Unfortunately, the cocktail of traits that made Western civilization doesn't seem to constitute an evolutionarily stable strategy.
That cocktail created prosperity, which, coupled with empathy and egalitarianism, led to the welfare state, which in turn is dysgenic for almost all civilization-making traits.
Not only that, the Western man decided to extend the welfare state to the whole world, subsidizing the proliferation of masses that will not be able to sustain modern civilization or themselves once the global welfare state is gone. And in the final phase of suicidal empathy, he decided to import a sizable share of those Third World masses into his own home, turbocharging the decline.
1) Not sure why you identify the start in western England in 7th century. That area was a real economic backwater.
2) In the table, I notice that the IQ increase does not appear to start until the 16th century. This meshes well with when southeast England started commercializing. As you note, the tiny sample size is a problem, but there appears to be no clear trend before that time.
3) I think the city/states of Northern Italy is a more likely start for the trend as they were the first Commercial society after the Roman Empire.
4) You seem to be making two competing claims that contradict each other: the increase in IQ started long before the Roman Empire (which you go into more detail in the article below) and the increase started with rise of commercial cities in the early modern period. I am much more persuaded by the latter.
1. You may be misreading the text. I associate the start of the rise in mean IQ with the late medieval period, possibly beginning in England and Holland c. 1300 and then spreading to the rest of Western Europe.
2. I would say around the 1300s, but that's just my eyeballing of the data. We definitely need more data.
3. That's my impression from the historical data. There seem to be several zones within Western Europe that have unusually high mean IQ. Northern Italy is one of them. Another is Brittany. They seem to be associated with cottage industries, i.e., ma and pa operations that were incentivized to have larger families (and hence more workers for the family business).
2. Those two claims don't contradict each other. There seems to have been a long rise in mean IQ after the introduction of farming. This rise ended not long before the time of Christ, possibly due to the uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success. There was then a decline in mean IQ that ended around the time Christianity became the state religion. The Christian era was generally a time of steadily rising mean IQ.
I've discussed this earlier rise and fall in earlier posts:
Well written. I would add that there was a institutional substrate that enabled and in some ways just outright generated the “cognitive advance” you describe. In England and across northwestern Europe, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and innovation wasn’t simply a matter of genes meeting markets; it was enabled and accelerated by lower-case “d” democratic governance structures. From guilds, parishes, and town meetings to local courts, mutual societies, and later civic associations, there existed dense, federated networks where ordinary people continuously deliberated, debated, and organized collective projects. These bodies diffused authority, distributed capital, and embedded knowledge in everyday civic practice. That’s why coffeehouses and debating clubs mattered, they were the outgrowth of a centuries-old culture of local participation. Where Rome concentrated power in imperial bureaucracies and kinship patronage, some parts of medieval and early modern Europe diffused it, creating the very redundancy and pluralism that allowed new ideas, new skills, and new forms of cooperation to scale. In other words, the “smart fraction” did not simply emerge in isolation; it was given continuous institutional traction by civic-democratic machinery that amplified its effects across society whileat the same time lierally growing it
Yes, the smart fraction arose within a more open society, where people could more easily create networks that went far beyond those of kinship.
Rome's elites were fearful of associations, seeing them as dangerous to public order. This was true not only for political collegia (which were banned by Julius Caesar) but also for religious associations.
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution. They resemble Europeans in some respects and differ in others:
- similar rise in mean cognitive ability, which then stalled after the Tang era with an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success among elite individuals.
- high level of cognitive empathy (i.e., strong ability to understand how one's actions impact other people), but low level of affective empathy (i.e., weak ability to experience emotionally how one's actions impact other people). Affective empathy ("ren") has to be learned. This is why Confucianism places so much emphasis on the acquisition of "ren."
- rule following is experienced as a social obligation; relatively low level of guilt proneness; "shame culture" rather than "guilt culture"; guilt is generally not experienced if no one else witnesses the rule breaking.
References
Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 10(3), 214-234. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012
Affective empathy has a high heritability according to a study of German participants: 52-57%. It's cognitive empathy that is mostly learned: 27%.
Melchers, M., Montag, C., Reuter, M., Spinath, F. M., & Hahn, E. (2016). How heritable is empathy? Differential effects of measurement and subcomponents. Motivation and Emotion, 40(5), 720-730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9573-7
Atkins (2014) found that affective empathy is more hardwired in British participants than in East Asian participants.
Atkins, D. (2014). The Role of Culture in Empathy: The Consequences and Explanations of Cultural Differences in Empathy at the Affective and Cognitive Levels. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent.
No more ironic than it is for other people with high levels of affective empathy.
In northwest Europeans, the level of affective empathy has been greatly increased in relationships beyond the one between mother and child (which seems to be where it originally evolved). In this behavioral system, the "Other" is defined much more in moral terms. The "Other" is considered morally worthless, and not simply different, and it is this moralized perception that inhibits feelings of empathy.
Yes, you are misunderstanding it: he is talking of means: statistical reality. And (in good MBTI terms) they are biased toward T compared to the West (which is no monolith either in itself).
No, not really. Cognitive empathy is much less hardwired.
As for affective empathy, keep in mind that a heritability of 52-57% doesn't mean that the remaining 43-48% is learned. That non-heritable portion includes accidents during fetal and neonatal development.
the subsequent and perhaps not so great cognitive retreat that has occurred since then is salient and disturbing to those of us whom would likely be average or above average individuals in times of great cognitive affluence..
To what degree could significant genetic stratification have been possible in imperial era Rome (central Italy)? I notice in the chart above that there appear to be some upper outliers in intelligence polygenic scores in the imperial sample, if I am reading it correctly. I could imagine a civilization still functional under such a model, sort of like Brazil, but comparatively even better because the cognitively demanding tasks are less (fewer and less beneficial per capita?) and the manual labor needed more than in the modern era.
Also, this was probably addressed before, but why does literature, art, and infrastructure seem to decline in late antiquity even with respect to the imperial era? I know quantity can be its own quality, but it seems a bit extreme given how foundational intelligence is to those pursuits.
Society was much more stratified during the Roman Imperial Era than in subsequent periods. Upper-class youths could do as they please with lower-class men and women. Beat them up. Rape them. Whatever. The courts always sided with the upper-class defendant, if the case even went to court. There wasn't even a pretence of fair play. People simply didn't believe that everyone was spiritually and legally equal.
You're right about the cognitively demanding tasks being fewer than today (or even than in the Middle Ages). There was little technological or scientific progress.
Mean IQ seems to have bottomed out in the 4th century. At that point, cognitive evolution began to point upward, but time was needed to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, the Empire was running out of time. It was like the Titanic heading toward the iceberg. You can reverse the direction of cognitive evolution, but it takes time to experience the benefits of that reversal.
There was also the excessive pacification of the Roman population. The average Roman was unsuited for army life. Recruits had to be found in the unpacified populations beyond the Empire's borders.
You mention social stratification, but I was thinking that perhaps this reflected real genetic stratification with respect to intelligence, not just the apathetic disposition of Roman society as a whole. Perhaps most of the population followed a normal bell curve, but with a heavier right tail. Building on this idea, maybe central Italy shifted from resembling a modern European country to something more like South Africa, where the distribution is bimodal. I guess that this is me being lazy, because the data is probably somewhere to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I also believe that other psychological traits, such as lower aggression, played a role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I suspect that other psychological traits, and perhaps even differences in IQ subscores, could explain one of the paradoxes of Roman civilization: that they were smart but not really innovative. It would be interesting to study not just what led to general high intelligence or pacification, but also how other or more specific psychological traits arose. After all, Roman civilization (high intelligence, comparatively low innovation), produced impressive yet ultimately ephemeral material advantages, whereas Greek civilization (high innovation), laid the foundation of science, the true engine of civilization (and perhaps, admittedly, also the engine of its eventual undoing).
In Rome, social stratification initially led to genetic stratification. During the Imperial Era, however, it became common for upper-class men to adopt the children of their mistresses (who were often fathered through previous relationships). I discuss this point in:
The State monopoly on violence is a recurring feature of human societies. Rome, like many other states of the ancient world, was founded by violent men, but once in power they selected strongly for submissiveness and pacifism in their subjects. As a result, male violence was selected out of the gene pool. See:
Unfortunately, the cocktail of traits that made Western civilization doesn't seem to constitute an evolutionarily stable strategy.
That cocktail created prosperity, which, coupled with empathy and egalitarianism, led to the welfare state, which in turn is dysgenic for almost all civilization-making traits.
Not only that, the Western man decided to extend the welfare state to the whole world, subsidizing the proliferation of masses that will not be able to sustain modern civilization or themselves once the global welfare state is gone. And in the final phase of suicidal empathy, he decided to import a sizable share of those Third World masses into his own home, turbocharging the decline.
Nothing is stable in evolution. It's not a purposeful process with a plan and an end goal.
But we humans have the ability to understand where we're going and act accordingly.
The importing of great masses of low-IQ people was not decided by "Western man": really not at all.
Interesting article. A few small points.
1) Not sure why you identify the start in western England in 7th century. That area was a real economic backwater.
2) In the table, I notice that the IQ increase does not appear to start until the 16th century. This meshes well with when southeast England started commercializing. As you note, the tiny sample size is a problem, but there appears to be no clear trend before that time.
3) I think the city/states of Northern Italy is a more likely start for the trend as they were the first Commercial society after the Roman Empire.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-medieval-northern-italy-transformed
4) You seem to be making two competing claims that contradict each other: the increase in IQ started long before the Roman Empire (which you go into more detail in the article below) and the increase started with rise of commercial cities in the early modern period. I am much more persuaded by the latter.
https://www.anthro1.net/p/when-did-northwest-europeans-become
1. You may be misreading the text. I associate the start of the rise in mean IQ with the late medieval period, possibly beginning in England and Holland c. 1300 and then spreading to the rest of Western Europe.
2. I would say around the 1300s, but that's just my eyeballing of the data. We definitely need more data.
3. That's my impression from the historical data. There seem to be several zones within Western Europe that have unusually high mean IQ. Northern Italy is one of them. Another is Brittany. They seem to be associated with cottage industries, i.e., ma and pa operations that were incentivized to have larger families (and hence more workers for the family business).
2. Those two claims don't contradict each other. There seems to have been a long rise in mean IQ after the introduction of farming. This rise ended not long before the time of Christ, possibly due to the uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success. There was then a decline in mean IQ that ended around the time Christianity became the state religion. The Christian era was generally a time of steadily rising mean IQ.
I've discussed this earlier rise and fall in earlier posts:
https://www.anthro1.net/p/adapting-to-an-environment-of-their
https://www.anthro1.net/p/how-christianity-rebooted-cognitive
https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
Well written. I would add that there was a institutional substrate that enabled and in some ways just outright generated the “cognitive advance” you describe. In England and across northwestern Europe, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and innovation wasn’t simply a matter of genes meeting markets; it was enabled and accelerated by lower-case “d” democratic governance structures. From guilds, parishes, and town meetings to local courts, mutual societies, and later civic associations, there existed dense, federated networks where ordinary people continuously deliberated, debated, and organized collective projects. These bodies diffused authority, distributed capital, and embedded knowledge in everyday civic practice. That’s why coffeehouses and debating clubs mattered, they were the outgrowth of a centuries-old culture of local participation. Where Rome concentrated power in imperial bureaucracies and kinship patronage, some parts of medieval and early modern Europe diffused it, creating the very redundancy and pluralism that allowed new ideas, new skills, and new forms of cooperation to scale. In other words, the “smart fraction” did not simply emerge in isolation; it was given continuous institutional traction by civic-democratic machinery that amplified its effects across society whileat the same time lierally growing it
Yes, the smart fraction arose within a more open society, where people could more easily create networks that went far beyond those of kinship.
Rome's elites were fearful of associations, seeing them as dangerous to public order. This was true not only for political collegia (which were banned by Julius Caesar) but also for religious associations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associations_in_ancient_Rome
Slowly piecing more and more new findings to our cognitive history. Love to see it!
But East Asian countries seem to be doing alright in the market economy, even better than the WEIRD countries now. How is that explained?
East Asians have followed a parallel evolution. They resemble Europeans in some respects and differ in others:
- similar rise in mean cognitive ability, which then stalled after the Tang era with an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success among elite individuals.
- high level of cognitive empathy (i.e., strong ability to understand how one's actions impact other people), but low level of affective empathy (i.e., weak ability to experience emotionally how one's actions impact other people). Affective empathy ("ren") has to be learned. This is why Confucianism places so much emphasis on the acquisition of "ren."
- rule following is experienced as a social obligation; relatively low level of guilt proneness; "shame culture" rather than "guilt culture"; guilt is generally not experienced if no one else witnesses the rule breaking.
References
Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 10(3), 214-234. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012
Frost, P. (2025). Cognitive evolution in eastern Eurasia, Peter Frost's Newsletter, March 25, https://www.anthro1.net/p/cognitive-evolution-in-eastern-eurasia
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your post, but affective empathy is largely learned for White people too.
Affective empathy has a high heritability according to a study of German participants: 52-57%. It's cognitive empathy that is mostly learned: 27%.
Melchers, M., Montag, C., Reuter, M., Spinath, F. M., & Hahn, E. (2016). How heritable is empathy? Differential effects of measurement and subcomponents. Motivation and Emotion, 40(5), 720-730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9573-7
Atkins (2014) found that affective empathy is more hardwired in British participants than in East Asian participants.
Atkins, D. (2014). The Role of Culture in Empathy: The Consequences and Explanations of Cultural Differences in Empathy at the Affective and Cognitive Levels. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent.
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47970/
I reviewed this literature at: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2020/03/affective-empathy-double-edged-sword.html
Ironic to study empathy in Germans though lol
No more ironic than it is for other people with high levels of affective empathy.
In northwest Europeans, the level of affective empathy has been greatly increased in relationships beyond the one between mother and child (which seems to be where it originally evolved). In this behavioral system, the "Other" is defined much more in moral terms. The "Other" is considered morally worthless, and not simply different, and it is this moralized perception that inhibits feelings of empathy.
Yes, you are misunderstanding it: he is talking of means: statistical reality. And (in good MBTI terms) they are biased toward T compared to the West (which is no monolith either in itself).
Affective “empathy” is as teachable and learnable as cognitive “empathy” and cognitive ability, lol.
No, not really. Cognitive empathy is much less hardwired.
As for affective empathy, keep in mind that a heritability of 52-57% doesn't mean that the remaining 43-48% is learned. That non-heritable portion includes accidents during fetal and neonatal development.
the subsequent and perhaps not so great cognitive retreat that has occurred since then is salient and disturbing to those of us whom would likely be average or above average individuals in times of great cognitive affluence..
Thanks for an interesting and informative article.
To what degree could significant genetic stratification have been possible in imperial era Rome (central Italy)? I notice in the chart above that there appear to be some upper outliers in intelligence polygenic scores in the imperial sample, if I am reading it correctly. I could imagine a civilization still functional under such a model, sort of like Brazil, but comparatively even better because the cognitively demanding tasks are less (fewer and less beneficial per capita?) and the manual labor needed more than in the modern era.
Also, this was probably addressed before, but why does literature, art, and infrastructure seem to decline in late antiquity even with respect to the imperial era? I know quantity can be its own quality, but it seems a bit extreme given how foundational intelligence is to those pursuits.
Society was much more stratified during the Roman Imperial Era than in subsequent periods. Upper-class youths could do as they please with lower-class men and women. Beat them up. Rape them. Whatever. The courts always sided with the upper-class defendant, if the case even went to court. There wasn't even a pretence of fair play. People simply didn't believe that everyone was spiritually and legally equal.
You're right about the cognitively demanding tasks being fewer than today (or even than in the Middle Ages). There was little technological or scientific progress.
Mean IQ seems to have bottomed out in the 4th century. At that point, cognitive evolution began to point upward, but time was needed to reap the benefits. Unfortunately, the Empire was running out of time. It was like the Titanic heading toward the iceberg. You can reverse the direction of cognitive evolution, but it takes time to experience the benefits of that reversal.
There was also the excessive pacification of the Roman population. The average Roman was unsuited for army life. Recruits had to be found in the unpacified populations beyond the Empire's borders.
You mention social stratification, but I was thinking that perhaps this reflected real genetic stratification with respect to intelligence, not just the apathetic disposition of Roman society as a whole. Perhaps most of the population followed a normal bell curve, but with a heavier right tail. Building on this idea, maybe central Italy shifted from resembling a modern European country to something more like South Africa, where the distribution is bimodal. I guess that this is me being lazy, because the data is probably somewhere to prove or disprove this hypothesis.
I also believe that other psychological traits, such as lower aggression, played a role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I suspect that other psychological traits, and perhaps even differences in IQ subscores, could explain one of the paradoxes of Roman civilization: that they were smart but not really innovative. It would be interesting to study not just what led to general high intelligence or pacification, but also how other or more specific psychological traits arose. After all, Roman civilization (high intelligence, comparatively low innovation), produced impressive yet ultimately ephemeral material advantages, whereas Greek civilization (high innovation), laid the foundation of science, the true engine of civilization (and perhaps, admittedly, also the engine of its eventual undoing).
In Rome, social stratification initially led to genetic stratification. During the Imperial Era, however, it became common for upper-class men to adopt the children of their mistresses (who were often fathered through previous relationships). I discuss this point in:
https://www.anthro1.net/p/was-the-roman-empire-eugenic
The State monopoly on violence is a recurring feature of human societies. Rome, like many other states of the ancient world, was founded by violent men, but once in power they selected strongly for submissiveness and pacifism in their subjects. As a result, male violence was selected out of the gene pool. See:
Frost, P. (2010). The Roman State and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology, 8(3), 376-389. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491000800306