Socialdem. 21st Century

Below are my summaries of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009):(1) “The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 1: A Summary,” July 20, 2017.(2) “The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 2: A Summary,” July 21, 2017.(3) “The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 3: A Summary,” July 22, 2017.(4) “The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 4: A Summary,” July 23, 2017.(5) “The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 5: A Summary,” July 24, 2017.(6)...

The conclusion of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) sums up the major hypotheses of the book as follows: (1) genetic change and evolution have been preconditions for cultural change (one clear example being the expansion of hominid brains that led to speech and advanced tool making), even though cultural change is powerful and can be an independent force;(2) genetic evolution and cultural evolution can also...

Chapter 7 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews got their Smarts,” and looks at the evolution of the Ashkenazi minority within Europe over the past 1,500 years.The chapter is based in part on earlier work in Cochran, Hardy and Harpending (2006). The Ashkenazim were a Diaspora Jewish community that was first based in northern France and Germany in the...

Chapter 6 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Expansions,” and examines the genetic effects of large-scale migrations of human beings.History is filled with examples of certain population groups that conquer, migrate into, or spread over large areas and replace other groups, or replace other groups with some mixing.Cochran and Harpending (2009: 156) accept that cultural and technological...

Chapter 5 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Gene flow,” and looks briefly at the evolutionary changes induced by mixing of genetically distinct populations.The chapter begins with the concept of a gene allele “sweep,” or the manner in which a favourable gene variant can spread throughout a population of people where interbreeding is general, but not highly isolated and localised. While most gene...

Chapter 4 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called the “Consequences of Agriculture.”The effects of agriculture accelerated human evolution and selective pressures in the following ways:(1) Infectious disease Farming caused the creation of sedentary settlements, cities and overcrowding, as well as greater contact with animals, and the bacteria, viruses and parasites that animals bear. Therefore disease...

Chapter 3 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called the “Agriculture: The Big Change,” and examines the evolutionary impact of the agricultural revolution and urban life.When human populations were low during the Stone Age, the smaller number of people entailed that new favourable traits from random sexual reproduction and mutations occurred at a low rate: that is to say, low-population Stone Age people...

Chapter 2 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “The Neanderthal Within,” and examines the possibility that early humans outside of Africa interbred with Neanderthals, and how this affected human evolution.Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens outside of Africa encountered one another and competed for resources – and early humans won out in about 10,000 years, perhaps because:(1) our ancestors had...

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is a truly extraordinary book that every person on the Left should read. Critical reviews of the book can be found in Wills (2009), Arden (2009) and Gorelik and Shackelford (2010).In essence, Cochran and Harpending challenge the notion that human evolution stopped around 50,000 years ago. In Chapter 1 of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending (2009: 1) argue...

Although this is an old interview with the Post Keynesian economist Geoff Harcourt from May 2007, it is a fantastic interview, retelling much of the history of Post Keynesian economics:[embedded content][embedded content]Realist LeftRealist Left on Twitter @realistleftRealist Left on RedditRealist Left BlogRealist Left on YouTubeLord Keynes on FacebookSocial Democracy for the 21st Century: A Realist Alternative to the Modern LeftAlt Left on the Internet:Alternative...