Rushton on the Genetic Basis of Ethnonationalism and Altruism

“Shared Genes: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism”
from Vdare.com, August 20, 2009

Jerry Z. Muller a professor at Catholic University, (“Us and Them,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008, and “Replies,” July/August 2008) argued that the power of ethnic nationalism “will drive global politics for generations to come” because it “corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit,” which often manifests in the “need for each people to have its own state.” His essay provided a valuable corrective to the position that ethnic identity is a mere social construction that globalization will steadily eradicate.

But Muller’s argument would have been strengthened by understanding why people prefer genetic similarity in others.

Ever since the 1994 publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes by Stanford University geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, it has been possible to measure genetic distances between population groups in terms of family equivalents. Anthropologist Henry Harpending showed that against the background of worldwide genetic variance, the average similarity between people within a single population is the same as that between half-siblings. 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.

The pull of genetic similarity explains why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighborhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance. In The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981), by Pierre van den Berghe, a sociology and anthropology at the University Of Washington, found that even relatively open and assimilative groups “police” their boundaries against invasion by strangers using cultural “badges” to mark group membership, such as scarification, linguistic accent, and clothing style. Another study calculated coefficients of consanguinity within and between Eskimo tribes in the Hudson’s Bay region of Canada and found prosocial behavior such as wife exchange, and anti-social behavior such as genocidal killing during warfare, followed lines of genetic distance, albeit mediated by ethnic badging such as dialect and appearance. [A study in the evolution of ethnocentrism, by C.  J. Irwin, in The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism, 1987]

From an evolutionary perspective, the reason why people construct ethnic identities and engage in ethnic nepotism is that by doing so they increase the survival of their genes. Central to discussion is the concept of inclusive fitness.

As Richard Dawkins explicated in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, it is genes that survive and are passed on across generations. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in fellow ethnics as well as in offspring, siblings, nephews, cousins, and grand-children. By benefiting extended kin, people benefit copies of their genes.

Of course, altruism has always posed a conundrum for Darwinism. How could altruism evolve through “survival of the fittest” if altruism means self-sacrifice? If the most altruistic members of a group sacrifice themselves for others, they will leave fewer offspring to pass on the genes that made them altruistic. At first glance, it would seem that altruism could not evolve, while selfishness would.

Yet altruism is common in all animals, even to the point of self-sacrifice. When bees defend their hive and sting intruders, the entire stinger is torn from the bee’s body. Stinging an intruder is an act of altruistic self-sacrifice. In ants, if nest walls are broken open, soldiers pour out to combat foragers from other nests; at the same time, worker ants repair the broken walls, in the process leaving the soldiers outside to die.

Evolutionary psychology answers the Darwinian conundrum. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration. So even when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of common genes. In this case, the vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo. . . . Read the rest of the article.