England began to shift from a knightly society to “a nation of shopkeepers” (as Napoleon would sneeringly call it), the wealthier commoners had more surviving children than the poorer ones, presumably because they married younger and could afford better food and cleaner living conditions. Clark calls it “the survival of the richest”: the rich got richer and they got children. This upper middle class was also outreproducing the aristocrats, who were splitting heads and chopping off body parts in their tournaments and private wars, as we saw in figure 3–7, also taken from Clark’s data. Since the economy as a whole would not begin to expand until the 19th century, the extra surviving children of the wealthier merchants and tradesmen had nowhere to go on the economic ladder but downward. They continuously replaced the poorer commoners, bringing with them their bourgeois traits of thrift, hard work, self-control, patient future discounting, and avoidance of violence. The population of England literally evolved middle-class values. That in turn positioned them to take advantage of the commercial opportunities opened up by the innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Though Clark occasionally dodges the political correctness police by noting that nonviolence and self-control can be passed from parent to child as cultural habits, in a précis of his book entitled “Genetically Capitalist?” he offers the full-strength version of his thesis:The highly capitalistic nature of English society by 1800—individualism, low time preference rates, long work hours, high levels of human capital—may thus stem from the nature of the Darwinian struggle in a very stable agrarian society in the long run up to the Industrial Revolution. The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.163
A Farewell to Alms is filled with illuminating statistics and gripping narratives about the historical precursors to the Industrial Revolution. But the Genetically Capitalist theory has not competed well in the struggle for survival among theories of economic growth.164 One problem is that until recently, the rich have outreproduced the poor in pretty much every society, not just the one that later blasted off in an industrial revolution. Another is that while aristocrats and royals may have had no more legitimate heirs than the bourgeoisie, they more than made up for it in bastards, which could have contributed a disproportionate share of their genes to the next generation. A third is that when institutions change, a nation can vault to spectacular rates of economic growth in the absence of a recent history of selection for middle-class values, such as postwar Japan and post-communist China. And most important, Clark cites no data showing that the English are innately more self-controlled or less violent than the citizenries of countries that did not host an industrial revolution.
So while recent biological evolution may, in theory, have tweaked our inclinations toward violence and nonviolence, we have no good evidence that it actually has. At the same time, we do have good evidence for changes that could not possibly be genetic, because they unfolded on time scales that are too rapid to be explained by natural selection, even with the new understanding of how recently it has acted. The abolition of slavery and cruel punishments during the Humanitarian Revolution; the reduction of violence against minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals during the Rights Revolutions; and the plummeting of war and genocide during the Long Peace and the New Peace, all unfolded over a span of decades or even years, sometimes within a single generation. A particularly dramatic decline is the near-halving of the homicide rate during the Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s. The decay rate of that decline, around 7 percent a year, is powerful enough to drag a measure of violence down to 1 percent of its original level over just two generations, all without the slightest change in gene frequencies. Since it is indisputable that cultural and social inputs can adjust the settings of our better angels (such as self-control and empathy) and thereby control our violent inclinations, we have the means to explain all the declines of violence without invoking recent biological evolution. At least for the time being, we have no need for that hypothesis.
MORALITY AND TABOO
The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the