My most offensive theory yet!

Before I begin, let me throw this mandatory disclaimer out there: I do not actually believe this. This is a joke. An adult joke. For us adults.

It's been said that Asian people are more intelligent and studious than other races (mostly by Asians and our gaijin friends when they want to copy our homework.) Asians, always fans of social Darwinism, seem to think that this is a genetic thing. Well I'm Asian and I think I can sort of explain why at least Chinese people are genetically superior to you... errrr.... people.

Pre-Communist Chinese culture (like most cultures at the time) was pretty misogynistic. The primary role of women was child-bearing, indicative of a society that really wanted a high rate of population growth. Of course, misogyny goes hand in hand with polygamy (incidentally, the motto of the American porn industry.) Typically, a man would have several concubines in addition to his wife.

Before the cries of "totally awesome dude... I want to live there!" get too loud, let me say that "typically" may be a bit misleading here as having concubines was far from typical. To support multiple concubines and the children they would bear, you had to be rich. The richer you were, the more concubines you could have. In a polygynous culture, there are winners and there are losers (as opposed to a monogamous culture where there are only losers.) The proportion of men to women in roughly 1:1 and if I'm paired with two women, someone else is not getting laid. So in Imperial China, you had this spectrum of pimpdom, starting with the Emperor, who would have dozens of consorts and concubines (Emperor Kangxi of the Qing dynasty had 64,) and ending up with broke-ass scrubs who would have no wives.

This created an environment with a huge amount of sexual selection. If you had the ends then you could hit the skins and you would pass your genes on to a significant number of offspring. If you didn't, your genes would die off. Over the course of a few thousand years, this could have a significant effect on the gene pool. Of course, the presence of selection is only one part of the picture. Also important are the characteristics that are selected for. Fortunately, being rich is not a genetic characteristic.

While the economy of Imperial China was fundamentally agricultural, there was a great demand for two things: merchants and bureaucrats. Incidentally, these were the people that got rich. It's not hard to see why you have to be smart to be a successful merchant so I won't really go into that. However, in America, it may be difficult to associate intelligence with bureaucracy. The bureaucracy of Imperial China was, strangely enough, a meritocracy, but not in the traditional sense of being based on actual merit. To become a bureaucrat, you had to undergo a series of examinations, which tended to be tough as nails.

More importantly, Imperial Chinese society (and arguably even modern Chinese society) did not value uniqueness or innovation (kind of weird for a country responsible for a vast array of important inventions, right?) Innovation breeds change and change breeds instability. Social stability is an important feature of a nation that was usually stretching its resources to the breaking point, and the easiest way to get social stability is to blend people into a soupy homogenous mass (don't believe the CSI hype.) Unfortunately, success in any society depends on standing out; doubly so when your society has consistently been the most populous in the world. So the way to stand out isn't to do things differently or do different things, it's to just do things better. Chinese culture values skill above all things and in that social framework, skilled people rise above others.

So the situation in China was like an alternate universe version of the movie Idiocracy. People with a great deal of skill get the money and get the girls. And they get a lot of girls. And have a lot of kids. Repeat for thousands of years and you get some smart people. By smart I mean really good at taking exams.

Of course, there are some problems with this theory. 2000 years is only about 100 generations or so. It would take a very efficient selection mechanism to cause significant genetic change in that time span. There's also the question of distribution. China has always been a nation with a huge proportion of its population hovering between destitute and impecunious. The profligacy of a few rich assholes would hardly create an efficient selection mechanism. Selection needs to be vicious and China's puppy dog polygamy was probably mostly monogamy anyways.

So yeah ignore everything I just wrote. It's just a bit of an introduction to what will hopefully be a series of entries on China.