Domino Theory Through the Lens of Human Evolutionary Ecology

Domino Theory posits that Communism spreads via emulation or force between nations as a function of geographic adjacency, the theory being so named because this dynamic is often likened to the toppling of dominoes. Using the 1917 Russian Revolution (RR) as a starting point, it is found that geographic distance between Moscow and the capital cities of countries that at one point were or are (either in part or in whole) Communist states strongly predicts the lag (in years) between the RR and the year in which these countries first experienced Communism in some form (r = 0.778, 95% CI = 0.628 to 0.872, n = 45 countries). In a subsample of 36 countries, the pair-wise genetic distance between the population of Russia and the populations of the other countries strongly mediates this relationship. A cladogram based on genetic distance between these national populations indicates strong lambda and kappa signals, meaning that Communism-uptake lag is inversely proportional to the degree of shared ancestry between populations, and that it spreads rapidly among populations once introduced into new regions. Controlling for lambda in regression revealed significant positive influences of historical disease prevalence and GDP per capita on the lag variable. These results suggest that the process that Domino Theory specifies may principally be a function of cultural transmission biased by genetic distance (relative to the population of Russia). Controlling for genetic distance, countries with higher relative wealth and historical disease prevalence experienced Communism later, possibly due to the buffering effects of historical reductions in poverty and of forms of evoked culture that are incompatible with (basic) communist ideology (e.g. strong xenophobia and religiosity, and other cultural expressions of the behavioral immune system). These two terms also interact positively, meaning that among countries exhibiting high historical disease burdens, increased relative wealth inhibited the development of Communism to the greatest degree.