Chapter 4 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called the “Consequences of Agriculture.”
The effects of agriculture accelerated human evolution and selective pressures in the following ways:
Interesting tidbit:
Yet another cognitive trait that may have been selected for in farmers is the ability to defer gratification (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 114). This was an extremely important type of behaviour on which farming is based, and needed for sowing of crops or breeding of animals, when those plants or animals can be eaten in the present. Farmers with personality traits such as delayed gratification, patience, a work ethic, self-control, and long-term planning would have survived to produce more offspring (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 114). Curiously, this would also have bred more selfish people in contrast to hunter gatherers (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 115).
The would bear out Rousseau's assumption over Hobbes.
Conversely, this would speak in favor of Hobbes.
Farming allowed the creation of more advanced state-based societies that developed systems of law and order and punishments. Many such societies have imposed the death penalty for socially-harmful behaviour, as in crimes like murder, violence, and so on. In a stable society over time, this would likely kill off more aggressive individuals (usually men) and leave that society with a gene pool favouring less aggressive and less violent individuals (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 111–112). Some have argued that the high levels of social conformity in East Asian societies are not just a cultural phenomenal, but the result of long-run genetic changes influencing personality arising from the thousands of years of how these state-based societies in East Asia have operated. This raises the interesting possibility that highly developed state societies have “tamed” human beings in certain ways, not just culturally but also genetically (Cochran and Harpending 2009: 112–113), and that in modern agricultural societies (which have had agricultural and state systems for thousands of years), the average man today might be less aggressive and less violent than the average man 2,000 years ago, or 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. People from state-based, agricultural societies – with thousands of years of history – probably have different cognitive traits, on average, as compared with people in hunter-gatherer societies not subject to the same kind of long-term evolutionary change.
Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 4: A Summary
Lord Keynes
