African Conundrum

A Bolshevik whose blog I read regularly is Louis Proyect. Louis writes good review of foreign films from places such as Turkey, films we don't get to see very often. He writes interesting personal reminiscences (he grew up in what used to be called the Borscht Belt) and on anthropological topics, such as the controversies about the studies of the Yanomami and the pecadillioes of the ethnographers who studied them.

He also descends periodically into the depths of "unrepentant" Marxism, as in this piece, where he rakes Columbia B-school types over the coals for their doctrinaire free-market views about Africa.

The critique's easy enough. You can't understand modern Africa without an honest assessment of the ravages of slavery and colonialism. The colonialists built some infrastructure and to some extent, educated the predecessors of the current class of leeches who run the place. Current extractive industries, such as oil and diamonds, don't help the locals very much, and sometimes ruin things for them.

A socialist critic, though, needs to answer a few questions.

1. Since independence, many countries have been officially "socialist," without much to show for it. Why not?

2. Why have the small states of East Asia, also colonized, also ravaged by war, oppression and corruption, fared so much better than Africa?

3. Can any political and economic system develop African countries whose average IQs are in the 60s and 70s?

Recent Natural Selection in Humans

A Nicholas Wade piece in the New York Times reports that two mutations for lactose tolerance in human adults arose in East Africa as recently as 3,000 years ago. The ability of adults to digest milk conferred a tremendous adaptive advantage among cattle herders. The mutations prevent the gene from being switched off after weaning. A different mutation with similar effects is found in northwest Europe, where a cattle-based agricultural economy also became dominant.

Aside from its intrinsic interest, this development raises the question--what other selective pressures, other than cattle domestication, have given rise to genetic changes in human populations? Are the tribes and regions that abound in excellent distance runners subject to selective pressures? In societies that reward scholars and test-takers, such as some Jewish groups and the Chinese Empire, does skill at book-learnin' confer a selective advantage? Did the Middle Passage, from Africa to American slavery, confer selective advantages on certain traits? If evolutionary change can be this rapid, lactose tolerance is unlikely to be an anomalous exception.

To consider seriously these important questions, we will have to give up our prudishness about inherited differences between populations.