[knight17]

>warning controversial hypothesis

Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.

In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.

[danieltillett]

The hypothesis Clark proposes is the least interesting part of his book - it is all the background and data on the industrial revolution that he provides that make it worth reading.

I am on the fence if "the rich outbred the rest" is valid, but I do know from the genetics side that an enormous amount of selection has taken place in the human population over the last few thousand years. We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago.

[oblio]

> We really are very different to the people living 5000 years ago.

Do you have more details for this? I was under the impression that biologically we aren't that much more different from Homo sapiens 50k years ago.

[danieltillett]

Genetically there has been more evolution in the last 10,000 years (most of this in the last 5000 years) than in the preceding 500,000. This is tied to the change in environment (hunter-gather to agriculture) and the expansion in the population size.

An accessible book on this topic is the 10,000 Year Explosion [0]. It is a little dated (it is before all the amazing data that has come from sequencing ancient homo DNA), but what it does have is a very good overview of the topic.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion