Malloy! Good to see you back!

Well, now, Jason, that was quite refreshing and different. It will be interesting to see how Steve responds. I must say I found Salter's thesis on ethnicity and "genetic interest" most alarming in its political implications when I read Salter's book a few months ago, following up on a reference to Salter in one of Steve's comments on this website.

Human altruism toward members of one's home in-group (particularly in times of warfare) has always struck me as something that could have evolved using "growing up in the same communiity with" as a proxy for close genetic relatedness, which it ususally was in the EEA I would think. But self-sacrifice in such situations could also be brought about through mechanisms of group shaming of cowardliness, sexual selection in favor of battlefied heros, and probably in other ways that are not the same as the kin selection mechanism in social insects.

I look forward to seeing where this discussion goes.

Malloy! Excellent post!

where he re-christens Washburn’s Fallacy as “the National Review Fallacy” after Richard Lynn’s negative National Review review of The Moral Animal

Whatever happened to National Review anyways? Why don't they ever publish Lynn anymore? Lynn has written some excellent articles over at the The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies and Mankind Quarterly.

Similarly, John Tooby’s Slate suggestion that Kevin MacDonald wasn’t really an evolutionary psychologist after his Trilogy on Judaism (despite the fact he was the HBES secretary!)

I think Kevin MacDonald is a crank, especially in the light of the crap he publishes over at The Occidental Quarterly (interesting crap, though). I wonder if he keeps a copy of David Duke's Jewish Supremacism on his bookshelf? From what I can tell, he has decided to become a far-right version of Stephen Jay Gould.

And what's with the contradictions on the far-right? They like to call Israel a "Nazi state," and then call themselves National Socialists. They regularly tell me that Israel is founded around many principles of National Socialism. Supposing that were true, and you're a National Socialist, wouldn't you say, "Look at Israel! It's not a bad state, is it? It's a National Socialist state. That's what we want!"

But no, it doesn't work that way. They come up with things like "group evolutionary strategy," and use it to attack the Jews, yet at the same time state that they like the idea of it.

Contradictions... contradictions... contradictions...

That was almost completely OT, though. Sorry.

Contradictions... contradictions... contradictions...

don't show up if you don't try to falsify your model.

Another great post!!

I always said Malloy was bright....for an artist. :)

razib,

What do you mean?

arcane,

many people collect a bunch of facts and create a plausible model. but, they don't take the next step and try to poke holes in the model. in many disciplines collecting facts to make a positive case is easy, on the other hand, withstanding critiques is more difficult....

Hello,

"contradictions..."

The contradictions go both ways. You have many proponents of preserving Jewish identity that will argue strongly against white separatist movements.

I think people would just like some consistency.

Some try to distinguish on the religion/race difference, but it is a thin line indeed. I don't think anyone would argue that Jews are more racially homogenious than the catch-all category of "whites".

-d

Dear Jason:

Steve Sailer here:

I've been planning to write about this at length, but let me briefly say that what you have on one side of this subterranean debate are expert PR-management types like Dawkins, Tooby, and Robert Wright who don't want evolutionary psychology tarnished politically. And then on the other side you have science-oriented scientists like Hamilton, Harpending, and Sarich (both recent converts), plus a number of social scientists who are willing to give up popularity to pursue reality like van den Berghe and Salter.

First, I don't think anybody worth listening to takes Washburn's argument seriously. Hamiltonian kin selection is completely relativistic and works on relative differences between individuals. That they are 99% or whatever related overall is irrelevant.

So, what are the serious objections to van den Berghe's theory of ethnic nepotism? (To be precise, van den Berghe defined it to include the idea that ethnic nepotism could be purely a cultural delusion on the part of people indoctrinated to believe, falsely, that they are "a band of brothers." But the interesting question is why people are so indoctrinatible into emotional concern for the motherland, fatherland, etc.)

The main objection that Dawkins and Tooby-Cosmides raise to "ethnic nepotism" is that Hamiltonian kin selection only applies to close kin because genetic similarity diffuses so rapidly as you move outward in your family tree. To use Hamilton's way of calculating, you are 1/2 related to your brother, 1/8 to your first cousin, 1/32 to your second cousin, 1/128 to your third cousin, etc. So, obviously, ethnic nepotism can't work because relatedness becomes vanishingly small.

Unfortunately, they are ignoring inbreeding (not in the "Deliverance" sense of marrying your sister, but in the sense that people from, say, Japan usually marry other people from Japan).

Genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending long pooh-poohed this argument when Frank Slater and myself presented it, until he finally sat down to do the math. Then, he discovered that the effect was twice as strong as we had thought!

Take Lewontin's figure that only 15% of genetic variation is among population groups. Harpending says it's more like 12.5%, so let's use that. Salter and I always argued that was the same as Hamilton's 12.5% relatedness to first cousins, and people tend to be nepotistic toward their first cousins.

What Harpending realized, and Vince Sarich confirmed, is that Lewontin is using Sewall Wright's way of calculating, and you need to double it to make it equivalent to Hamilton's way. So, 12.5% times two is 25%, which is the degree of relatedness to your nephew! In other words, on average, people are as closely related to other members of their subracial "ethnic" group (e.g., Japanese or Italian) versus the rest of the world as they are related to their nephew versus the rest of their ethnic group.

So, "ethnic nepotism" is ro

TO CONTINUE:

So, "ethnic nepotism" is roughly as strong on average globally as the etymologically classic case of nepotism among close kin, the uncle-nephew bond.

[Note: Greg Cochran should go argue with Henry Harpending about this, not me!]

Arcane,

Contradictions... contradictions... contradictions...

The more thoughtful WNs do not criticize Jews for organizing along ethnic lines and making there own ethnic state. As Dave pointed out, they see the double standard in a society that accepts Israel, yet rejects the idea of a "white homeland".

They [National Socialists] come up with things like "group evolutionary strategy," and use it to attack the Jews...

So Kevin MacDonald is a Nazi too, eh? It's tough to keep track of all these Nazis.

please move all jewish related topics to the open thread. i want this thread to remain fixed on the topic at hand.

Steve,

Thanks for the reply. Here I think is the crux of the matter:

"Take Lewontin's figure that only 15% of genetic variation is among population groups. Harpending says it's more like 12.5%, so let's use that. Salter and I always argued that was the same as Hamilton's 12.5% relatedness to first cousins, and people tend to be nepotistic toward their first cousins."

This is indeed Wasburn's fallacy - if kin selection is relative, as you state above, then how did you just turn all people from the same racial group into first cousins? By such a formulation wouldn't actual first cousins now be pushed to something between a normal and a twin brother in relatedness! The problem hasn't been removed but pushed further down: by expanding the gene pool under consideration, you've changed all the numbers but have changed nothing about their inter-relationship or the game-theoretical considerations behind kin selection.

Again, first cousin altruism doesn't evolve because first cousins share 12.5%, or 55%, or 99.9777% of their genes, or however this number is determined. Descent is crucial, because we are talking about the survival of specific genes, not a shared number of genes, and recent descent is crucial because such genes would be vunerable to quick elimination. A first cousin altruism gene could be passed down before the invasion of a selfish gene, but an ethnic altruism gene could not (or not likely at least) according to the same rules that nullify group selection.

PS - Do you have any conversations with Hamilton about this? I find nothing in 'Narrow Roads' that seems to support this idea.

re: EEA & this stuff, if we assume that socially mobilizable units were pretty small (maxed on on the order of hundreds) doesn't it seem like some level of distrust of middle-relational kin (for lack of a better word) might be prudent? certainly, assuming that there are relative discontinuities in clines, some tribe or clan might border upon a racially dissimlar group, say, the montane boundary between south asians and east asians, so perhaps in this context these groups would evelop middle-relational kin altruism (lowlanders vs. highlanders), but wouldn't these only be a small % of the total number within any "ethnic" group?

it seems that ethnocentrism as an emergent property or abstraction of lower level proximate behavorial tendencies is pretty obvious. is this what we're talking about? or something more ultimate?

Jason asks: "PS - Do you have any conversations with Hamilton about this? I find nothing in 'Narrow Roads' that seems to support this idea."

I asked Pierre van den Berghe about his interactions with Hamilton. He said, they spent several days together once and found themselves in complete agreement.

Personally, I found a lot in William D. Hamilton's books supporting this, but trying to quote Hamilton is like trying to pick up mercury with a spoon or find the beginning of a ball of twine. I suppose I'll have to...

Okay, look at pages 338 to 346 (paperback) of Vol 1 of Hamilton's Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Evolution of Social Behavior. This is a section entitled "Tribal Facies of Social Behavior." It begins:

"One of the conclusions fo the models just mentioned is that with a grouped population the migration between groups is crucially important in determining the general level which altruism can reach within a group. This is something which should now seem fairly obvious but which has been surprisingly overlooked in most discussions of group selection previous to Eshel's. The less migration there is the more relatedness will build up within groups." ...

"The size of demes may matter surprisingly little. An indigenous villager may know some of his many connections with other villagers and be aware of a plexus of relationship through the misty past. What might surprise him (as it surprised me) is that relatedness as measured here (and as manifested in physical similarity) builds up just as much eventually in a large unit, say a remote town, as it does in a village, if the same actual numbers enter and leave each generation. In other words, connections which the remote townsman does not so easily know of make up in multiplicity what they lack in close degree."

I think there's a character limit to these comments, so I'll have to break this long quote from Hamilton (due to some peculiarity of his prose style, there are no such things as short quotes from Hamilton) up into multiple comments. (Unfortunately, Volume I is not up on Google's "Look Inside This Book" feature.) To continue:

"For Wright's simple island model where migrants go anywhere among infinitely many colonies the approximate formula for mean intragroup relatedness (after migration has occurred) is very simple, b=1/(2M+1) where M is the number of migrants (assumed small) per subpopulation per generation. so with one migrant exchanged every other generation we find b=1/2, the same as for siblings in a panmictic population, and we therefore expect the degree of amicability that is normally expressed between siblings. If three migrants go (and three come) every generation we get b=1/7. This is slightly more than the relatedness of outbred cousins (b=1/8), so such colonies should be slightlyh more intra-amicable than groups of cousins would be."

Then Hamilton spends several hundred words relaxing the constraints. To pick up later in the paragraph:

"...when close migration preponderates members of a neighbour deme can easily have more than half the relatedness that applies to an own-deme member. And up to a point increasing migration reduces the contrast between own and neighbour deme, so that there are genetical as well as cultural reasons why, in humans, intergroup migration and marriage should decrease intergroup hostility."

Hamilton says that linear layouts of populations, such as along a shore or riverbank, "should have been particularly harmonious."

"... at about the point where the colony members are related to each other like outbred sibs it should become relatively easy for individuals to detect a fairly clear difference in appearance when comparing fellow colony members with outsiders... We shall shortly see why natural selection might favour motivation and ability to discriminate."

To continue quoting W.D. Hamilton, now p. 340 of "Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Vol. 1"

"What is happening to the ordinary families embedded in these supposedly endogamous colonies? Siblings, parents, and offpring will still be the individual's closest relatives. Owing to the inbreeding, their relatedness will be above the value of 1/2 that applies under outbreeding. Thus an individual should be more altruistic than usual to his immediate kin. But the other neighbours who are not immediate kin are now also closely related and it is this reduced contrast between neighbours and close kin that will give what is probably the most striking effect: we expect less nepotistic discrimination and more genuine communism of behavior. At the boundary of the local group, however, there is usually a sharp drop in relatedness. If migrants (or whole groups) are very mobile, leading to an "island" rather than a 'stepping-stone' situation, this drop may be such as to promote active hostility between neighboring groups. Even though these groups have some relatedness, as practical limitations to distant migration naturally ensure, the constrast is still such that a minor benefit from taking the life of an outsider would make the act adaptive."

I am on the open thread about Jews, mac and Dave.

To wrap things up ...

This long excerpt is from Hamilton's 1975 chapter in Robin Fox's "ASA Studies 4: Biosocial Anthropology" entitled "Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach from Evolutionary Genetics." There's much else of interest in it.

In his late 1990s introduction, Hamilton writes:

"Robert Trivers was later to refer to the article that I contributed to Fox's volume as my 'Fascist paper.' I believe that he was referring not mainly to his own impression but rather to what others were saying about it and particularly to one strong response by a noted anthropologist, S.L. Washburn, in which, singling my paper out of the whole volume, he called it 'reductionist, racist, and ridiculous.' ... I wonder if people who struggle to extend the frontiers of a discipline against a current of peer disapproval sometimes need to convince themselves and other that they are not quite the heretics and outlaws everyone thinks and this need is expressed through an extra militancy against further extension in the direction they themselves have been taking." ...

"I think it would be sad to have to accept a culturist's conclusion that current minority and traditional cultures have nothing that they can usefully contribute genetically to the systems that dominate them. Few I think would deny a contribution of minority genes to America's basketball excellence for example. If such a contribution is accepted for a physical trait, why not look for others? ... It is a pity to see scientists struggling to tie each other's hands in respect of some kinds of understanding and in effect crippling themselves in this way relative to poets and novelists. I think that people who do not agree with speculations should simply say why hints that suggested them are worthless, what contrary facts support their own view, and so on. Washburn did none of this."

"This is indeed Wasburn's fallacy - if kin selection is relative, as you state above, then how did you just turn all people from the same racial group into first cousins?"

When discussing kin selection, what matters is the % of identical DNA cf. to the total variable DNA in a population.
Cousins do not havew 12.5% identical DNA, they have (on average) DNA that is 12.5% identical for all of the alleles that are variable in the population (we are modeling the population as an exclusively inbreeding group with random mating).

Steve's point was that people are the same race have the same level of relatedness cf. to people of other races that first cousins do cf. to people of the same race.
A first cousin has 12.5% DNA similarity at variable allels cf. to other people in the random mating group. His identity is much higher when cf. to someone of a different racial group.
Alternately, a close relative who is partly of a different race could be less related to you than a stranger from your own group.

This discussion is rather getting away from the question whether Dawkins is being PC or scientifically dishonest, or whatever. I think Jason provided good evidence for rejecting that proposition.

"This discussion is rather getting away from the question whether Dawkins is being PC or scientifically dishonest, or whatever. I think Jason provided good evidence for rejecting that proposition."

No. I know it's hard to read Hamilton's writings, but what I've quoted shows that Hamilton laid out in 1975, for humans, an explicit model of what van den Berghe later called "ethnic nepotism." Yet, Dawkins has worked hard to deny the concept of ethnic nepotism. For example, here is part of an interview between between Frank Miele and Dawkins where Miele almost pins Dawkins down.

Skeptic: Shortly after publication of The Selfish Gene, you wrote a letter to the editor of Nature [the leading British science magazine, similar to Science here in the US], in which you stated that kin selection theory in no way provides a basis for understanding ethnocentrism. You said you made this statement, in part at least, to counter charges that were being made in the UK at that time by Marxist critics that Selfish Gene Theory was being used by the British National Front to support their Fascist ideology. In retrospect, do you think you went too far in trying to distance yourself from some would-be and very unwanted enthusiasts, or not far enough?
Dawkins: As to distancing myself from the National Front, that I did! The National Front was saying something like this, "kin selection provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other individuals." Kin selection doesn't do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family. It does not favor a generalization of nepotism towards millions of other people who happen to be the same color as you. Even if it did, and this is a stronger point, I would oppose any suggestion from any group such as the National Front, that whatever occurs in natural selection is therefore morally good or desirable. We come back to this point over and over again. I'm definitely not one who thinks that "is" is the same as "ought."

Skeptic: How do you evaluate the work of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, J.P. Rushton, and Pierre van den Berghe, all of whom have argued that kin selection theory does help explain nationalism and patriotism?
Dawkins: One could invoke a kind "misfiring" of kin selection if you wanted to in such cases. Misfirings are common enough in evolution. For example, when a cuckoo host feeds a baby cuckoo, that is a misfiring of behavior which is naturally selected to be towards the host's own young. There are plenty of opportunities for misfirings. I could imagine that racist feeling could be a misfiring, not of kin selection but of reproductive isolation mechanisms. At some point in our history there may have been two species of humans who were capable of mating together but who might have produced sterile hybrids (such as mules). If that were true, then there could have been se

I have previously read Hamilton's paper cited by Steve (for evidence see my post several months ago on 'Group selection and Price's Equation'). Steve is right to interpret it as suggesting an evolutionary basis for hostility between human groups, but the 'groups' Hamilton seems to have in mind are primarily distinguished at a *tribal* level, not 'races' as commonly understood (i.e., 'races' distinguished by obvious physical differences). During most of human history interaction between 'races' (e.g. East Asian and African) must have been rare - too rare for hostility between 'races' as such to be an evolved mechanism. If such hostility does exist, and does have a genetic basis, it is more plausible (IMHO) to interpret it as a by-product of some other evolved trait (such as preferences in sexual selection) than as a directly selected adaptation. I think this is the point Dawkins is making in his interview, and whether or not you agree with it, it is not 'unscientific'.

"During most of human history interaction between 'races' (e.g. East Asian and African) must have been rare - too rare for hostility between 'races' as such to be an evolved mechanism."

Okay, so now we're agreed that all this talk about Hamiltonian nepotism _only_ applying to "close kin" -- e.g., uncle-nephew -- is hooey and that Hamilton specifically wrote as far back as 1975 about it applying to fairly large groups of people.

So, let's get to the question of whether Hamilton was talking about "race" or just "tribe."

Once again, your argument -- and Dawkins' -- is with Hamilton. In the second paragraph of Hamilton's 1975 book chapter "Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach from evolutionary genetics" (p. 330 of the paperback of Vol 1. of "Narrow Roads of Gene Land." Hamilton wrote "... I hope to produce evidence that some things which are often treated as purely cultural in humans -- say racial discrimination -- have deep roots in our animal past and thus are quite likely to rest on direct genetic foundations." So, Hamilton was talking about the evolution of "racial discrimination."

I call this widespread but naive assumption that David is expressing that "racism" is something radically different by nature from "ethnocentrism" or "tribalism" or "clannishness" or whatever, the "American Fallacy."

The late 20th Century America is one of the few places/times in world history where the assumption that the only salient groups differences are between continental-scale groups could have seemed plausible. Even early 20th Century Americans would have thought that implausible. It's a measure of the imperialistic cultural power of America that it can spread an idea based on an almost uniquely American situation all over the world, even though the local facts on the ground give it the lie.

Well, he wasn't talking about 'racial discrimination' in the article Steve specifically referred to earlier. Moreover, to say that 'racial discrimination' has 'direct genetic foundations' is not the same as saying that it is an evolved adaptation. For the reasons I gave, I regard that as highly unlikely. And if Hamilton thought otherwise, I disagree with him! Hamilton's bad ideas are usually more interesting than most people's good ideas, but he wasn't infallible.

Sorry, I must correct myself, he did *mention* 'racial discrimination' in the preliminaries to that article, but the arguments he actually develops in the substance of the article relate to neighbouring 'tribes'. Whether his arguments are sound even in that context is moot. One of his key assumptions is that there is a sharp drop-off in relationship at the 'boundaries' between 'tribes'. This would need to be empirically tested. One reason for doubting it it the tendency of neighbouring 'tribes' to steal each other's women in warfare.

There is a contradiction in that argument that there would not be racial conflict in the adaptationally important period, and the simultaneous claim that races don't exist, or don't exist except as almost-imperceptibly grading-off clines. If the clines, and thus genetic distance also, are really there, that leaves open the case of a faculty measuring genetic distance, and the possibility of increasing negative response to genetic distance, beyond a near threshold. The Hamilton quote from above:"...make up in multiplicity what they lack in close degree" is a short one that expresses the point in dispute.

David B. is getting confused and contradictory. Leda Cosmides' argument against Hamilton's position is that before modern transportation, cavemen would never have come in contact with races from other continents, so ethnic nepotism couldn't have evolved in the EEA. Hamilton, in contrast, showed a model way back in 1975 of exactly how it could have evolved in the EEA on a much smaller scale for tribes (or for in the historic era for "towns," as Hamilton also says). Cosmides needs to disprove Hamilton's model. When I challenged her on it, her response was that Hamilton was a poor lecturer, which didn't strike me as particularly persuasive.

To then say, as David tries to do that, well, sure ethnic nepotism evolved during the EEA with only the subtle differences seen between tribes as the fuel for ethnic nepotism and ethnocentrism, but then this instinct couldn't work in the modern world with the big, obvious glaring differences seen between continental races is simply self-contradicting.

Maybe Hamilton is wrong, but I sure haven't heard any good arguments for that. Moreover, I've shown definitively that van den Berghe and Salter are Hamilton's true heirs, not Dawkins and Tooby/Cosmides.

A lot of government power is riding on the official claim that aversion to genetic distance has to be learned. Could it be tested by having young children who've only seen relatives in some isolated villages be presented with strangers of varying degrees of genetic distance; then observe their fear responses to see if they correlate. If officials are confident that they should be trusted with more power to try to improve relations between groups, because any such aversions have to be learned, then they should be eager to prove their case by such means.

I am probably confused, and I may be contradictory. To be frank I am just not very interested in the subject of racial differences. Neither, I suspect, is Dawkins. Among the top 20 issues of interest and importance in human evolution, I would put the evolution of racial differences somewhere in the bottom quartile.

However, for the record, I don't see any contradiction in what I have said so far. Steve says "To then say, as David tries to do that, well, sure ethnic nepotism evolved during the EEA with only the subtle differences seen between tribes as the fuel for ethnic nepotism and ethnocentrism, but then this instinct couldn't work in the modern world with the big, obvious glaring differences seen between continental races is simply self-contradicting."

Well, it would be, but it isn't what I said.

Hamilton has an interesting, but avowedly speculative, argument for the possibility that 'ethnocentrism' is an adaptive evolved trait among 'tribes'. I agree that this is a possibility, but I would reserve judgement on whether it is actually true. Based on anthropological evidence, I suspect that 'tribes' have enough genetic interchange to prevent marked discontinuities of relatedness arising between nearby tribes.

Be that as it may, Hamilton's argument applies principally to groups that are much smaller and more physically similar than what we are accustomed to call 'races'. If 'ethnocentrism' is an evolved adaptation, it has not evolved primarily in relation to people of different 'races'.

However, it is conceivable that an adaptation evolved at a 'tribal' level is now operating, with malign consequences, in the new circumstances created by modern conditions, where people from different continents are mixed together. If this is what Steve is saying, I would agree that it is a possibility, but I don't think it is inconsistent with what I said earlier. Of course, we would need evidence, not just speculation.

It is also clear that in modern circumstances such an 'instinct', if it exists, would be a maladaptation which we should aim to suppress or eliminate, not encourage. But for what it is worth, based on the experience of the UK, I don't think that hostility between 'races' is very deep-rooted, whereas differences of religion, culture, and language are very serious obstacles to 'peace and understanding'.

After all that, I'm not sure if anyone wants to talk about anything else, but how about the issue of similarities or differences in physical appearance not respecticing racial boundaries? Steve Sailer mentioned Hispanics that look Middle Eastern, Papuans that look black, and the Naga people that look Native American when they're really Asian. Here are some other ones that may be similiar: Polynesian people such as Maori's that look Native American, Eskimos and Chukchis that look more Asian than Native American, some central Asian peoples that look Asian as in "Oriental" but are apparently more genetically similiar to Native Americans, and South Asians who apparently have a large degree of Asian (as in Oriental) admixture, but for the most part, just look like white people painted brown. The issue of admixture seems puzzling because sometimes admixture seems to blend appearance as well as DNA, but sometimes it doesn't. For example, the actor who played Pablo Escobar in the movie Blow is part Maori and part white, so given that he is part Polynesian and part white, and many Polynesians look Native American, it makes sense that he looks Hispanic. But he has also played Arabs in other films. And may Aboriginies look African, but from the pictures I've seen, it seems that aboriginies who are part white look nothing like Africans who are part white. In fact, those two mixed groups look very different from one another despite they're being presumably more genetically similiar because they're both part white. In general, Papuans and Aboriginies are kind of weird because they apparently belong to the same racial group but can look very different and overall there doesn't seem to be any unifying "look" to this group of people. Some look black, some look Native American, some have a unique aboriginie look about them, some look sort of Caucasian and some don't look like any of the above. I've never read of anyone trying to use stuff like this to weaken the concept of race or say that "race doesn't exist", but I would have more respect for an argument along those lines than some of the other ridiculous baloney that is used to try to deconstruct race.

For what it is worth, most tribal conflict in the past was maybe not with near neighbors but rather more distant ones. How so? With population pressure during the EEA, when a single local group outgrew the carrying capacity of its traditional hunting and gathering territory, it might impinge upon its neighbors'. But when all groups are growing, more complex dynamics take place, in which large groups of tribally related groups migrate through kin territories into more distantly related regions. You see this in the European setting in ancient and historical times (albeit now it is a neolithic, agricultural economy) with Goths displacing Visigoths displacing Gauls or whatever in complex swirling patterns that, like a lava lamp, are continental in dimension. Such a mechanism might favor conflict between more distantly related groups over more closely related ones. I know this is very impressionistic, but the thought occurs.

david b:
It is also clear that in modern circumstances such an 'instinct', if it exists, would be a maladaptation which we should aim to suppress or eliminate, not encourage.

playing devil's advocate here, but is this bromide etched in stone?

I don't think that hostility between 'races' is very deep-rooted

maybe not hostility, but fear and trepidation.

For puposes of argument, suppose ethnic nepotism is wired in (at the genetic level). How are different ethnic groups to live together peacefully in the future?

One obvious thing is to control population numbers within all ethnic groups and national boundaries. When population growth outstrips resources this obviously can lead to conflict.

For this reason, lamenting the fact that certain groups and/or nations are not reproducing at replacement levels might be misplaced. Far worse, on this crowded planet, are those groups that are reproducing above replacement levels, and then spilling over into neighboring areas.

Thus permitting large-scale immigration from highly reproductive areas into less reproductive areas may not be a good idea, particularly if it has a negative effect on the rate of economic development in the highly reproductive areas, thus delaying the demographic transition that seems to accompany such development.


For example, rather than encouraging large-scale immigration from North Africa to Europe, say, or from Mexico to the United States, it might be better to encourage economic growth in these areas through trade and investment policies. In fact, from this perspective, we might even consider the possibility that it is better to favor these near neighbors over ones further away -- trade and investment in Mexico, for example, in preference to China and India, which currently are vacuuming up the lion's share of Western resources, to the detriment of Mexico, from which factories are already emigrating to Asia, and whose level of per capita GDP has stagnated in the last thirty years.

So maybe the move to a global free trade system was premature, given these regional disequalibriums? Nafta, yes, Gatt no? Even so, to make Nafta work over the long-haul (let alone Gatt )it will be necessary to recognize and address the negative effect it has on American wage rates -- something the "politically correct" economics profession has wilfully refused to do.

Thus, we may be suffering from two forms of mendacity simultaneously: h-bd denial on the one hand, and "factor price equalization" denial on the other. If so, like Diogenes let us put on wooden buckets and search for an honest man to lead us. A willingness to look truth in the face would be more important in such a situation than whether one calls oneself a liberal or a conservative, or belongs to the Democratic or Republican party.

There is a quote from Haldane in which it is said that one could die for two brothers, or 8 cousins, and this would be sensible in the genes' terms. I found several versions of this searching for 'haldane die brothers cousins', but I can't tell which is the accurate one. If one extends that theory out, to the limits of those who "make up in multiplicity what they lack in close degree"(WDHamilton, as quoted above), the implications as to racial affinity and disaffinity would seem undeniable. Or, that is, unless we lack the capacity to estimate genetic distance, beyond some point short of what would be needed.

What is lacking in the arguments which suggested that we would favor other species according to their genetic similarity to us, is that they are not even potentially part of our breeding pool. That is, by natural means, they are not part of it. Likewise there is a limit short of the entire species, beyond which disaffinity as a function of genetic distance can't operate. There must be at least two groups in some degree of competition, and within a species, for genetic distance- determined alarms to go off by a natural impulse.

It is sometimes joked that the human race would unite to repel an alien invader, but for no other purpose. That seems to imply that the degree of relatedness required for altruistic behavior varies according to the situation. We are ready to sacrifice for immediate family members in many everyday situations, for our country or community in times of emergency, but seldom, if ever, for our "race" or "species."

Furthermore, apart from immediate family, it is not clear that these sacrifices are mediated by passions (ie, presumably genes) rather than rationally, ie, using our brains to reason about what is in our long-term interest to do. E.g., did the United States enter World War II in Europe because we felt greater kinship with the English than the Germans? Or because we made common cause to protect values (freedom, democracy) which we held in common with the English, and knew we needed allies to defend them? The latter is obviously closer to the truth -- and also explains why we made a temporary alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union, whose values were diametrically opposed to our own.

Does the degree to which different groups are guided by genes vs. reason vary with the average intelligence level of the group? Most Europeans seem to recognize the advantage of living in a liberal democracy, and are willing to act accordingly when given the opportunity to have one, as we saw in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. We don't see anything similar in Iraq. Is this a matter of intelligence, of culture, or lack of trust in the promise of democracy which the Americans claim to be bringing, because of the genetic distance between us?

It wouldn't be surprising that people who practice 1st cousin marriage, would have more esprit de corps, and more hostility or distrust of the distant outsider who claims to be on their side. Internationalists keep having this blow up in their faces, and they can't learn from a repetition of it, because that would destroy the faith that drives them to intervene as the selfless nationless champions of the remote downtrodden. To many, it is the same as if kofi came to your town and said he knows how to liberate you; how many would be inclined to believe him?

Dawkins does seem to be at pains to make race seem trivial and superficial, even saying that racial discrimination is always wrong. Is war always wrong? In war situations, people get killed just because they're from a group which is foreign, and this difference can be racial. Would we send whites into an environment where 90% would die of malaria, and provide no drugs, since the natives weren't getting them, and racial discrimination supposedly is always wrong? Dawkins could take a less apologetic position on whether racial classifications cause harm. He leaves the genetic distance consideration obscured.

"To be frank I am just not very interested in the subject of racial differences. Neither, I suspect, is Dawkins."

Which is, I think, the point Steve was making.

"Be that as it may, Hamilton's argument applies principally to groups that are much smaller and more physically similar than what we are accustomed to call 'races'. If 'ethnocentrism' is an evolved adaptation, it has not evolved primarily in relation to people of different 'races'."

Uh... so what? If we are hardwired to trust people based on their degree of similarity to us (or to distrust them based on their dissimilarity) woudln't someone who is wildly dissimilar evoke stronger distrust?
If humans evolved to distrust other nearby tribes that were slightly different, you don't think that that instinct would cross over to people who were wildly dissimilar? A taste for sweet things that developed before refined sugar still causes us to enjoy candy, after all.

As for whether or not we should prefer otehr species that are more gentically similar; well, why do you think we find mammals cute and cuddly and find reptiles to be gross and disgusting? Why are we more horrified at eating apes or monkeys than at eating cows?

Good points; a continous spectrum of responsiveness is efficient. Having to have evolved specific aversions is a straw man or false dilemma proposed perhaps to serve a project of intensifying intervention. Suppose that there are two alleles, one called anti-panmictic; and its null allele. Anti-p homozygotes are 80%, heterozygotes are 19%, and there are 1% homozygous for null anti-p. This last 1% bring in the outside genes which can take over during a pathogenic selective sweep. Outbreeding depression is avoided, while the population remains open to something very superior. This allows for maintenance of genetic distance over long periods. Dawkins, in Devils Chaplain, pp.76-77, says sexual selection maintains the differences, which he calls superficial. The immune system, and life and death differences, don't seem so superficial, though.

Some excellent comments.

I'd just add that a lot of how ethnic nepotism grows up is not through some kind of physical genetic distance recognition mechanism buth through higly prosaic chains of kin. Jared Diamond reports that in New Guinea, when two strangers meet on a jungle trail they typically begin talking about all the relatives and in-laws they have, looking to make a connection -- "Great, so you aunt's cousin is my uncle' nephew by marriage." If they have kin in common, they feel they can trust each other because their kin networks would disapprove of bad dealings toward kin.

In our world, a lot of cultural attitudes travel along kin networks, typically among women. Men tend to seek out more specialized networks of like-minded men to converse with (hmmhmmh, what does that remind me of? Oh yeah, this comment section), but women spend an awful lot of time keeping in touch with kin, who keep in touch with their kin, etc. But typically, there is some degree of inbreeding, so these kin networks don't immediately diffuse out into the ether, but tend to close back in on themselves, to some extent.

In that case, one would expect the concepts uncle, aunt, nephew, cousin and even great-uncle, to be among the very oldest. Or perhaps not, if they would have said father's mother's brother's son's daughter.

"If we are hardwired to trust people based on their degree of similarity to us (or to distrust them based on their dissimilarity) woudln't someone who is wildly dissimilar evoke stronger distrust?"

It is difficult to see how such an adaptation could have evolved. How does an individual recognise the 'degree of similarity' of another individual to himself? We are not born with self-portraits coded in our brains. Conceivably an individual might learn to recognise similarities based on childhood experience, so that they would be more 'trusting', or whatever, towards people who resemble their childhood playmates, etc. But in this case, 'racial discrimination', far from being 'deep-rooted', would be dependent on the details of each individual's upbringing. This does at least have the merit of suggesting testable hypotheses, e.g. that people have have been brought up in racially mixed areas will be less hostile or suspicious towards people of other races than those who are brought up in unmixed areas.

In any case, we don't need any elaborate Hamiltonian theory to explain suspicion of strangers, which makes good adaptive sense on plain old Darwinian grounds.

David's POV reminds me of the Uncanny Valley.

only 15% of genetic variation is among population groups. Harpending says it's more like 12.5%

Did Harpending explain why he belives the figure is closer to 12.5? Did he mention any studies, say Cavalli's ?

Officials are asking for, or arrogating despotic powers, on the presumption that genetic distance-correlated disaffinity is learned or acquired environmentally. Yet the relevant experiment has not been performed. Babies who've only been with their relatives could be tested for adrenaline or similar responses, which correlate positively with degree of genetic distance; and these increments going all the way out to the racial and furthest polarities of genetic distance, of persons presented. It is known that people and animals have olfactory abilities to discriminate part of this range. Also, adopted newborns, who have bonded with adopted parents of a different race, could be tested for fear response variability, when introduced to strangers of different race vs. strangers of that of their adoptive parents. If these or equivalent experimental observations are not made, this indicates that officials fear the worst is true; that it is all genetic, and their programs are unfounded.

It is difficult to see how such an adaptation could have evolved. How does an individual recognise the 'degree of similarity' of another individual to himself? We are not born with self-portraits coded in our brains.

Well, we trust our parents, siblings and other family members who look like us, so if we trust people who look like them, then we will trust people who look somewhat like us.

Dienekes: good point. Of course, the recognition of similarity is then of similarity to relatives, not ourselves, but the effect is much the same. The degree of 'trust' engendered should be very limited, or it will be grossly maladaptive. It should also be quite sharply graded: only people who look *a lot* like our own family should be trusted very far.

This proposal is a long way from what Hamilton suggested, but it is feasible and worth testing. John S Bolton has suggested some possible tests.

Does anyone know of a study which investigates the degree of ethnocentrism between the sexes? I would think it would be stronger among males. In the EEA, groups were small and tenuous and could easily cease functioning as a coherent unit after conflict with other groups. And since humans are social animals and can’t just go off on their own and meet periodically for mating like bears, males would suffer far more from such a scenario because females would more easily be absorbed in a neighboring group.

In addition, if patrilocal groups were the norm, females would share greater kinship with neighboring groups than males. This would be well before greater male mobility and conquest rape.

David B. is still wondering:

"It is difficult to see how such an adaptation could have evolved. How does an individual recognise the 'degree of similarity' of another individual to himself?"

Obviously, we have lots of proxies for helping us recognize genetic kinship. Robert Axelrod calls them "tags" -- racial and/or ethnic traits such as appearance, clothing, language, smell, religion, etc. These are not foolproof -- for example, I'm adopted but my extended (adopted) family has always treated me very well. But, if the tags aren't 100% accurate, so what? (I'm defining "racial traits" as traits that can only be passed down within biological families and "ethnic traits" as traits that are often passed down within biological families but don't have to be.)

For example, a simple proxy is: Do they speak the same language as us? For example, many African-Americans strongly dislike it when Hispanic immigrants speak Spanish to each other in front of them because they feel they might be plotting against them. This is not a ridiculous belief due to the low level of law and order in black neighborhoods. Similarly, as Jared Diamond pointed out, when strangers meet on a trail in New Guinea they usually start discussing whether they have any relatives in common to find out whether they can trust each other. If you can't hold that conversation because you don't speak a mutual language, the likelihood that you share kin is low. If you met two guys on the trail who talked to each other about you in a language you couldn't understand, you'd be right to be very worried about their intentions, and maybe you'd shoot first and ask questions later.

Similarly, when national vernacular languages coalesced in Europe, such as more and more Italians starting to know Florentine Italian so they could read Dante, or more Germans learning High German so they could read Luther's Bible, then nationalism started to take off because one of the common tags of kinship -- the ability to communicate verbally -- had now spread to what we would recognize as a national scale. Not too many generations of this development and it wasn't hard to talk Europeans into dying for the fatherland/motherland/fraternity and other kin-based terms in the national vernacular language.

Steve's last comment on the use of proxies is interesting, especially the part about standardization of dialects leading to nationalism. I hadn't heard that one before. What I am wondering about are the implications of all this. Is Steve's point just that these processes are real, we need to recognize them, and go from there? Or does he have something more specific in mind? For example, given that the United States is already a multi-ethnic society, wouldn't the best prescription for social peace in the future be to encourage maximum mixing now in order to produce the new American ethnic group of the future, different from the rest of the world, as an alternative to a lot of ethnic strife leading God knows where (a future Yogoslavia type meltdown) if we don't all assimilate to a common core? If so, this might be a new and additional argument for restricting immigration, in order to allow the assimilation process to speed along as rapidly as possible. Your thoughts, Steve? Also, a personal question, if you don't mind: you once mentioned you were half Jewish, if I remember correctly; how does this relate to your birth vs. adopted parents?

The implications would be, that if affinities and disaffinities of gene-competitive origin are driving a lot of the conflicts which officials delight in exacerbating, we should not grant them power and funding on the basis that all such disaffinities can be re-educated away. If Dawkins is right about sexual selection for trivial ornamental traits, being what population-genetic structure consists of, then presumably officials could regulate Hollywood and other cultural influences, to redefine standards of beauty and desirability, and, presto, no more racial disaffinity. Are these people getting fooled by their own propaganda?

Data indicating that genetic distance itself causes hostilities, has this year been presented by 'joanna shepherd... racial diversity...'(search term) was found to increase interracial violence with an elasticity 3x neutral expectations, and as the independent variable. This effect was independent of other possible influences, and that would point to biological explanations, or not?

I doubt that "ethnic nepotism" is primarily a genetic-biological phenomenon.

One of the predictions of this theory would be that genetically-related ethnies would ally themselves against genetically more distant ones.

But, that rarely happens, and more often than not genetically related ethnies fight each other, or ally themselves with genetically distant ones.

If there is an "inherited impulse" to favor a population's genetic kin, it has certainly not been manifested throughout most of recorded human history.

The growth of nations, as in Europe, could be called a systematic enlargement of alliances, along lines of genetic similarity. At the other extreme, the hundreds of aboriginal nations which were exterminated, or nearly so, on several continents, were disposessed by Europeans who formed alliances or societies out of multiple ethnic groups, who were genetically similar.

An older model of alliance and territory-building, which failed, was the mosaic-pattern of enclave territories linked by a dynastic family. The ever-larger and less enclave-riddled polities swept over the mosaic polities so thoroughly, that today's internationalism even builds up its faith by saying that an iron fate drives us into ever-larger states.

I just re-read Hamilton's article, in search of further enlightenment.

Unfortunately I am not at all sure that Hamilton himself avoids 'Washburn's Fallacy', but his discussion is too vague and speculative to be sure about this. The charitable view is that he was thinking of smallish 'tribes' constantly competing against each other for territory, etc, so that the inter-group component of fitness variance would be high, and with-group altruism would be favoured by between-group selection. This explanation would not apply to larger 'nations', let alone entire continental races. As Jason pointed out, it would definitely be a form of Washburn's Fallacy to suppose that individuals in a large 'nation' would be adapted by kin selection to be altruistic towards each other (compared to outsiders) merely because they might on average have (say) 15% of genes identical by (very distant) descent. I don't think Steve Sailer has replied to this point - or perhaps understood it?

BTW, Hamilton himself clearly implies that within-group altruism would drop away in large modern societies, because he says (p.338) 'As to altruism, recent tribal immigrants are likely to be net importers of this precious stuff - themselves the losers when they expose their natural communistic generosity to civilized exploitation.'

Whether Hamilton is right about the evolution of within-group altruism in 'tribes' is moot. I have pointed out the likelihood of strong gene flow between tribes due to capture of women. On an empirical level, the anthropological evidence, e.g. on the Australian aboriginals, does not suggest that they were particularly friendly towards each other. Even the 'peaceful' Bushmen have homicide rates higher than American cities.

Typo: in the fourth line of the second paragraph it should say 'within-group altruism'.

And the page reference should be page 338 - I don't know how the smiley-face got in there!

Certainly misplaced generosity can backfire, even bringing on lethal attacks. In terms of Dawkins offering sexual selection; don't people feel aversion to the grotesque and exaggerated, and sexually prefer what looks healthy and normal? The mark of sexual selection might be useless exaggerated appendages, while humans seem to call desirable what looks close to the average of their population, but more robust, or bursting with health in appearance?

There are two opposite forces constantly in dynamic tension: what, for lack of better terms, I'll call nepotism and sibling rivalry. People are most likely to fight with those closest to them on the family tree because that who is best situated to compete with them for a resource -- e.g., parental attention, an inheritance, etc. But they are also most likely to form alliances with those closest to them when competing with outsiders.

Steve Pinker pointed out to me a couple of years ago that most of the most famous tragedies of the stage -- Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, King Lear, Long Day's Journey into Night -- are so cathartic because they are based on that tension between the 50% of your genes you share with your first degree relatives and thus drives you toward nepotism and the 50% you alone possess which drives you toward sibling rivalry. If you were a worker bee who shared 75% of your genes with your sister the queen, it just wouldn't be as moving to observers if you chose to give up your chances of mating and reproduction to help your sister and nephews/nieces (which is why plays about social insects general fail to make it to Broadway ... among other reasons).

The same dynamic tension is seen at larger levels of social organization. The most convenient people to predate upon are those closest to you, but they are also your most convenient allies when an outsider threatens both of you. They are also the likeliest allies if your ambitions for predation grow more ambitious. To paraphrase Rodney King, "If we can all just get along .. we can conquer the world!"

This two-opposing force model of how the world works strikes me as being the simplest, most far-reaching Social Theory of Everything I know of. Not surprisingly, though, it's somewhat lacking in surprising implications because people have been thinking about various aspects of this theory forever.

Okay, here's one prediction: the best possible situation for the human race in terms of global peace and solidarity as a whole would be a low-intensity War of the Worlds against an alien planet for possession of some uninhabited but habitable third planet. Ronald Reagan told the UN in a speech in 1988 that our human disputes would seem petty and vanish if we were attacked by aliens. Of course, we don't really want to be attacked by aliens, but a slow motion struggle for a control of a third planet would be useful.

To come down to Earth, I published a list of ideas about how young people of different races can be better induced to get along in National Review at 1995 using techniques borrowed from the U.S. Army and football teams: http://www.isteve.com/armyrace.htm

The basic idea is to manipulate artificial "tags" that we generally sense as signifying kinship to develop fraternal feelings in young men of different races.

On a broader level, I would endorse respect for international borders, ideally enforced by a hyperpower with widely seen as having no territorial ambitions of its own (e.g., America before the Iraq Attaq) and no special relationships with local powers having territorial ambitions (e.g., the Likud Party), limits on immigration to no more than can be assimilated by intermarriage (i.e., the percentage of people self-identifying as belonging to an immigrant group should stay the same), individualism and equal treatment by the law among citizens, but discrimination in favor of citizens over noncitizens, etc.

Governments today seem rather content with nepotism. Still, the question is raised, as only government schools could cause it to be made an issue of; why do you do for your people what you will not do for a disadvantaged minority? The entire culture militates against it today; yet spontaneous benevolence happens systematically as if it were ruled by genetic distance considerations, and not by the approved impulses. Associative learning can compete with the olfactory mechansim which may underlie the genetic disaffinity spectrum. There is a race industry which pretends that this spectrum is environmental. Officials are striving to magnify the secondary signals of such difference as if conflict were the objective.

The basic idea is to manipulate artificial "tags" that we generally sense as signifying kinship to develop fraternal feelings in young men of different races.

Heh...G-Unit!!


as for the rest, I think that the key issue here is that quoting a scalar figure for similarity of "12.5%" and saying it means cousin-similarity and within-ethnic-group similarity are comparable is not correct.

For one thing, it neglects all the linkage and correlation structure between those genes.

Even if you just concentrate on the scalar figure, the problem is that the MRCA (most recent common ancestor) calculation in both cases is not directly comparable. In the cousin case the MRCA are your grandparents, and you can do a simple path diagram from pop gen 101 to figure that 1/8 of your genes are identical by descent to those of your cousin - meaning exactly the same base pair sequences in the same locations on the same chromosomes, modulo recombination & mutation.

In the ethnic group case the calc isn't based on MRCA and identical by descent directly. It is premised on sequence data for the most part. The two frameworks ARE comparable, but not on a one-for-one basis of 12.5 to 12.5. As Malloy pointed out, for one thing the standard cousin path diagram would count many relationships as non-inbreeding...BUT if you take the common ancestor *way* back, humans *are* more inbred within ethnic groups, and the figure would be considerably higher than 12.5 similarity for cousins.

Put another way, the standard 12.5 cousin similarity figure from path diagrams in pop genetics 101 assumes that your parents have no alleles that are identical by descent. If they are in the same ethnic group, that assumption is clearly false, and they are "inbred" in this sense.

All these calculations would be different if it were known, what is the intensity of anti-panmictic tendencies in man. If theory tells us that the MRCA of all humanity should be only ~2k yr ago, as Rohde determines; but another line of inquiry says that it was, say 100k yr ago, that yields an estimate of divergence from panmictic expectations, or not? What if self-consciously internationalistic and anti-racist science is afraid to inquire into this, because it rattles certain optimistic assumptions about peace and goodwill, and governability of polyglot polities?

Here is a link to William D. Hamilton's paper Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: an Approach from Evolutionary Genetics from 1975 that we have been discussing.

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bow...wery/ isaom.html

Anyone know of any internet sites containing the other major articles by Hamilton? Vol I of Gene Land is a big hit to the wallet.

I once read an article in which Dawkins was complaining about the fact that people always assumed that because he was a geneticist, he believed in the idea that man was simply another animal, confounded by nature, and whose biologly purpose was to simply reproduce. He claimed that this idea was nonsense,and claimed that the fact that man uses contraception completely discredits this idea . I don't even need to explain how ridiculous that agrument is. Dawkins was obviously either deliberately making a fallicous agrument to to keep favor with people with certain political prejudices, or he's allowing his jugdement to be obscured by his own political prejudices. either way, i don't trust him, and have to agree with steve sailer.