There's an intriguing article in yesterday's Times about a new theory about the factors that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in England.

For centuries, England's citizens lived on the brink of starvation. Although innovations would periodically increase agricultural productivity, greater access to food invariably led to population increases, which in turn brought per capita food levels right back to where they started. It took the Industrial Revolution to finally bring the growth rate of the food supply above the growth rate of the population.

Historian Gregory Clark's study of wills from 1200-1800 found the following:

Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution....

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Clark speculates that there may be genetic and/or cultural components to these changes in behavior:

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

I don't know enough about behavioral genetics to have a sense of whether this is plausible; regardless, his application of Darwinian thinking in this particular case is intriguing.

Substitute funding for food, and it's clear that the current NIH mess is a Malthusian crisis. And as with England, this is only the most recent of a series. What are these selection pressures doing to the population of academic scientists?

When times are tight, it becomes a lot less pleasant to be an academic. Fewer proposals get funded, and even if you do get funded, a lot more work has to go into your proposals. Industry starts looking a lot more attractive by comparison. Increased numbers are forced out, and more interestingly when we start thinking like Darwin, increased numbers either leave by choice or never seek academic careers in the first place.

Economics tells us that the more attractive one's industry prospects relative to academic alternatives, the more likely one is to end up there. And if you work in industry, you don't "reproduce" by training students. Thus, academia's Malthusian crises may very well be selecting against those who are most capable of success outside of academia.

Funding levels in academia are driven by the prospect of economic returns to investments in research. Unfortunately for all concerned, unlike Clark's hypothesized England, academia appears to be selecting against some of those most capable of increasing the "food" supply.