 6-8 kids, for example).
Why have our "indoctrination" and "cultural transmission" capabilities attenuated so much, is a question I'm really interested in learning more about.
Cool overview, Clark also affected my worldview a lot and you covered some stuff I hadn’t thought about before. Maybe a slightly elitist take, Clark himself thinks his research lends support to more redistribution to promote equality, I don’t think he’d want to promote guys status signalling with multiple wives or whatever.
One thing I still find confusing about all this is what is actually happening psychologically on the ground when people are picking partners with such a strong influence from assortative mating. Basic evo-psych suggests our mating instincts come from our hunter-gatherer past before there were strong social hierarchies in wealth/power. So people’s tendency to pair up on status genes probably can’t be an evolved instinct.
I’m slightly sceptical that there really is such strong assortative mating since it runs counter to our more basic instincts to select for hotness etc. And if there is, it’s probably socially constructed, not in our genes.
Two thoughts here - in the EEA, 80% of women had descendants but only 40% of men, indicating that hypergamy is a strong force for hundreds of thousands of years.
So although HG’s seem pretty egalitarian, there is definitely very strong empirical selection effects in terms of who is having offspring.
Second, a lot of that selection is probably “g” driven, and as we all know, “g” is positively correlated with just about every good thing (health, attractiveness, life satisfaction, etc.).
Geoffrey Miller makes a pretty decent argument that our brain size was nearly ENTIRELY driven by sexual selection vs "fitness selection."
You can see this because H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, and H Neanderthalis all had brain sizes the size of modern H Sap - but Erectus used lower paleolithic tool sets for ~2M years, and HH and Neanderthals similarly used much simpler lower Paleolithic toolsets for many hundreds of thousands of years, and all were globally distributed and successful the whole time.
I touch on this a little bit in my "world dominating superweapon" post here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-149332133
And indeed, supportive of Miller, when ethnographies are surveyed, the high prestige / status leaders (and so the more reproductively successful) in HG societies are those who are “producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly.”
Those all seem fairly g-loaded, and seem like they'd correspond pretty well to later civilizational "social competence."