Are Warlords and Their Top Warriors Responsible for Our `Smart’ Genes?

I might be adding 1 to 1 and getting 5, but…

In recent years, I’ve been reading a bit about human ancestry, especially that of those peoples with languages and cultures and at least some substantial amount of genes which came from some (proto-)Indo-European people. These peoples include Europeans, Iranians, northern Asiatic Indians, and some others. In December of 2015, I wrote three essays on the general issues:

The first of those essays includes a bibliography which provides a list of most of the relevant books I had read to that time, all recommended by some respectable scholar and all containing a good body of knowledge as well as a sophisticated understanding of the issues; those books include some `mainstream’ history works which written by historians who had considered this new archaeological and genetic knowledge. The books and writings on that list disagree on some issues, though some of the disagreements have been settled by more recent work. A lot of leads and links to various books on genetics and history—or both—and religion, as well as some commentary by a highly-regarded geneticist and commentator, Razib Khan, can be found at Gene Expression Blog.

In addition, there are some study results published in the past two years or so which bring the interested student of human being pretty much up to date on European descendants of those Indo-European peoples (there is also significant ancestry of European peoples from Anatolian first farmers and those already resident in Europe as of 10,000BC or so):

It seems pretty plausible to me that this all supports the possibility that those who led long-distance military raids or outright conquests and those who managed the logistics of a large migration of families and their goods and animals probably had high levels of intelligence of the sort allowing for political and military organizing and for tactical and strategic thinking. Some of those family or tribal leaders might have been brutish in some ways but all of them would have had to take care of the needs of their warriors or more diverse followers. Some might have had specifically technical intelligence so that they understood the metal technology behind their weapons, tools, wagon, gear for horses, etc. Some maybe were just good at selecting good blacksmiths, leather-workers, horse-breeders, and so forth. (Analogously, some have claimed that Genghis Khan was competent as a military leader but a genius as a political leader who picked out and nurtured great generals.)

Politics. Military matters. Organizing human communities and inspiring them to follow.

I’m not at all discounting the increase in intelligence as blacksmiths and other technicians became important and gained greater reproductive advantages, but they were probably selected in a social environment for which the war-lords and their greatest warriors were disproportionately responsible. In other words, as a speculation by an outsider knowing just enough to be dangerous, I’m suggesting that it was the warlords and great warriors who were the driving force behind the increase in human IQ, at least once the process first began; this speculation includes the idea that those warlords and warriors were the best customers of many of the blacksmiths and other technologists. The evidence indicates that the leaders of those military or migratory events gained reproductive advantages both by way of killing resident males and taking the girls and women and also by way of setting up their descendants in positions of power and wealth.

Interesting ideas to a Christian who believes in the Body of Christ, the idea that the friends of Christ are destined for an everlasting life of peace and fullness of our human nature. Why do we travel through a world where violence and disease and natural disasters are so common? The prophet Jeremiah asked such questions of God and records no revealed knowledge; he and many others have had to travel on, wondering and often mourning, but always struggling to keep the faith and to work towards God’s Kingdom. We’re farther along on in the journey and have great empirical knowledge of our past but still no convincing way of explaining why God makes us travel through such a wonderful but often distressing world to get to an everlasting life of peace and fulfillment of our legitimate desires.

To pile on a little, we have to remember that the book of Genesis tells us that it was the first murderer who founded civilization and technology. Maybe those ancient authors knew a lot more than we often think, even if they lived before the days of archaeology and genetics.

Food for thought, at least for those of us who wish to deal honestly with the Creator and His Creation, accepting what He actually did and working to build the Body of Christ in full recognition of the tough facts rather than just trying to jump toward some utopian state in this mortal realm.