Cycles of famine, war, and plague as pressures of evolutionary change.

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 149.

This is, I think, the weakest beam in Wade's construction.

Each of the major civilizations has developed the institutions appropriate for its circumstances and survival. But these institutions, though heavily imbued with cultural traditions, rest on a bedrock of genetically shaped human behavior. And when a civilization produces a distinctive set of institutions that endures for many generations, one can reasonably ask if some variation in the genes underlying human social behavior may have accompanied the emergence of these institutions.

Yes, its more than plausible that behavior shapes institutions and we know that at least some aspects of behavior are genetically influenced.

But has there been such distinctively different influences in the different parts of the world so that there is now distinctively different behaviors (and therefore different institutions)? That is the part I find hard to accept. Possible but it seems improbable.

My hesitancy to dismiss out of hand is heavily influenced by select passages from The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe 1648-1815 by Tim Blanning. A deeply interesting read. I know much of the information he is recounting in Chapter 2 but he is putting it in a different frame in the past which makes it especially pertinent to Wade's argument. Blanning mentions that before the Industrial Revolution, Europe (and the rest of the world) was stuck in the Malthusian Trap. In particular, there were three winnowers of the population. Not all at the same time but in different cycles. The three were Famine, War and Plague (add in Death and you have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

For Wade's argument to work you need at least two elements. The first is evolutionary pressure and the second is for that pressure to have a direction.

Frequent mass death events is certainly one form of evolutionary pressure. It would at least be influential via a founder effect. Would multiple near extinction effects be sufficient simply through the founder effect to incidentally drive a difference in continent wide behaviors. Possibly, but I instinctively would be skeptical.

The second element would depend on the near extinction events having some shaping commonality. Would the surviving populations survive because, for example, they had a higher disposition towards cooperative behavior? Certainly possible. But if there were similar near extinction events happening in Africa and Asia, wouldn't the outcome be similar? Seems like too many dependent variables to be reliably true.

So I remain skeptical, but here are some of the passages from The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe 1648-1815 which cause me hesitation and reflection. Pages 43, 53 and 59

Following the catastrophic population losses caused by the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, recovery began in the late fifteenth and continued throughout the sixteenth. But around 1600, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse returned with a vengeance to many parts of Europe, bringing war, plague and famine with devastating demographic consequences.The great plague which struck Castile in 1599-1600, for example, was only the first of many such visitations which reduced the population of the region by a quarter by 1650.

[snip]

It has been estimated that during the terrible mortalite of 1692-94, 2,800,000 people, or 15 per cent of the total population of France, perished. The 1690s proved to be particularly destructive all over western, northern, central and eastern Europe. In Finland the famine of 1696-7 carried off at least a quarter and perhaps as much as a third of the population. In Scotland, a poor harvest in 1695 was followed by severe failure in 1696, a modest improvement in 1697 but general failure in 1698. In the worst affected counties, such as Aberdeenshire, the mortality rate reached 20 per cent. As Sir Robert Sibbald observed: "Everyone may see Death in the Face of the Poor.'

[snip]

Some idea of the havoc inflicted by plague can be gained from simple statistics: Naples lost about half its population and Genoa 60 per cent in 1656; Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence lost half in 1721; Reggio di Calabria lost half in and Messina 70 per cent in 1743; Moscow lost 50,000 or about 20 per cent in 1771-2, and so on.