A Tang tomb epitaph could record a man’s ancestors, his father’s office, and how far he climbed. In a study of 3,640 of these inscriptions, passing the imperial examinations became an increasingly strong predictor of an elite career. Aristocratic pedigree lost some of its force. The inscriptions show how the rewards for learning changed.
The institutional history predates this series. Ping-ti Ho studied examinations and social mobility; Benjamin Elman traced their cultural history. The biological conjecture has its own history: Pan Guangdan read Confucianism in sociobiological terms, and Peter Frost later proposed that examination culture might exert selection on cognition. Those proposals preceded an ancient-DNA test.
A career is not a family tree. Still, if skill at learning influenced marriage and the number of children people raised, centuries of changed rewards might leave a trace in descendants’ DNA. Could ancient genomes show one?
That was the question behind my earlier post, “Did Confucian institutions select for educational attainment?” An education-linked genetic score appeared to rise faster after regional dates chosen to mark the spread of Confucian institutions. I have now tested a score linked to fluid intelligence in the same 1,384 people and re-examined the dates behind that apparent turn. The result is intriguing, but one study carries more of the evidence than I first realised.
