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Female Mate Preference and Somatypes
1450 words
PumpkinPerson’s most recent article Are muscular guys genetically inferior? is a joke. He makes huge assumptions and attempts to this ‘social experiment’ as evidence that women find ‘nerds’ more attractive. The logic here is that since East Asians are the ‘most evolved’ race and (in his world) they have the least testosterone along with the highest intelligence, that this is some kind of apex of human evolution. However the conclusions he makes off of this one video are very erroneous and I will explain why.
PP writes:
They are simply genetically inferior because the muscular body type branched off the evolutionary tree pre-maturely.
…No idea what he’s talking about. No source that the ‘muscular body type branched off the evolutionary tree prematurely.’ This is just an assumption because Africans supposedly have higher testosterone than both Europeans and East Asians, except East Asians have the highest testosterone out of all of all three traditional races, not Africans.
After watching this video I feel like starving my muscles off (not that I recommend that).
Good luck with that.
I realize not everyone agrees with the progressive model of evolution, but real scientists do. For example, check out this phys.org article:
This article has nothing to do with progressive evolution at all. In fact, this article is basically a summary of Full House (Gould, 1996) in which Gould argues that since life began at the left wall of complexity—where no organism can get simpler—that a right-tail distribution of complexity was inevitable. I have covered this here. This is not evidence for progressive evolution. It is, in fact, the opposite. He’s never read Gould’s books so he wouldn’t know that.
Now, PP’s contention that women find nerds more attractive has no basis. When I think of a ‘nerd’, I think of a scrawny pencil-neck, buck teeth, person with thick-rimmed black glasses. This, obviously, isn’t true. If it were, then why do East Asians—Japan specifically—have the lowest birthrates? Of course, social factors have a lot to do with it—birthrates decline in developed countries (Nargund, 2009; Sinding, 2009), as well as genetic ones (Harris and Nielson, 2016). So, clearly, the more intelligent, more developed countries don’t have more children, which then, of course implies that either higher IQ people are less desirable from a reproductive point of view (plausible), or they forgo having children until around 28 years of age (Lange, Rinderu and Bushman, 2016). Whatever the case may be, those with higher IQs do not conceive as many children as those with lower IQs, signifying something about their fitness aspects.
Further, women, evolutionarily speaking, sexually selected men for high levels of testosterone, which leads to bigger muscles, more defined facial features, higher levels of aggression (good for protecting genetic interests) and so on. The fact that some people may think that nerds have better prospects than non-nerds, evolutionarily speaking, had no basis in reality and for one to believe as much, it has to be driven by ideology.
Dixson et al (2010) showed that women prefer men with the mesomorphic somatype and ‘average’ body type, then prefer ectomorphs (a skinnier body type) and finally endomorph (a heavier build) ranging from most attractive to least. This study shows that, at least when it comes to European females, they prefer mesomorphic somatypes, which, more often than not, one who is over 6 feet tall will have. Does that seem like a ‘nerd’ to you? I don’t think so. Someone who has the potential ability to control a room with his presence doesn’t seem like a nerd to me. These are the same people who are CEOs.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell showed that on average, CEOs averaged just under 6 foot tall. Since the average American is 5 foot 9, the average CEO has a three-inch height advantage over the average man in America. However, when looking at those who are 6 feet tall and up, for average Joe the percentage is a paltry 3.9 percent while, in Gladwell’s sample, 30 percent were over 6’2″. So, Gladwell states, the lack of minorities and women in high positions has a plausible explanation: height. Men are, on average taller than women. Tall men earn more money than their shorter counterparts. Taller children also perform better on cognitive tests, taller men earn more money in Mexico, and taller children do better on learning tests in India (Lawson and Spears, 2016).
Women want taller men more than men want taller women (Stulp, Buunk, and Pollet, 2012). Tall men are also more likely to have a mesomorphic somatype. Those somatypes are seen as the most attractive. Does that seem like a nerd somatype to you? An athletic somatype? On the other hand, women aren’t attracted to short men (Nettle, 2002). East Asians—the so-called ‘most evolved race’—are the shortest race. Doesn’t look too good for them.
Furthermore, while East Asian men see themselves as attractive and dateable, they don’t believe society sees it that way. Forty-six percent of the sample said they could recall one instance where they hear someone state that they do not date Asian men, while eleven percent of Asian men have heard it at least six times. For Okcupid’s 2009 race/dating data, 18 percent of Asian women (3,381 yes) would date someone of their own background/skin color while 82 percent (17,227) wouldn’t! So much for the ‘most evolved’ race having dating prospects in their own race. East Asian men said yes to the question at a rate of 24 percent (7,965 yes) and no 76 percent of the time (25,358).
To further put this into perspective, white women would said yes to the question at a rate of 54 percent (154,595) and no at a rate of 46 percent (132,497) while white men said yes at a 40/60 yes/no rate (183,360/277,827 respectively). In total, 45 percent of whites would prefer to date someone of their skin color/ethnicity while 55 percent wouldn’t (337,955/410,324) while non-whites said yes to the question 20 percent of the time while they said no 80 percent of the time (56,080/222,484).
A 2014 follow-up found the same thing, however with Asian women showing some positive ratings toward Asian males (while all races of men didn’t find black women particularly attractive). However, Asian men were seen as the least attractive throughout the whole sample. Asian males are also seen as less attractive than males of other races (Fisman et al, 2008). In their sample, they found even after running regressions that Asian women found white, black, and ‘Hispanic’ men. They also show that even Asian men find white, black and ‘Hispanic’ females more attractive than Asian females.
In sum, PP’s contentions and reaches in his article are wrong. ‘Nerds’ (in the way I’m defining the word) are not more successful than the alpha CEOs who are over 6’2”. PP seems to have an aversion to testosterone (believes that it is the cause for racial differences in prostate cancer differences, but vitamin D deficiencies are a more likely culprit). East Asian men—the so-called ‘most evolved’ men of the ‘most evolved’ race do not fair well in terms of physical attractiveness, and this may be a reason why the Japanese birthrate is declining, with the average Japanese woman having only one child during her lifetime (Nomura and Koizumi, 2016). PP’s theory makes no sense, because women favor mesomorphic somatypes. Mesomorphs are more likely to be CEOs of 500 companies, more likely to be more cognitively adept and make more money than their shorter counterparts. Making evolutionary theories off of one (obviously fake) ‘social experiment’ is ridiculous. East Asian men, the so-called ‘most evolved man’ fall short in the dating game, due to being seen as less attractive.
References
Dixson, B. J., Dixson, A. F., Bishop, P. J., & Parish, A. (2009). Human Physique and Sexual Attractiveness in Men and Women: A New Zealand–U.S. Comparative Study. Archives of Sexual Behavior,39(3), 798-806. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9441-y
Fisman, R. J., Iyengar, S. S., Kamenica, E., & Simonson, I. (2008) (n.d.). Racial Preferences in Dating: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.610589
Gould, S. J. (1996). Full house: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony Books.
Harris, K., & Nielsen, R. (2016). The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. Genetics, 2016 doi:10.1101/030387
Lange, P. A., Rinderu, M. I., & Bushman, B. J. (2016). Aggression and Violence Around the World: A Model of CLimate, Aggression, and Self-control in Humans (CLASH). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-63. doi:10.1017/s0140525x16000406
Nargund G. (2009) Declining birth rate in Developed Countries: A radical policy re-think is required. F.V & V in ObGyn. 2009;1:191-3
Nettle, D. (2002). Women’s height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,269(1503), 1919-1923. doi:10.1098/rspb.2002.2111
Nomura, K., & Koizumi, A. (2016). Strategy against aging society with declining birthrate in Japan. Industrial Health INDUSTRIAL HEALTH,54(6), 477-479. doi:10.2486/indhealth.54-477
Sinding S.(2009) Population, poverty and economic development. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 364.
Stulp, G., Buunk, A. P., & Pollet, T. V. (2013). Women want taller men more than men want shorter women. Personality and Individual Differences,54(8), 877-883. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.12.019
How Does the Increasingly Diverse American Landscape Affect White Americans’ Racial Attitudes?
1700 words
Last month I wrote about how Trump won the election due to white Americans’ exposure to diversity caused them to support Trump and his anti-immigration policies over Clinton and Sanders. That is, whites high in racial/ethnic identification exposed to more diversity irrespective of political leaning would vote for Trump for President and not Clinton or Sanders. It is commonly said that more diversity will increase tolerance for the out-group, and all will be well. But is this true?
Craig and Richeson (2014) explored how the changing racial shift in America affects whites’ feelings towards the peoples replacing whites (‘Hispanic’/Latino populations) as well as the feelings of whites towards other minority groups that are not replacing them in the country. Interestingly, whites exposed to the racial shift group showed more pro-white, anti-minority violence as well as preferring spaces and interactions with their own kind over others. Moreover, negative feelings towards blacks and Asians were seen, two groups that are not replacing white Americans.
White Canadians who were exposed to a graph showing that whites would be a projected minority “perceived greater in-group threat” leading to the expression of “somewhat more anger toward and fear of racial minorities.” East Asians are showing the most population growth in Canada. Relaying this information to whites has them express less warmth towards East Asian Canadians.
In their first study (n=86, 44 shown the racial shift and 42 shown current U.S. demographics), participants who read the title of a newspaper provided to them. One paper was titled “In a Generation, Ethnic Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority”, whereas the other was titled “U.S. Census Bureau Releases New Estimates of the US Population by Ethnicity.” They were asked questions such as “I would rather work alongside people of my same ethnic origin,” and “It would bother me if my child married someone from a different ethnic background.” Whites who read the newspaper article showing ethnic replacement showed more racial bias than those who read about current U.S. demographics. Whites exposed to projected demographics were more likely to prefer settings and interactions with other whites compared to the group who read current demographics.
In study 2 a (n=28, 14 Dutch participants and 14 American participants, 14 exposed to the U.S. racial shift, 14 exposed to the Dutch racial shift), those in the U.S. racial shift category showed more pro-white/anti-Asian bias than participants in the Dutch racial shift category. Those who were exposed to the changing U.S. ethnic landscape were more likely to show pro-white/anti-black bias than participants exposed to the Dutch racial shift (study 2b, n=25, 14 U.S. racial shift, 11 Dutch racial shift). In other words, making the U.S changing racial/ethnic population important, whites showed that whites were, again, more likely to be pro-white and anti-minority, even while exposed to an important racial demographic shift in a foreign country (the Netherlands). Whites, then, exposed to more racial diversity will show more automatic bias towards minorities, especially whites who live around a lot of blacks and ‘Hispanics’. Making whites aware of the changing racial demographics in America had them express automatic racial bias towards all minority groups—even minority groups not responsible for the racial shift.
In study 3 (n=620, 317 women, 76.3% White, 9.0% Black, 10.0% Latino, 4.7% other race) whether attitudes toward different minority groups may be affected by the exposure to the racial shift. Study 3 specifically focused on whites (n=415, 212 women, median age 48.8, a nationally representative sample of white Americans). Half of the participants were shown information about the projected ethnic shift in America while the other half were given a news article on the geographic mobility in America (individuals who move in a given year). They were asked their feelings on the following statements:
“the American way of life is seriously threatened” and were asked to indicate their view of the trajectory of American society (1 = American society is getting much worse every year, 5 = American society is getting much better every year); these two items were standardized and averaged to create an index of system threat (r = .64). To assess system justification, we asked participants to indicate their agreement (1 = strongly agree, 7 = strongly disagree) to the statement “American society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve.”
They were also asked the following questions on how certain they were of America’s social future:
“If they increase in status, racial minorities are likely to reduce the influence of White Americans in society.” The racial identification question asked participants to indicate their agreement (1 = strongly agree, 7 = strongly disagree) with the following statement, “My opportunities in life are tied to those of my racial group as a whole.”
The researchers had the participants read the article about the impending racial shift in America and had them fill out “feeling thermometers” on how they felt about differing racial groups in America (blacks, whites, Asians and ‘Hispanics’) with 1 being cold and 100 being hot. Whites reported the most positivity towards their own group, followed by Asians, blacks and showing the least positivity towards ‘Hispanics’ (the group projected to replace whites in 25 years). Figure 2 also shows that whites don’t show the same negative biases they would towards other minorities in America, most likely due to the ‘model minority‘ status.
So the researchers showed that by making the racial shift important, that led to more white Americans showing negative attitudes towards minorities—specifically ‘Hispanics’. This was brought about by whites’ “concerns of lose of societal status.” When whites begin to notice demographic changes, the attitudes towards minorities will change—most notable the attitudes towards blacks and ‘Hispanics’ (which is due to the amount of crime committed by both groups, and is why whites show favoritism towards Asians, in my opinion). Overall, it was shown in a nationally representative sample of whites that showing the changing demographics in the country leads to more negative responses towards minority groups. This is due to the perceived threat on whites’ group status, which leads to more out-group bias.
These four studies report empirical evidence that contrary to the belief of liberals et al—that an increasingly diverse America will lead to more acceptance—more exposure to diversity and the changing racial demographics will have whites show more negative attitudes towards minority groups, most notably ‘Hispanics’, the group projected to become the majority by 2042. The authors write:
Consistent with this prior work, the present research offers compelling evidence that the impending so-called “majority-minority” U.S. population is construed by White Americans as a threat to their group’s position in society and increases their expression of racial bias on both automatically activated and selfreport attitude measures.
Interestingly, the authors also write:
That is, the article in the U.S. racial shift condition accurately attributed a large percentage of the population shift to increases in the Latino/Hispanic population, yet, participants in this condition expressed more negative attitudes toward Black Americans and Asian Americans (Study 3) as well as greater automatic bias on both a White-Asian and a White-Black IAT (Studies 2a and 2b). These findings suggest that the information often reported regarding the changing U.S. racial demographics may lead White Americans to perceive all racial minority groups as part of a monolithic non-White group.
You can see this from the rise of the alt-right. Whites, when exposed to the reality of the demographic shift in America, will begin to show more pro-white attitudes while derogating minority out-groups. It is important to note the implications of these studies. One could look at these studies, and rightly say, that as America becomes more diverse that ethnic tensions will increase. Indeed, this is what we are now currently seeing. Contrary to what people say about diversity “being our strength“, it will actually increase ethnic hostility in America and lead towards evermore increasing strife between ethnic groups in America (that is ever-rising due to the current political and social climate in the country). Diversity is not our “strength”—it is, in fact, the opposite. It is our weakness. As the country becomes more diverse we can expect more ethnic strife between groups, which will lower the quality of life for all ethnies, while making whites show more negative attitudes towards all minority groups (including Asians and blacks, but less so than ‘Hispanics’) due to group status threat. The authors write in the discussion:
That is, these studies revealed that White Americans for whom the U.S. racial demographic shift was made salient preferred interactions/settings with their own racial group over minority racial groups, expressed more automatic pro-White/antiminority bias, and expressed more negative attitudes toward Latinos, Blacks, and Asian Americans. The results of these latter studies also revealed that intergroup bias in response to the U.S. racial shift emerges toward racial/ethnic minority groups that are not primary contributors to the dramatic increases in the non-White (i.e., racial minority) population, namely, Blacks and Asian Americans. Moreover, this research provides the first evidence that automatic evaluations are affected by the perceived racial shift. Taken together, these findings suggest that rather than ushering in a more tolerant future, the increasing diversity of the nation may actually yield more intergroup hostility.
Thinking back to Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory, we can see why this occurs. Our genes are selfish and want to replicate with out similar genes. Thus, whites would become less tolerant of minority groups since they are less genetically similar to them. This would then be expressed in their attitudes towards minority groups—specifically, ‘Hispanics’ as that ethny will most likely to become the majority and overtake the white majority in 25 years. This is GST on steroids. Once whites realize the reality of the situation of increasing diversity in America—along with their status in the country as a whole—they will then show more negative bias towards minority out-groups.
All in all, the more whites are exposed to diversity in the social context as well as the reality of the ethnic demographic shift in 25 years will be more likely to show negative attitudes towards all American ethnies (though less negative attitudes towards Asians, dude to being less criminal, in my opinion). As the country becomes less white, so to will the whites in America become less tolerant of all minorities and start banding together for pro-white interests—showing that diversity is not our strength. This, in reality, is exactly what liberals do not want—whites banding together showing less favoritism towards the out-group. However, this is what occurs in countries that increasingly become diverse.
The Rise of Ethnocentrism and the Alt-Right: The Rebirth of Selfish Genes
2500 words
Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past two years, you should have come across the Alt-Right movement somewhere on the Internet. What is driving the rise of the Alt-Right and Nationalism in the West? Simple answer: Selfish Genes. We are, at the end of the day, bags of meat trying to replicate our genes and have more children as to increase our genes’ copies of themselves. This rise in the Alt-Right is due to continued demonization of whites. For instance, a Rutgers professor was quoted as saying “All white people are evil, some are only ‘less bad’ than others“. Statements of this nature, said over and over again towards a population that’s about to become a minority (I won’t use any of the estimates as the TFR for populations constantly changes, but it will happen eventually) will eventually have the open-minded ones become sick of what is occurring to people who look like themselves. I hypothesize that more ethnocentric people have higher levels of the brain peptide oxytocin, which in turn leads to higher rates of ethnocentrism. From the article:
Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one’s group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members.
…
Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.
Oxytocin is known as ‘the love drug’. We can then stretch this to ‘love of one’s race/ethny’. Since political beliefs are heritable (though environment is “still key”, we know that we make our environments based on our genes), I hypothesize that those who are genetically more prone to leaning conservative and ALSO have higher levels of brain oxytocin would be more likely to be ethnocentric and follow a movement such as the Alt-Right. Conversely, people who are genetically more prone towards liberalism (neo-liberalism, not old-fashioned real American liberalism) also have higher levels of oxytocin, except instead of directing their altruistic behaviors towards genetically similar co-ethnics, they direct their altruism towards the out-group. Oxytocin as well as which political ideology one is genetically disposed to, can more than likely be the culprit for these current phenomena that we see in America with both right-wingers and left-wingers.
Some excerpts from my article from earlier in the year Altruism and Ethnocentrism:
We can see ethnocentrism in action in our very own society today. Black Lives Matter is one (extreme) definition of ethnocentrism. La Raza is yet another extreme example. The KKK is another. We can see that in these groups, the motivation to be altruistic to one’s own kind far outweighs being altruistic to those of a different race/ethnicity. Altruism/ethnocentrism is a huge part of the woes of America today.
Which finally brings me to this: why exactly do whites in America not have this same altruistic/ethnocentric behavior towards their own?
Rushton answers this question in one of his AmRen talks: Genetic Similarity Theory and Ethnic Nationalism.
He says that he has really thought about it before and has no definitive answer. But, we are a species who ‘follows the leader’ so to speak. He says to look at individual psychology and not anything to do with being more spineless. That we want to be liked and not disliked. We learn many of our social attitudes (social learning). So we look to people who are similar to ourselves (names some Presidents and others), and that those people tell us things, and since they are high status, we believe it. It’s difficult to go against what those at the top of our society say.
He says what is right and wrong is basically what our neighbors are doing. One outstanding example he gives is how when those at the top say “open your borders and allow more immigrants in” since we are social animals we take to it and want to do it because we ‘follow the leader’. With the majority though right now in America (liberalism/leftism/Marxism), that is the ‘societal norm’ for the country. Therefore, everyone follows that one societal norm, for the most part.
The mass media plays a huge role in this, as I have noted in my previous article on what is going on in Europe and why. Telling whites to hate themselves, that whites are the cause of all evils in the world, makes one begin to hate themselves, their families and, of course, their race/ethnic group. Rushton says many people have said that the media is the cause for many whites with the self-hate that they have. He says back in earlier times, the Jews were self-hating in their identity, because they have assimilated some of the disdain for the wider community. He says the black groups have historically hated themselves because they identified with the conception they have of themselves of the white slave masters/white majority have of them.
Though there is a genetic desire to construct (hi social constructs. =^) ) an identity, the positive cues of that identity has to be picked from the culture (notice anything?).
Finally, David Duke asks Rushton “How would one increase ethnic solidarity and ethnic nationalism”. He says it’s common sense when Goebbels had complete control of the media in Germany, ethnic nationalism shot up, ethnic solidarity increased, out-group hatred increased and the German birth rate shot up. He said the images being displayed on television is the cause for the rise in the aforementioned points. He says, for instance, if you show a lot of blonde haired, blue eyed white babies and women being happy with those white babies in the media, showing women that are happy being stay at home mothers and not working in turn, more women will want to go out and have more babies and be stay at home mothers. He says what you see portrayed on TV, what is portrayed by people who look like you in the media, will make you take to it more.
How is our media today? I noted, very briefly in my previous article, that the media is anti-white. Showing things to bring down the morale of American whites is a huge cause of the lack of altruism and ethnocentrism in American whites.All of these anti-white articles you see in the media daily, all of the anti-white things you see on TV every day, all compound to have what we have in our society today: Marxist whites who go along with groups such as BLM, going completely against their genetic interests, because of media socialization.
Rushton’s AmRen talk on ethnic nationalism should be on your list to view. Media socialization plays a huge part in the self-denigration of whites in America. Being told you’re ‘racist’ just because of your ancestry, to being told that you should be “so sorry” for things that transgressed hundreds of years ago (never mind the fact that the chance that a white person who currently lives in America today most likely has no familial ties of any type of slavery that occurred in the beginnings of this (once great) country. Things like this, when told to someone over and over again, will eventually have them embrace ”’radical”’ ideologies (radical in this sense being far outside of the American norms).
This rise in ‘identity politics’ (hate that phrase, both sides do it) has led to the rise of both the far-left and far-right. But, when you really think about it, ‘identity politics’ is a way to show altruistic behaviors towards genetically similar others. Rushton’s genetic similarity theory (based off of Dawkins’s (1976) theory of selfish genes) explains why these differences how our altruistic acts manifest themselves physically. According to Rushton’s theory, we are more likely to help others who share a similar set of genes. That’s not to say that liberals showing altruistic behavior towards non-co-ethnics refutes the GST theory; on the other hand, it strengthens it.
Americans of mixed ancestry made up for ethnic dissimilarity by matching up on the more heritable traits, whereas the correlation is lower for those traits that are more influenced by the environment. Since the correlation is higher for heritable traits, i.e., BMI, personality, alcoholism, aggressiveness, criminality, psychiatric disorders and so on. Since the correlations are higher than in the environmentally mediated traits and since mixed-race couples match on more heritable traits than on the traits more influenced by the environment, this shows us that even though they are marrying outside of their race/ethnicity, they still match up on the more heritable traits and not the traits more influenced by the environment. So even a liberal’s altruistic actions towards non-co-ethnics shows that GST is still in effect.
The main point is this: our genes are selfish AND they want to produce similar genes. Who is more likely to be genetically similar to yourself? A co-ethnic. This is why nationalism is rising—it works!! Nationalism is rising because the people themselves—the vast majority of ‘vehicles’—are in danger of not being able to ‘replicate’ (their genes). So since the ‘vehicle’ is in danger, the ‘replicators’ have one be more altruistic/ethnocentric to a co-ethnic; oxytocin is the mediator of ethnocentrism as a whole. I’d love to see a study conducted on ethnocentrists and non-ethnocentrists to see what the average level of oxytocin in each group is. I’d bet a large sum of money that the ethnocentrists have higher levels of brain oxytocin while the non-ethnocentrists have a statistically lower amount.
Some of the most distinct genes of individuals will, of course, be found in close family—mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, first cousins, etc. However, against the worldwide variance, the average similarity between people within a single population is on the magnitude of second cousins, so I posit that those with higher levels of brain oxytocin will be more likely to be ethnocentric over others with less of this hormone. See, there is a reason for so-called ‘racist’ (ethnocentric) behavior: since the average similarity between people within a single population is on the magnitude of second cousins against the worldwide variance, this shows why ethnocentric behavior arises.
The rise of nationalism in Europe follows these same patterns. When looking at diversity in the social context, we can see the negative effects of said diversity in neighborhoods (net negative effect, even with the positives that Putnam cites). Knowing the effects of diversity within a homogenous population, we can see the exact cause for the rise of the Alt-Right.
For some people, diversity decreases social trust (this is my opinion) because they see how the out-group acts: increased crime, not assimilating fully to native culture, how many benefits the out-group receives, etc. Then, since it’s drilled into them that ‘we are all the same in the brain no matter where our ancestors evolved for tens of thousands of years’, that all genetically isolated groups must act the same on average. This then causes what Putnam calls ‘hunkering down’—avoiding engagement with the community. This ‘hunkering down’ leads to less social interaction with neighbors and the community as a whole, causing the social trust that Putnam found in his research. Since one of the ways we match on genetic similarity is by culture, when out-groups move in and begin changing the native culture, the ‘hunkering down’ begins to lessen the one way that population propagates its genes—by masking the native culture—which arose for the sole reason of ensuring that the gene made copies of itself with genetically similar others. The increased diversity changes the average person’s perception of their own people since it’s drilled into them that we all have the same mental capacities and behaviors on average (with deviations from said average due to average individual variation; not any inherent genetic racial/ethnic differences).
On the other hand, for one who is more predisposed to lean right who has a higher amount of brain oxytocin on average, sees the negative effects of diversity along with their countrymen getting hurt, negative (natural) feelings then arise. Moreover, seeing how sections of formerly once nice neighborhoods deteriorate when the out-group moves in further drives these feelings. This is one small example from Putnam’s data that shows how diversity negatively affects societies. I’d be interested in a study on racial/ethnic diversity in third-world countries/the East.
This rise we have seen in the Alt-Right is due to the increase of mass immigration to third-world countries. We want to be around genetically similar others—to propagate copies of our genes. With the gene being ‘selfish’, it wants to make copies of genes like itself. Who’s more likely to share similar genes? Parents, brothers, uncles, sisters, brothers, grandparents, first cousins, second- cousins, and third cousins. Since we are related to co-ethnics on the magnitude of second cousins, this shows how and why ethnocentrism evolved. It was beneficial to be more altruistic towards your ‘clan’, and to derogate the out-group since they are genetically dissimilar. This then extends to today in regards to out-groups being derogated—no matter if they’re genetically similar others or if they share the same personalities or hobbies. We want to be around people like ourselves, to better help out members of the ‘team’. The ‘team’ can be anything from race, ethnicity, baseball team, basketball team, football team, hockey team, etc. To understand ethnocentrism, we must understand human evolutionary history. That’s how you understand the rise of far-right or left politics. Genetic similarity theory is that road map to discovering how and why we act the way we do in regards to out-groups.
Any organism strives for the betterment of its group. Any organism will defend that group. Genes cause people to construct ideologies to improve genetic fitness. That one sentence pretty much sums up the rise of the Alt-Right, and along with the negative effects of diversity, you have the recipe for a new right-wing movement.
This growth of “white survivalism” and militant “Christian Identity” groups such as the Aryan Nations, and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, represent a more extreme response to these perceived threats to the AngloSaxon gene pool. If this overall analysis is correct, one might expect similar correlations in deviations from both genetic and ideological norms in other groups. Preserving the “purity” of the ideology might be an attempt at preserving the “purity” of the gene pool. Are ideological “conservatives” typically more genetically homogeneous than the same ideology’s “liberals”?”
The rise of the Alt-Right shows, in my opinion, one of the main facets of human nature—ethnocentrism. It’s seen with the Ashkenazi Jews and Arabs, to Europeans, Africans, and the pretty much isolationist East Asians. The world is beginning to become more ethnocentric—and selfish genes are in the driver’s seat.
The Evolution of Violence: A Look at Infanticide and Rape
1700 words
The pioneer of criminology was a man named Cesare Lombroso, an Italian Jew (a leftover remnant from the Roman days), who had two central theories: 1) that criminal behavior originated in the brain and 2) criminals were an evolutionary throwback, a more primitive type of human. Lombroso felt strongly about the rehabilitation of criminals, at the same time believing in the death penalty for “born criminals”. Though, with new advances in criminology and new insights to the brain, it looks like Lombroso was right with his theory of born criminals.
Why are you 100 times more likely to be killed on your birthday? Why are children 50 times more likely to be murdered by their stepfather than biological one? Why do some parents kill their children? Finally, why do men rape not only strangers, but also rape their wives? All of these questions can be answered with evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionarily speaking, antisocial and violent behavior wasn’t a random occurrence. When these actions occurred tens of thousands of years ago, they were because resources were being acquired from these actions. Thus, we can see some modern criminal acts as resource competition. The more resources one has, the easier it is for him to pass his genes on to the next generation (a big driver for violence). In turn, women are more attracted to males who can provide resources and protection (those who were more antisocial and violent). This also explains these prison romances, in which women get into romances with murderous criminals since they are attracted to the violence (protection) and resources (theft).
The mugger who robs for a small amount of money is increasing his odds of resource acquisition. Drive-by shootings in violent neighborhoods increase the status of those who survive the shootout. What looks like a simple brawl over nothing may be one attempting to increase social dominance. All of these actions have evolutionary causes. What drive these actions are our ‘Selfish Genes’.
The more successful genes are more ruthlessly selfish in their struggle for survival, which then drives individual behavior. The individual behaviors that occur due to our selfish genes may be antisocial and violent in nature, which in our modern society is frowned upon. The name of the game is ‘fitness’. The amount of children you can have in your time allotted on Earth. This is all that matters to our genes. Even those accomplishments you think of, such as completing college or attaining mass amounts of capital all fall back to fitness. With that, increasing your fitness and ensuring your genetic lineage passes on to the next generation is greatly enhanced.
Biological fitness can be enhanced in one of two ways. You can have as many children as possible, giving little parental care to each, or you can have fewer children but show more attention and care to them. This is known as r/K Selection Theory. Rushton’s r/K Selection Theory compliments Dawkins Selfish Gene theory in that the r-strategist is maximizing his fitness by having as many children as possible, while the K-strategist increases his fitness by having fewer children in comparison to the r-strategist but showing more parental attention. There are, however, instances in which humans kill children, whether it’s a mother killing a newborn baby or a stepfather killing a child. What are the reasons for this?
Killing Kids
The risk of being a homicide victim in the first year of life is highest in the first year of life. Why? Canadian Psychologists Daly and Wilson demonstrated in inverse relationship between degree of genetic relatedness and being a victim of homicide. Daly and Wilson discovered that the offender and victim are genetically related in only 1.8 percent of all homicides. Therefore, 98 percent of all murders are killings of people who do not share the killer’s genes.
Many stories have been told about ‘wicked stepparents’ in numerous myths and fairytales. But, as we know, a lot of stories have some basis in reality. Children of stepparents are 40 times more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of a stepparent. People who are living together who are unrelated to one another are more likely to kill one another. Even adoptions are more successful when the adopting parents view the child as genetically similar to themselves.
In this study carried out by Maillart, et al, it was discovered that for mothers, the average age of offense for filicide was 29.5 years for the mother and 3.5 years for the babe. Bourget, Grace, and Whitehurst, 2007 showed that a risk factor for infanticide was a second child born to a mother under 20-years of age. The reasoning for this is simple: at a younger age the mother is more fertile, and thus, more attractive to potential mates. The older the woman is the more sense it makes to hold on to the genetic investment since it’s harder to make up for the genetic loss late in her reproductive life.
Genetic relatedness, fitness, and parental investment show, in part, why filicides and infanticides occur.
Raping Your Wife
There are evolutionary reasons for rape as well. The rape of a non-relative can be looked at as the ultimate form of ‘cheating’ in this selfish game of life. One who rapes doesn’t have to acquire resources in order to attract a mate, he can just go and ‘take what he wants’ and attempt to spread his genes to the next generation through non-consensual sex. It’s known that rape victims have a higher chance of getting pregnant, with 7.98 percent of rape victims becoming pregnant. (News article) One explanation for this is that the rapist may be able to possibly detect how fertile a woman is. Moreover, rapists are more likely to rape fertile women rather than infertile women.
One rapist that author of the book The Anatomy of Violence, Adrian Raine interviewed said that he specifically chose ugly women to rape (Raine, 2013: 28). He says that he’s giving ugly women ‘what they want’, which is sex. There is a belief that women actually enjoy sex, and even orgasm during the rape, even though they strongly resist and fight back during the attack. Reports of orgasm during rape are around 5 to 6 percent (Raine, 2013: 29), but the true number may be higher since most women are embarrassed to say that they orgasmed during a rape.
Men, as we all know, are more likely to engage in no-strings-attached sex more than women. This is due to the ‘burden’ of sex: children. Women are more likely to carefully select a partner who has numerous resources and the ability to protect the family. Men don’t have the burden of sticking around to raise the child.
Men are more likely to find a sexual relationship more upsetting in comparison to women who are more likely to find an emotional infidelity as more distressing. This data on Americans still held true for South Korea, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands. Men are better than women at detecting infidelity, and are more likely to suspect cheating in their spouses (Raine, 2013: 32). Unconscious reason being, a man doesn’t want to raise a child who is not genetically similar to themselves.
But this begs another question: why would a man rape his wife? One reason is that when a man discovers his spouse has been unfaithful, he would want to inseminate her as quickly as possible.
There has never in the history of humankind been one example of women banding together to wage war on another society to gain territory, resources or power. Think about it. It is always men. There are about nine male murderers for every one female murderer. When it comes to same-sex homicides, data from twenty studies show that 97 percent of the perpetrators are male. Men are murderers. The simple evolutionary reason is that women are worth fighting for. (Raine, 2013: 32)
A feminist may look at this stat and say “MEN cause all of the violence, MEN hurt women” and attempt to use this data as ‘proof’ that men are violent. Yes, we men are violent, and there is an evolutionary basis for it. However, what feminists who push the ‘all sexes are equal’ card don’t know, is that when they say ‘men are more likely to be murderers’ (which is true), they are actively accepting biological differences between men and women. Most of these differences in crime come down to testosterone. I would also assume that men would be more likely to have the ‘warrior gene’, otherwise known as the MAOA-L gene, which ups the propensity for violence.
The sociobiological model suggests that poorer people kill due to lack of resources. And one reason that men are way more likely to be victims of homicide is because men are in competition with other men for resources.
Going back to the violence on stepchildren that I alluded to earlier, aggression towards stepchildren can be seen as a strategic way of motivating unwanted, genetically dissimilar others out of the home and not take up precious resources for the next generation bred by the stepfather (Raine, 2013: 34).
Women also have a way to increase their fitness, which a brunt of it is through sexual selection. Women are known to be ‘worriers’. That is, they rate dangerous and aggressive acts higher than men. Women are also more fearful of bodily injury and more likely to develop phobias of animals. In these situations, women are protecting themselves and their unborn (or born) children by maximizing their chances for survival by being more fearful of things. This can help explain why women are less physically violent than men and why those murder stats are so heavily skewed towards men: biology.
Women compete for their genetic interests with beauty and childbearing. The more beautiful the woman, the better resources a woman can acquire from a male and this will ensure a healthy life for the offspring.
Evolutionary psychology can help explain the differences in murder between men and women. It can also explain why young mothers kill their children and why stepparents are so abusive to, and are more likely to murder stepchildren. Of course, a social context is involved but we need to look at evolutionary causes for what we think we may be able to simply explain. Because it’s, more often than not, more complex than we could imagine. And that complexity is our Selfish Genes doing anything possible to reproduce more copies of itself through its vehicle: the human body.
Marriage, Divorce and Genetic Similarity Theory
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Genetic Similarity Theory states that we seek out similar others in order to give our genes the best chance to produce copies of themselves. As Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene, it is genes that survive to the next generation with more copies being found in siblings and related co-ethnics. Therefore, the theory goes, by benefitting genetically similar others, we are benefitting copies of our genes. Speed daters match on genotype, which shows evidence for ability to detect genetically similar others. On a subconscious level, we have the ability to detect genetically similar others.
Assortative mating is a form of sexual selection in which those with similar genotypes and phenotypes mate with each other more often than in would be expected under a random breeding model. One of the numerous ways we match by genetic similarity is phenotype. If the phenotype is similar, more often than not, the genotype is as well. This is what drives friendships and marriages, as well as being the cause for ethnocentrism.
Rushton (1987) showed that humans are able to detect degrees of genetic similarity in others, and prefer those most similar to themselves for friends and spouses than less genetically similar individuals, which is the basis for ethnocentrism. A husband and wife are, on average, as close as fourth cousins. Due to matching by GST, spouses should also match on heritable traits such as IQ, body measurements and personality traits. As McCrae et al (2008) write:
Altruism, Modesty, and Tender-Mindedness are characteristics that most people desire in a spouse (cf. Buss, 1986), but people are most likely to find a mate with these characteristics if they have them themselves. This is an instance of the principle that people with desirable qualities have more options in seeking a desirable mate. At the same time, it seems likely that there is a sense in which disagreeable people may actually prefer the company of their own kind, like the haughty Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” who disposed of his wife because she was too indiscriminately nice.
Everyone has the perfect spouse in their head that they dream of. However, the type of spouse we end up with will, more often than not, be genetically similar to ourselves. Even spouses who are not of the same race or ethnicity match up on heritable traits such as The Big Five, IQ and physiological measurements.
Divorce is also influenced by genetic factors. Jockin, Mcgue and Lykken (1996) found that 40 percent of the variability in the heritability of divorce comes from genetic factors that affect the personality of one spouse. Traditionalism, extraversion and neuroticism (2 of the Big 5 Personality Traits) are causes for divorce. A few reasons I can think of for neuroticism and extraversion being personality traits correlated with divorce is highly neurotic people are more likely to be stressed, anxious, have hypochondria (the worry of contracting an illness) and obsessive behavior. This can put extra strain on a marriage, leading to both of the spouses not being happy in their marriage, leading to divorce. With extraversion, more extraverted people are more open to meeting others and are more social and talkative. This will lead to feelings of jealousy, causing a strain on the marriage.
The genetic and environmental influences responsible for marriage are different from those that are responsible for divorce. Evidence exists that after mate selection, there may be some protective factors for the couple, such as religion. While other factors that place couples at risk for divorce, such as alcoholism, are also genetic in nature.
Trumbetta and Gottesman (2000) suggested endophenotypes with one being oriented to pair bonding and the other to mate diversification. Pair bonding, obviously, leads to a happier marriage as both spouses are monogamous, whereas mate diversification is associated with multiple marriages. It sounds to me like those who pair bond are more introverted whereas those who have diversity in marriage partners are more extraverted, leading to high divorce rates due to jealousy and cheating. The conclude that there are significant genetic influences on both endophenotypes with unique environmental factors accounting for the rest of the variance,
Spouses, as well as friends, sort on characterisitics such as race, socioeconomics, physical attractiveness, level of education, family size and structure, IQ and longevity. This is the Selfish Gene in action. By seeking out copies of itself (which would be in co-ethnics in higher frequencies), the gene is able to ensure its survival onto the next generation.
Even in couples who are not the same race or ethnicity match on other heritable characteristics. Rushton and Nicholson (1988), tested predictions from genetic similarity theory and found that spouses select each other on the basis of more genetically influenced cognitive tests. It’s known since The Bell Curve came out in 1994 that spouses select each other based on IQ. What Rushton and Nicholson noted in the study was that estimates of genetic influence calculated on Koreans and Canadians predicted assortative mating in European Americans in Hawaii and California. Americans of mixed ancestry made up for ethnic dissimilarity by matching up on the more heritable traits, whereas the correlation is lower for those traits that are more influenced by the environment. The observations on genetic selection were weaker but still had a positive correlation, when the g factor was taken out of the equation. This suggests that we choose mates based on the general intelligence factor. This effect is seen in, for instance, white women who date black men. They, more often than not, have lower average IQs than the mean (100).
Pan and Wang (2011) showed that spouses are similar in academic achievement as well as IQ. 6 out of the 8 traits tested (reading, spelling, arithmetic, vocabulary, verbal and full-scale IQ) showing evidence of spousal correlations.
Humans have a natural instinct to marry genetically similar others. Whether the traits are environmentally or genetically influenced, spouses will match on traits with the highest correlations (BMI, waist size, arm size). Genetic Similarity Theory proposes that these phenomena is not by chance, but was how we evolved. Sexual selection, which is natural selection arising through preference by one sex for certain traits in individuals of the other sex, is the driving factor here. Through sexual selection, we humans were able to gain higer intelligence (for men) and gain higher verbal abilties that allowed to care for children (women). These differences remained even when controlling for geographic location. Spouses and friends being as similar as 4th cousins is no accident, in fact, it is evolution in action.
Islam, Suicide Bombings, IQ and Consanguinity
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A lot of people seem to confuse causes between ‘Islam’ and behavior that’s just ‘low IQ’. Whenever these attacks like shootings, sexual assaults and rapes happen, that’s due to their low IQ; not religion. I wrote about this in IQ, Inbreeding and Clannishness. All of the behavior you see is due to low IQ. 1) being in an area with a hot climate and 2) cousin marriage has been going on there ever since Jews from the Levant introduced it to them around 200 BC. To quote myself:
Those innate behaviors which result in the favoring in all areas of life, themselves and their family, is a result of genetic similarity because of the closely related genes they share (the father’s brother’s daughter type is the most common in the Muslim world). Also, first and second cousin marriages are more common, which also result in increased altruism for their own family because of the close genetic similarity, but also those in their own group, which is mediated by the brain hormone oxytocin.
In a paper on the mean IQ of Muslims and non-Muslim countries, Donald Templer states that the Muslim world, which used to be have great intellectual achievements from the 7th to 12th centuries, has seen an underrepresentation in highly creative contributions in science journals. This is because of the inbreeding effect (2.5 to 10 point drop in IQ) of close cousin marriage. He ends up saying that genetic factors are more important than social/cultural/religious values (back to the inbreeding, causing defects and lowering IQ) in regards to IQ.
I also put a map of individualism and collectivism in Europe here. You can see that the collectivist countries are fighting back more. The countries/regions where it’s more red roughly matches up to the situation. You can see how in Central, Northern and Northwestern Europe they’re more individualistic, as well as more atheist, than those collectivist countries. So that leads to what we see with this ‘welcome refugees’ signs, as well as, I would assume, more oxytocin in the brain for Europeans, which leads to more altruism towards other peoples. Of course, 1000 years ago, the high altruism was fine due to being a mostly homogeneous society. But when others move in who are not from the area, and who do not have the same biology as you due to certain selection pressures, that’s when the ‘clash of cultures’ commences. Which it’s not really a clash of culture, more like a clash of biology, because 2 groups who shouldn’t live together are being forced to live together.
This also brings me to people who confuse the causality between Islam and blacks. As I said, it’s a low IQ religion (which I have provided enough evidence for my case). So blacks who become Muslim do so because of low IQ. Anything after that doesn’t mean that being a Muslim had them do it. Lets say that Islam never popped up and the same peoples were still there, continuing such close inbreeding, would that be Islam doing it? No. It’s their biology. **
Using environmental factors (Islam, culture) is what leftists do. In my post on behavior not equaling genes plus environment, I showed how people create their own environments based on their own genetics. The environment we put ourselves in is based on our genetics. We can clearly see that Islam is bringing their culture (genetics) to Europe and are incompatible with Europe as well as all Western societies around the world. Due to this, we can see that wherever any population goes, it will be the same from the original place they emigrated from if migration in large enough numbers occurs. A country is only as good as its majority population.
In Non-Western People are Abnormal to Our Societies, I showed how due to differing cultures (genetics), these third-world immigrants coming into our countries cannot readily assimilate due to differing average IQs and other hormones that lead to crime differentials with the native population. Though Arabs are Caucasian, evolving closer to the equator lead to higher levels of testosterone as more exposure to the sun increases vitamin D levels, which is not a vitamin but actually a steroid hormone. These differences in testosterone then lead to more sex attacks with high testosterone combined with low IQ. Lower IQ people are less likely to be virgins than higher IQ people. This shows that higher IQ people have less testosterone and can also hold back urges more than lower IQ people. This then translates over to an increase of sexual assaults by ‘migrants’ to European women. These ‘abnormalities’, though, would be abnormal anywhere. Putting differing cultures (genetics) in a place with a completely different culture will lead to strife due to genetic distance between the two populations.
I wrote in Evolutionary Reasons for Suicide Bombings that Muslims who suicide bomb do so to increase inclusive fitness. The increase in inclusive fitness comes about due to the suicide bomber having no prospects as well as no kids, so he/she is just taking up resources. By committing suicide, they are freeing resources for others who have a better chance to spread their genes. Many suicide bombers come from middle-class backgrounds, which further proves the case for genetic interests being the cause for this. The majority of Al-Qaeda members come from educated, middle-class backgrounds. Even for Palestinian suicide bombers, none of them were poor, uneducated, simple minded nor depressed.
The average IQ for a criminal is 85 adult offenders, 92 for juvenile offenders. What’s the average IQ in the Middle East? 81, around 1.3 SD lower than average, and 4 points lower for chronic adult offenders in America. The lower IQ comes from being more inbred, which then manifests itself in the crime rate. The strife in the middle east can also be traced back to IQ and consanguinity rates in those populations. How inbred a population is predicts IQ as well as how much strife occurs in those populations.
Germany has said they will begin IQ testing their ‘migrants’. If it works well (I highly doubt it will, and if it is, it won’t be implemented well) this could curb some attacks that happen. Since IQ differences between populations are one of the biggest causes for crime differentials (lower IQ is also correlated with higher testosterone) between them, screening for and only allowing high IQ ‘migrants’ in would curb some violent crime and sex attacks if implemented on a wide enough scale. IQ differences between populations are one of the biggest reasons for differences between any population you can think of.
For a comparison, we can use Christian Arabs. Christian Arabs are less inbred than Muslim Arabs, which shows in the amount of terror attacks committed by Christian Arabs, which I can’t find any data for. If anyone has found any, leave a comment. hbdchick then says this about consanguinity between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs:
so, the rate of cousin-marriage amongst lebanese christians was 16.5% while the rate for muslims approached double that at 29.6%.
christians married cousins more distant than first cousins at a slightly higher rate than they did first cousins: 8.6% (>1C) versus 7.9% (1C). muslims, on the other hand, favored first cousin marriage: 17.3% (1C) versus 12.3% (>1C). this is a similar pattern found elsewhere in the middle east/arab world. in egypt, for instance, copts tend to marry second cousins while muslims tend to marry first cousins (no, i can’t find the reference!).
there was also more fbd marriage amongst muslims (6.4%) versus christians (3%).
This is directly mirrored in how often we hear about Christian Arab attacks and crime (I haven’t heard of this), showing that consanguinity rates can predict crime rates. Due to this extreme inbreeding, they are more genetically similar, which leads to higher amounts of altruism for their own group, in turn leading to derogation of the out-group. Europeans are, on average, less inbred than Muslims. This is why it’s said that Muslims are incompatible with our societies. They are more clannish and altruistic for their own. Like JP Rushton said, groups will proliferate ideas that are good for their genetic interests.
Even more evidence can be shown with Chechen inbreeding. I can’t find any data on Chechen IQ, so lets use the closest country to Chechnya, which is Georgia with an average of 94. Since inbreeding can depress IQ 2.5 to 10 points, Chechnya’s average IQ should be somewhere around the mid-80s. This shows similarity with the consanguinity rate. hbdchick then concludes:
it’s no wonder, then, that they still engage in blood feuds (just like the albanians). you’d half expect them to build tower houses for protection during clan disputes like the albanians or the maniots.
oh, wait.
Muslim (Arab) populations are incompatible to Western societies due to how inbred they are. Their own societies are built on their genetics, which they then bring to the West and attempt to bring what they’re running from to their new host country.
In conclusion, whenever people say “it’s Islam doing it”, it’s low IQ behavior. Those with lower IQ are more likely to be drawn to Islam. Islam developed after 1300 years after the start of Arab inbreeding. We can draw, from IQ from American criminals, that 85 is the sweet spot for criminality, and since criminality is correlated with low IQ more so than any other variable you can think of. A good example of this is a low IQ person coaxed into committing a crime. It’s an obvious biological difference, the sociopolitical garbage is just that, garbage. The biology drives the politics. Consanguinity rates are one of the biggest factors. You should be concerned with the biology aspect.
Note: When I say “Muslim” I mean Arab. I am also not attempting to “apologize” for terror attacks. I’m simply looking at it through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Most people who read this blog know why Africans act the way they act, and African “migrants” are no different.
Even More Evidence for GST: Speed Daters Match on Genotype
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Your success at speed-dating might be influenced by your genetic make-up and your potential partner’s ability to detect so-called ‘good genes.’ The research team found that participants who were more likely to be asked on a second date had genotypes consistent with personal traits that people often desire in a romantic partner.
Coming off of a successful refutation of JayMan (check comments too), more evidence for our claim came out the other day. Us humans can match on genotype, which we, of course, match with people with other similar heritable characteristics. Since humans match on these traits that are more heritable than the ones that are more influenced by environment, then we can say that we are seeking out partners who are like us, therefore matching on genetic similarity.
Wu, et al (2016) examined 262 Asian Americans in a speed-dating setting. The researchers predicted that there would be considerable matching by genotype between the genders. They found that the gene A118G, which is linked to submissiveness and social sensitivity, whereas for the men, the minor variant with the -1438 A/G allele, which is linked to social dominance and leadership, were shown to have greater success. They also discovered that men and women with genotypes consistent with “prevailing gender norms were more likely to receive second date offers”
The researchers say that “These results suggest that personal attributes corresponding to A118G and −1438 A/G can be detected in brief social interactions, and that having a specific genetic variant or not plays a tangible role in dating success,” Those with the A118G polymorphism had greater capacity for experiencing social pleasure and pain as well as their need to have social contact. This also shows how Men and women with the opposite of each allele (men having the A118G allele and women having the -1438 A/G allele) were seen as less desirable mates, showing good evidence that each allele is gender-specific. Wu also believes this effect could also expand to other social interactions, such as job interviews.
This study shows more evidence for Rushton’s theory of spouses matching phenotypically by genotype. Spouses are as similar as 4th cousins. Spousal genetic similarity is a significant driving force for human civilization, as it selected for certain traits over others that then lead to things such as higher IQ in Eurasian men to beauty in Eurasian women, vice versa for Africans. In Eurasian societies, men hunted and while women took care of the children. Higher intelligence then evolved in men due to needing to strategize, among other things such as surviving the frigid temperatures. Women took care of the children, and thus developed a higher verbal IQ as a result of this. In Africa, women gathered food, selecting them for slightly higher intelligence than their male counterparts. Conversely, the African males were selected for attractiveness (Fuerle, 2008).
Those K-selected have lower birth rates, and thus, must be more rigorous in choosing a mate. Choosing a mate based on intelligence showed that the male could provide food as well as protect the family against predators and other bands of humans. R selected humans have more children and show less care, so they have higher birth rates to counter this. They are less rigorous in mate selection due to need to have more children due to a higher death rate. This is mirrored still, even today in modern society. Human sexual selection is one of the reasons why human evolution progressed to the point is has, with the driver being evolution in harsher climates. Eurasian women needed to be more stringent in choosing mates due to a higher chance of death in choosing the wrong mate. Over time, this lead to a ‘genotype sensor’ if you will, which by matching by certain phenotypic traits (facial symmetry, skin color, height, health, etc), chances for intelligent children, better care and more food will come as a result of this stringent selection by women, which in turn lead to evolution of certain traits in Eurasian men and women.
This shows that these human differences in how we select our spouses to how our civilizations ultimately end up is due to a) climate, b) sexual selection and c) genetics. Passing on the best genes lead to an ultimately better society, and as a result, this lead to those genes that were more successful having a chance to produce more copies of themselves, assuring that society would be run well in the future. This is also why government systems such as monarchies have hereditary rulers.
I have said numerous times that the tendency to favor co-ethnics is the tendency to favor shared genes. Benefiting those similar to yourself ensures that you’re benefiting copies of your genes, ensuring your genetic legacy for the future. Matching with those who appear similar to us by genotype when there is such phenotypic similarity shows that this is a trait we humans have to seek out those co-ethnics genetically similar to ourselves.
Ethnic Genetic Interests and Group Selection Does Exist: A Reply to JayMan
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JayMan has said that ““Ethnic Genetic Interests” Do Not Exist (Neither Does Group Selection)“. It’s clear from what he says towards the end that he has some sort of bias to attempt to disprove Ethnic Genetic Interests and Group Selection. This will be a definitive refutation of JayMan’s belief of the non-existence of GST and GS. Along with Dr. Swaggins from the CoonU Blog, both of us today will prove that EGI and GS do in fact exist and that JayMan has an implicit bias in the denial of EGI and GS. I will also address JayMan’s comment to me in that same article that I never responded to save it for this article.
I first wrote an article, Genetic Similarity Theory, in reply to his denial of EGI. It was short, but I got my point across with the Price Equation. JayMan then comments:
Ethnic altruism can’t evolve through genetic similarity because the coefficient of relationship between co-ethnics (who aren’t close family) is pretty small. Even kin selection itself is pretty weak in general. How much time do you spend with your second and third cousins?
In-group favoritism likely evolved through individual selection for reciprocal altruism. Overall similarity simply allowed individuals to recognize likely partners for trading favors (shared language and customs may help). This may have even co-opted systems designed to act towards close kin – misfiring kin altruism, if you will.
Rebutting Jayman’s denial of the ethnic kinship coefficient requires an explanation of the concept of relatedness as a whole. How, for example, can I be 50% identical to my father if I’m 99.8% identical to all living humans? The answer is that I am not 50% identical to my father; rather, I am 50% identical to my father by comparison to the baseline level of relatedness of all living humans. If all living humans are 99.8% genetically identical then I’m 99.9% identical to my father. Jayman’s argument that two random co-ethnics aren’t related fails to factor this into account: a calculation of relation needs a baseline level of relatedness for comparison. So he’s correct in stating that two co-ethnics are not similar to one another- but only by comparison to the baseline level of relatedness of their entire population.
Since the ethnic kinship coefficient has been worked out to the equivalent of half siblings, it may be useful to frame the issue in those terms. If I am 25% identical to my half sibling by comparison to any other co-ethnic, it is because there is a quarter of my genome that I share with my half sibling due to our common descent. Specifically, our mutual descent from our mutual parent gives us a specific combination of genes that nobody else is likely to have. 25% of my genome is 100% identical to his alleles of the same genes and the other 75% is as similar to his as it is to any other co-ethnic, but taken as an average across my entire genome, any given allele is 25% more likely to be shared with him than it is everyone else in our race.
The ethnic kinship coefficient works in an uncannily similar way. Instead of inheriting those 25% identical genes from recent common ancestors, the two co-ethnics inherit the same genes due to the fact that people of their race usually have those genes (think melanin, keratin, microcephalin, EDAR, HERC2, or any other gene for which the frequency of alleles differs overpopulation). In spite of that difference in the origin of ethnic vs familial similarity, the mathematics are shockingly similar: according to Henry Harpending in his review paper Kinship and Population Subdivision, “Many studies agree that Fst [genetic distance between populations] in world samples of human populations is between ten and fifteen percent,” with “a conservative general figure” being 12.5%. What’s more, Fst “is computed for each allele at each locus, then averaged over all loci.” In other words, 1/8th of human genetic diversity is at the between-group level.
To put things into perspective, a 1/8th reduction in diversity within a family occurs when two half siblings (25% identical) have a child. There is a 1/16th chance that the common parent will pass a given allele to both children and that both children will pass that allele to their child, and a 1/16th chance for the same to occur for the other allele of the same gene; when computed allele for allele, “diversity” (odds of heterozygosity) goes down by 1/8th among a population that is 25% identical by descent.
One such calculation finds, for example, that a Frenchman is 24% identical to another Frenchman if your baseline for comparison is the genetic similarity between the French and Japanese.
This is the inevitable implication of the central tenet of HBD: that the various races of the world are genetically different from one another. It is also the inevitable implication of Lewontin’s famous finding that 15% of all human genetic variation is racial; if it were 100% then all co-ethnics would be identical and it were 0% then race wouldn’t exist at all. If it were 15%, though, then that 15% would be composed of genes whose alleles vary in frequency across populations; these are genes you share with co-ethnics much more often than you share with anyone else. If you’re more likely to share a lot of genes with co-ethnics than you are with anyone else, then you’re more genetically similar to co-ethnics than you are anyone else. When they sequence the genes of people of different races and compute the odds of similarity locus for locus, you’re much more likely to share some genes (ABCC11, MC1R, etc) with co-ethnics than you are others, but taken as an average across both copies of the entire genome, it’s about 25%. Apply those odds to the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome and the result will be consistent with the data that members of a given race are about 25% identical by comparison to members of other races.
We are not the first people to predict that these genetic differences would result in kin selection expressed as altruism towards co-ethnics and discrimination towards others; to quote an article by the late Henry Harpending posted in March 2012, “In the new diverse community the average person can find someone related as f~0.06, corresponding roughly to a great-grandchild at f=1/16. Suddenly there is a fitness payoff to discrimination.” (In this hypothetical population, an individual is 1/8th more related to a co-ethnic than to the average and 1/8th less related to some of a different race than to the average.) In an ethnically homogeneous population, discrimination of this kind will not occur because the fitness payoff of benefiting one co-ethnic or the other is the same, but in a heterogeneous population, you suddenly have people in whom you have comparatively more or less genetic interest. In December 2012, Harpending and Salter published “JP Rushton’s Theory of Ethnic Nepotism,” a paper predicting that the Fst data would support Rushton’s theory of ethnic genetic interest, by providing evidence for kin selection. Towards the end of this article, I will provide evidence for human altruistic behavior fitting the patterns predicted by kin selection, and I will present a likely animal model for subspecies competition over resources. In the meantime, however, there are more misconceptions to clear up.
JayMan says:
I suppose a key misunderstanding in the matter is the failure to realize that each individual gene contributes to fitness independently. Each gene is “out for itself”, so to speak. It just so happens that in any given organism, genes achieve success by working together (most of the time). As sucheach individual gene’s “aim” is to make more copies of itself. What’s going on in the rest of the genome is tangential to this. ((—>Each gene would be just as happy to mix with any other gene, so long as its own fitness is increased in the process.<—)) (Additions in last sentence for emphasis are mine)
Individual genes don’t always contribute to fitness independent of one another; the venerable Nicholas Wade has pointed out that there is at least one gene which confers different levels of selective disadvantage depending on the other genes they’re mixed up with: an allele that slightly increased risk of heart problems in Europeans causes big problems whenever it introgresses into Africans. Naturally, the population which has had this allele for longer has more genes elsewhere in the genome compensating for its negative effects, meaning that said allele will cause fitness problems after it introgresses into another population. Introgression is just a fancy word for race mixing, though, and there are other problems with it, as follows:
In a study of 100,000 mixed-race adolescent school children, those who identified themselves as such had higher health and behavior instances than those of one race. The effect was still observed even when SES and other factors were controlled for. A problem with an obvious genetic component.
Yet another study done on white-Asian mixes notes that they have a two times higher rate to be diagnosed with psychological problems such as anxiety, depression and substance abuse.
It was found, in agreement that black-white mixes engaged in more risky behavior than did monoracial children. They also observe that mixed-race adolescents are stark outliers in comparison to whites and blacks, which still holds true despite being raised in similar environments to monoracial children.
Fitness doesn’t look increased in that process, seeing how mulatto children show more health problems and negative behavior than monoracial children. And given the data relating to the allele mentioned above, we can’t rule out the possibility that health problems in biracial children arise because their parents’ genes don’t necessarily work together.
There is no impact on one’s fitness from the race of one’s mate (or an offspring’s mate) so long as close relatives are off the table as mates (aside from the fitness impact of the particular genes such mates were bringing in the environment in question). The fitness impact to a White man’s genes if his daughter marries a Black man is the same as if she married an unrelated White man (again, fitness from gene function notwithstanding).
Do you really believe that? As shown above, mixed-race children show more health and behavior problems than do monoracial children. Africans were not selected for resistance to the negative effects of certain European genes as Europeans were, and we have no reason to believe that any race is selected to compensate for the negative effects of genes they don’t even have.
Just the same, the inclusive fitness impact to a White American is the same whether he focuses his altruistic act on an unrelated White American or on a Namibian; it is zero in both cases. If you adopt children rather than have your own, the fitness hit to you is the same whether your adopted children are White, Black, Chinese, or Venezuelan.
Again, this assumes that there are no genetic differences between populations, but there are, so your fitness is probably higher if you adopt a co-ethnic than if you adopt someone else.
Hence, there is no human ethnic group that exhibits ethnic nepotism. This includes Ashkenazi Jews. But these have nothing to do with ethnic nepotism, didn’t arise via kin selection, and don’t depend on genetic relatedness per se. This includes Ashkenazi Jews.
Ashkenazi Jews evolved their nepotism through thousands of years of getting driven out of countries. Along with being barred from certain jobs, this led to them being only able to do banking jobs and those jobs that took more intellect, which they then evolved their higher IQ as well as more group favoritism to help them in societies where they are the minority. This is clearly evident today with Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities; their average IQ of 110 suggests that they shouldn’t be that much of the student body since they’re six times as likely to be geniuses but many more times likely to make it into the top institutions. Odds are pretty good that that’s ethnic nepotism in action. We’re talking about a group of people 38% likely to consider themselves religious but 70% likely to believe the old mythos that the omnipotent, omniscient creator of everything that ever existed prefers them to literally everyone else, and judge whether someone is worthy of this inconceivably lofty status purely on the basis of their genetics; before they had handy-dandy PCR machines and enzymes, Jews determined someone to be Jewish by matrilineal descent, not cultural custom. If the Ashkenazim lacked any ingroup preferences of any kind during their time in Europe, they would’ve literally copulated themselves to death by marrying Gentiles until their population was totally absorbed by ours. What would you call it then, JayMan, if not EGI? They’re one of the best examples FOR the existence of EGI. See, the thing is, if someone is an Ashkenazi Jew, more often than not, they will be more related to each other than some other random person from another population.
This particular fact – that co-ethnics share genes – is why they have a genetic interest in one another.
The Ethnic Kinship Coefficient has been corroborated literally every time anybody calculated Fst values between different human races, and by JayMan’s understanding of kin selection it disproves his assertion that ethnic genetic interests do not exist:
This [relatedness] is the probability that a given relative of an individual possesses a copy of an allele the individual possesses.
Co-ethnics are about 25% more likely to share the statistically average allele than people of different races are, so the Hamiltonian drive to confer benefit on co-ethnics is comparable to the drive to confer benefit on secondary relations (half siblings, grandchildren, etc). In other words, it doesn’t matter that the frequency of altruistic alleles is unaffected by the presence of outsiders, because people have a genetic imperative to assist the genes they share with their co-ethnics either way (and are therefore selected for altruism/ethnic nepotism either way); since they are related to their co-ethnics regardless of context, they are selected for the desire to confer benefit on co-ethnics regardless of context, and they only have a genetic interest in derogating an outgroup if doing so will increase the fitness of the ingroup. This is why Harpending and Salter observe, in the paper linked above, that racial solidarity “strengthens in response to attacks perceived to be aimed at group identity, especially invasion of the homeland and physical harm done to co-ethnics.” Observe Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen excoriating the bureaucrats they deem responsible for an alleged invasion, or Black Lives Matter being more enraged about a Hispanic killing a black than by thousands of blacks killing thousands of other blacks. A supposed shift in altruistic allele frequencies was never the point, and to argue against it is to battle with strawmen.
If altruism is the result of kin selection, then an organism will confer benefit on the criterion of relatedness. If a European man saves a daycare with 8 Asian babies in it from some freak accident, then he saves as much of his own genes as were shared by those babies. If he saves a daycare with 8 European babies in it, he just saved a collection of his own copies of HERC2 or ABCC11 or EDAR or some other such gene which he previously failed to save as well. If he saves 8 of his co-ethnic first cousins, the proportion again goes up, this time by 12.5%. By the same mathematical model we use to explain kin selection (Hamilton’s Rule), we predict and observe that altruism will be expressed to various degrees depending on the degree of relatedness.
The adaptation to this would have nothing to do with magical altruism genes which change in frequency when Japanese people arrive in France. Rather, the selection pressures predicted by the kin selection model would select for organisms that exhibited compassion and cooperation in proportion to relatedness.
The fact that co-ethnics share so many genes means that they do have a genetic interest in one another, if kin selection is real. I personally believe that kin selection is a clearer and more likely explanation for altruism than group selection in most cases, but due to the difficulty of determining causality in processes that occurred thousands if not millions of years ago (namely the original evolution of altruistic behavior), I doubt that the scientific community can put this one to bed yet. For the purposes of this issue, however, JayMan has already professed his belief that group selection has never occurred, meaning that one of a few different things must be true.
- Humans are not altruistic at all. Untrue.
- Humans are altruistic, but not due to kin selection or group selection. Unlikely; we can talk about mutual back-scratching all we want but the fact that people take bullets and jump on grenades for one another means that mutual benefit cannot be our only reason to confer benefit upon others.
- Humans are altruistic due to kin selection. This explanation is consistent with genetics and evolutionary theory; evolution holds that survival is a matter of passing on genes and genetics show that related organisms have many of the same genes. It also has pretty good predictive power (it predicts familial love, racism, and other real phenomena). For these reasons, I’m going to be arguing from the assumption that kin selection is a primary reason for human altruism, and that it, therefore, must exist in humans.
Due to the genetic similarity between co-ethnics, there is a genetic interest between them. Each has a Darwinian interest in the other comparable to roughly 25% of their own survival. Operating from the assumption that kin selection is the reason for human altruism, one would predict one of the following possibilities:
- Humans will prefer to confer benefit to their co-ethnics over others due to the fitness advantage gained by doing so,
- That humans cannot perceive genetic similarity and have therefore been selected to benefit one another regardless of genetic similarity in hopes that they hit the mark by accident,
- Humans do prefer those who are genetically similar but are incapable of perceiving the genetic differences between the various human subspecies, or
- Humans understand the genetic differences between themselves and others but for whatever reason will not take the 25% fitness advantage. I’m going to go ahead and throw this one out.
We know that humans prefer others on the basis of genetic similarity, and we know that nearly all human cultures have considered those of different ethnicities to be “the other,” or at least different in some significant way. We know that people can determine someone’s biological race based on their appearance, in any case, and in his 1996 book Race in the Making: Cognition, culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds, Lawrence Hirschfeld found that even children could do so. All of which means that humans can get a rough idea of genomic similarity (or difference) using phenotype and family history as a proxy, and that race is among the types of genetic difference that humans are capable of perceiving. If humans prefer one another based on the criterion of genetic similarity (they do), and race is a genetic difference that humans can perceive (it is), then we expect humans to generally prefer those of their own race (they do).
Even in studies of bereavement, Littlefield and Rushton (1986) put forth ten hypotheses (I will only bring the ones up that prove the case for EGI) to make the case for Genetic Similarity Theory:
- A mother will grieve more than the father: this is due to the mother having finite number of ova, have a more limited reproductive potential than do men and also bear the burden of bearing children, this shows that each offspring of a mother is more important to the overall success to her genes than the are to the father’s.
- Male children will be grieved for more intensely than female children. This is due to a male having a higher chance to have more children and spread his genes to more progeny.
- Similar children will be grieved for more intensely than dissimilar children. GST explains the phenomenon of assortative mating, the phenomenon that spouses will be genetically similar on those traits more influenced by genetics. One consequence of assortative mating is that one parent may be more similar to the child than the other. This can be illustrated as follows: Rushton and Littlefield: “If a father gives his child 50% of his genes, 10% of which are shared with the mother, and the mother gives the child 50% of her genes, 20% of which are shared with the father, the child would be 60% similar to the mother and 70% similar to the father (Rushton et al., 1984)”. So we can see that depending on the amount of genes a child gets from his parent will infer whether or not they are genetically similar to which parent, and in the case of a possible surprise death, the parent who believes the child looks (shares more alleles in common with) like their selves, will grieve longer and more intensely due to having a greater fitness hit due to the increased GST.
This study shows good evidence that the more genetically similar the child is to the grieving parent, the more strong and intense the grieving process will be. How mothers and fathers will risk their lives for their children, their genetic endowment, shows another truth to this phenomenon: altruism. Altruism for those who are genetically similar to yourself. We can then take this and show that since co-ethnics are closer to each other than they are to distant populations, and that since they are more genetically similar to themselves, the same kind of derogation and suspicion that parents give strangers who come around their children, co-ethnics will give to non-co-ethnics when they appear in their homeland. Robert Putnam’s research corroborates this.
Altruism/nepotism does increase when out-groups come to the land. When this occurs, the native population of the country will, in theory, become more altruistic to co-ethnics since their genetic interests are at stake. This is currently occurring in Eastern and Southern Europe in countries like Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Italy.
The model has pretty good predictive power since it predicts racism and other phenomena, which I’ll dive into now. Applying the kin selection model to humanity we expect that altruism will not only be doled out proportionally with respect to genetic similarity, but also to the number of babies the recipient is likely to have. I wouldn’t do as much for my DNA by saving the residents of a retirement home as I would by saving a daycare. And saving women is smarter than saving men. Hence, when the Titanic sinks, the rallying cry of the day is literally “save the women and children!” (Because the people who didn’t do that throughout our biological history had less of an impact on our gene pool than the ones who did.)
So you’re going to see innumerable charities for the benefit of children, and comparatively, nobody trying to solve the conundrum of how terrible life is in nursing homes for the elderly. On the Forbes list of top US charities, numbers 1-4 all frequently work with children (as do many others) and numbers 5, 6, 12, and 14 are specifically for children. None of them are specifically for the elderly; making sure that Grandpa isn’t miserable and alone registers nowhere in the top 50 items of our society’s to-do list.
And you’re going to see things like this, in spite of the fact that men are equally likely if not a hair more likely to get lung cancer and it’s a big killer in both sexes because people care more about “women” than they do about “people.” And I’m not joking or cherry-picking: Lung Force’s blog is seemingly more about women’s feelings than about lung cancer, no doubt because these people are aware that breast cancer research receives way more funding than prostate cancer research does in spite of similar death rates . In other words, it’s a well-known fact among people whose jobs are to stir up altruism that people will give more resources for the well-being of women than for the well-being of men.
All of which is just another case of altruism that “just so happens” to confer group and/or kin benefit, and does so proportionally to the expected increase in fitness, precisely as kin selection would predict. I would expect people to donate more to co-ethnics as well, were it not for the facts that:
a) It’s fashionable in our society to virtue signal niceness to swarthier folks, and
b-z) Haitian children literally eat dirt for breakfast.
In any case, you can look at where rich nonwhites send their donation dollars, be it the fitness benefit gained by JayZ when he donates to clean water causes in Africa, or by George Lopez in his “contributions to the Latino community“. This isn’t a cherry-picked trend of statistically irrelevant anecdotes: Blacks donate to other Blacks, “Identity-based giving is gaining momentum in the Latino, Asian American, Arab American, and Native American communities,” and “Latino’s motivation to give is embedded in a sense of responsibility and desire to give back to their community.” Much of the work of such people may end up benefiting Whites who happen to be there when a catastrophe hits a bunch of the donor’s co-ethnics (observe a Black donating to Hurricane Katrina; New Orleans is majority black, but not devoid of Whites), or occasionally they’ll donate to other nonwhites. But I’m not holding my breath for the day they raise awareness for the White squatter camps in South Africa.
Basically, any time that a person does a nice thing for another person, it will be proportional to any combination of three factors: genetic similarity, assumed number of offspring, and/or how bad the recipient needs help. All three of these are predicted by kin selection since all three are factors which predict the fitness gained by engaging in an altruistic act.
Importantly, virtually every culture on Earth preferred co-ethnics to others prior to the Communist subversion of the West, at which point accusations of racism became something of a social death sentence. (You don’t believe me on the Communist subversion thing- think it’s a conspiracy? Google up where all of this “social construct” ideology we keep encountering ultimately came from, and look up who’s promoting it today.) One could claim that whether a culture is “racist” or not depends on “culture” rather than biology, and point to the modern West as an example of an “anti-racist” culture, but in that case, it’s one hell of a coincidence that every race on Earth generally preferred themselves to everyone else, and did so for 10,000 years or more if you count prehistory. Considerably more likely is that populations with no ingroup preference are subsumed by other populations who gain a fitness advantage by doing so (they mounted no defense because they didn’t understand the need to do so) and that the majority of modern humans are therefore descended mostly from passionate racists.
Co-ethnics have a real genetic interest in one another due to large amounts of shared DNA, meaning that ethnic genetic interest is real. Humans do act on genetic interests in general, as the family studies show, and they are capable of perceiving racial genetic differences, as the ethnicity studies show; it is, therefore, likely that they will act on these ethnic genetic interests as they do with other genetic interests, because racism is caused by the innate preference for genetically similar people. In other words, racism is a biological phenomenon instead of a cultural one.
That, or nearly every culture ever in the history of forever was racist by pure coincidence.
To put subspecies competition into perspective, I will point out that wolves and coyotes have a Fst value between 0.056 and 0.121 and can interbreed. We can call subspecies and other taxonomic classification a social construct if we like; technically we’d be correct in the case of canids, to whom the words “species” and “subspecies” are doled out in a pretty arbitrary fashion. We can say that the admixture is proof that the wolf and coyote DNA doesn’t care about which other genes it’s combined with, if we like. But everything we say about it does absolutely nothing to change the fact that the biological fitness of coyotes massively drops when they share territory with wolves.
Understatement of the week: the implications of having to compete for the same resources is probably why canids fight for territory. Wolf packs, being direct family, would no doubt have a high Fst with other wolf packs, no different from how I’m more similar to my grandpa than I am my housemates. They fight for territory on a familial level because of genetic interest, and they have been observed fighting for territory on the level of subspecies as well, with a clear genetic interest in doing so. The only difference between them and us in this respect is that our method of acquiring resources relies on commerce rather than hunting, and so we weren’t selected for the propensity to wander around a given territory fighting off other families who intrude. That’s not good for business; in fact, I’d be willing to bet that warfare usually occurs in humans when the profit incentive for conquest is greater than the profit incentive for trade. Humans who don’t engage in a lot of commerce and belong to inbred populations, though, have fewer incentives towards peace and higher Fst values relative to others- and they aren’t above killing the guys from the next tribe over. What a surprise that these village’s conflicts had to do with territory and breeding, both of which have to do with fitness. In any case, humans from populations selected for agriculture and commerce engaging in this sort of behavior is the exception that proves the rule, because the only reason anybody knows about the interfamilial warfare of the Hatfields and McCoys is that it falls under the “man bites dog” rule.
I have this radical view that biological rules still apply to humans, and that we are therefore self-replicating bags of meat smart enough to understand that we are self-replicating bags of meat. I see little difference between wolves reclaiming their old hunting grounds and the Reconquista movement. Coyotes had taken over when the wolves kept getting killed by men; Spaniards took over when a storm of viruses killed off most of the Natives. Even after the Spanish admixture, the Fst values between Whites and the now-mestizos likely falls within the range of coyote-wolf Fst values. Wolves feed their kind with elk and we feed ours ultimately with money; the distribution of elk meat to wolves isn’t good for coyotes and I’m willing to bet that the distribution of money and jobs to other nations and their peoples explains much of our abysmal birth rates in the West (with birth control technologies being another primary factor). We had lots of kids back when there were blue collar jobs you could get fresh out of high school which instantaneously elevated you to the middle class. We could afford to have them, no different from the fact that European nobles had more kids on average than us commoners. If current economic, cultural, and political trends continue, though, then ethnic Europeans might go out roughly 50x faster than the Neanderthals did.
Biological organisms show preference of those who are similar at the level of self (me), family (the Kennedys), tribe or nation (Papuan tribes or Mexico), race or subspecies (Native Americans), and species (I eat pork and kill spiders more often than I eat aboriginal Australians and kill Sentinelese people). All are the same phenomenon (attempts to increase the odds of self-replication at the genetic level), all are predicted with Fst values and Hamilton’s Rule, all are observed in animals to whom “culture” doesn’t apply, and all are observed in mankind.
Now, the question is this: how would GST be detected? Numerous ways. Location, for one. Since up until around 50 years ago, most countries were monoracial, those in your general proximity will, more often than not, be more genetically similar to you than a group that’s 50 miles away. Culture, which is an expression of genetics, is yet another way that GST can be detected. Since culture is an expression of genetics, when that culture is expressed, this shows other genetically similar co-ethnics that this individual shares more genes in common than those who don’t share their culture. There is also matching by phenotype, which goes along with the location aspect. But, as I stated in my article Genetic Similarity Theory as a Cause for Ethnocentrism:
It’s clear that we are more altruistic to people who look more phenotypically similar to ourselves, to pass on and benefit copies of our genes. This evolved in spite of the negative impact on behalf of the altruist. The altruist is helping copies of his shared genes survive so that they may be copied into the next generation of progeny. The tendency to favor co-ethnics is the tendency to attempt to help pass on shared genes, as if the phenotype is similar, more often than not, the genotype is as well. This is the basis for ethnocentrism.
There is also what is called the “Grandmother’s hypothesis” in which the researchers theorize that women live past menopause to help take care of their grandchildren. In doing so, they can then make sure their grandchildren are well-fed and nourished. The researchers state that by using Hamilton’s relation coefficients (what we have been using in this article), that a grandmother should share 25 percent of genes with her grandchildren. Ted Sallis says:
Therefore (and this is the important point), a paternal grandmother, all else being equal, is genetically less related to a grandson than to a granddaughter, and less related to a grandson than is a maternal grandmother. Conversely, a paternal grandmother likely is more genetically related to a granddaughter than is a maternal grandmother, given the certainty that the granddaughter possesses an X chromosome from the paternal grandmother.
The researchers hypothesized that the grandmother’s investment in grandchildren will be directly mirrored by how genetically similar they are to each other. The authors conclude that women live past menopause to help care for their children’s offspring. Since they share 25 percent of their genes with their grandchildren, they too, have a genetic investment in making sure they get adequate nutrition and are well cared for. They found that in 7 previously studied populations that “separating grandchild survivorship rates by sex reveals that X-chromosome relatedness correlates with grandchild survival in the presences of MGMs and PGMs. In all seven populations, boys survive better in the presence of their MGM than PGM. In all bar one population, the PGM has a more beneficial effect on girls than on boys. Our X-linked grandmother hypothesis demonstrates how the effects of grandmothers could be sex-specific because of the unusual inheritance pattern of the X-chromosome.”
This is what this whole debate is about: ability to detect genetic similarity in co-ethnics. Matching by phenotype, culture, and general proximity will, with good chance, bring you together with someone who shares more alleles in common with you and someone who you would feel more altruistic towards since you have a genetic interest in ensuring that some of your genes survive to the next generation.
Mixed-race relationships don’t discredit the existence of EGI/GST, in fact, it helps to strengthen it. Americans of mixed ancestry made up for ethnic dissimilarity by matching up on the more heritable traits, whereas the correlation is lower for those traits that are more influenced by the environment. Since the correlation is higher for heritable traits, i.e., BMI, personality, alcoholism, aggressiveness, criminality, psychiatric disorders and so on. Since the correlations are higher than in the environmentally mediated traits and since mixed-race couples match on more heritable traits than on the traits more influenced by the environment, this shows us that even though they are marrying outside of their race/ethnicity, they still match up on the more heritable traits and not the traits more influenced by the environment.
JayMan brings up the concept of reciprocal altruism as if it negates the effect of racial/ethnic altruism as a whole. It does not. Reciprocal altruism and Genetic Similarity Theory go hand-in-hand as genetic similarity eliminates the need for the reciprocation to occur again. Since two related individuals share more genes in common with each other than two unrelated individuals, this then caused reciprocation and GST to evolve hand-in-hand with each other. To quote Rushton:
Thiessen and Gregg (1980) make the same point. Thiessen and Gregg state that “cooperation among `nonrelatives’ (`reciprocal altruism’) may be based in large part on genetic and phenotypic similarity” (p. 133).
Another reason that GST and reciprocal altruism go hand in hand is that genetic similarity at certain important loci can predict the efficacy of a reciprocal altruistic relationship; Fowler & Christakis find that close friends are as similar as 4th cousins, and Guo et al find the same for spouses. Selecting for phenotypic compatibility means selecting for genetic similarity at the loci which determine the relevant phenotypes (height, IQ, personality and so on). For example, different races of the world differ in Big Five personality traits, and the reason for these differences is likely genetic. If a statistically normal, introverted East Asian prefers to associate with fellow introverts, what are his odds of becoming best friends with a comparatively gregarious Black man? A gregarious Asian or an introverted Black may become fast friends with those of other races, but most of their kinsmen are more stereotypical.
Ultimately, however, what it comes down to is this: if a gene can better ensure its own survival by bringing about the reproduction of family members with whom it shares copies with, then it can also do so by bringing about the reproduction of any organism that it shares genes with. Meaning altruistic self-sacrifice. But, if there is a fitness gain for the altruist, then how is it altruism? Simple. The altruist is just protecting genetic interests. The altruist is just being driven by his genes to save copies of itself. This is basically what we humans are: organisms that only attempt to bring about those with similar genetics to ourselves.
Evolutionary Reasons for Suicide Bombings
2700 words
With all of these suicide bombings in the news recently, I figured I’d talk about some evolutionary reasons for suicide bombings. While reading JP Rushton’s paper Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory, I came across a small part of the paper where he talks about evolutionary reasons for suicide bombings: mainly that it increases inclusive fitness. I know that biology doesn’t tell the whole story, but it tells a lot of it. Today I will argue that mainly, suicide bombings are driven by genetic similarity, as argued by Rushton in his paper. The data is there that this is a possibility and a worthwhile hypothesis to take note of.
Due to how inbred Muslims (Arabs) are, (as well as other Muslim populations, which are also inbred, such as the Chechens), they are more genetically similar to themselves than they are to other groups. The brain hormone oxytocin is conjectured to increase ethnocentrism, seeing as oxytocin is shown to increase in-group cooperation, and at the same time out-group derogation. This is also the case when two genetically distinct cultures meet up and live together. Their biology is so dissimilar, ethnic strife arises due to the far genetic distance between the two groups. So due to this increased genetic similarity, this causes those who are more similar to themselves, to favor those phenotypically similar to themselves, because if the phenotype is similar, more often than not, the genotype is as well. This is the basis for all ethnocentrism. To quote Rushton from the paper mentioned above:
Political issues are especially explosive when survival and reproduction are at stake. Consider the growth of Middle Eastern suicide bombers. Polls conducted among Palestinian adults from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank show that about seventy-five per cent support suicidal attacks, whereas only about twelve per cent are opposed (Margalit 2003). Many families state that they are proud of their kin who become martyrs.
Most analyses of the motives of suicide bombings emphasise unique aspects such as the Palestinian or Iraqi political situation, the teachings of radical Islam, or a popular culture saturated with the glorification of martyrs.
Political issues are especially explosive when survival and reproduction are at stake. Consider the growth of Middle Eastern suicide bombers. Polls conducted among Palestinian adults from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank show that about seventy-five per cent support suicidal attacks, whereas only about twelve per cent are opposed (Margalit 2003). Many families state that they are proud of their kin who become martyrs.
Most analyses of the motives of suicide bombings emphasise unique aspects such as the Palestinian or Iraqi political situation, the teachings of radical Islam, or a popular culture saturated with the glorification of martyrs.
These political factors play an indispensable role but from an evolutionary perspective aspiring to universality, people have evolved a ‘cognitive module’ for altruistic self-sacrifice that benefits their gene pool. In an ultimate rather than proximate sense, suicide bombing can be viewed as a strategy to increase inclusive fitness.
There is “altruistic self-sacrifice” for what suicide bombers do. Rushton then posits, that the self-sacrifice then, in turn, benefits their gene pool and that suicide bombing can be looked at as a strategy to increase inclusive fitness. Many people in the field have come to this conclusion. There is a reason, a genetic reason, for a lot of these suicide bombings. How could suicide bombings increase inclusive fitness if the individual is committing suicide? As I have said numerous times on my blog, evolution selects for genes, not individuals. So with selecting for genes, individuals who share similar genes with others who sacrifice themselves for other, more genetically similar people to themselves are actually increasing the proliferation of their genes. This is, yet again, is another answer to the people who argue that genetic similarity theory, which is predicated on self-sacrifice for those genetically similar to yourself, would select for selfishness, and not ethnic altruism. This is the case because those genes are being preserved. Individuals are basically just organisms to proliferate copies of their genes in to the next generation and nothing more.
Rushton then says:
What reasons do suicide bombers themselves give for their action? Many invoke the rhetoric of Islam while others appeal to political and economic grievances. Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash, a twenty-one-year-old bachelor from Tulkarm who blew himself up near Tel Aviv in May 2001 said in a videocassette recorded before he went on his mission (cited in Margalit, 2003):
I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians, especially the blood of the women, of the elderly, and of the children, and in particular the blood of the baby girl Iman Hejjo, whose death shook me to the core. Many other national groups have produced suicide warriors. The term ‘zealot’ originates in a Jewish sect that existed for about 70 years in the first century CE. According to the classical historian Flavius Josephus (1981), an extreme revolutionary faction among them assassinated Romans and Jewish colla- borators with daggers; this likely reduced their chances of staying alive. A group of about 1,000 Zealots, including women and children, chose to commit suicide at the fortress of Masada rather than surrender to the Romans. Masada today is one of the Jewish people’s greatest symbols. Israeli soldiers take an oath there: ‘Masada shall not fall again’. Soldier armies – the Japanese kamikaze, or the Iranian basaji – have carried out suicide attacks against enemy combatants. Winston Churchill contemplated the use of suicide bombers against the Germans if they invaded Britain (see Cornwell 2003). Some of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who are Hindus, have killed themselves in attacks on politicians and army installa- tions, and they have done so with utter disregard for the lives of civilians who happened to be around.
It’s clear that ethnic genetic interests were a main motivator for this attack. He also cites the Zealots, a Jewish sect from around 70 Ad, who committed suicide so that the Romans wouldn’t kill them. He cites the Japanese Kamikaze and the Iranian basaji, as well as saying that Churchill contemplated using suicide bombers against Germany if they invaded Britain, all of these examples serve as examples for genetic interests and altruistic self-sacrifice for you kin/co-ethnics. Rushton ends the paper as follows:
Genetic similarity, of course, is only one of many possible influences operating on political alliances. Causation is complex and there is no value in reducing relationships between ethnic groups to a single factor. Fellow ethnics will not always stick together, nor is conflict inevitable between groups any more than it is between genetically distinct individuals. In addition to reproductive success, individuals also work for motives such as economic success. However, as van den Berghe (1981) pointed out, from an evolutionary perspective, the ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Behavioural outcomes are always mediated by multiple causes. Nonetheless, genetic similarity can be expected to play a clear role in the social behaviour of small groups and even of large ones, both national and international. The hypothesis presented here is that because fellow ethnics carry copies of the same genes, ethnic consciousness is rooted in the biology of altruism and mutual reciprocity. Thus ethnic nationalism, xenophobia and genocide can become the ‘dark side’ of altruism. Moreover, shared genes can govern the degree to which an ideology is adopted (e.g. Rushton 1986 and 1989a). Some genes will replicate better in some cultures than in others. Religious, political and class conflicts become heated because they affect genetic fitness. Karl Marx did not take his analysis far enough: ideology may be the servant of economic interest, but genes influence both. Since individuals have a greater concentration of genetic interest (inclusive fitness) in their own ethnic group than they do in other ethnic groups, they can be expected to adopt ideas that proliferate their genes.
GST is a great argument that suicide bombers want to proliferate the genes of those genetically similar to themselves while at the same time getting rid of genes who didn’t pass kin on to the next generation, as well as getting rid of one individual who takes up resources without copulating kin to the next generation, by doing so this increases the fitness of his or her co-ethnics, and therefore, through altruistic self-sacrifice, spread on their genes in that manner. Because evolution is about reproduction, not production.
In this short paper, Suicide Bombers: Does an Evolutionary Perspective Make a Difference?, which is a review of a book called The Myth of Martyrdom, the author argues that suicide bombers have similarities to others who commit suicide as well as murder-suicide, he ends up positing that there is no altruistic self-sacrifice and that suicide bombings are a result of mental health issues and individual crisis. The linked paper expands the author of the book’s idea that suicide bombers are increasing the inclusive fitness of their people. Those who behave in ways to promote the reproductive success of close kin (kin selection), in turn, enhance their inclusive fitness. There is also evolutionary evidence that we humans have been programmed evolutionary history to promote reproductive success of their kin as well as those closely related to them (their co-ethnics).
Parents who sacrifice themselves for their children are doing so because of evolution. In saving their child, who shares 50 percent of their own genes, they are increasing the evolutionary success of their genes to continue to reproduce other generations. This is because the average similarity between people within a single population is on the magnitude of half-siblings. So co-ethnics are share 25 percent of their genes, on average. This is a cause for ethnocentrism, as I have argued many times here.
If an individual’s reproductive prospects are low, and they are not contributing to the welfare of those genetically similar to themselves, then removing their genes through suicide will not remove genes that already weren’t going to be removed due to not having any kin. The authors of the paper also argue that if the individual is taking up resources that could be better used by other kin to promote their best (ethnic) interests, then prolonging that individuals existence may diminish, rather than enhance, inclusive fitness for that group. Suicide is more common in those who are elderly as well as terminally ill, because those who are elderly or terminally ill have less of a chance of proliferating their genes, so they care less about their individual fitness, and in turn, care about inclusive fitness instead.
In the ASID (Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire), which is a 25 question self-report to measure suicide ideation and behavior in adults (Reynolds, 1991 b), those who participated in the study ranked feelings of suicide on a scale of zero to seven which include: “0 = Never had this thought; 1 = I had this thought before, but not in the last month; 2 = About once a month; 3 = Couple of times a month; 4 = About once a week; 5 = Couple of times a week; 6 = Almost every day). The ASIQ has extremely high, almost perfect correlations, .96, .96 and .97 in a sample of college students, community college students and a psychiatric sample using Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficients. Overall, the ASID correlates with depression (r=.60) and with hopelessness (r= .53) in a sample of college students (Reynolds, 1991 a).
There is also a positive correlation between suicide ideation and perceived burden to kin. The relationship was strengthened when participants were added for those with poor health as well as low interpersonal satisfaction, both of which indicate low inclusive fitness.
These reasons also show why Japanese Kamikaze Fighters did their suicide attacks: to protect their kin in their homeland as to better protect those genetically similar to themselves.
Many suicide bombers come from middle-class backgrounds, which further proves the case for genetic interests being the cause for this. The majority of Al-Qaeda members come from educated, middle-class backgrounds. Even for Palestinian suicide bombers, none of them were poor, uneducated, simple minded nor depressed. The myth of the suicide bomber being poor and destitute and, therefore, chooses to kill himself for the myth of 72 virgins, which a majority of Muslims don’t believe in and is pushed by the Jews, is just that, a myth. Most are driven for altruistic self-sacrifice for their co-ethnics, as all co-ethnics are around the world.
Satoshi Kanazawa argues that many suicide bombers are driven to suicide due to sexual repression. He also notes that most Western men who are tricked by porn movies, most Muslims are tricked by the Quran, which did not exist in their ancestral environment. He theorizes that in the same way that Western men who watch porn believe they can potentially copulate with the women they see in porn movies, the same reasoning can be said for Muslims who believe they can copulate with the 72 virgins in their Heaven. Kanazawa says:
If you are a likely reproductive loser in the United States, watching porn is your way of meeting women and having sex. If you are a likely reproductive loser in a Muslim society, committing suicide bombing is your ticket.
He also notes how most suicide bombers are slightly more wealthy as well as educated than the population they come from, which I have just referenced above:
Social scientists have recently noted that suicide bombers tend to be slightly more educated and wealthier than the general Muslim population from which they come (Atran, 2003; Berrebi, 2003; Krueger and Maleckova, 2003), in seeming contradiction to my suggestion here, because such men should have more reproductive opportunities on earth than their less educated and poorer competitors. Closer examination of these studies reveals, however, that they are not inconsistent with my evolutionary psychological explanation of suicide bombings. For example, a study of 129 Hezbollah shahids (martyrs), only three of whom were suicide bombers, shows that shahids are significantly more likely to have attended secondary school or higher, and significantly less likely to come from a poor family (Krueger & Maleckova, 2003, pp. 129-135). However, this is entirely because Hezbollah members are more likely to come from Beirut and South Lebanon, characterized by higher level of education and less poverty. Once the geographic origin is controlled, shahids are no more likely (albeit no less likely either) to come from privileged background. (emphasis his)
Though most Muslims don’t believe the hadiths involving 72 virgins, Kanazawa puts forth a great theory, which also goes along with what I’ve been talking about for this whole article: there is a subconscious thing in their brain, which motivates them to suicide bomb as a strategy for inclusive fitness. By doing so, they are not taking up any more resources, so their kin/co-ethnics can better use those resources in order to proliferate their genes to the next generation.
Ashkenazi Jews show the same nepotism as Arabs, but go about their goals in a different way. They are two different sides to ethnic genetic interests and genetic similarity theory, basically polar opposites. Looking into both groups’ motivations through history and learning why they do what they do shows a lot about how the world is today.
Inbreeding was introduced to the Arabs by the Jews around 200 BC near the Levant. With that much inbreeding happening for so long, this led to the aforementioned effect of lowered IQ by 2.5 to 10 points on average and increased clannishness.
Suicide bombings offer yet another window into the reality that is Ethnic Genetic interests, as well as Genetic Similarity Theory and Group-Selection. Without those drivers, suicide bombings would be less in number because a majority of suicide bombings happen to increase inclusive fitness in the group because many of the men/women are childless or terminally ill. So by stopping themselves from taking up resources, they also increase the inclusive fitness of their co-ethnics because they are not taking up any more resources. They are also eliminating their genes, which didn’t copulate more progeny to the next generation. By getting rid of genes that don’t make it to the next generation and strengthening the gene pool of those who reproduce.
Suicide bombings show yet more reasons for the existence of GST, because if they weren’t so genetically similar due to inbreeding, suicide attacks would be lessened.
Genetic Similarity Theory as a Cause for Ethnocentrism
1600 words
Genetic Similarity Theory evolved so we could better spread on shared genes in our immediate population, as well as those closest to ourselves. Meaning those of our race/ethnicity. People say “how could altruism evolve if it’s self-sacrifice, selfishness would win out”. Well, what’s being preserved is not the individual, obviously, but shared genes. To those who say (JayMan) that ethnic genetic interests don’t exist, there is a mountain of evidence that says otherwise.
Rushton and Nicholson (1988), tested predictions from genetic similarity theory and found that spouses select each other on the basis of more genetically influenced cognitive tests. It’s known since The Bell Curve came out in 1994 that spouses select each other based on IQ. What Rushton and Nicholson noted in the study was that estimates of genetic influence calculated on Koreans and Canadians predicted assortative mating in European Americans in Hawaii and California. Americans of mixed ancestry made up for ethnic dissimilarity by matching up on the more heritable traits, whereas the correlation is lower for those traits that are more influenced by the environment. The observations on genetic selection were weaker but still had a positive correlation, when the g factor was taken out of the equation. This suggests that we choose mates based on the general intelligence factor.
In studies on bereavement, it’s noted that those parents who believe their children resembled their side of the family grieved more than if they believed their child resembled the opposite side of their family (Littlefield and Rushton, 1986). This has huge implications for Genetic Similarity Theory.
Henry Harpending showed that against the background of worldwide genetic variance, the average similarity between people in a single population is on the order of magnitude of half siblings. To quote Rushton:
Political scientist Frank Salter calculated that compared to the Danes, any two random English people have a kinship of 1/32 of a cousin. Two English people become the equivalent of 3/8 of a cousin by comparison with people from the Near East, 1/2 cousin by comparison with people from India, half-siblings by comparison with people from China, and like full-siblings compared with people from sub-Saharan Africa.
Thus, the aggregate of genes people share with co-ethnics dwarfs those shared with extended families. Rather than being a poor relation of family nepotism, ethnic nepotism is virtually a proxy for it.
His conclusion being:
Conclusion: the reason people engage in ethnic nepotism, as well as marry similar others, and like, make friends with, and help the most similar of their neighbors, is that doing so benefits copies of their genes.
The sense of a common ethnicity remains a major focus of identification for individuals today. It is no more likely to diminish in the future than is that of the family.
Genetic similarity theory explains why.
In Rushton’s paper GENE-CULTURE COEVOLUTION AND GENETIC SIMILARITY THEORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR IDEOLOGY, ETHNIC NEPOTISM, AND GEOPOLITICS, two individuals will be, on average, more genetically similar to those of their own ethnicity than to those two from different ethnic groups. Therefore, it will be in the individual’s own self-interest to help one genetically similar to himself, and therefore, derogate the out-group, causing ethnic strife when two genetically dissimilar groups meet up and live together.
Jews that have been separated for thousands of years still show more genetic similarity to each other than to other populations. This shows in how ethnically nepotistic Ashkenazi Jews are to themselves. Jews from Iraq have more in common from a genetic viewpoint than do those 2 groups in comparison to other populations in the world. We can, therefore, expect Jews, as well as all populations in the world, to adopt ideologies that will proliferate their own genes, but come at the expense of derogating out-groups.
Genetic Similarity Theory may also explain how well and with how much tenacity the German military fought in WWII, as well as the lack of morale in the American Army during Vietnam.
He says that if genetic distance measures were calculated, that American liberals will be more genetically distant from the WASP average. The growth of white survivalism is also explained by genetic similarity theory. To quote Rushton:
The growth of “white survivalism” and militant “Christian Identity” groups such as the Aryan Nations, and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, represent a more extreme response to these perceived threats to the AngloSaxon gene pool. If this overall analysis is correct, one might expect similar correlations in deviations from both genetic and ideological norms in other groups. Preserving the “purity” of the ideology might be an attempt at preserving the “purity” of the gene pool. Are ideological “conservatives” typically more genetically homogeneous than the same ideology’s “liberals”?
This can be seen today, no matter where you look in the world. From the Rwandan genocide involving the Tutsis and the Hutus to La Raza in the American Southwest to Black Lives Matter to the KKK and other white interest groups, to even how East Asians and other Asian immigrants basically isolate themselves in areas with those who are culturally, as well as genetically like themselves. Genetic similarity manifests itself in our societies and makes itself evident every day.
We can also view conflicts from other parts of the world to see genetic causes for them as well. We can look at the Northern Ireland conflicts between the Irish Protestants and Catholics to see if it represents a thousand-year-old continuation of the war between the AngloSaxons and the Celts, to the conflict of the Babylonians and the Egyptians which could be manifesting itself today between the Jews and the Arabs, ethnic dissimilarity shows itself in world geopolitics, as well as showing that ethnic dissimilarity is a driving focus in most of our wars and problems.
Rushton then finally asks the question:
If the replication of genetically similar genes is as strong a biological imperative as sociobiological theorizing suggests, why are descendants of North European populations everywhere in the world currently experiencing negative growth, while concurrently allowing extensive immigration from genetically less similar gene pools? Why, at the same time have North European populations adopted an ideology of secular humanism which discourages racist attitudes and encourages antipathies toward religious sentiment proportional to the degree to which those ideologies combat the new orthodoxy?
Cultural and organic evolution are different, yet linked in many ways and may ultimately share certain properties. Both strive to replicate at the expense of other groups, so we can see how ideologies could evolve that dramatically decrease fitness for one group over another. This also goes back centuries. This is seen in classes, and sometimes race. Those at the top, i.e., the more intelligent, have fewer children than the people that they rule over. Then, it’s not too long until the ruled become the rulers and the cycle repeats itself. Rushton says:
There is indeed evidence that this trade off exists at a quite profound level and moreover is related to other characteristics, the whole complex being partly genetic in origin (Rushton, 1985). My own guess is that low fertility may be partly mediated by a psychological process in which the desire to be in control of both oneself and one’s environment is taken to an extreme.
This is one of the many reasons that Europeans today have such a low birth rate. I have written before on how to ameliorate this effect, i.e., positive things shown to women in the media such as being happy with babies. That was shown to increase the birth rate in pre-WWII Germany as well as having a positive benefit on the psyche of the German women seeing other women happy with children. The effects of media socialization, though, go both ways, which is one reason for low European birthrates.
Successful cultures ultimately arise in those that the top of the society limits its reproduction, which, in turn, didn’t give others more genetically similar the chance to replace them. This may be a cause, as Rushton says, for the fall of the Graeco-Roman Empire, stating that the Roman Empire and other similar cultures were, presumably, evolutionary dead ends. He then asks: “If this perspective is accurate, are North Europeans headed for the same fate as the ruling classes of ancient Greece and Rome?”
Rushton ends the paper as follows:
The question is: if that time comes, in whose image will it be shaped? People will differ in their moral prescriptions. The choices they make are likely to reflect both their genetic and their ideological interests.
This is why I say, that, on an individual level, morals are subjective. Society as a whole sets morals, but this says to me that on an individual level that morals are subjective, but that’s for another time.
There are many reasons why altruism and ethnocentrism evolved, as well as many reasons why that same altruism is being used against Europeans, as well as some more environmental factors. This is also seen in Non-Western people who are abnormal to our societies due to differing evolution and culture, which culture is a product of genetics.
It’s clear that we are more altruistic to people who look more phenotypically similar to ourselves, to pass on and benefit copies of our genes. This evolved in spite of the negative impact on behalf of the altruist. The altruist is helping copies of his shared genes survive so that they may be copied into the next generation of progeny. The tendency to favor co-ethnics is the tendency to attempt to help pass on shared genes, as if the phenotype is similar, more often than not, the genotype is as well. This is the basis for ethnocentrism.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
