"How many Americans have ever lived? I would estimate that less than a billion Americans have every existed. After all, the nation is just a couple of hundred years old. How did such a small population – relative to the larger global population of humans – ever get to have such a disproportionate influence on the world by producing such a large number of amazing individuals? What is the secret of their success?"
See his answer. Or was it genetics?;
"There is now growing evidence that the behavioral traits which predispose some of us to risky and novelty-seeking behavior have a genetic basis. A recent book, American Mania, by a colleague, Peter Whybrow, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, summarizes this evidence. He begins by noting that human migration is one major form of risky and novelty-seeking behavior. Only a few of our species left their ancestral home in the African savannahs and began that long walk to the ends of the earth which allowed homo sapiens to colonize the world. Who were these earliest migrants? It turns out they had a particular genetic profile. They had a higher percentage of an exploratory and novelty-seeking gene than those remaining behind. As novelty seeking and risk taking “are . . . behaviors essential to exploration and migration. . . this should be reflected in a distribution pattern of the relevant allele [the D4-7 allele gene] that is similar to the ancient migratory paths of our species.” How do we know this? The geneticist Luigi Luca Cavali-Sforza of Stanford University and his colleagues have provided a genetic mapping of the geographical dispersal of homo sapiens from their original home in Africa. Subsequently, Dr. Chauseng Chen of the University of California, Irvine, found that a coherent pattern emerges from this mapping “where those who stayed close to their original homeland have a higher percentage of the common D4-4 allele in the population and a lower prevalence of the exploratory and novelty-seeking D4-7 allele.”
Thus in Africa, from where humans began their worldwide migratory dispersal between ten and twenty thousand years ago, those remaining behind who constitute Africa’s current population have “a far higher percentage (between 60 and 80 percent) of the [non-migrant version of the D4 gene] D4-4, compared with those who continued the initial migrant expansion of our species across the Asian continent.” Within Africa the Bantu, who have migrated the farthest, have a majority of the migratory D4-7 allele gene. In Asia, those Chinese who migrated from the mainland and Taiwan to South East Asia have a “greater percentage of D4-7 allele in the population than the aboriginal population of Taiwan who stayed behind.” As our human ancestors crossed the land bridges linking Asia to the Americas in the Ice Age, we should expect that those who walked farthest down the South American peninsula would have had the migratory gene. This turns out to be so, as “those who pushed into the Southern Hemisphere, the Colombians and members of the Karitiana, Surul, and the Ticuna tribes—carry a preponderance of the [migratory] D4-7 allele.” By contrast, in Japan the frequency of the migratory gene is very low and in parts of East Asia does not exist at all.
This “migration” gene, as we may call it, is also found in those who evince the most extreme form of risk-taking and novelty-seeking behavior to which the gene predisposes its bearers: addictive behavior which often descends into manic depression (bipolarity).Risk taking and novelty seeking are of course also the hallmarks of the merchant and the entrepreneur. For both migrants and entrepreneurs are “mavericks. . . who run at the edge of the human herd. Migrants are a self-selected band of seekers—those of adventurous and curious mind—who in their restless approach to life lie at the extreme of the bell-shaped curve of behavioral distribution.” So the migrant gene will be rare. As even during the great disruptions of human history caused by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse “for every two individuals who sought their salvation in migrant flight, ninety-eight remained behind to accept what fate would bring"
Related Podcasts;
Gene dreams or gene schemes
Benjamin Franklin - 300th anniversary
Two Views on Global Development: Revive the Invisible Hand or Strengthen a "Society of States"?- Deepak Lal at Cato.
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