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Advances in Anthropology, 2017, 7, 154-174
http://www.scirp.org/journal/aa
ISSN Online: 2163-9361
ISSN Print: 2163-9353
DOI: 10.4236/aa.2017.73011 August 30, 2017
The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture
Coevolution in Northwest Europe
Peter Frost
Department of Anthropology, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada
Abstract
North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social rel
a-
tions have long conformed to the Western European Marriage Pattern, i.e.,
men and women marry relatively late; many people never marry;
children
usually leave the nuclear family to form new households, and households o
f-
ten have non-
kin members. This pattern goes back at least to the thirteenth
century and perhaps to prehistoric times. I argue that this environment
of
weaker kinship caused northwest Europeans to create communities based on
shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship. Community members e
n-
forced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior of other members but
also their own behavior and even their own thoughts.
Initially, this new
mindset did not have a genetic basis. Individuals acquired it within the
bounds of phenotypic plasticity. Over time, however,
a genetic basis would
have developed through the survival and reproduction of individuals wh
o
were better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at mon
i-
toring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-
judging, and
self-punishing. These psychological adaptations—independent social orient
a-
tion, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, guilt proneness—are mo
d-
erately to highly heritable. Although they are complex, they required only
minor evolutionary changes to evolve out of
mechanisms that were already
present but limited to specific behavioral contexts. Affective empathy, for i
n-
stance, is a species-
wide trait but usually confined to relations with close kin,
particularly between a mother and her young children. An evolutionary sc
e-
nario is proposed, and two questions discussed. Are these mental traits too
complex t
o have evolved over a span of 30 to 300 generations? Are they too
altruistic to be sustainable?
Keywords
Empathy, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Guilt, Hajnal Line, Northwest Europe,
Rule Adherence, Western European Marriage Pattern
How to cite this paper:
Frost, P. (2017).
The Hajnal Line and Gene
-Culture Coevo-
lution in Northwest Europe
.
Ad
vances in
Anthropology
, 7,
154-174.
https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2017.73011
Received:
August 1, 2017
Accepted:
August 27, 2017
Published:
August 30, 2017
Copyright © 201
7 by author and
Scientific
Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY
4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access
P. Frost
155
1. Introduction
The Hajnal line runs approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg. To the north
and west, social relations have long shown a certain pattern:
− Men and women marry relatively late;
− Many people never marry;
− Children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households;
− Households often have non-kin members (Hajnal, 1965; ICA, 2013; Laslett,
1977).
This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP). Everyone is single
for at least part of adulthood, many stay single their entire lives, and “a signifi-
cant proportion of households [have] persons not belonging to the immediate
family or even to the kin” (Laslett, 1977: p. 13). In short, the individual is less
fettered by the bonds of kinship even within the household.
The WEMP was once ascribed to the ravages of the Black Death in the four-
teenth century, but this explanation has been refuted by a study of first marriag-
es between 1252 and 1478 in an English community. Even before the Black
Death, the average age at first marriage was 24 for the woman and 32 for the
man (Hallam, 1985: p. 66).
Earlier periods provide less data to work with. Nonetheless, a high rate of ce-
libacy has been shown at two locations in ninth-century France: the estates of
the Abbey of St Germain-des-Prés near Paris, where about 16.3% of all adults
were unmarried, and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where the figure was 11.5%. At
both locations, households were small and nuclear (Hallam, 1985: p. 56). A
ninth-century survey of the Church of St Victor of Marseille shows both men
and women marrying in their mid to late twenties (Seccombe, 1992: p. 94). Fur-
ther back, in the first century, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the
Germanic tribes, “Late comes love to the young men, and their first manhood is
not enfeebled; nor for the girls is there any hot-house forcing; they pass their
youth in the same way as the boys” (Tacitus,
Germania
20, 1970). Julius Caesar
made the same observation:
Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest
commendation among their people: they think that by this the growth is
promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are
strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth
year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts; of which matter there is
no concealment, because they bathe promiscuously in the rivers and [only]
use skins or small cloaks of deer’s hides, a large portion of the body being in
consequence naked. (Caesar,
De Bello Gallico
6:21, 1915)
The WEMP also includes weaker ties between parents and grown children.
This is attested from an early date in English society:
Probably from Anglo-Saxon times—and certainly from the thirteenth cen-
tury—children had no automatic rights in a parent’s property. A child
could be disinherited; there is no “family property”,
nemo est heres viventis
P. Frost
156
(no one is the heir of a living person). Maitland documents this in detail,
showing that from at least the thirteenth century parents could leave their
property to whom they liked—and by gift, sale or will disinherit all their
children if they so wished. (Macfarlane, 2012)
Finally, as far back as the earliest written records in northwest Europe, kinship
ties were weaker and more focused on the individual, as shown by the practice of
tracing ancestry through the male and female lines, with the individual as the
starting point. This “ego-focused” system is in contrast to the much more com-
mon “unilineal” one of forming descent groups that trace ancestry through one
gender, usually the male line.
What is most striking, is that in England, as in much of Europe, this system
of reckoning kin has remained practically unchanged since at least the se-
venth century. [...]
Such a system already predisposes a society towards flexibility, networks
and the concept of the individual as more important than the group. In-
deed, there are no groups, just ego-centred networks of people. Each indi-
vidual’s kin (except brothers or sisters) is different. This is a central under-
pinning of an individualistic way of looking at the world. (Macfarlane,
1992: p. 173-174)
By making the individual more important than the group, a weak kinship en-
vironment is more conducive to letting the market organize social and economic
relations. Markets of one sort or another were present in all areas of early Eng-
lish society.
Recent work on thirteenth century manorial documents has uncovered a
very extensive land market from at least the middle of the thirteenth cen-
tury. There is rapidly accumulating evidence of the buying and selling of
pieces of land by non-kin; the idea that land passed down in the family is
now increasingly regarded as a fiction. (Macfarlane, 1978: p. 259)
[...] It appears probable that in many areas of England in the period before
the Black Death up to half of the adult population were primarily hired la-
borers. It was not parents and children who formed the basic unit of pro-
duction, but parents with or without hired labor. This was only made possi-
ble by the widespread use of money. The work of Kosminsky and Postan
has shown that commutation of labor services for cash was widespread by
the middle of the twelfth century. Cash penetrated almost every relation-
ship; selling, mortgaging and lending are apparent in many of the docu-
ments. Most objects, from labor to rights in all kinds of property, were
marketable and had a price. Production was often for exchange rather than
for use. (Macfarlane, 1978: p. 260)
Although markets initially developed the most in the Middle East, they re-
mained localized in space and time, as marketplaces. They failed to spread into
other areas of society because people preferred the ties of kinship to the more
P. Frost
157
ephemeral ties of commerce. True market economies would arise elsewhere in
the world where cultural conditions were more conducive.
The WEMP thus existed for almost a millennium in northwest Europe and
perhaps longer. It was a cultural environment with challenges as real as those of
the natural environment. People had to adapt to a milieu where kinship ties were
weaker and, consequently, less reliable as a means to organize community life
and ensure proper behavior.
2. Coevolution with the WEMP
Genetic evolution in our species accelerated over a hundred-fold about 10,000
years ago (Cochran & Harpending, 2009; Hawks et al., 2007; Laland, Odling-Smee,
& Myles, 2010). At that time humans were no longer adapting to new natural en-
vironments. They had already spread over most of the earth’s surface, from the
tropics to the Arctic, and were now adapting to new cultural environments as
hunting and gathering gave way to farming—a mode of subsistence that brought
not only new food sources but also population growth, sedentary living, and so-
cial complexity.
One of these new cultural environments was the WEMP. I will argue that hu-
mans adapted to it by developing a more independent social orientation and by
creating communities based on shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship.
Community members enforced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior
of other members but also their own behavior and even their own thoughts.
These “moral communities” were made possible by a certain mindset, essentially
four interrelated mental traits:
Independent social orientation
—independence of the self from others, in-
cluding stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy
and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness.
Universal rule adherence
—capacity to obey universal and absolute moral
rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational
morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only
others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and
expelled from the entire moral community, as opposed to being ostracized by
close kin.
Affective empathy
—capacity to experience the emotional states of other
people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. Help is condi-
tional on the other person being judged morally worthy.
Guilt proneness
—capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule ad-
herence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.
Does this mindset coincide in space and time with the WEMP? This question
can be best answered for the last trait, guilt proneness, which has been studied
from a cross-cultural perspective. In the anthropological literature, “guilt” is
contrasted with “shame,” the latter being the primary means in most cultures to
enforce correct behavior. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict described the differences
P. Frost
158
between guilt cultures and shame cultures:
True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as
true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reac-
tion to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ri-
diculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ri-
diculous. In either case, it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience
or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where
honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer
from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt
may actually be relieved by confessing his sin. (Benedict, 1946: p. 223)
In the sociological literature, these two emotional responses are cited to ex-
plain differences between Protestant and Catholic Europe. Protestants rely much
more on guilt to regulate behavior because their faith is more interiorized and
offers less mediation between the believer and God. Also, unlike Catholics, they
cannot regularly purge their personal burden of guilt through confession. It thus
tends to become pervasive in their lives (Carroll, 1981). For sociologist Max
Weber, Protestant Europeans suffer from an “inner loneliness” and “inner isola-
tion of the individual”:
[…] In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most im-
portant thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path
alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No
one could help him.
[...] this inner isolation of the individual contains, on the one hand, the
reason for the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous
and emotional elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no
use toward salvation and promote sentimental illusions and idolatrous su-
perstitions. Thus it provides a basis for a fundamental antagonism to sen-
suous culture of all kinds. On the other hand, it forms one of the roots of
that disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism which can even
today be identified in the national characters and the institutions of the
peoples with a Puritan past [...]. (Weber, 1930: p. 104-105)
Yet, even before Protestantism, guilt seems to have been a common emotional
response in northwest Europe. The English abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955-1010)
described a kind of shame where the witnesses to a wrongful act are spirits:
He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must
shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the
hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002: p. 80)
This argument often comes up in Anglo-Saxon literature, forming a “peniten-
tial motif”:
The motif runs: it is better to be shamed for one’s sins before one man (the
confessor) in this life than to be shamed before God and before all angels
P. Frost
159
and before all men and before all devils at the Last Judgement. (Godden,
1973)
The motif was apparently of native origin:
One particularly interesting fact that emerges is the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon
character of the motif. Not only did it circulate widely in Old English writ-
ings but the only two Latin works in which I have been able to find it were
written by Anglo-Saxons—Alcuin and Boniface. Moreover an important
element of the motif, the notion of three hosts present at the Last Judge-
ment, is itself characteristic of Anglo-Saxon writers: the usual representa-
tion of the Last Judgement in continental works (as in Alcuin’s letter) has
the angels and all mankind present, and sometimes the devil as prosecutor,
but not the whole host of devils, whereas the concept of the three hosts, as
in Boniface’s homily, is very common in Old English writings generally.
(Godden, 1973)
A pre-Christian reference to guilt may appear in the epic poem
The Song of
Beowulf
where the hero is plagued by “dark thoughts” because he has broken a
rule:
That was sorrow to the good man’s soul, greatest of griefs to the heart. The
wise man thought that, breaking established law, he had bitterly angered
God, the Lord everlasting. His breast was troubled within by dark thoughts,
as was not his wont. (
The Song of Beowulf
, 1990)
Northwest European guilt culture may thus predate Protestantism and even
Western Christianity, being a pre-existing mindset that was carried over into the
new religious context, much like the Christmas tree and other formerly pagan
traditions. Later, as the center of Christendom moved west and north, this
mindset gained importance within Western Christianity and pushed it more and
more toward the idea that everyone inevitably bears a personal burden of guilt.
This may be seen in the historical development of the doctrine of original sin,
which is absent from Judaism and Islam and was originally identified in Chris-
tian tradition with the sin of concupiscence, i.e., ardent, sensual longing. Anselm
of Canterbury (1033-1109), an English Catholic, was the first to separate original
sin from concupiscence, defining it as “privation of the righteousness that every
man ought to possess” (Original sin, 2017). This doctrine assumed its final and
most radical form during the Reformation, as seen in the
Augsburg Confession
of Lutheranism:
It is also taught among us that since the fall of Adam all men who are born
according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin. That is, all
men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are
unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover,
this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the
eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and
the Holy Spirit. (Original sin, 2017)
P. Frost
160
3. Heritability and Potential for Selection
A new mindset can become established in a population without changes to the
gene pool. Initially, individuals acquire it within the bounds of phenotypic plas-
ticity—by doing the most they can with their existing mindset. Over time, how-
ever, a genetic basis will develop through a process of gene-culture coevolu-
tion—in this case, through the survival and reproduction of individuals who
have been better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at
monitoring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-judging,
and self-punishing. Thus, as heritable predispositions strengthen the pattern of
adaptation, the new phenotype becomes a new genotype (Laland, Odling-Smee,
& Myles, 2010).
There is moderate to high heritability for all four traits of the northwest Eu-
ropean mindset. Each of them has also been identified with specific neural
pathways or brain regions.
3.1. Independent Social Orientation
This mental trait is influenced by the
5-HTTLPR
serotonin transporter gene,
whose short allele is more frequent in collectivistic cultures than in individualis-
tic cultures, the latter being the cultures of western and northern Europe (Chiao
& Blizinsky, 2010). The short allele is associated with heightened responsiveness
to the social environment. In a study of American toddlers (24 months old), car-
riers were more likely to imitate the way other people behaved (Schroeder et al.,
2016). Social orientation is likewise influenced by the dopamine D4 receptor
gene (
DRD4
). Some of its alleles are associated with a less independent social
orientation and are more frequent in East Asians than in Euro-Americans. None-
theless, they exert this effect independently of cultural background. When a so-
cial orientation test was administered to Euro-Americans and to East Asians
from China, Korea, or Japan, the latter were found to be less individualistic than
the former, but this difference was limited to carriers of
DRD4
variants that in-
crease dopamine signaling. Non-carrier East Asians were just as individualistic
as non-carrier Euro-Americans (Kitayama et al., 2014).
3.2. Universal Rule Adherence
Heritable predispositions can orient people toward moral universalism, which,
among other things, requires one to tell the truth in all social contexts. The al-
ternative—changing one’s story to suit one’s audience—is called “dishonesty”
and seems to be moderately heritable. In a Hawaiian study, the tendency to lie
showed the strongest family similarity out of 54 personality traits (Ahern et al.,
1982). This genetic influence is supported by a British twin study, which showed
that lie scores were more similar for monozygotic twins than for dizygotic twins,
heritability being estimated at 48% (Young et al., 1980). A study of twins and
family members similarly estimated broad heritability at 29% to 42% (Eaves et
al., 1999). In a Swedish twin study, individuals were asked about the acceptabili-
ty of four dishonest behaviors: claiming sick benefits while healthy (1.4%
P. Frost
161
thought it totally or fairly acceptable); avoiding payment for public transit
(2.8%); avoiding taxes (9.7%); and accepting bribes on the job (6.4%). Heritabil-
ity was estimated for each response respectively at 42.5%, 42.3%, 26.3%, and
39.7%. Since honesty correlated only weakly with age, sex, religiosity, preferences
for risk and fairness, locus of control, and charitable giving, it did not seem to be
a proxy for these other factors (Loewen et al., 2013).
Rule adherence seems to depend on serotonin neural pathways, which are key
to behavioral inhibition and executive function. Conversely, reduced biosynthe-
sis of serotonin is associated with a higher level of deceptive behavior (Shen et
al., 2016).
Loewen et al. (2013) conclude that studies are needed in other countries be-
cause the role and extent of genetic and environmental influences may vary with
the cultural context. In many cultures, people behave morally only with close
kin. This ethos, called “amoral familialism” in sociology, is a major obstacle to
the creation of larger, more complex societies (Banfield, 1958). The adjective
“amoral” is misleading here because familialism is a morality in its own right,
albeit one that is situational and relativistic rather than universal and absolute.
This point should be kept in mind when we see loaded terms like “dishonesty” in
the psychological literature. In most cases, dishonesty is not an end in itself but
rather one of many means to a common end, i.e., advancement of oneself, one’s
family, and one’s kin by whatever means necessary.
3.3. Affective Empathy
Empathy has an estimated heritability of 68% (Chakrabarti & Baron-Cohen,
2013). It has two components: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Some
researchers recognize a third, pro-social behavior, but its relationship to the
other two seems tangential.
Cognitive empathy (also known as perspective taking) is the capacity to un-
derstand how another person is feeling and then predict how different actions
will affect that person’s emotional state. It can be used for selfish purposes, such
as by con artists, telemarketers, and rapists who seek to understand their in-
tended victims in order to entrap them.
Affective empathy (also known as empathic concern) is the capacity not only
to understand another person’s emotional state but also to experience that state
vicariously. It may have initially evolved as a means to bind a mother more
closely to her young children, being later extended to other relationships within
the group (Decety, 2015). It is perhaps for this reason that affective empathy is
stronger in women than in men, whereas cognitive empathy is the same in both
sexes (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004; Goerlich-Dobre et al., 2015; Yang et
al., 2009). Likewise, young children preferentially show affective empathy toward
their mothers (Decety & Cowell, 2014).
The capacity for affective empathy varies between individuals. Some feel it
only for a narrow circle of loved ones; others readily feel it for strangers and even
nonhuman pets (Decety & Cowell, 2014). We half-acknowledge this variation
P. Frost
162
when we distinguish between “normal people” and “psychopaths,” whose capacity
for affective empathy is very low. This normal/abnormal dichotomy makes us lose
sight, however, of the continuous variation that exists among those we consider
normal (Decety, 2015). Every day, we may meet seemingly normal people whose
capacity for affective empathy is much lower than our own.
Just as this capacity varies between individuals, it can also vary between popula-
tions because it is more adaptive in some cultural contexts than in others. In most
cultures, affective empathy becomes maladaptive the moment it makes no distinc-
tion between helping one’s kin and helping one’s non-kin, especially if the assistance
is costly (as opposed to low-cost aid, like giving directions, providing temporary
shelter, etc.) and does not flow from an established relationship of reciprocal assis-
tance (such as between longstanding friends).This is not so, however, in northwest
European cultures, where kinship ties have long been weaker and where assistance is
withheld from “moral outsiders” rather than from non-kin.
Affective empathy results from a sequence of mental events that first produces
cognitive empathy. When one observes a person’s behavior, mirror neurons re-
spond by firing in tandem, thereby generating a mental model. Copies are sent
to other regions of the brain, which decode the nature and purpose of the beha-
vior and predict the sensory consequences for the observed person. An emotion-
al response may occur if this output is fed into one’s own emotional state (Carr
et al., 2003). Some people will respond emotionally only if the observed person is
close kin, and other people only if the observed person is a perceived “moral in-
sider,” a perception that requires knowledge of past behavior. In a study with
Swiss as the observers and Balkan immigrants as the observed, an emotional re-
sponse was triggered after only a few positive experiences with the observed
person or even with someone similar. The study’s authors did not try reversing
the ethnic backgrounds of the observers and the observed (Hein et al., 2016).
The relevant brain regions have been identified. Individuals with high cogni-
tive empathy have denser gray matter in the midcingulate cortex and the adja-
cent dorsomedial prefontal cortex, whereas individuals with high affective em-
pathy have denser gray matter in the insula cortex (Eres et al., 2015). A high ca-
pacity for empathy is also associated with enlargement of the amygdala, which
controls responses to facial expressions of fear and to other signs of distress
(Goerlich-Dobre et al., 2015; Marsh et al., 2014). The left amygdala seems to
specialize more in the affective component of empathy and in the related con-
struct of emotional self-awareness (Goerlich-Dobre et al., 2015). Two studies,
one American and one English, have found that “conservatives” tend to have a
larger right amygdala (Kanai et al., 2011; Schreiber et al., 2013). This has been
seen as evidence of “fearfulness” on the political right (Hibbing et al., 2014). One
could alternatively say that conservatives are less indifferent to distress in other
people and that this political category is a proxy for an ethnic catego-
ry—individuals of “old stock” northwest European descent.
To test this alternate explanation, we need to measure the capacity for affec-
tive empathy in different populations within and outside Europe. A possible
P. Frost
163
yardstick is the presence or absence of a deletion variant of the
ADRA2b
gene.
Carriers remember emotionally arousing images longer and more vividly, and
their amygdala shows more activation when they view such images (Todd &
Anderson, 2009; Todd et al., 2015). We cannot say for sure that “emotional
memory” is the same as affective empathy. It seems to be the capacity to deduce
an emotional state from visual information (a person’s face, a puppy, etc.) and
keep it in current emotional experience. It may thus be upstream from affective
empathy and closer to cognitive empathy.
Carriers of this variant are more common in some populations than in others.
Two studies have shown a higher incidence in Euro-Americans than in African
Americans: 31% versus 12% (Small & Liggett, 2001); and 37% versus 21% (Belfer
et al., 2005). A study with Rwandan participants found an incidence of 21% (de
Quervain et al., 2007). Curiously, carriers were more common in Euro-Canadians
(50%) than in Euro-Americans (31% - 37%) (UBC News, 2015, cf. Todd et al.,
2015). The reason may be differences in participant recruitment or differences in
ethnic mix between the two countries, since people of European descent may
have origins on either side of the Hajnal line. Three studies have reported the
following incidences in specific European groups: 50% of Swiss (de Quervain et
al., 2007); 56% of Dutch (Cousijn et al., 2010); 48% of Israeli Holocaust survivors
and 63% of Israelis who emigrated as children from Europe to British Palestine
(Fridman et al., 2012).
Higher incidences have been reported in East Asians: 68% of Chinese (Zhang
et al., 2005); 56% of one group of Japanese (Suzuki et al., 2003) and 71% of
another (Ishii et al., 2015). Among the Shors, a Turkic people of Siberia, the in-
cidence was 73%. Curiously, male carriers (79%) were more common than fe-
male carriers (69%). Male non-carriers might have a higher death rate, since the
incidence increased with age (Mulerova et al., 2015).
The picture is still incomplete but the incidence of the
ADRA2b
deletion va-
riant seems to range from 10% - 20% of some sub-Saharan African groups to
30% - 65% of some European groups and 55% - 75% of some East Asian groups.
The high values for East Asians suggest that this variant does not measure affective
empathy per se but rather empathy in general (both cognitive and affective). East
Asians may have followed a somewhat different path of gene-culture coevolution,
thereby acquiring a capacity for empathy that is higher but less differentiated into
its cognitive and affective components. A study of Chinese university students
states that “the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy appear to fuse in Chi-
nese adolescents” (Siu & Shek, 2005). In a comparative study of young adults in
China and the United States, the two groups had similar scores for total empathy
(cognitive and affective), but the Americans scored higher on empathic concern
and fantasy. “American students may experience more intense feelings of sym-
pathy and concern, and increased ability to imagine experiencing oneself as a
character in a work of fiction (e.g., in a book, movie, or play)” (Melissa, 2014: p.
31). A complicating factor in this cross-cultural comparison, as the author notes,
is that empathy scores have declined in American college students since 1979.
P. Frost
164
Affective empathy (“empathic concern”) has dropped the most, followed by cog-
nitive empathy (“perspective taking”) (Konrath, O’Brien, & Hsing, 2010).
It is perhaps significant that the
ADRA2b
deletion variant has a high inci-
dence among the Shors, who were largely hunter-gatherers until recent times.
This finding suggests that empathy reached high levels in Eurasia before the ad-
vent of farming. The example of the Shors also suggests that non-carriers suffer
from a higher death rate, a somewhat surprising finding, given the evidence that
carriers have a higher risk of heart disease (Mulerova et al., 2015).
This variant interacts with variants at other genes. People with at least one
copy of the short allele of
5-HTTLPR
tend to be too sensitive to negative emo-
tional information, but this effect is attenuated by the
ADRA2b
deletion variant,
which either keeps one from dwelling too much on a bad experience or helps
one to anticipate and prevent repeat experiences (Naudts et al., 2012). As we
have seen earlier, the short allele of
5-HTTLPR
is less frequent in individualistic
cultures than in collectivistic cultures (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010). Perhaps the
same selection pressure that makes it less frequent also increases the frequency
of alleles that limit its phenotypic expression, like the
ADRA2B
deletion variant.
3.4. Guilt Proneness
Guilt proneness shows high heritability between families (Cattell et al., 1981).
According to a twin study based on a small sample and on parental report, dis-
plays of guilt are significantly heritable at 14 months but not at 20 and 24
months (Zahn-Waxler & Robinson, 1995). Another study found that intensity of
childhood trauma is significantly associated with guilt proneness only in carriers
of the low-expressing Met allele of
BDNF Val66Met
. There is a weaker associa-
tion with the short allele of
5-HTTLPR
(Szentágotai-Tătar, 2015). This is our
third encounter here with the
5-HTTLPR
short allele, which is associated with
collectivistic cultures. Such cultures are characterized by strong kinship ties and
a tendency to limit affective empathy and guilt proneness to mother-child rela-
tions. It may be that childhood trauma disrupts the natural decline in guilt
proneness after childhood, causing it to persist into adult life.
The
5-HTTLPR
short allele may thus provide another yardstick to measure
the capacity for independent social orientation/affective empathy/guilt prone-
ness in different human populations. According to data collated by Chiao and
Blizinsky (2010), this allele has a lower incidence in societies of northwest Euro-
pean descent (see Table 1).
The geographic incidence of the
5-HTTLPR
short allele is consistent with the
Hajnal line and the WEMP. It also suggests that the intensity of selection for the
northwest European mindset may be thought of as a series of concentric rings
with the highest intensity in the North Sea/Baltic littoral. There is, however, a
lack of data from southeast Europe. In fact, Turkey is the only European country
that clearly falls outside the WEMP zone and for which we have data. Further-
more, as critics have pointed out, data from multiethnic countries may not be
representative; the studies conducted in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ar-
gentina used subjects of European descent (Eisenberg & Hayes, 2011).
P. Frost
165
Table 1. Aggregate data on
5-HTTLPR
by country (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010, Supp. Table
1).
Country
No. of studies N % short allele
South
Africa (of European descent) 2 753 27.79
Estonia
2 808 34.81
Poland
4 696 36.96
Denmark
1 1369 40.80
Hungary
4 1067 41.71
Finland
2 4269 42.45
Slovenia
1 468 42.52
Netherlands
1 989 42.72
New Zealand
1 847 43.03
Germany
12 4105 43.03
France
8 2665 43.18
Sweden
3 752 43.63
Austria
2 416 43.65
Russia
4 1370 43.91
United Kingdom
3 5888 43.98
United States
14 4162 44.53
Australia (of European descent)
4 1758 45.91
Spain
8 3152 46.75
Brazil (of European descent)
6 1747 46.96
Italy
4 876 48.54
Israel
8 2561 49.26
Argentina (of European descent)
2 2012 51.04
Mexico
3 380 51.96
Turkey
6 1194 54.29
India
3 1007 58.85
Taiwan
1 192 70.57
Singapore
2 629 71.24
P.R. of China
3 1896 75.20
Korea
5 931 79.45
Japan
5 1176 80.25
Guilt is closely associated with affective empathy, the two seeming to share
much of the same neural wiring. Both are consistently associated with the capac-
ity to recognize facial emotions (Treeby et al., 2016). Both are positively asso-
ciated with valuing of universalism, benevolence, tradition, and conformity and
negatively associated with valuing of power, hedonism, stimulation, and
self-direction (Silfver et al., 2008). Guilt cannot exist without affective empathy:
P. Frost
166
“People are innately prepared to feel empathic distress in response to the suffer-
ing of others, and guilt combines empathic distress with a self-attribution of
causal responsibility for the other’s suffering” (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heather-
ton, 1994: p. 246).
While guilt may superficially resemble shame, the two show opposing associa-
tions with affective empathy:
[…] across several independent studies, shame has been consistently linked
to low self-esteem; a tendency to externalize blame; a seething, bitter, re-
sentful kind of anger; an impaired capacity for empathy; and dysfunctional
family relationships […]. Guilt, on the other hand, has been consistently
positively related to interpersonal empathy and negatively related to exter-
nalization of blame, a detached/unconcerned attitude toward negative in-
terpersonal events, resentment toward others, and a hostile sense of humor,
particularly with regard to the unique variance in guilt. (Tangney, Wagner,
& Gramzow, 1992: p. 471)
4. An Evolutionary Scenario
To recapitulate, at some point in time, northwest Europeans became less kin-
ship-oriented and more individualistic, and this new cultural environment fa-
vored individuals who were more socially independent, more empathic, more
guilt-prone, and more adherent to universal moral rules. At first, the new mind-
set had no genetic basis. Individuals did the best they could with what they had.
If, however, some were more inclined toward independent social orientation,
universal rule adherence, affective empathy, and guilt proneness, they would do
better than others, not only socially but also reproductively. Conversely, the less
inclined would do worse. There was thus selection for these traits, and a steady
change to the gene pool over time.
Ten generations of selection can significantly change a gene pool (Cochran &
Harpending, 2009: p. 73). Even if the WEMP had not existed before the thir-
teenth century, it would have exerted a selection pressure on northwest Euro-
peans for some thirty generations. And fragmentary evidence points to its exis-
tence as far back as Anglo-Saxon times in England and Roman times on the con-
tinent. For earlier periods, historical documents are lacking, and archaeological
data can inform us only about more general demographic characteristics.
One might think that the WEMP could not have begun as early as the Meso-
lithic, i.e., before 7000-6000 BP in northwest Europe. During the Mesolithic,
people were hunter-gatherers, a mode of subsistence generally associated with
small bands of related individuals. Such a cultural context is not conducive to
individualism or to regular interaction with non-kin. It was perhaps for this
reason that Inuit hunting bands used shame rather than guilt to ensure correct
behavior:
That is, in the past, the individual was expected and encouraged to do what
he wanted, and thus had little guilt over most acts. In fact, there was so little
P. Frost
167
censure, overtly, that one could do whatever one could get away with. But
there was always the shame—concern with what people would think. What
guilt existed was very archaic and related to oral incorporation and “bad
mother” fears. Taboo-breaking was always a problem but at least one was
not “guilty,” but simply inappropriate in his acts. (Hippler, 1973)
Things were different, however, among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived
along the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic. They were not at all small bands
of related individuals.
The societies of the last hunters (and fishers and gatherers) of northern
Europe appear to have evolved quickly toward increasing complexity in the
period prior to the spread of agriculture. Complexity is defined by greater
diversity (more things) and integration (more connections). Advances in
technology, settlement, and subsistence are preserved in the archaeological
record. During this period technology developed toward greater efficiency
in transport, tools, and food procurement. Settlements were generally larg-
er, more enduring, and more differentiated in the Mesolithic than in the
preceding Paleolithic. Food procurement was both more specialized and
more diversified—specialized in terms of the technology and organization
of foraging activities, and diversified in terms of the numbers and kinds of
species and habitats exploited. (Price, 1991: p. 229)
From around 8500 BP, these hunter-fisher-gatherers began to achieve levels of
population density and social complexity like those of farming peoples farther
south. They were thus able to halt the advance of farming for two to three thou-
sand years:
After a rapid spread across Central Europe, [...] farming communities came
to a halt in the North European Plain, leaving the coastal areas of the North
Sea occupied by hunter-gatherers [...].
This could not have been due to ecological conditions. The frontier extends
across a uniform geographical area, and the soils of southern Scandinavia
are, in many places, light, fertile, and favorable for cultivation [...]. The rea-
son for the delay must be sought in the late Mesolithic communities of the
region. Although regional differences exist [...], hunter-gatherers in the
southern Baltic region are likely to have had a greater population density
than central European foragers [...], larger and more permanent settlements
[...], and a complex economic pattern involving specialized extraction
camps, seasonal scheduling, and seasonally intensive use of specific re-
sources [...]. (Zvelebil & Dolukhanov, 1991: pp. 262-263)
These semi-sedentary hunter-fisher-gatherers generally lived from spring to
fall in large coastal agglomerations where they fished, sealed, and collected shell-
fish. They then dispersed inland to small hunting stations (Price, 1991: pp.
220-223). Johansen (2006) has argued for a high degree of mobility: “a number
P. Frost
168
of small groups rotating between sites on a seasonal basis within a confined ter-
ritory, but perhaps periodically aggregating at key localities.” Bang-Andersen
(1996) states: “In certain areas such as the seaboard of central West Norway, par-
ticularly resource-rich marine and terrestrial environments may have made it
possible to stay within restricted parts of the region all the year round on a diffuse
sedentary basis.” Most areas, however, had “a permanent or semi-permanent
base camp on the coast, a certain number of extended extraction sites for sea-
sonal hunting, gathering and fishing activities, a larger amount of transitory
sites, and an almost indefinite number of special purpose sites or single-activity
loci.” There was thus seasonal movement: people moving inland in autumn,
breaking up into small hunting bands, and regrouping on the coast again in the
spring. This back-and-forth movement created a fluid social environment that
could be better regulated by guilt than by shame, which works only as long as
one still interacts with the witnesses to a shameful act.
Before the Mesolithic, northwest Europe was covered by ice. The WEMP
therefore began no earlier than the time of the hunter-fisher-gatherers (<300
generations ago) and no later than the thirteenth century (>30 generations ago).
Some genetic change can happen even over a span of thirty generations, but the
postulated change in mindset may be too much for any time span beginning lat-
er than the Pleistocene. This objection is, in fact, central to evolutionary psy-
chology:
It is no more plausible to believe that whole new mental organs could
evolve since the Pleistocene—i.e., over historical time—than it is to believe
that whole new physical organs such as eyes would evolve over brief spans.
It is easily imaginable that such things as the population mean retinal sensi-
tivity might modestly shift over historical time, and similarly minor mod-
ifications might have been made in various psychological mechanisms.
However, major and intricate changes in innately specified informa-
tion-processing procedures present in human psychological mechanisms do
not seem likely to have taken place over brief spans of historical time.
(Tooby & Cosmides, 1989: p. 34)
The psychological mechanisms in question are indeed complex. Affective
empathy in particular requires being able not only to monitor how other people
feel but also to incorporate this emotional state into one’s own. Nonetheless, it
did not have to arise
ex novo
. It could have evolved out of a mechanism that was
already present but limited to a specific behavioral context, i.e., the relations
between a mother and her young children. Guilt proneness may have a similar
origin in mother-child relations, i.e., the infantile idea that mother sees all and
knows all. We can draw an evolutionary parallel with the capacity to digest milk
sugar, which is limited to childhood except in those human groups that have
domesticated cattle for milk production (Laland, Odling-Smee, & Myles, 2010).
Second objection: affective empathy and guilt proneness are too altruistic to
be sustainable. They are too easily exploited by individuals who ask for help
P. Frost
169
while giving nothing in return. Over time, selection should favor these “free rid-
ers” and their offspring at the expense of their empathic, guilt-prone hosts. This
scenario is at least partly averted, however, by community members monitoring
each other and expelling those who are judged to be “morally worthless.” Such
behavior monitoring may have evolved in two stages: first, an increase in capac-
ity for cognitive empathy; second, an increase in capacity for affective empathy.
Monitoring and expulsion of rule-breakers would have thus evolved in an envi-
ronment where mutual assistance was much more conditional and much less
spontaneous.
If we look at northwest Europeans during the Mesolithic, we see that their
annual cycle of fall dispersal and spring reconstitution meets the conditions of
the “haystack model,” one of the few that can account for evolution of altruistic
behavior (Smith, 1964). In this model, empathic, guilt-prone individuals are eas-
ily exploited, but the community as a whole benefits from their presence. Com-
munities with many of them will thus expand at the expense of communities
with few. As long as the communities regularly split up and reunite, the whole
population will show a steady increase in mean capacity for affective empathy
and guilt proneness, even though each community will show a decrease during
its brief existence.
Guilt proneness and affective empathy may or may not be altruistic, but
another behavioral tendency of northwest Europeans clearly is: a relatively large
proportion of men and women contribute to the community while remaining
celibate and childless. As we have seen, this is a longstanding tendency. How and
why did it arise? It might be a side-effect of selection for high parental invest-
ment and, thus, for willingness to postpone marriage until one has enough re-
sources for family formation. This selection is achieved at the cost of some
people never marrying.
5. Conclusion
In North and west of the Hajnal Line, kinship has been a weaker force in social
relations since at least the early Middle Ages and perhaps the Mesolithic. Be-
cause of this weak kinship environment, northwest Europeans came to view so-
cial relations more through the lens of universal moral rules. Such rules were
enforced by monitoring not only other community members but also oneself.
The new mindset initially developed within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity,
but over time it would have been gradually hardwired through selection for in-
dependent social orientation, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, and
guilt proneness.
This mindset had only limited success at first. While it enabled northwest Eu-
ropeans to resist the spread of farming from the south and provided an alternate
means to build larger and more complex societies, these hunter-fisher-gatherers
remained confined to the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic. Even there,
farming eventually won out, and their descendants long remained marginal on
the world stage politically, economically, and demographically. It was elsewhere,
P. Frost
170
principally in the Middle East, that people first reached the benchmarks of cul-
tural development, e.g., urban growth, road building, reading and writing, con-
struction of large polities, etc. Northwest Europeans gained an edge over the rest
of humanity only with the rise of the market economy and the success they had
in applying this organizing principle to their own societies. They succeeded be-
cause their social relations were already less structured by the rival organizing
principle, i.e., kinship, and because they were already psychologically adapted to
individualism.
In sum, this new mindset freed northwest Europeans from the limitations of
kinship and enabled them to organize their societies differently, thus clearing the
way for later historical developments, notably the market economy and, later
still, the modern State. They thereby met the challenge of creating larger, more
complex societies while ensuring orderly social relations.
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