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From the website posted by Karen –
i.e.: "Valuation of quality, through better nourishment and education for children, fed back into technological progress. And as technology advanced, it fed back into more education. Human capital took off. This leap in evolution came to dominate the population as a whole, and centuries of economic stagnation ended." The authors attribute acceleration in this evolutionary process to the emergence of the nuclear family that fostered intergenerational links. Prior to the agricultural revolution, 10,000 years ago, people lived among hunter-gatherer tribes that tended to share resources more equally. "During this hunter-gatherer period, the absence of direct intergenerational links between parental resources and investment in their offspring delayed the evolutionary advantage of a preference for high-quality children," said the authors. In fact, according to the theory, a switch back to a quantity emphasis began to take place in the 20th century. I have some familiarity with groups that, until very recently, lived as hunter-gatherers, and to some considerable extent still live that way – the Inuit and Dene of the Canadian north. To survive under the conditions that their harsh environment imposed on them required the production of "high-quality children". Children of "low-quality" would not likely have survived. Groups as a whole would not have survived unless the individuals that comprised them were adaptive and intelligent. Intergenerational links within these groups were strong because "elders" had a depth of knowledge (human capital) that was vital to survival. I wouldn’t want to be critical of Galor and Moav until I had read their article, but the website piece suggests that they see people who learned to manipulate and industrialize the environment as being somehow superior to people who learned how to integrate with it and live within its constraints. It suggests that one form of human adaptation is superior to another or, really, that our industrialized mode of behaviour is better because it produces "higher-quality" offspring who are able to make the machine continue to move forward. This raises questions of forward to what and where our "high-quality children" are taking us, but I’ll leave that for the time being. Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax (613) 728 9382
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