History and Humans
A Bell Curve of Ordinary People
I should start off by saying this whole train of thought left the station with me listening to Iran Lego diss tracks on Spotify.
I swear if they dropped a full album, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I'd drive around D.C. bumping it.
Then my mom popped into my head.
“History is a huge story.”
Outta nowhere. She does that sometimes.
And I got thinking about how we look at history scientifically. As we should. Objectivity is important in research. A list of names, dates, and facts. This battle happened here with these guys during this war that was about who owned this dirt.
But humans don’t do things in a vacuum.
History is a massive tapestry of characters and plot twists. Villain arcs and origin stories. Prequels and sequels scattered across centuries. Entire civilizations unknowingly setting up events that won't pay off for hundreds of years.
Entire centuries revolve around the principle of Chekhov’s Gun.
Then, from the back of the lecture hall of my imagination, came a question:
“What was that research paper you read back in college? The dumb one.”
I knew exactly what I was referring to. (Thank you, Dr. Parker.)
A “scientific” research paper so problematic and all-out racist that it’s used as the singular example of what NOT to do in the science community.
J. Philippe Rushton (1988)
Race differences in behaviour: A review and evolutionary analysis
Stay with me. I promise we are going somewhere.
So what made this paper so terrible? Rushton basically took every racist stereotype you’ve ever heard and dressed it up in scientific language.
He basically divided humanity into just three broad categories:
“Negroids” (Black people)
“Caucasoids” (White people)
“Mongoloids” (East Asians)
Oh yeah. He went there and he only gets worse. His argument was that humanity could be ranked on an evolutionary continuum, with East Asians at the top, white people in the middle, and black people at the bottom.
Just…wow.
The claims were exactly what you’d expect from a paper trying to justify stereotypes:
Black people were supposedly more athletic but less intelligent
East Asians were supposedly highly intelligent but less athletic and more restrained
White people were supposedly somewhere in between on intelligence and athleticism, have more genetic variability between hair color and eye color but notably are more aggressive than the other races
And here’s where my brain went: “...well... he’s not entirely wrong about that last part.”
Not because white people are biologically programmed to be aggressive - that’s exactly the kind of lazy thinking Rushton was doing. But because if you look at history, European kingdoms and empires spent centuries in near-constant competition and conflict with one another before carrying those rivalries across the globe through colonial expansion.
I should make it clear that I'm not defending colonization. What happened was horrific. But understanding why it happened requires looking at context, not genetics.
And that’s exactly what Rushton missed. Completely.
Europeans weren’t conquering the globe because they had some innate aggression gene. They were doing it because Europe had become a pressure cooker of competing kingdoms, each one worried its rivals would gain wealth and power first. European maritime technology had advanced enough to make long-distance ocean voyages practical, and they were desperate to bypass the overland trade routes that made Asian goods extraordinarily expensive. Add centuries of near-constant warfare that had already normalized organized violence, and you had all the ingredients for aggressive overseas expansion.
Other civilizations weren’t just sitting around because they were biologically less likely to throw down either. They were responding to the incentives in front of them. Their geography, economies, political structures, and strategic priorities rewarded different choices.
The Chinese weren’t thinking “let’s be less aggressive than Europeans” - they were thinking “we have an enormous empire to manage and internal stability is more important than risky ocean voyages. We’re good.”
The Mali Empire wasn’t thinking “we should conquer the globe” - they were thinking “we’re getting incredibly wealthy through trans-Saharan trade and that’s working pretty great for us right now. No need.’’
The Inca weren’t thinking “let’s stay isolated” - they were thinking “we’ve built a sophisticated empire connected by mountain roads that feeds millions of people, why would we risk that on uncertain ocean voyages? Crazy talk.”
And here’s the thing that really gets me when I think about this:
No civilization is the villain in their own story.
History constantly has to ask:
“What problem were they trying to solve?”
Each civilization was solving the problems they actually faced, not the problems Europeans were facing. Europeans weren’t more aggressive because of biology - they were more aggressive because their particular situation rewarded aggression in a way that other civilizations’ situations didn’t.
And this is where Rushton’s paper reveals something much bigger about how we try to understand human differences. We’re always looking for simple explanations. We want to believe that complex historical patterns can be reduced to neat biological categories. But humans don’t work that way.
This is the problem with trying to study human behavior like we study chemicals in a lab. People aren’t variables you can control. They’re responding to incentives, histories, geographies, and circumstances that are constantly changing.
Which brings me back to that uncomfortable moment when I read Rushton’s claims about white people being more aggressive and thought “...well...”
The objective findings are European colonialism was hyper aggressive. Once they got a taste, it was game over for everyone else.
But here’s where the psychology and statistics part of my brain starts screaming: correlation doesn’t prove causation!
This is exactly what they teach you in research methods: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And when you’re making claims about innate biological differences between races, you better have some rock-solid proof that goes way beyond “I noticed a pattern.”
Rushton saw a correlation between race and certain behaviors, and he jumped straight to biological causation. But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. He completely ignored the massive web of historical, economic, and social factors that could explain the same patterns.
My historian side who loves all history, from everywhere, this huge grand story - has to acknowledge that my ancestors were usually the villain in many of these stories.
I mean, I’m just being real about it. We were.
Just one "yikes" after another throughout the centuries.
The reality is, most humans aren’t conquerors or colonizers. Throughout all of history, most people are just trying to live their lives. We want to work together, we want to raise our families, we want to get through the day.
Humans aren’t good or bad. We’re a bell curve. Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle, capable of both kindness and cruelty depending on the situation. But the vast majority of us are wonderfully ordinary.
History doesn't remember the middle though. History remembers the outliers. The standouts on both sides of the spectrum, the extraordinary altruists and the inhuman monsters. That's just how statistics works. The extremes are what get the most attention. It remembers the people who changed the trajectory of civilizations, for better or worse. The thousands of years of ordinary people quietly getting along don't generate nearly as many history books as wars and conquests.
But to look back and ask the objective question:
“What problem did they think they were solving?”
And sometimes the answer is...
“We wanted more gold.”
“We wanted to beat our rival kingdom.”
“We believed our God wanted us to convert everyone.”
“We wanted the land.”
And then you just stare at the page like...
“Really? Millions of people suffered because of that?”
Humans have this uncanny ability to solve one problem and create three more in the process.
Anyway, I’m rambling but I hope you enjoyed the ride.
All of this because I listened to Iran Lego diss tracks while making coffee.
Some people open Spotify and discover a new favorite song.
I accidentally fell down a rabbit hole that started with an idiotic paper I read in college and somehow ended with research methods, colonialism, statistics, and why history is really one enormous story.
My brain is a interesting place to live.
I’m getting another cup of coffee.
Happy Thursday.
Your brain is awesome.