Very good piece - thanks for sharing it.
Murry lays out well how, again and again, the Left is anti-science, a role they like to ascribe to our side.
But I was struck by this “[the book discusses} circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th.”
That is interesting, but what is meant by “lower class”, esp.in that time frame? I mean, wouldn’t that be almost everybody?
I would guess that passage refers to Gregory Clark´s “A farewell to alms”:
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282
And yes, the lower class would indeed be the bulk of the population - hence the relevance. ;)
I think I know what this involves.
Extensive analysis of birth rates over 1000 years of English history have shown that the nobility, gentry and merchants had a significantly higher surviving number of children than the serfs/peasants/artisans.
In the economy of the times, not all could maintain their parent's status. So the younger sons all took a step down.
Noble younger sons became gentry. Gentry younger sons became farmers. Merchant younger sons became artisans, etc.
Over many generations this resulted in the lower classes gradually being changed genetically to be closer to the upper classes, and this is sometimes used to explain the gradual emergence of England as a world power.
Sorry I don't have more detail on the thesis, but I think that's the gist of it.
Apparently this didn't apply to the same extent on the Continent, I'm unsure why.
That struck me too. What is he talking about?
For example, there's a movement now to reconstruct how English was actually pronounced in Shakespeare's time, and they're actually putting on plays in what they call "original pronunciation."
It sounds like the way movie pirates talk -- "war" for example is "waaahr", like the pirates' "aaarrrr!" One of the ways to try to reconstruct the pronunciation is to take old poems, like Shakespeare's sonnets, and assume that the words really do rhyme, where they don't rhyme in today's language. (I noticed the lack of rhymes when I was a kid, and wondered why. Apparently it's due to pronunciation changes.)
Anyway, the original pronunciation experts say the modern upper class British pronunciation only dates from the last 200 or 250 years. In Shakespeare's time there was no "upper class" pronunciation.
But if that's true, it would seem that "lower-class" eveolutionary genetic distinctions, if any, could hardly go back much more than say 250 years.