Here is the narrated slide deck that my co author, Prof. Gregory Connor, prepared for our paper “Genomic Evidence for Clark’s Theory of the Industrial Revolution.”
In this talk he walks through:
How we assembled about 600 genomes from England, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands (700–1850 CE).
How we used modern GWAS to compute polygenic scores for educational attainment (EA) in these ancient individuals.
The estimated 0.78 SD rise in EA polygenic scores over this period, and what that implies for the upper tail of the distribution.
How we control for technical factors such as imputation variance, coverage, and study effects.
What these trends mean for Gregory Clark’s idea that preindustrial England was undergoing slow genetic change in traits linked to education, foresight, and economic success.
If you prefer a structured, visual explanation rather than a long article, this video is the most concise overview of the data, methods, and results in the paper, straight from my co author’s slides.
The paper can be downloaded from ResearchGate at this link.
