The Alleged Connection between Genetic Diversity and Economic Growth: The Out-of-Africa Theory and the Idea of an Economic Super-Race as an Abuse of Biology
Gregor Becker, Paulina Knobloch, Olga Piotrowska

Abstract
The paper “THE "OUT OF AFRICA" HYPOTHESIS, HUMAN GENETIC DIVERSITY, AND COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT” by Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor deals with the hypothesis of an alleged direct connection between genetic diversity of society and economic growth. The article claims that genetic diversity has created a fundamental long-lasting economic effect ever since, like to any other factor like geography, institutions, economic system and culture. Ashraf and Galor conclude that balanced levels of heterozygosis lead to a productive equilibrium of social expenses of high diversity and the creative benefits of higher variance in cognitive skills. The explanation of economic growth as such by a reduction to genetic diversity in a biological sense is neither just an improper attempt to base the social phenomenon economy on scientific biology nor does it lead just automatically to probable claims for ethnical cleansing; it is a direct misuse of scientific biology for an possibly politically motivated work-out from within Humanities, fully comparable e.g. to formerly popular “transfer-theories” of so-called Social-Darwinism or Eugenics. This broadly discussed paper has to be called highly problematic due to its defective methodology, its insufficient and partially illogical and inconsequent conclusions of analogy, leading to fatal errors caused by the direct transfer of biological facts to socio-economic circumstances. Finally, the article has to be called an example for a growing number of publications receiving enormous attention in the science world by their controversy claims and unfounded hypotheses that are finally not tenable.

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