Human Biodiversity (5): Cultural Group Selection Through Migration and Assimilation

In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade writes: "Behavioral traits are particularly likely to be retained, but the universal instinct to conform to social rules seems to ensure that the political behaviors of the host country supplant those of the immigrants.  Chinese Americans do not organize themselves into authoritarian structures, nor Arab and African Americans into tribal ones" (188).  He also observes that "the forces of differentiation [of the races] seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).

Here and elsewhere in his book, Wade points to the power of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution, which has been studied by Darwinian theorists of cultural evolution.  Some of these theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have suggested that the historical turn towards liberal capitalism could be explained as a process of cultural group selection driven by immigration and assimilation.  And that seems to be what Wade is pointing to in the above passages.

In some papers--found here and here--Boyd and Richerson have argued that one important mechanism of social evolution is cultural group competition for immigration in which people "vote with their feet."  Although it is true, that groups have often competed through violent conflict and conquest, they argue (as did Darwin) that a more powerful form of group competition is cultural competition for immigration.  People tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, more just societies.  And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice. 

A dramatic example of this was the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, which showed how an oppressive regime might have to use barbed wire and armed border guards to keep its people from leaving in the pursuit of a better life elsewhere.

Boyd and Richerson also cite the example of two neighboring village societies in New Guinea.  The Gebusi were driving themselves into extinction through disruptive witchcraft trials and executions.  Some of the Gebusi were able to migrate to the society of the Bedamini, who had a better social order.

Similarly, some of the ancient empires--such as Rome and China--flourished because their institutions (such as Roman law and Confucian bureaucracy) attracted immigrants from other societies that were disordered and oppressive.

Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.

Wade captures this same idea when he speaks of the historical move from "extractive" institutions that provoke people to leave to "inclusive" institutions that attract immigrants looking for a better life.

There are genetic propensities at work here.  The natural propensity to "better one's condition" (as Adam Smith called it) motivates people to migrate to societies that offer opportunities for improvement.  And "the universal instinct to conform to social rules" (in Wade's words) ensures that the immigrants will assimilate into their new societies.  This latter corresponds to what Boyd and Richerson identify as the genetically evolved disposition for social learning by conforming one's behavior to the social norms of the majority in the population, which explains why the children of immigrants can pick up the norms of their surrounding culture.  In this way, the process of cultural group selection through migration and assimilation is part of a gene-culture coevolution.

And thus one can explain the power of classical liberal ideas and institutions as cultural traditions that appeal to natural human desires and thus tend to win the competition with illiberal regimes.

Some of these points have come up in previous posts here, here, and here.

Gillian Brown and Peter Richerson have written an excellent paper comparing "cultural evolution," "human behavioral ecology," and "evolutionary psychology" as three schools of evolutionary social science.