Steve Hsu links to an unpublished paper that Unz wrote as a freshman at Harvard under E. O. Wilson. His theory is remarkably similar to Greg Clark’s regarding the English (Clark said the major difference is that the English were quite filthy, and the resulting disease burden led to higher per-capita wealth, with another difference being the fratricidal tendencies of the aristocracy). There are a number of typos in the paper, but the oddest one which goes uncorrected is the frequent reference to “epigenetics” as the alternative to culture. He seems to be treating it as synonymous with “genetics”, as there is certainly no reference to gene regulation or methylation.
Another interesting bit is that Unz, who I’d thought was a libertarian, referred to old rural China as a “nightmare” of unrestricted free-market social darwinism. Mancur Olson thought its too-stable economy was distorted by trade associations (I’m a bit intoxicated at the moment, but I recall a story about a defecter from a cartel being bitten to death by hundreds of his peers). The more things change.
February 20, 2011 at 5:01 am
Unz gets this use of “epigenetics” from Wilson. It actually makes sense — our genes don’t interact with the environment directly and usually don’t manifest themselves in the very simple ways geneticists typically focused on during the 20th century. Rather their impact is quite indirect, via gene regulation, protein synthesis and post-synthetic modification, the growth of cells, nerve impulses, etc.
So Wilson and his students use “epigenetic” to refer to all the consequences of genes on our body and behavior, not just the obvious Mendelian ones geneticists focused on. They wanted to distinguish from the most simple/obvious genetic traits (esp. single gene traits that can be characterized as dominant or recessive). They wanted to hypothesize traits, e.g. behavioral tendencies, e.g. IQ, that they believed to be heavily influenced by genes but that did not exhibit obvious and simple Mendelian characteristics that geneticists of that time studied.
February 21, 2011 at 8:54 am
Maybe it was different back then, but the usage I’ve heard uses the term to refer only to changes not based on the underlying DNA code. And I think you can get more complicated than Mendelian results without bringing in the epigenome.
February 22, 2011 at 4:18 pm
You are right on all counts. I hadn’t heard of that usage before. But clearly it is very ambiguous in the 90s-00s-10s and would make a mess if reintroduced now.
February 21, 2011 at 11:32 pm
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