War and Peace: A Diachronic Social Biogeography of Life History Strategy and Between-Group Relations in Two Western European Populations

Abstract

We report successful diachronic replication of two major sets of prior findings in the social biogeography of human life history (LH) strategy: (1) the constructive replication of the diachronic changes in the latent hierarchical structure of intelligence in Britannic populations, but as presently applied to the latent hierarchical structure of human LH strategy, now cross-validated in both Britannic and Gallic populations; and (2) the diachronic replication in both Britannic and Gallic populations of the structural relations found synchronically among human LH strategy, between-group competition, and economic productivity in cross-sectional data on contemporary samples of both national and subnational polities. In addition, a supplementary methodological objective was: (3) the convergent validation of diachronic lexicographic measures of LH strategy with respect to more traditional non-lexicographic indicators of LH strategy, such as infant mortality rates, total fertility rates, and life expectancies. We obtained complete configural invariance across Britannic and Gallic biocultural groups, meaning that the same model predictors were statistically significant, but incomplete metric invariance, meaning that most but not all model parameter estimates were statistically equivalent in magnitude and direction. All new results obtained from diachronic data in Britannic populations were replicated almost perfectly in Gallic populations.

The ecology of empire

“…In spite of these steps, internal consistency with respect to the factor scale was not guaranteed to be consistently high for every single item, as illustrated by the negative (albeit statistically nonsignificant) part-whole correlations of the items victoire and songes in the French version of the scale. 32 Unit-weighted factor loadings for the slow LH factor in the Britannic version ranged from .822 to .974 (all significant), and the overall factor explained 86.11% of the variance in the total word usage frequencies. In the Gallic version, factor loadings ranged from -.107 to .937 (all positive and significant except for victoire), and 64.66% of the variance was explained by the common factor among word usage estimates.…”

“…26 It was validated relative to diachronically convergent indicators of competition among groups, and the translation and adaptation process to French was recently validated as well. 32 The equivalent words in the French version were abnégation, bienveillance, charité, compassion, devoir, dévouement, hardiesse, héroïsme, obéissance, and patriotisme.…”

“…Consistent with Figueredo et al, 32 spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (AD 1800-1999), data were collected for Britain, inclusive of the United Kingdom, and its successor states, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. With respect to France, French Algeria and French Guiana were added to the traditional confines of the French Republic, as all such territory is included in the national census.…”

“…These MLMs allowed us to ascertain whether the serially autoregressive effects were negligibly small (estimated as covariances of zero) for the array of cross-sectional cross-trait variances, as they previously were found to be for the unit-weighted common factor score of the slow LH factor, operationalized as the arithmetic mean of the five standardized LH indicator traits. 32 This turned out to be the case, meaning that the descriptive statistics reported did not need to be corrected for any residual covariances among successive observations.…”

The affective origins of the Industrial Revolution

“…But the temporal association between K and micro-innovation rates is less well established. Here we examine this association using temporal correlations involving a latent chronometric K-factor composed of convergent trends in the utilization frequencies of both low-and high-K indicating vocabulary items tracked using Google Ngram Viewer; life expectancy, infant mortality, and total fertility rates (from Figueredo et al 2019); and a measure of per capita macroinnovation rates and GDP per capita (from Woodley of Menie et al 2017b), predominantly sampled from the United States and United Kingdom, covering 104 years (1889Kingdom, covering 104 years ( -1993.…”