And as Clark is from Scotland (and his grandfathers were both Irish), it is downright bizarre that he would so narrowly focus on England, as opposed to Britain as a whole. Perhaps he is saving his big guns for a future work, but the lack of a wider British perspective weakens his case.

Apart from this, Clark never makes the genetic – or even social or cultural – connection between the idea of the survival of the richest and his core thesis, that “…the attributes that would ensure later economic dynamism—patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education—were … spreading biologically throughout the population,” despite the subtle misdirection of all of the data that he throws at the issue.

Clark also incorporates an interesting bias in discounting the offspring of upper class women, born either out-of-wedlock, or to lovers of various classes, who were set aside and not raised by their aristocratic parents. The fates of these children were often lost to history, but they might still have some genetic impact on English society.

In addition, since the English upper classes were never genetically uniform, I do not how Clark could possibly make any claim about their evolutionary effect on English society. Native Britons were displaced by Anglo-Saxons, who were in turn displaced by Normans. Coming closer to the Industrial Revolution, a branch of the aristocracy that was more Scottish and German (after the accesion of George I) displaced any branch that could even remotely be described as “English.”

In addition to all this, the decision that the English monarch must be Protestant pushed Catholic aristocrats downward on the social ladder, closer to the English middle and lower classes. None of this had anything to do with genes, but everything to do with the vagaries of historical circumstance. Clark simply cannot deal with this and tries to wish it all away in various tables and computations.

One could easily make a counter-case that the Industrial Revolution came about in part because the English upper classes at crucial times married savvy middle and lower class people (such as Bess of Hardwick, who at one time was the richest woman in England, apart from Elizabeth I), or Katherine Swynford, a woman of modest background who, as the wife of John of Gaunt, was an ancestor of the Tudor line of English monarchs.

The great irony of all this is that Clark, and other scientists, understand how to massage data, but not how to apply it to history, while many historians are unnecessarily intimidated by science and anything that reeks of statistical analysis, and so fail to point out the obvious weaknesses in Clark’s thesis.

Tim adds: Umm, no. You’re not understanding what “upper class” means in English, nor which class Clark was saying outbred the rest.

“Upper Class” means the aristocracy. What Clark carefully proves (this is the soundest part of his research) is that the bourgeois (the middle class) outbred the aristocracy. No one has ever believed that the British (or English) aristocracy valued “hard work, thrift and other proto-capitalist ideals” as anyone who has ever read Austen knows, that would be “trade”. You’ve either not read the book or you’ve grossly misunderstood the points being made. Try again, eh?

Tim, I also take issue with your use of Lamarckian inheritance here, though there are examples of this, e.g. the altered alignment of cilia (tiny hairs) on the tiny microbe Paramecium. However, the terms now used are cultural or memetic evolution, in part to distinguish it from that which Lamarck was commenting upon. Two reasons for this that I can see a) Lamarck was not talking about the sort of selection we are talking about and thus should not be attributed the credit for it, and b) Lamarckism is so discredited that the label carries controversy with it and so is unhelpful.

I’ve not read the book but I would be similarly uncomfortable about someone talking about potentially genetic mechanisms and Darwinian selection without clarifying very early on whether they were or not and how it affected the predictions of their hypothesis.

Tim adds: This Lamarck and Darwin is purely my own addition. Yes, I understand that it’s incorrect technically. It’s an allegory, no more, and certainly not the way that Clark himself explains it. It’s just that his critics (or at least this one, today) are insisting that as Darwinian evolution doesn’t work with this speed, or that they don’t want to think that being bourgeois is caused genetically, I’m trying to point out that cultural or memetic evolution does happen….and I’m using the term Lamarckian for that, the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”.

Anything wrong with the analogy is purely my fault, not Clark’s.

Yes?

I’d be interested to see how that compares to Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism

An excellent piece, Tim.

A million miles from Lamark. And Darwin didn’t have the mechanism for inheritance – he could simply wotk out its nature from an armchair and a very big brain.

Cultural transmission isn’t ‘best decribed as Lamarkism’ in any way, shape or form because what you’re describing here is very exactly not what Lamark was claiming.