Nicholas Wade (1) (1942–)
Author of Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
For other authors named Nicholas Wade, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Born in Aylesbury, England, Nicholas Wade studies at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He has worked at nature and Science and is currently a science reporter for The New York Times. The author of four previous books, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: By Jane Gitschier - Gitschier J. (2005) "Turning the Tables—An Interview with Nicholas Wade". PLoS Genetics 1(3): e45. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0010045 doi:info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010045.g001, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19703939
Works by Nicholas Wade
Life Script: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health (2001) 25 copies
The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations (2025) 13 copies, 2 reviews
The science business : report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research : background paper (1984) 2 copies
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wade, Nicholas
- Legal name
- Wade, Nicholas Michael Landon
- Birthdate
- 1942-05-17
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Eton College
University of Cambridge (King's College) - Occupations
- reporter
editor
author - Organizations
- New York Times
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- UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- UK
Members
Discussions
Before the Dawn - SRH group read in 75 Books Challenge for 2014 (May 2017)
Reviews
This book had untold potential to tell the story of the evolution of religion, biologically and culturally, within human societies. Wade squandered it through chapters full of navel-gazing anecdata tortured into pretending to support his theses.
The first half of the book was slow and repetitive but interesting. The book's central hypothesis is that religion evolved through forms of kin selection, by providing advantages to societies largely in the form of greater cohesion and conformity. show more Keep in mind that for the first 45,000 years or so of the existence of modern humans, we lived in small tribes with no formal hierarchies, no legal systems, no penal code. Somehow, a common moral code must be not only developed but enforced, even when no one is watching. Enter gods, who can see you everywhere and are for mysterious reasons deeply interested in the minutiae of human behaviour.
The above was a throwaway reference to the biological evolution of religion I first encountered in a book primarily about the biological evolution of fiction, and I was hoping Wade would further expand on what's known and provide an overview of the science--after all, that's what he proposes in the book copy. No such luck. Instead, while he frequently repeats his assertion that religion facilitates the successful expansion of pre-state societies by bonding warriors together and providing them with reasons to sacrifice their lives for their tribe-mates, he provides no evidence whatsoever, and instead treats the reader to extensive digressions about his own prejudices.
There were small elements of science--sciencelets, let's call them--in the early chapters. He discusses recent neurological and psychological research on moral reasoning and moral intuition that were a pleasure to read, although if you're interested, you can find better accounts elsewhere with less baggage. Or here: science has pretty conclusively shown that people jump to moral conclusions via intuition and then reason their way into those conclusions after the fact. That's the short version. Now you can skip that chapter too.
Other than that, he quotes no science, instead relying on just-so cherry-picked anthropological anecdotes about different religions that support whatever point he's trying to make in that chapter. About halfway through, he careens right off course--dumping any pretense at talking about biology, evolution or neurobiology, and instead diverging weirdly into chapters about the historical accuracy of the bible and the koran, the role of christianity in modern american politics, and population control.
I would be less frustrated if the entirely speculative nature of this book were due to a lack of science or research on the biological underpinnings of religion. But the simplest google search shows that there is a ton out there on connections between certain genes and religious behaviour, or the neurological components or functions of religious beliefs, much of it available before the book's 2009 publication date. Wade does not discuss a single one. How do you write a 300 page book about the evolution of the faith instinct without once using the word "gene"?
You also get to read lovely bits like the following:
Yup. It would be better, you see, if those uppity women and black people had kept subordinating their selfish desires to be seen as human beings and individuals. Then we would still have a sense of community. Our bad!
Yep. He went there. Let's ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with "no religion," aka atheists, would be alarmed and displeased to the extreme to be lumped in with Christians when it comes to religious education in the classroom. Those 5 per cent of Americans are real people! The whole point of rights is that they belong to everybody! You don't get to decide they don't count because it's a minority--that's the whole point of legal fucking rights! No one took away the Christians' rights to religious education; they just took away state funding for it, for god's sake. I'm pretty sure that people besides lawyers were very very happy to get bible learning out of the public education system.
Those days never existed, asshat. If he could distinguish scientific facts from a hole in the ground, he might be familiar enough with anthropological research to know this. And it's not just here. Unwarranted observations about the role and characteristics of men vs. women are scattered all over the book. None of them relate to his thesis, and all of them are demonstrably false. Worst is his constant insistence that religion = initiation rites for male adolescents = military training = success in warfare. Where's the evidence? Well initiation rites for boys are often painful (initiation rites for girls are not discussed, at all), and war is painful, so abracadabra, and let's just ignore every bit of archaeological evidence we have for the presence of female warriors throughout prehistory.
Oy.
Last criticism, promise:
It's too black and white.
There are some evolved characteristics that are required for survival, and these are universal. Like breathing. If you don't breathe, you don't live, so the biological and neurobiological mechanisms exist in all of us. To the extent that breathing is not universal in our day and age, it's because we have created some pretty fancy medical equipment that can take over this function and provide it for people who can't breathe on their own. Same for eating, sleeping, swallowing, etc, and some characteristics that are required for reproduction (the other component to evolution).
There are some traits that are not required for survival or reproduction, but which confer enough of a benefit to be very common. These exist on a continuum between almost-necessary and almost-optional. Personality and character traits are placed all over this continuum, and the same trait can have different outcomes depending on the environment. Not just in humans, by the way--I remember one fun study about extraversion in a minnow species, and how genes associated with extraversion were adaptive in some environments and non-adaptive in others (calm waters vs. rapids, though I can't remember which was better or worse for the outgoing fishies).
Well--isn't it really, really bloody obvious that the same would be true for religiosity?
Religiosity exists on a continuum. Some people are fanatical, other people are committed, some flexible, more-or-less half-hearted, willing to go along but not a believer, or committed non-believer. Much like extraversion, sensitivity, and intelligence, among other personality traits. And so like other personality traits--obviously what's adaptive and what's not adaptive varies depending on environment, including the culture.
There have always been some atheists and non-believers. I don't believe for a second that ancient hunter-gatherers didn't have any skeptics among them. That there were no people who were just going along because they enjoyed the dancing and the feasting and didn't really care if the gods existed or not. And it's a matter of historical record that in societies where religion was outlawed, some people risked their lives to continue practicing their faith. Cultures are not 1 or 0, yes or no, religious or not religious, and neither are individual people.
This could have been such a fascinating avenue for discussion. If religion is a means of enforcing social and moral conformity in pre-state societies, which I can accept as a plausible argument, then there are a range of possible adaptations and individual responses to that context. Adhering strictly to the culture's religion is one way of enhancing survival and reproductive success, but finding ways to exploit the religious beliefs of others becomes another adaptation. Like altruism: highly altruistic individuals are good for societies but their own survival and reproductive success can suffer if they give away too much; individuals very low in altruism (eg. sociopaths) can be very successful individually if they're not caught, but too many sociopaths and you don't have a society, certainly not one in which cooperation and mutual trust can flourish. So you have a tug of war between these two poles, with the optimal level of altruism at an individual and societal level being continually negotiated between shifting norms, resource levels, social commitment and conformity, and so on.
He hints at this in his chapter on the links between religious conformity, trust and commerce--particularly when briefly describing how charlatans can exploit religion to create undeserved trust--but this is a subject that deserves a lengthy and detailed discussion in any book that is truly going to explore and explain the evolutionary basis for religion.
Were prehistoric atheists well-adapted to exploit the religious beliefs of their more fervent neighbours for selfish ends? Would this have created evolutionary pressures for more in-the-middle folks--skeptical believers, if you will? What implications would this have had for the warfare-bonding or other cohesive functions of religion in society? Does religion still 'work' in this way if its adherents are 50% or 75% committed? (Though come to think of it, he spends the first chunk of the book talking about religion as a social bonding mechanism that works through ritual, not belief; and then the second half of the book talking about religion as requiring belief--this needs better teasing out before these discussions would have any meaning. "Belief" in the former context has no meaning--one could be an atheist and very devout, simultaneously.)
I would have loved to delve into a discussion on these topics, but it wasn't there. Practically nothing was there. I got more out of the evolution-of-fiction book and its throwaway line than I did from this entire manuscript. show less
The first half of the book was slow and repetitive but interesting. The book's central hypothesis is that religion evolved through forms of kin selection, by providing advantages to societies largely in the form of greater cohesion and conformity. show more Keep in mind that for the first 45,000 years or so of the existence of modern humans, we lived in small tribes with no formal hierarchies, no legal systems, no penal code. Somehow, a common moral code must be not only developed but enforced, even when no one is watching. Enter gods, who can see you everywhere and are for mysterious reasons deeply interested in the minutiae of human behaviour.
The above was a throwaway reference to the biological evolution of religion I first encountered in a book primarily about the biological evolution of fiction, and I was hoping Wade would further expand on what's known and provide an overview of the science--after all, that's what he proposes in the book copy. No such luck. Instead, while he frequently repeats his assertion that religion facilitates the successful expansion of pre-state societies by bonding warriors together and providing them with reasons to sacrifice their lives for their tribe-mates, he provides no evidence whatsoever, and instead treats the reader to extensive digressions about his own prejudices.
There were small elements of science--sciencelets, let's call them--in the early chapters. He discusses recent neurological and psychological research on moral reasoning and moral intuition that were a pleasure to read, although if you're interested, you can find better accounts elsewhere with less baggage. Or here: science has pretty conclusively shown that people jump to moral conclusions via intuition and then reason their way into those conclusions after the fact. That's the short version. Now you can skip that chapter too.
Other than that, he quotes no science, instead relying on just-so cherry-picked anthropological anecdotes about different religions that support whatever point he's trying to make in that chapter. About halfway through, he careens right off course--dumping any pretense at talking about biology, evolution or neurobiology, and instead diverging weirdly into chapters about the historical accuracy of the bible and the koran, the role of christianity in modern american politics, and population control.
I would be less frustrated if the entirely speculative nature of this book were due to a lack of science or research on the biological underpinnings of religion. But the simplest google search shows that there is a ton out there on connections between certain genes and religious behaviour, or the neurological components or functions of religious beliefs, much of it available before the book's 2009 publication date. Wade does not discuss a single one. How do you write a 300 page book about the evolution of the faith instinct without once using the word "gene"?
You also get to read lovely bits like the following:
As other ethnic groups went through the WASP school system, they assimilated the same values, particularly the Protestant art of forming associations of all kinds. But the balance between individualism and community-building has shifted dramatically toward the former in the last fifty years .... Groups demanding rights for specific sections of the population have also undermined community in unintended ways. (p. 202)
Yup. It would be better, you see, if those uppity women and black people had kept subordinating their selfish desires to be seen as human beings and individuals. Then we would still have a sense of community. Our bad!
The Church felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group .... Some 95 percent of Americans are Christian or belong to no religion. Minorities--including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. (p. 267)
Yep. He went there. Let's ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with "no religion," aka atheists, would be alarmed and displeased to the extreme to be lumped in with Christians when it comes to religious education in the classroom. Those 5 per cent of Americans are real people! The whole point of rights is that they belong to everybody! You don't get to decide they don't count because it's a minority--that's the whole point of legal fucking rights! No one took away the Christians' rights to religious education; they just took away state funding for it, for god's sake. I'm pretty sure that people besides lawyers were very very happy to get bible learning out of the public education system.
Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. (p. 125)
Those days never existed, asshat. If he could distinguish scientific facts from a hole in the ground, he might be familiar enough with anthropological research to know this. And it's not just here. Unwarranted observations about the role and characteristics of men vs. women are scattered all over the book. None of them relate to his thesis, and all of them are demonstrably false. Worst is his constant insistence that religion = initiation rites for male adolescents = military training = success in warfare. Where's the evidence? Well initiation rites for boys are often painful (initiation rites for girls are not discussed, at all), and war is painful, so abracadabra, and let's just ignore every bit of archaeological evidence we have for the presence of female warriors throughout prehistory.
Oy.
Last criticism, promise:
It's too black and white.
There are some evolved characteristics that are required for survival, and these are universal. Like breathing. If you don't breathe, you don't live, so the biological and neurobiological mechanisms exist in all of us. To the extent that breathing is not universal in our day and age, it's because we have created some pretty fancy medical equipment that can take over this function and provide it for people who can't breathe on their own. Same for eating, sleeping, swallowing, etc, and some characteristics that are required for reproduction (the other component to evolution).
There are some traits that are not required for survival or reproduction, but which confer enough of a benefit to be very common. These exist on a continuum between almost-necessary and almost-optional. Personality and character traits are placed all over this continuum, and the same trait can have different outcomes depending on the environment. Not just in humans, by the way--I remember one fun study about extraversion in a minnow species, and how genes associated with extraversion were adaptive in some environments and non-adaptive in others (calm waters vs. rapids, though I can't remember which was better or worse for the outgoing fishies).
Well--isn't it really, really bloody obvious that the same would be true for religiosity?
Religiosity exists on a continuum. Some people are fanatical, other people are committed, some flexible, more-or-less half-hearted, willing to go along but not a believer, or committed non-believer. Much like extraversion, sensitivity, and intelligence, among other personality traits. And so like other personality traits--obviously what's adaptive and what's not adaptive varies depending on environment, including the culture.
There have always been some atheists and non-believers. I don't believe for a second that ancient hunter-gatherers didn't have any skeptics among them. That there were no people who were just going along because they enjoyed the dancing and the feasting and didn't really care if the gods existed or not. And it's a matter of historical record that in societies where religion was outlawed, some people risked their lives to continue practicing their faith. Cultures are not 1 or 0, yes or no, religious or not religious, and neither are individual people.
This could have been such a fascinating avenue for discussion. If religion is a means of enforcing social and moral conformity in pre-state societies, which I can accept as a plausible argument, then there are a range of possible adaptations and individual responses to that context. Adhering strictly to the culture's religion is one way of enhancing survival and reproductive success, but finding ways to exploit the religious beliefs of others becomes another adaptation. Like altruism: highly altruistic individuals are good for societies but their own survival and reproductive success can suffer if they give away too much; individuals very low in altruism (eg. sociopaths) can be very successful individually if they're not caught, but too many sociopaths and you don't have a society, certainly not one in which cooperation and mutual trust can flourish. So you have a tug of war between these two poles, with the optimal level of altruism at an individual and societal level being continually negotiated between shifting norms, resource levels, social commitment and conformity, and so on.
He hints at this in his chapter on the links between religious conformity, trust and commerce--particularly when briefly describing how charlatans can exploit religion to create undeserved trust--but this is a subject that deserves a lengthy and detailed discussion in any book that is truly going to explore and explain the evolutionary basis for religion.
Were prehistoric atheists well-adapted to exploit the religious beliefs of their more fervent neighbours for selfish ends? Would this have created evolutionary pressures for more in-the-middle folks--skeptical believers, if you will? What implications would this have had for the warfare-bonding or other cohesive functions of religion in society? Does religion still 'work' in this way if its adherents are 50% or 75% committed? (Though come to think of it, he spends the first chunk of the book talking about religion as a social bonding mechanism that works through ritual, not belief; and then the second half of the book talking about religion as requiring belief--this needs better teasing out before these discussions would have any meaning. "Belief" in the former context has no meaning--one could be an atheist and very devout, simultaneously.)
I would have loved to delve into a discussion on these topics, but it wasn't there. Practically nothing was there. I got more out of the evolution-of-fiction book and its throwaway line than I did from this entire manuscript. show less
A random walk to global dominance
The history of homo sapiens has long been the home turf of palaeontologists and linguists. Recently behavioural biology and particularly genetics have added new tools and knowledge to understand man's earlier past. Before the Dawn summarises our knowledge as per 2005 in an easy to understand way. It also conveys some inconvenient truths.
Homo sapiens is the product of a long line of evolutionary change, a process that is still ongoing. New genes arise all the show more time and become more common if they confer some biological advantage. However, the male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial DNA are passed down almost unchanged, except for a random change every few generations. These random changes can be used to estimate how many generations ago a certain differentiation started.
The relative stability of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA gives us a lot of information. E.g. all men not of African descent have the M168 Y chromosome. Equally, all non-African women have the L3 branch of mitochondrial DNA, and both together proof man's origin in Africa. Modern humanity can be traced back to a group of about 5,000 about 50,000 years ago in the Horn of Africa, making our race about 2,000 generations old.
Homo sapiens is not the first hominoid that has left Africa. Neanderthals (to Europe and the Middle East) and homo erectus (to Africa, Asia, and Australia) went before the homo sapiens. All have died out, the last one being the small sized homo floresiensis on the remote island of Flores.
Language, and particularly grammar, is a unique capability of the human race that probably grew out of navigation skills. Basically, language is a set of sounds that can be infinitely combined. Language is too complex for an infant to learn from scratch, and must therefore be genetically coded. The FOXP2-gene that is about 200,000 years old plays an important role here. People can develop new languages with a proper syntax quite rapidly, as the various pidgin languages and groups of deaf people proof.
The hunter-gatherer people in Namibia called the Koi or !Kung have a culture that is probably nearest to that of our mutual ancestors. The Koi live in small groups without hierarchy. Hunting is done in groups and the bounty is shared equally among all.
The Koi also have 3 times the murder rate of the US, and infanticide is common for defects at bird. One of the most interesting subjects in Before the Dawn is about the origins of human violence. Originally, the human frame and skull were heavier, which makes perfect sense if life is violent. Not only the Koi lead violent lives. Among Papuans, another group with little genetic diversity and traceable to the original migration out of Africa, warfare claims about 30% of males' lives. The same applies to the Yanomamo, who live a basically comfortable life in the Brazilian rain forest (they need to work just 3 hours a day), and, genetically further afield, to the patrilocal chimpanzees. During raids both chimpanzees and Yanomamo calculate the odds for a raid in the same manner: they want to be in a 3 to 1 majority before they attack. The benefit of such attacks is not economic and certainly not greater security, but biological. The reproductive advantage of participating in raids derives from the prestige of killing an enemy. Yanomamo who have killed have on average 2.5 times as many wives, and more chances to pass on their genes to offspring. The same can be said about the organisation of groups. The males in a group are related and band together. Consequently, many of your genes are passed on to a new generation, even if you do not have offspring yourself. This applies to both chimpanzees and Yanomamo, making the author conclude that
a willingness to kill members of one's own species is apparently correlated with high intelligence.
There is also genetic evidence for widespread cannibalism quite late in our evolutionary history.
Hominoids had hairy bodies with light skins. Later on in our evolution body hair was mostly lost. This exposed the body’s folid acid to UV-radiation. Folic acid influences fertility and is broken down by UV-radiation, and thus homo sapiens' skin turned dark. Some 12,000 years ago Caucasian and Mongoloid people with lighter skins appeared on the scene. It is one of the proofs of man's continuing evolutionary development. Geography, sexual selection, warfare, climate, disease all cause separate gene pools. Any form of isolation (which can be geographical, religious, etc.) automatically does so. The tolerance to lactose among the inhabitants of Northwestern Europe and Africa is an example of genetic change based upon cultural change that happened independently in segregated regions. Man can be labeled in 5 clusters, fitting the geographical continents. Skin colour is not an important factor in gene pools, but genetic make-up is. People can interbreed and function in different cultures irrespective of “race”. Still there are variations in the susceptibility to disease and in the response to drugs. Before the Dawn mostly stays away from the touchy subject of racial difference and intelligence, but does mention the great success of West African athletes in sprinting and East African athletes in middle distance events. Later on it also tries to explain the relatively high IQ-score of Ashkenazi Jews.
A truly revolutionary chance was the beginning of sedentary life. Sedentary life required privately owned property and hierarchy, and thus limited individual freedom. The current state of knowledge indicated that sedentary life began before the advent of agriculture. An explanation would be that larger groups can better protect themselves against marauders. Agriculture was first developed by the Natufians in an area that nowadays comprises Israel, Jordan, and Syria. Why it took so long to move to this type of sedentary life is a mystery. It cannot be because of the difficulty of agriculture. Cereals can be domesticated in about two decades. An explanation could be a set of genetic changes that brought new behaviours so people could live in larger groups, accept hierarchy, and coexist without constant fighting. A proof for such a theory could be the thinning of the human skull. Sedentary life and agriculture brought a revolution. An advantage enjoyed by settled societies is the ability to generate and store surpluses. These form the basis for trade. They can be exchanged for things like weapons, alliances, or prestige.
Humans are the only species that can trust individuals beyond family. This is an important quality. It allow us to trade with strangers and to live in today’s mega cities. Our genetic make up generates the sociality that cements a larger society, like a sense of fairness and reciprocity, language, religion.
Religion is a remedy against freeloading, according to the author. "Religion is a safeguard against deception". On the one hand it is morally wrong to doubt your religion, and on the other hand, religions are based on truths that cannot be tested. Language gives the power to deceive, reason for religion to arise at the same time as language. Rituals are used to confirm commitments of group members. Religion is superbly serviceable to the purpose of warfare and economic exploitation, because it can persuade individuals to subordinate their self-interest to the interest of the group.
If you ask me it confirms an earlier statement of the author that
"higher social primates like apes and people probably encounter no problems more challenging than those dealing with other members of their community." show less
The history of homo sapiens has long been the home turf of palaeontologists and linguists. Recently behavioural biology and particularly genetics have added new tools and knowledge to understand man's earlier past. Before the Dawn summarises our knowledge as per 2005 in an easy to understand way. It also conveys some inconvenient truths.
Homo sapiens is the product of a long line of evolutionary change, a process that is still ongoing. New genes arise all the show more time and become more common if they confer some biological advantage. However, the male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial DNA are passed down almost unchanged, except for a random change every few generations. These random changes can be used to estimate how many generations ago a certain differentiation started.
The relative stability of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA gives us a lot of information. E.g. all men not of African descent have the M168 Y chromosome. Equally, all non-African women have the L3 branch of mitochondrial DNA, and both together proof man's origin in Africa. Modern humanity can be traced back to a group of about 5,000 about 50,000 years ago in the Horn of Africa, making our race about 2,000 generations old.
Homo sapiens is not the first hominoid that has left Africa. Neanderthals (to Europe and the Middle East) and homo erectus (to Africa, Asia, and Australia) went before the homo sapiens. All have died out, the last one being the small sized homo floresiensis on the remote island of Flores.
Language, and particularly grammar, is a unique capability of the human race that probably grew out of navigation skills. Basically, language is a set of sounds that can be infinitely combined. Language is too complex for an infant to learn from scratch, and must therefore be genetically coded. The FOXP2-gene that is about 200,000 years old plays an important role here. People can develop new languages with a proper syntax quite rapidly, as the various pidgin languages and groups of deaf people proof.
The hunter-gatherer people in Namibia called the Koi or !Kung have a culture that is probably nearest to that of our mutual ancestors. The Koi live in small groups without hierarchy. Hunting is done in groups and the bounty is shared equally among all.
The Koi also have 3 times the murder rate of the US, and infanticide is common for defects at bird. One of the most interesting subjects in Before the Dawn is about the origins of human violence. Originally, the human frame and skull were heavier, which makes perfect sense if life is violent. Not only the Koi lead violent lives. Among Papuans, another group with little genetic diversity and traceable to the original migration out of Africa, warfare claims about 30% of males' lives. The same applies to the Yanomamo, who live a basically comfortable life in the Brazilian rain forest (they need to work just 3 hours a day), and, genetically further afield, to the patrilocal chimpanzees. During raids both chimpanzees and Yanomamo calculate the odds for a raid in the same manner: they want to be in a 3 to 1 majority before they attack. The benefit of such attacks is not economic and certainly not greater security, but biological. The reproductive advantage of participating in raids derives from the prestige of killing an enemy. Yanomamo who have killed have on average 2.5 times as many wives, and more chances to pass on their genes to offspring. The same can be said about the organisation of groups. The males in a group are related and band together. Consequently, many of your genes are passed on to a new generation, even if you do not have offspring yourself. This applies to both chimpanzees and Yanomamo, making the author conclude that
a willingness to kill members of one's own species is apparently correlated with high intelligence.
There is also genetic evidence for widespread cannibalism quite late in our evolutionary history.
Hominoids had hairy bodies with light skins. Later on in our evolution body hair was mostly lost. This exposed the body’s folid acid to UV-radiation. Folic acid influences fertility and is broken down by UV-radiation, and thus homo sapiens' skin turned dark. Some 12,000 years ago Caucasian and Mongoloid people with lighter skins appeared on the scene. It is one of the proofs of man's continuing evolutionary development. Geography, sexual selection, warfare, climate, disease all cause separate gene pools. Any form of isolation (which can be geographical, religious, etc.) automatically does so. The tolerance to lactose among the inhabitants of Northwestern Europe and Africa is an example of genetic change based upon cultural change that happened independently in segregated regions. Man can be labeled in 5 clusters, fitting the geographical continents. Skin colour is not an important factor in gene pools, but genetic make-up is. People can interbreed and function in different cultures irrespective of “race”. Still there are variations in the susceptibility to disease and in the response to drugs. Before the Dawn mostly stays away from the touchy subject of racial difference and intelligence, but does mention the great success of West African athletes in sprinting and East African athletes in middle distance events. Later on it also tries to explain the relatively high IQ-score of Ashkenazi Jews.
A truly revolutionary chance was the beginning of sedentary life. Sedentary life required privately owned property and hierarchy, and thus limited individual freedom. The current state of knowledge indicated that sedentary life began before the advent of agriculture. An explanation would be that larger groups can better protect themselves against marauders. Agriculture was first developed by the Natufians in an area that nowadays comprises Israel, Jordan, and Syria. Why it took so long to move to this type of sedentary life is a mystery. It cannot be because of the difficulty of agriculture. Cereals can be domesticated in about two decades. An explanation could be a set of genetic changes that brought new behaviours so people could live in larger groups, accept hierarchy, and coexist without constant fighting. A proof for such a theory could be the thinning of the human skull. Sedentary life and agriculture brought a revolution. An advantage enjoyed by settled societies is the ability to generate and store surpluses. These form the basis for trade. They can be exchanged for things like weapons, alliances, or prestige.
Humans are the only species that can trust individuals beyond family. This is an important quality. It allow us to trade with strangers and to live in today’s mega cities. Our genetic make up generates the sociality that cements a larger society, like a sense of fairness and reciprocity, language, religion.
Religion is a remedy against freeloading, according to the author. "Religion is a safeguard against deception". On the one hand it is morally wrong to doubt your religion, and on the other hand, religions are based on truths that cannot be tested. Language gives the power to deceive, reason for religion to arise at the same time as language. Rituals are used to confirm commitments of group members. Religion is superbly serviceable to the purpose of warfare and economic exploitation, because it can persuade individuals to subordinate their self-interest to the interest of the group.
If you ask me it confirms an earlier statement of the author that
"higher social primates like apes and people probably encounter no problems more challenging than those dealing with other members of their community." show less
Nicholas Wade discusses how the growing science of genetics expands and deepens our understanding of human evolution, our relationship to our closest relatives, and how we became the species we are--and what we might become in the future.
There's a lot of ground to cover, and this is a survey, not a textbook. It's very well-referenced, but in some cases he's relying on cutting edge research that, inevitably, will not all hold up. He also ventures into some touchy areas that not all readers show more will be comfortable or happy with. Nevertheless, it's an excellent, informative, and thought-provoking book that is well worth reading.
One of the topics covered here is the often-surprising path of human migration and expansion out of Africa. Just one major human lineage, L3, left Africa, and it's from that lineage that all the sub-lineages that populate the rest of the globe are descended. Human migration went eastward and along the coastlines, to India, southeast Asia, and Australia before going northward and westward. He repeatedly emphasizes that dates derived from genetic mutation rates are approximate and need to be evaluated in conjunction with archaeological evidence. That said, he gives us a fascinating picture of how archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence interact to give us a much fuller, richer, more complete picture of human evolution.
Among the conventional assumptions overturned by the growing body of evidence is the notion of early human hunter-gatherer bands as peaceful people, living in harmony with other humans they encountered, with war as an invention of sedentary societies after the invention of agriculture. In fact the evidence points the other way: hunter-gatherer bands, even today, are very violent societies, frequently raiding their neighbors and as much as 30% of the population dying by violence. Our nearest relatives, the common chimpanzees, are even more violent, not only raiding other troops and killing any member of another troop found alone, but also handling most internal disputes including leadership disputes by violence. Permanent settlements, with higher population density and less ability to move away from neighboring individuals or groups you didn't get along with, required an increase in human sociability, and willingness and ability to cooperate even with unrelated individuals, in order to work. And the archaeological evidence shows that agriculture came after that point, a result rather than a cause.
Humans have been domesticating each other, along with domesticating other species, and the typical experience of violence in settled, developed societies is much, much less and decreasing compared to "more natural" hunter-gatherer societies. The human ability to cooperate with unrelated strangers, routinely and on a large scale, is simply unknown in other species. Some readers will be disturbed by that argument. Others will be disturbed by the case that Wade makes that one of our evolved mechanisms for making this cooperation possible is religion.
I'm not going to go on, touching on every issue Wade discusses. This is an excellent, highly readable book, laying out all we've learned about our past in recent years, due to the advance of genetics. Because he does rely on research that, in 2006, was very new and cutting-edge, some of what he says will prove to be wrong--but there's still a lot to learn here, and well worth your time.
Highly recommended.
I borrowed this book from a friend. show less
There's a lot of ground to cover, and this is a survey, not a textbook. It's very well-referenced, but in some cases he's relying on cutting edge research that, inevitably, will not all hold up. He also ventures into some touchy areas that not all readers show more will be comfortable or happy with. Nevertheless, it's an excellent, informative, and thought-provoking book that is well worth reading.
One of the topics covered here is the often-surprising path of human migration and expansion out of Africa. Just one major human lineage, L3, left Africa, and it's from that lineage that all the sub-lineages that populate the rest of the globe are descended. Human migration went eastward and along the coastlines, to India, southeast Asia, and Australia before going northward and westward. He repeatedly emphasizes that dates derived from genetic mutation rates are approximate and need to be evaluated in conjunction with archaeological evidence. That said, he gives us a fascinating picture of how archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence interact to give us a much fuller, richer, more complete picture of human evolution.
Among the conventional assumptions overturned by the growing body of evidence is the notion of early human hunter-gatherer bands as peaceful people, living in harmony with other humans they encountered, with war as an invention of sedentary societies after the invention of agriculture. In fact the evidence points the other way: hunter-gatherer bands, even today, are very violent societies, frequently raiding their neighbors and as much as 30% of the population dying by violence. Our nearest relatives, the common chimpanzees, are even more violent, not only raiding other troops and killing any member of another troop found alone, but also handling most internal disputes including leadership disputes by violence. Permanent settlements, with higher population density and less ability to move away from neighboring individuals or groups you didn't get along with, required an increase in human sociability, and willingness and ability to cooperate even with unrelated individuals, in order to work. And the archaeological evidence shows that agriculture came after that point, a result rather than a cause.
Humans have been domesticating each other, along with domesticating other species, and the typical experience of violence in settled, developed societies is much, much less and decreasing compared to "more natural" hunter-gatherer societies. The human ability to cooperate with unrelated strangers, routinely and on a large scale, is simply unknown in other species. Some readers will be disturbed by that argument. Others will be disturbed by the case that Wade makes that one of our evolved mechanisms for making this cooperation possible is religion.
I'm not going to go on, touching on every issue Wade discusses. This is an excellent, highly readable book, laying out all we've learned about our past in recent years, due to the advance of genetics. Because he does rely on research that, in 2006, was very new and cutting-edge, some of what he says will prove to be wrong--but there's still a lot to learn here, and well worth your time.
Highly recommended.
I borrowed this book from a friend. show less
Seldom have I encountered better writing on such a complex and baggage-laden subject - human evolution. Wade succeeds in putting before the reader a synthesis of what is known about several aspects of our development from when and where modern humans originated, when and where migrations occured in relation to changes in environment (drought, cold etc.) when and where language probably occurred, domestication of animals, the beginnings of agriculture. His main point is that study of DNA - of show more both matrilineal mitochondria to the male Y chromosome has made it possible to track the timing and location of many of these changes to a remarkable degree. Of course, scientific inquiry moves so swiftly now that even I, essentially a science ignoramous, know of a couple of recent discoveries that have been made and confirmed in the seven years since this book first came out - the first a definite albeit very small genetic link between Neandertals and the basic European stock of modern humans and for a second, some earlier dates for the presence of the domesticated dog in Europe and I expect there are several more in the field of paleo-linguistics, or whatever, you want to call it! I am intrigued by the idea too, that we have been gradually 'domesticating' ourselves and are likely continue to do so. The linguistic furor over language origins and the idea of an original proto language were, for me, the most fascinating chapters. In short, I can't recommend it more highly! ***** show less
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