'Empathising and Systematising' - a short story by Adam Carlton

Antoinette and myself at my agent's office

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She walked across while I was waiting to see my agent.

Antoinette: I remembered just in time. One of the readers of the slush pile. Bottom of the food chain in the business.

But Antoinette stood out, I thought: she had sparkle.

"Hi Adam," she said, showing me a printout, "I came across this and I'm puzzled. My first thought was, well, it's not for us; but something about it - the argument - it piqued a bit of interest..."

She gave me a charming smile, with only the slightest flicker of irony, and handed me the document.

"I thought of you."

Like I said, smart girl.

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The Evolution of Elite Cognition: Systematizers vs. Empaths in the March of Civilization

By Dr Henry Lutending

Human society was once small, tribal, and violently xenophobic. Hunter-gatherers operated in tight-knit bands well below the Dunbar limit, where social trust was personal, reciprocity was direct, and there was little requirement for abstract reasoning or large-scale cooperation. The only selection pressures at play were for basic survival skills—strength, cunning, a capacity for immediate social bonding, and a deep suspicion of outsiders, who, given resource limitations, were almost certain to be hostile.

Then came agriculture, surplus, cities, and suddenly, a new game. Societies grew beyond the size where direct reciprocity was possible. Elites—those who could manage complex societies—emerged. And to do that, they needed two things: (1) systematizing intelligence, to plan taxes and economies, develop legal codes, and run administrative structures; and (2) high-level prosociality, to negotiate, defuse conflict, and create the ideological glue that held populations together. In short, enhanced intelligence and empathy became adaptive in a way they simply hadn’t been before.

Selection responded accordingly. Over the last ten thousand years, elite classes across civilizations—from the Middle-East to China—developed traits that were alien to their peasant underclasses. Elites had to think long-term, manage abstract systems, and suppress impulsivity in favor of diplomacy and reputation-building. These traits, culturally vital, were biologically selected. The best networkers and system-builders left the most descendants, shaping gene frequencies over time. (Peasants also adapted away from their hunter-gatherer forebears, to a life of sedentary drudgery and endemic disease - a different set of adaptations).

Selection was fast, messy, and polygenic. Just as rapid selection for intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews produced both extraordinary cognitive abilities and a cluster of neurological disorders [1], so too did the selection for high-trust, high-intelligence elites produce its own variety of pathological byproducts—over-systematization, over-empathizing, and the various maladaptations we now call autism, anxiety disorders, and elite neurosis.

Fast forward to today, and we see the consequences all around us. The class structure of modern Western societies forms a cognitive and temperamental cline.

At one extreme, the criminal underclass: impulsive, aggressive, low-future-orientation, thriving on immediate dominance rather than delayed reciprocity.

At the other extreme, the hyper-refined elites: measured, strategic, highly networked, masters of abstract thought but often physically timid, conflict-averse, and tempted toward comforting illusions at the expense of harsh realities they are often insulated from.

Within those elites there has always been a schism: between the systematizers, who think in hierarchies, structures, and long-range planning; and the hyper-empaths, who seek to create moral consensus, enforce ideological norms, and suppress overt aggression in favor of soft power.

This schism is the backbone of our present culture wars. The progressive elites—the hyper-empaths—dominate institutions that rely on moral framing: academia, media, HR bureaucracies. They create narratives, enforce taboos, and attempt to neutralize dissent through social pressure rather than direct confrontation - repressive tolerance, in Marcuse's words [2]. 

Their failure mode? Paralysis in the face of real conflict, an inability to handle reality when brute force is required, and the consequential destruction of high-trust norms when predatory actors exploit them. As the phrase goes: when the bullets start flying, the liberals leave the room, in tears, wringing their hands.

Meanwhile, the systematizing elites—the pragmatic, hierarchical, and meritocratic—lean toward finance, tech, the military, and entrepreneurial domains. Their failure mode? Brutal, zero-sum thinking, a tendency to ignore social legitimacy, and, in the extreme, a return to old-fashioned coercion when persuasion fails.

Every current civilization oscillates between these poles. When the systematizers dominate too completely, society hardens, becomes rigid, loses social legitimacy, and collapses under its own brutal hierarchies. When the hyper-empaths dominate, society feminizes, unmoors itself from reality, loses its ability to defend itself, and becomes prey to external or internal predators.

The pendulum swings. And right now, after decades of progressive dominance, it’s swinging back. The liberal consensus, built on high-trust norms and an almost pathological aversion to direct power, is fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions. The coming era will be more masculine, more systematizing, and, inevitably, more coercive.

AI adds a new factor to the mix.

If elite cognition has been honed by centuries of intense selection for specific traits—systematizing, empathizing, problem-solving, and navigating complex social structures—what happens when you begin to outsource those very traits to machines? Artificial intelligence, for example, could decouple cognitive labor from biology entirely, allowing for a kind of disembodied, almost immortal competence that doesn't have the same evolutionary pressures we do. The very nature of "elite" ability could shift radically, and potentially in a direction that doesn’t favor the long-standing human social fabric.

This has been explored in a fictional setting by the author S. M. Stirling in his sequence [3], The Domination of the Draka. The books explore an alternate history where the Draka, a brutal and highly militarized society, dominate much of the world.

Draka society is not simply a dystopia in the sense of a broken system, but rather an alternative hyper-competent, brutal, and authoritarian regime that has achieved a form of success. The Draka operate on the mastery of domination through genetic servitude to create an order that is efficient, stable, and terrifying.

It's not the only future we can envisage. Once technology has improved on mere human labour, it may occur to elites to simply let the working classes fade away to extinction. With the total fertility rates we see in modern economies, that's probably the default option, anyway.

The abilities of elite populations to genetically optimise their own systematizing and empathizing traits has never been greater. Paradoxically as genome engineering makes that imminent prospect enticing, the arrival of superhuman embodied AI may render it unnecessary. 

The elites will transition to something new, to be sure: it may even be their own extinction.

References

[1] "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion". Cochran and Harpending, 2009.

[2] "Repressive Tolerance". Herbert Marcuse, 1965.

[3] "The Domination". S. M. Stirling, 1988-96.

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I looked back at Antoinette in disbelief.

“Where to begin? References to genetics in social science, fascistic regimes cited without obligatory moral condemnation?

"Does this guy even have a job?”

Antoinette shrugged, her tight, translucent blouse shimmering in the sun, “There's no affiliation on his manuscript - maybe he's an independent researcher. So what do you think? The circular file?"

I thought about it. Normally yes, of course. But perhaps the times were changing; perhaps a smart agent could get ahead of the curve...

"I think you should go for it, it's kind of interesting, after all. But to be on the safe side, make sure you frame it as satirical fiction...”

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Our ancestors were not like us

At some level this is obvious; we're so much more squeamish. No more public executions, mass-spectacle bear-baiting or routine Game of Thrones-style interpersonal violence.

At least not in the enlightened west.

Greg Clark's "Genetically Capitalist?", which I cited in passing in an earlier post, has something to say about all this:

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"In the Malthusian era on average every woman could have only two surviving offspring. But these two had to be selected by some mechanism from the average of 5 children each woman had in the pre-industrial era.

"And as long as mothers and fathers varied in their characteristics this survival process favored some types of individuals over others. The Darwinian struggle that has shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution, but continued indeed right up to 1800. " (p. 16).

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" Genetically modern English males are 50-100% Anglo-Saxon, despite the fact that Anglo-Saxon migrants to England in the fifth century AD are now believed to have constituted no more than 0.5% to 10% of the population.

"Thus economic orientation had a dynamic of its own in the static Malthusian economy. Middle class values, and economic orientation, were most likely being spread through reproductive advantage across all sections of stable agrarian societies. " (p. 35).

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"What were societies like at the dawn of the settled agrarian era with the Neolithic Revolution of c. 8,000 BC?

"Based on observation of modern forager and shifting cultivation societies we expect that the early agriculturalists were impulsive, violent, innumerate, illiterate, and lazy. Ethnographies of such groups emphasize high rates of time preference, high levels of interpersonal violence, and low work inputs.

"Abstract reasoning abilities were limited. " (p. 53).

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Before agriculture and pastoralism, all of hunter-gatherer humanity was like this; it was civilisation that made us genetically-modern (see, for example, the last paragraph here).

The late Henry Harpending summarised and extended Clark's ideas in this instructive post which extended the analysis to the collapse of the Roman Empire and some contemporary events.

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It's an interesting idea of Peter Frost's (the Roman Empire link above) that by the fifth century the Pax Romana had altered the genetic distribution of its citizens making them over-welcoming to the Barbarians, militarily incompetent, and .. Christian.

The paper doesn't do the selection-rate maths. It's interesting to consider whether we can get enough data - I have in mind an exercise something like the (in)famous 'Amish Quotient'.

What we really need is whole-genome sequencing of representative samples of Roman Citizens and contemporary Barbarians.

That, plus a decoding map identifying those prosocial alleles underpinning 'human domestication'.

It will come.

Our elites were selected for .. what?

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending's seminal 2006 paper, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (PDF) is a gift which keeps on giving.

It outlines their case that "the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness pay-off to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability."

The Ashkenazim were not the only people doing highly g-loaded work during the 800 years from 800-1600 AD; why were similar pressures not pushing up the IQ of Caucasian elites?

On page 14  we see this:

“It is likely that the selective pressures affecting the medieval Ashkenazi were far stronger [...] because such a high percentage had cognitively demanding jobs, and because the Ashkenazi niche was so specifically demanding of accounting and management skills, while upper classes elsewhere experienced a more diverse set of paths to wealth.

“Societies reward different behavioural traits. In some times and places successful warriors and soldiers have had high status, in others merchants, in still others bureaucrats as in ancient China. There were societies in pre-modern Europe in which merchants and businessmen ranked near the top, but this was atypical.

“To the extent that status and wealth were inherited rather than earned, the correlation between cognitive traits and reproductive success in elite groups may have been quite weak. In almost every case elite groups experienced substantial gene flow with other, much larger groups that were not subject to the same selective pressures. This means that the selective pressures experienced by such groups were diluted, spread out into the general population.

“Christian merchants in London or Rotterdam may have experienced selective pressures similar to those of the Ashkenazi Jews, but they intermarried: there was extensive gene flow with the general population, the majority of whom were farmers. The selection pressures experienced by farmers were probably quite different: most likely cognitive skills did not have as high a correlation with income among farmers that they did among individuals whose occupations required extensive symbol manipulation, such as moneylenders, tax farmers, and estate managers.”

What was almost certainly selected for amongst the elites was prosociality (usually conceptualised as Agreeable+ and Conscientious+). The Empathy Quotient seems to be the nearest we have to an instrument measuring this.

Prosociality allows the elite to cohere, to negotiate disagreements in a reasonably harmonious way and to conduct long-term and elaborate cooperative ventures; essential to running complex economies and disparate empires. It also seems evident that there's a prosociality gradient running down the class structure of complex societies - it would be good to see some statistics.

Prosociality generates a specific self-ideology when its tenets are normatively extrapolated to everyone under all circumstances. In this malign form, it surfaces as political correctness - "I can tolerate anything except intolerance".

Maddening though it is, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Mr Trump, I might be talking about you.

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See also my post about elves (!) for more about political correctness and moralising.

The Inquisition and Galileo (redux)

Professor Jonathan Anomaly (from Duke University) writes: (h/t Razib Khan)

"In the first half of the twentieth century, many public intellectuals made odious claims about the moral or intellectual superiority of men over women and of some races over others. Those claims—which were often couched in pseudo-scientific jargon—helped justify colonialism, discriminatory laws, and even the Holocaust (though the primary group targeted in the Holocaust, Ashkenazi Jews, were killed because of their “domination” of the sciences, medicine, and business, not because of their intellectual inferiority).

"As the twentieth century made clear, beliefs have consequences. So after the Second World War, many academics had an understandable fear of allowing themselves (or others) to believe that different groups have different average abilities or aptitudes.

"Although the fear is easy to explain, and in some cases justifiable, it has led to a widely shared and religiously held dogma in academic circles: that people are, in all relevant ways, biologically identical. Those who deny this dogma should be “educated” about their implicit biases, and made to recant their views, regardless of the evidence.

"After reading some recent work on the biology of group differences last summer, it occurred to me that as an ethics professor, I should write something about the moral upshot: if there are such differences, what are the consequences for how we should treat one another? Should we support policies that attempt to equalize opportunities only if they produce equal outcomes?

"My conclusion was modest: if there are biological differences between groups, and if, as Lee Jussim has argued, some stereotypes turn out to be accurate in part because of correct generalizations about biological differences, these facts should not undermine our commitment to treating one another as moral equals, or to increasing opportunity for all, regardless of group membership.

"But I had committed a sin in the eyes of the two referees who read and commented on my paper. I simply acknowledged the possibility of group differences while arguing that whether or not they exist, they should not matter. For having done that, the two journal referees used expletives and exclamation points to give the most venomous and dismissive feedback I have ever encountered. (Needless to say, the paper was not accepted for publication after such hostile comments.) "

Well, one swallow doth not a summer make .. but wait, what's this (from Henry Harpending)?

"Over a year ago Mike Weight (an undergraduate) and I posted a draft of a manuscript about using quantitative genetic theory to evaluate changes over time in traits. We had in mind a technology useful for distinguishing cultural from genetic transmission. Many readers of our blog made helpful comments and, to our shame, found a large number of typos.  I shudder when I reread that old post.  It was written shortly after I had my temporal lobe bleed and the whole part of my brain that was capable of proofreading seems to have been knocked out.

"We thought we should submit it somewhere where social scientists would read it.  We got back, from a succession of three journals, a stunning set of ignorant and irrelevant reviews.  For example the first sentence of the first one we read said “this is really about race and it ought to be made clear”.  Another said “they are trying to push genetics where it has no place”.  The tone of all of them was like this, angry and scornful.  One reviewer told us that our views were outdated and discredited since epigenetics had swept the field!

"We had two and one half mildly sensible reviews, one about technical aspects of quantitative genetic theory and another by a reviewer unhappy with the level of detail and statistical aspects of the treatment of Amish test results.  Since we regarded the Amish data as a toy set of data, we made no changes. The other reviewers were all hostile and angry at what we had written, several convinced that the paper must be racist but they didn’t quite understand how or why.  We could only laugh at the collection of reviews because none of them had any idea what they were talking about.  None  made it so far as to read and understand the central point of the paper.  With the exceptions mentioned above, they were pig ignorant and proud of it."

I remember watching the Brecht play, the Life of Galileo:

"The Inquisitor represents the geocentric view of the church authorities: “They (the laity) have been assured that God’s eye is always on them – probingly, even anxiously – that the whole drama of the world is constructed around them so that they, the performers, may prove themselves in their greater or lesser roles. What would my people say if I told them they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star?.. I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. so nobody’s eye is on us, they’ll say.”

"The authorities  are annoyed that Galileo writes his theories of astronomy in the “idiom of fishwives and merchants”.  They believe that if the peasants start talking about the “phases of Venus” they may even start to question the work of God.  They may not see God as responsible for all miracles. Their world view could change. “Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated, and worn out as we are? Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it’s merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it’s just bending and carrying”.

"Ludovico explains the perspective of the landowners and farmers. They do not want the peasants talking about the change to the universe. They believe that it would disrupt their livelihood and the status quo. ..."

A commentator Dale wrote the following about Harpending and Weight's experience:

"My observation is that a sudden flash of incoherent rage in your interlocutor is a sign that you’ve violated a taboo. The wise person tries to discern exactly what the taboo is.

"You write, “We had in mind a technology useful for distinguishing cultural from genetic transmission.” But of course that violates the anti-racist taboo because it considers possible that there is a cultural trait in humans that is genetically transmitted. And the core principle of anti-racism is to deny anything that has ever been used by racists in their arguments.

"The significance of all this requires analysis that has not yet been done. Of course, the human brain is an organ for survival and reproduction, not for discerning the truth, and in reality, academic disciplines are at best devices for the propagation of the cultures that nurture them, not for the discernment of the truth per se. With physics, discerning the facts helps our culture prosper (and out-compete others) by enlarging practical technologies … but also, our culture has gone through a lot of agonizing adjustments so that its activities aren’t discomfited by inconvenient physical facts. A few hundred years ago, those adjustments hadn’t been made and physics inquiry could threaten the social order.

"The social sciences are worse off. Partly because discovered facts can be used directly to argue for political positions, and those arguments may be directly harmful to our culture’s competitiveness by messing up the agreements, compromises, and distributions of power that make the culture run smoothly. And partly because the practical technology to be obtained from social science fact seems to be fairly limited."

It's been forty years since E. O. Wilson's "Sociobiology" proposed the reconstruction of social science on biological/Darwinian foundations. The social-sciences have since maintained their invincible, fortress-like ignorance .. but that could be about to change.

As Dale perceptively observed, it's technologies that make ideas matter in the real world, create options for societies to advance and remake the social-order.

Genomics and genetic engineering are the technologies that will empower the future Biotech Galileans against the Inquisition.

Let's hope they're more successful.