[jlg23]

Unless you have some references, I'd call this a "nice theory" (to be read with a British accent).

Spontaneously:

* South America appeared to be more catholic than any Western European or US-American place I've visited, but family and extended family are still a big thing.

* Calvinists seem to be much more "open" than catholics to me.

* Damn, I want the secret recipe that lets me set a policy and enforce it in vast areas (at times without any reliable messenger system) and across many generations, even if my successor comes from a different faction within the catholic church.

[iguy]

The fairly solid part here is that the west is different, and my understanding is that the divergence in things like family/clan structures dates to early medieval times, in a zone something like London-to-Milan, core europe. Something changed, long before 1500.

The peripheral was different, e.g. Scotland had strong clans until they got kicked out (to Ulster, and thence Appalachia...). And Spain wasn't even christian at this point in time.

That the church did it is less clear, I agree. There are economic arguments too. I guess I'm persuaded that things like suppressing cousin marriage had something to do with it. I'm certainly not suggesting that there's some essential magic attached to the pope! It was core europe that invented Protestantism too... at the same time as Cortez & co were taking the reconquistia to the Incas, with the pope's blessing but a very different culture.

[barry-cotter]

Extended family may be a thing in Western Europe and derived cultural areas but clans are not. Descent based political groupings are for backwoods peasants at best, not the commanding heights of the polity, unlike every other meta cultural grouping.

The recipe for setting and enforcing a policy over vast areas of time and space is incentive compatibility. It is always in the interest of one powerful political group to make coordinated action against it more difficult. The Catholic Church had a strong incentive to break up extended kin groups and they did. It was possible to get dispensations for royalty and the peasantry mostly did whatever it wanted. Keeping up the same policy for over a thousand years was enough to make Western Europe and especially Northwestern Europe uniquely atomised in human history.

If you want an academic source look below. Frost basically took what blogger hbdchick had been writing about for years, did a review article on it and didn’t cite her. http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe Peter Frost

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

[AlexCoventry]

He would have tipped his hand as a purveyor of speculative, just-so, white-supremacist garbage, if he'd cited her. Also, there is nothing in that paper to support your claim about the policies of the Catholic Church.

[barry-cotter]

If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.

If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

On the Church banning marrying relatives

> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.

The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.

> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".

As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

[AlexCoventry]

> Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified.

If it's not verifiable even in principle, it's useless from a scientific perspective. And it just happens to be a theory telling white people why they're genetically disposed to morally superiority, which is highly suspicious, coming from a white guy.

> Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

You're not taking the enormous hypothesis space into account. This is not a compelling fit, by any means.

[barry-cotter]

I’m neither a behaviour geneticist nor an evolutionary psychologist, merely an interested amateur so if I can think up ways to test these hypotheses I’m sure actual experts can do better.

We’re learning more and more about the genetic underpinnings of personality traits and getting betterat extracting ancient DNA. It’s also trivial to compute indices of relatedness between two people if you have either a full genotype or just SNPs. If the personality traits associated with WEIRD populations are highly correlated with declines in inbreeding it’s not proof of the hypothesis but it makes it more likely. We don’t have proof outside of Math anyway, Science is about more or less likely.

If you want to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology the Oxford Handbook is excellent and it’s on libgen.io. The introduction is only about 60 pages and addresses the most common and uncommon criticisms ably.

If you think that being unusually individualistic and unfamilistic is morally superior that’s a personal preference you are of course free to indulge.

[AlexCoventry]

Dude, I've written papers on population genetics. I know exactly how hard what he's trying to do is. He's full of it.

[AlexCoventry]

Thanks for the info. I'm not that Alex.

[freddie_mercury]

Check out:

The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, which has a pretty long section about how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe worked really hard to break up the power of clans. (It is one reason why they forced priests to become celebate.)

Along the same lines see History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church by Henry Lea.

South America's conversion to Catholicism came long after this period was largely over.

Family & extended family in Western Europe and the US is nothing like it is in some other places in the world. Do you -- and 50 other descendents -- take a plane trip every year to go to your grandfather's grave 1,000 miles away to pray to him on the anniversary of the day he died for good luck? We do that here.

[walterbell]

> the secret recipe that lets me set a policy and enforce it in vast area

Prioritize the targeting of clan leaders?

[pard68]

By Calvinists I assume you are referring to Protestants? Or are you actually referring to Calvinistic Protestants? Just curious, outside of Christian circles and history I don't think I have ever seen someone reference Calvinists.

[IkmoIkmo]

Might be different in the US, in Europe it's not too uncommon to talk about calvinists, particularly in certain countries like the Netherlands it's a well-established term (which is even used there to describe Dutch behavioral culture, because it's deemed to be so fitting), and separate from other forms of protestantism.

[davidgay]

Calvinists get plentifully referenced in general circles when you grow up in Geneva ;)

[jlg23]

I received a protestant education and as such Calvinism is part of the curriculum.