Maladaptive Altruism: Western Culture in Eugenics Decline

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Maladaptive Altruism: Western Culture in Eugenics Decline

"Natural selection at the gene level is concerned with competition among alleles for a particular chromosomal slot in a shared gene-pool." Richard Dawkins.

The following article was inspired by rereading The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins, 1982. (For a quick overview of what that book says about maladaptive altruism read excerpts that follow in Appendix A.) But I understood its basic principles while reading Nietzsche over thirty years ago as I pondered a very alien world, one that I was unprepared to face. Growing up in a Midwestern state with mostly Scandinavians and Germans, I looked around and could not understand why my relatives were so passive and aloof. They lacked the aggressiveness that seemed to be natural to me. A desire to conquer, to do, to be aware, and understand what the world was all about. So when I left that world and moved to other places, I almost felt sorry for those lost cousins, as they seemed to be duped by the world they found themselves in, but they didn't seem to care.

Jumping forward thirty years, imagine that you are part of team of ten computer programmers for a large computer-consulting firm. You are working for a large manufacturer with its own internal staff of computer programmers and technicians. And of course the environment is hostile. Your team knows that as a group, they must provide a final product that the manufacturer wants and will, therefore, enhance the reputation and income of the consulting firm you work for. Likewise, if you succeed, you antagonize the computer programmers and technicians of the manufacturer you are working for. Sure, the company managers want you to succeed, those that were responsible for hiring you. But almost everyone else, employed by the manufacturer, wants you to fail. You are outsiders -- aliens that do not belong there.

The ten members of your team therefore have a lot at stake to make the project a success. But the competition does not stop there. Each member of the team, as well as each member of the manufacturing company's team of programmers, are competing with each other for status and recognition. After the project is completed, successfully or not, the employees of each company will go back to competing amongst themselves. It is in our nature to compete with each other and between groups. But what drives this aggressive competition?

The Selfish Genes
Anyone familiar with the twenty years or more battle between essentially radical environmentalists (Marxists, postmodernists, fundamentalists, socialists, etc.) and the neo-Darwinists has understood that the E.O. Wilson/Dawkins' perspective of evolution have won out over the Gould/Lewontin's perspective of trying to turn back adaptationism or what they perceive to be genetic determinism.[1]

For a full history of this battle, with its ideological quirks and deceptions, read Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond by Ullica, Segerstrale, 2000.[2] Segerstrale does a superb job at looking at the players in this controversy, labeling the two sides as essentially cosmopolitan versus rural, and declaring, thru capitulation by the Marxists, that the rural genes-eye-view has won out, along with the other concepts interwoven into the sociobiology perspective. The Marxists could never come up with an alternative set of hypotheses that could withstand the challenges by empiricists. So the genes-eye-view stands and is a fundamental concept in understanding evolution.

The Selfish Gene, written by Richard Dawkins in 1976, has been the foundation upon which Darwinian adaptationists have built the perspective of how organisms evolved. I will try to summarize it as best I can for those who may not be familiar with it. About 3.8 billion years ago, life started on this planet from the primordial soup. The evolutionary algorithm that drove organisms into higher and higher levels of complexity are solely the results of a blind process where genetic mutations, followed by differences in the genes between like organism, caused the most successful genes to progress on into the future generations. That is, all life forms or organisms are merely organic vehicles for these genes to reside in as they replicate and expand, filling almost every available niche of the globes surface. There was never a grand plan, a goal, higher or lower life forms, just a blind mathematical algorithm that changed different organisms in response to their environments, including competition between organisms for the successful genes to be passed onto the next generation. For an understanding of this ratcheting process there again is no better book than The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. This classic book explains how this blind process, driven by only four letters in its code, arranged in triplets, that provide the formula for 64 possible amino acids that make up all life-forms, is essential reading in my opinion to fully comprehend this phenomena (DNA is nothing more than four bits in triplets or 4^3=64 for 64 possible amino acids strung together to make any particular protein. Duplicate amino acids however reduce the permutations down to 21 rather than 64).

That is all that any organism is. A simple genetic code strung together in such a way that it develops into a viable living vehicle, that if lucky will be able to help pass along into the future that genetic code, on average, that it represents. Now this is where it gets very interesting and where the concepts become interesting for human behavior and its variants.

Inclusive Fitness (see appendix A for supporting quotes from The Extended Phenotype)
Hamilton proposed that evolution or reproductive success was not simply having more progeny, it was a matter of passing along similar genes. That is, similar genes could act together, and in competition, to get themselves into the next generation. Of course this is only a metaphor, as genes can't think. But evolution acts as if they can because of the way the combinations of genes are mixed up, rearranged, and then compete for success at primarily the level of the vehicle, that is you, that represents or presents your different set of genes to the world. Your genes acted to build a vehicle to represent them. They made you horny to get your sperm into viable women, a younger woman preferably, because they are a better bet. They made you sufficiently hungry to make sure you would get off your dead ass and go out and hunt or gather food. They make you feel cold to make sure you will seek shelter as night falls, as well as making sure that the tribe sat around and gossiped about the day's events.

Yes, for humans, gossip became an essential driving force for the genes-eye-view to succeed. The tribe needed to succeed as vehicles at different levels: the individual, the family and the tribe. (See Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Boehm, 1999 and reviewed on this web site.) The genes' goals are to get passed on to the next generation, but not necessarily in any one particular vehicle! That's correct. Just like the ant colony where the queen produces all of the progeny and the workers' genes are a dead end, the different combinations of genes shared by all of the ants makes them work for the same goal. But the reductionism does not stop there.

It is not the genes or the genome that is in competition to get passed into the future, but the different alleles of genetic differences that are in competition. As example and for simplicity, let's assume that extroversion versus introversion in humans is a Mendelian genetic variance or is just two alleles (alternate types) of just one gene. A person is born with possibly three combinations from the two chromosomes they inherited, one from each parent: Extroverted with genetic alleles {AA}, neither extroverted nor introverted with alleles {Aa}, or introverted with alleles {aa}. That is, on the two chromosomes where this trait resides, there are two alleles in competition with each other: {a} for introversion and {A} for extroversion. So which allele is winning? They are both expressed behaviors in human nature, isn't one better than the other? Nope.

In fact, most genetic variation or alleles, have gone to fixation. That is all but about 100,000 genes have gone to fixation. There is essentially no phenotypically expressed variation between one individual and another. And of course we share over 97% of this common genetic code with our closest relatives the chimpanzees. And that is because most of our genome is involved with routine chores such as pumping blood, filtering urine, coughing responses to clear the throat of lodged objects, blood group types that differ but perform equally well, etc. That is, 99% of the competition between alleles has already been decided. The boxing match for them is over. There are no more phenotypic differences, that is, differences that matter that will drive the selection process. So evolution only acts on those remaining 100,000 alleles that cause one organism or person to develop differently from another. Athletic ability, good looks, intelligence, aggressiveness, conscientiousness, altruism and group cohesiveness (the subject of this article); just to name a few.

So back to the introvert; it seems pretty obvious that extroverts should do better in the game of life than introverts. After all, whether at work, shopping at the mall, networking with people who can advance your career, finding a mate -- these would all seem to favor people who are extroverted. So why haven't the introversion alleles gone extinct? Well, several primary reasons explain this seeming anomaly. First, the gene or genes responsible for introversion may be linked to other genes. That is, to get rid of the introversion allele(s) may cause adverse behavior or physical changes in other parts of the person making it difficult to remove or get rid of alone. That is, it is not a Mendelian gene. And of course this was the primary mistake of the old eugenics -- thinking that something like crime or alcoholism or introversion was a single gene that could be eliminated.

Then there is the other problem of environments. It seems that extroversion would be the preferred behavior, but it may not have been in the past when we were evolving. For example, when we were a tribal people over 10,000 years ago traveling in small bands, introversion might have been very beneficial or even a selected for trait (again see Hierarchy in the Forest). The small bands of people did not need extroverts to upset the egalitarian balance. The small band needed people who would cooperate, and introverts may be more compliant than extroverts. Another possible explanation that we find in behaviors that vary is that different behaviors are better under different conditions. It is wise for an organism to keep those different alleles when conditions may change. Introverts may have been more successful in some environments than in others. Under a harsh feudal lord, it may do well to silently till the fields, let the lord take your bride's virginity as custom had it, and keep a low profile. The extrovert who may have protested too much would not be long for this world -- on average. And the same is true for other traits like skin pigmentation. There is enough genetic variation in every race from the Africans to the Norwegians with regards to skin pigmentation that if the Norwegians suddenly found themselves in an environment with far more sunshine, over the generations alleles for darker protective skin would on average win out. The new Norwegians in the new location would on average be much darker. So it is wise for alleles that may be beneficial under different environments to stay around in small numbers because they may increase in frequency once again some day as needed. And if not, any one allele variant may selectively go to fixation because it confers less benefit than its competing allelic form of gene.

Altruism and its variance in population groups
I will use the term altruism as meaning the caring for others in the band or tribe or beyond. Today altruists would be viewed as the bleeding heart liberal, egalitarians, compassionate people, do-gooders, and those people who excessively cry over the hardship of others, no matter how remote they are genetically or physically from the altruist. How could this possibly be? Where did evolution go wrong? This altruism contradicts the concept of competing alleles in the vehicles of kin who are alike. Well, that makes it in terms of evolution a maladaptation under the current environment. It is giving benefit to those genetic alleles that are not common in the altruist's genome.

When humans evolved, they did so in an environment of competing bands of people. As group evolutionary strategies evolved, altruism towards the group was beneficial, along with genocidal hatred for other competing groups and fanatical aggressiveness or bravery when it came to defending the tribe, what we call today patriotism and how we define heroes or martyrdom. The tribe, as a unified vehicle carrying more of the alleles for these traits competed with neighboring tribes, the more aggressive, genocidal, cohesive and intelligent tribe on average eliminated the lesser tribe (sometimes of course taking hostages). But slowly, humans that had bloodlust displaced the more peaceful tribes around them, and step-by-step humans became adapted for patriotism towards the group. Individualism was suppressed and cohesiveness became predominant. But all was not equal between different tribes.

The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation
Our ancestors stayed put over thousands of years and developed under vary different environments. For example, xenophobia, group cohesion, tribal conflict, ethnocentrism was heightened in groups that evolved where people were in competition for resources and lived closer together. From Asia to the Mediterranean for example, more people could be supported by the natural resources available. There were many more people, more tribes, and more conflicts. Evolutionary pressures pushed competing groups towards higher frequencies of genetic alleles that favored aggressiveness against one's neighbor. Constant wars and conflicts accelerated this process, producing on average people who today would score much high on ethnocentrism and would have little time for helping or tolerating exploitation by the other. Weak and peaceful tribes were either killed or enslaved.

At the other extreme for example, northwestern Europeans evolved in an extremely harsh environment, one that was glaciated about 10,000 years ago, and supported very few people. Neighboring tribes were not close together, population density was low, and tribal conflict less salient than planning and making provisions for the long harsh winters. In fact, it would be easy to imagine that coming across unknown and relatively altruistic neighbors was live saving. These people evolved in an environment that nurtured compassion for the stranger, because often strangers were a needed resource and not a threat. The greatest threat came from the harsh winters, not from competing tribes. So altruism flourished over xenophobia and fear of the other. High frequencies of alleles for altruism, compassion, tolerance, and benevolence towards all were selected for. But within reason of course. As long as the other did not appear as a threat, reciprocal altruism was selected for over intolerance.

Parasitic groups within maladaptive altruistic groups

Now we live in a world where population groups, or races at whatever level of differentiation you would like to make, have genetic differences with respect to ethnocentrism versus altruism. Europe, with its predominantly altruistic races, especially those closer to the far northwestern regions, find within their midst, races of people who are far more tribalistic, demanding, less tolerant, and aggressive in taking as many resources as they can without concern for the common good. These races have become, as defined by Dawkins, parasites amongst a host population. And Dawkins' revised central theorem states that one race (the parasite) may try to manipulate other races (the host) in such a way as to change the host's behavior to maximize the parasite's inclusive fitness. And of course, that is what we are seeing today under multiculturalism in many circumstances. And of course, one race may be a parasite in one area of society and a host in another.

The revised central theorem proposed by Dawkins also requires that the parasite will be free to try and manipulate the host into performing in such a way as to benefit the parasite's fitness, while reducing the host's fitness, and the host will not retaliate as long as the harm is not significant. That is, if there is a great deal of benefit that can be gotten by the parasite manipulating the behavior of the host, the host may go along with the manipulation as long as the damage is not too great.

This way of looking at the different races then gives us an insight into many of the charges, counter charges, and machinations of race relations in multicultural societies. Even in countries where the majority is manipulated by the minority, there is little that can be done when the forces of parasite/host manipulation takes root. A case in point is Indonesia. They have a minority Chinese population (with a higher average IQ) that virtually controls all of the industry and commerce. And yet, even though there is a lot of anger and resentment by the indigenous Indonesians, the situation for now is an evolutionary stable strategy [ESS]. The minority Chinese have manipulated the Indonesian elite to maintain their favored position.

India is another example. It has used the caste system not only to keep the races apart, but also to make sure that the host races will yield to the parasite races at the top of the caste system. In this case again, the parasites are on average more intelligent and the host races easily indoctrinated to accept the caste system as right and proper.

When the United States was founded of course it did not need to manipulate the Black race for the fitness of the White race. No manipulation was required. Blacks were merely enslaved.

Later on however, starting in the 1960's, the host/parasite positions began to change. Indoctrination combined with compassion or concern for the status of Blacks by the maladaptive altruistic traits of Whites, started putting the resources of Whites into the hands of Blacks. Whites were being manipulated for the benefit of Blacks. How did this occur? Blacks were not intelligent, they did not control the press, and yet Whites were now being easily manipulated for the increased fitness of Blacks.

At first it really did have a lot to do with concerns for justice, what is morally right in terms of the accepted religious norms, etc. Whites, with an overabundance of altruism just plain tried to be more benevolent. And the media, especially television, brought the images of an oppressed Black population into the homes of Whites who had never lived with Blacks. They were easily indoctrinated into the liberal viewpoint: "Blacks were equal to Whites in intelligence, and it was only racism that kept them down." The public bought it, but the Blacks didn't really have much to do with it. Others were pulling the strings.

The classic host/parasite conflict is the Gentile/Jewish conflict. (Gentile or White capitalized will refer to Whites as a race, excluding Jews. Jews used in this paper refers to Ashkenazi Jews as a race and not a culture or religion.) For a massive work on the history of this conflict, its origins, its course through history, etc.

The Jews have been able to successfully manipulate their hosts into behaviors that favor the fitness of Jews at the expense of their hosts. The hosts are unable to deter this manipulation for many reasons but the main ones are: the Jews are far more intelligent, the Jews control the media to make indoctrination not only possible but exceedingly easy, the Jews will fight amongst themselves but will unite like a beehive when threatened by outsiders, they are highly xenophobic or ethnocentric, and they have the wealth and the resources to enforce their will nationally as well as internationally. Likewise, Whites are not aware of being harmed by the Jews manipulation of White's behavior that benefits Jewish fitness, and Whites are genetically biased towards maladaptive altruism as discussed above. This situation makes Whites extremely vulnerable then to Jewish manipulation and harm. And as it turns out, to the whims and wishes of many other races as well under the aegis of Jewish media and Jewish political control. (See Appendix B for a summation of Jewish wealth and power in the United States.)

So let us look at just some of the few manipulations of the host's behavior that has been taking place only in the last few decades to enhance Jewish fitness:

Americans pay an exorbitant amount of money to prop up Israel at the behest of American Jews. In addition, we have intervened militarily in the Middle East as a protector of Israel. This has cost many billions of dollars over the last few decades and there is no end in sight.

American foreign policy is always directed in such a way that policy will bring no harm to Jews in other countries. To excessive restraints on nationalism to suppression of free speech in Europe, to supporting European policies that hurt Whites, American foreign policy is heavily influence by Jewish interests.

Multiculturalism has led to massive immigration in both the United States and in Europe with a decrease in the quality of life for Whites and an increase in crime. Whites are no longer allowed to have a White only nation under international pressure for open borders.

The media, courts, and especially Hollywood has been assaulting anything that is cherished by Christians. They attack Christian ideals, symbols, and the traditional family. (Strangely, Christians are in my view no threat because generally they are oblivious to these issues and are sympathetic to Judaism as a sister religion. A failure of Christian consciousness will only revitalize racial consciousness. )

By promoting diversity, Whites are forced into a lesser position of rights under quotas, affirmative action, set asides, and opportunities. Even Asians, who already have higher educational levels and average income, can take advantage of these minority programs, and Whites must pay the price. (There is a mild consensus that Jews do not like affirmative action because of resources flowing to minorities. However, they control the media and the media is almost universal in advocating diversity. This dilemma may be due to the fear that if the low genetic intelligence of Blacks is ever admitted to, Jews likewise will be tagged as genetically superior -- causing hostility. (In private conversations with Jews, they go absolutely apoplectic when their success is attributed to their genetic intelligence.)[3]

The media in general portrays Whites, as the purveyors of hate against minorities, by only reporting the White on minority hate crimes while ignoring the reverse. This manipulation of public perception is primarily used to make Whites feel guilty because therefore Whites must be incorrigible racists. This again tends to undermine White racial identity, while the same racial identity is encouraged in all other groups.

Conclusion

Using what we know about inclusive fitness, and evolutionary principles in general, we are starting to understand the conflicts between races. These conflicts are natural and predictable. How they progress and how they will eventually be resolved, if that is possible, is not predictable by evolutionary science, but can only be speculated about. In the case of Whites, unless they have lost all ethnocentrism and have become universally individualistic, more ethnocentric races will merely slowly displace them.

This of course is highly unlikely, and the most logically expected outcome would be racial mobilization and strife. Small cohesive White groups will form at first, and will be dismissed as radicals by other Whites under the current doctrine of political correctness. But slowly, attitudes can change throughout the White race; a new ethos will emerge, to supplant the current one. This is how races or nations swing from one extreme to another. They must first relax their rigid perspectives under the existing indoctrination rules before they can accept new ones. It happens not by logical debate but slowly, person-by-person, but driven by the changing society around them. Already, racially conscious Whites around the world have abandoned old hostilities between themselves in the face of external threats. As inclusive fitness shows, humans have an innate sense of who is the other, and will prefer to promote the genetic success of their own kind.

====================

Notes

[1] Afterword by Daniel Dennett in The Extended Phenotype.

This book has been required reading for any serious student of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory since it first appeared in 1982, and one of the striking effects of re-reading it today is that it provides a time-lapse snapshot of the glacial pace of criticism. Stephen jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in the United States, and Steven Rose in the United Kingdom, have long warned the world about the 'genetic determinism' that supposedly rises menacingly out of Dawkins's gene's-eye view of biology, and here in Chapter 2 we find all their most recent criticisms already handily rebutted. You would think that in almost twenty years his opponents would have come up with some new angle, some new crack into which they could drive a subversive wedge or two, but, as Dawkins remarks in another context in which there has been no evolution, 'there is apparently no available variation for further enhancement' in their thinking. How much more satisfying, when faced with the task of replying to your most vehement critics, to be able simply to republish what you said on the topic many years ago!

What is this dread 'genetic determinism'? Dawkins (p. 10) cites a 1978 definition by Gould: 'If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change them either by will, education, or culture.' But if this is genetic determinism -- and I have seen no seriously revised definition from the critics -- then Dawkins is no genetic determinist (and neither is E. 0. Wilson, or, so far as I know, any well known sociobiologist or evolutionary psychologist). As Dawkins shows, in an impeccable philosophical analysis, the whole idea of the 'threat' of 'genetic' (or any other kind of) determinism is so ill-thought-out by those who brandish the term that it would be a bad joke if it weren't a scandal. Dawkins doesn't just rebut the charges, he diagnoses the likely sources of the confusions that make this such a tempting charge, and as he notes, 'There is a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.' Sad to say, he is right.

Not all criticisms of neo-Darwinian thinking are so misbegotten. Adaptationist thinking, the critics say, is seductive; it is all too easy to mistake an unsupported just-so story for a serious evolutionary argument. This is true, and time and again in this book Dawkins deftly exposes tempting lines of argument that run foul of reality in one way or another. On p. 38, Dawkins makes the very important point that a change in the environment may not just change the success rate of a phenotypic effect; it may change the phenotypic effect altogether! So much for the standard, and boringly false, charge that the gene's-eye point of view must ignore or underestimate the contribution of changes (including 'massively contingent' changes) in the selectional environment, but the fact remains that adaptationists often do ignore these (and other) complications, which is why the book fairly bristles with warnings against facile adaptationist reasoning.

The charge of 'reductionism', another standard epithet applied to the gene's-eye perspective, is perversely inappropriate when leveled at Dawkins. Far from blinding us to the marvels of higher levels of explanation, the idea of the extended phenotype expands their powers by removing crippling misconceptions. As Dawkins says, it permits us to rediscover the organism. Why, if phenotypic effects do not have to honor the boundary between organism and 'outside' world, are there (multicellular) organisms at all? A very good question, and one that one probably wouldn't ask -- or ask well -- if it weren't for the perspective that Dawkins offers. Each of us walks around each day carrying the DNA of several thousand lineages (our parasites, our intestinal flora) in addition to our nuclear (and mitochondrial) DNA, and all these genomes get along pretty well under most circumstances. They are all in the same boat, after all. A herd of antelope, a termite colony, a mating pair of birds and their clutch of eggs, a human society -- these groupish entities are no more groupish, in the end, than an individual human being, with its trillion-plus cells, each a descendant of the ma-cell and pa-cell union that started the group's voyage. 'At any level, if a vehicle is destroyed, all the replicators inside it will be destroyed. Natural selection will therefore, at least to some extent, favor replicators that cause their vehicles to resist being destroyed. In principle this could apply to groups of organisms as well as to single organisms, for if a group is destroyed all the genes inside it are destroyed too'. So are genes all that matter? Not at all. 'There is nothing magic about Darwinian fitness in the genetic sense. There is no law giving it priority as the fundamental quantity that is maximized. . . . A meme has its own opportunities for replication, and its own phenotypic effects, and there is no reason why success in a meme should have any connection whatever with genetic success'.

The logic of Darwinian thinking is not just about genes. More and more thinkers are coming to appreciate this: evolutionary economists, evolutionary ethicists, and others in the social sciences and even in the physical sciences and the arts. I take this to be a philosophical discovery, and it is undeniably mind-boggling. The book you hold in your hands is one of the best guide-books to this new world of understanding.

[2] Book review by Matthew Nuenke of Defenders of the Truth:

This book is an amazing compilation of the battle between Marxists and traditionalists in their debates over primarily sociobiology; but also morals, intelligence, racism, religion and the individual philosophies that the players brought to the debate. The author was there, interviewing the players over thirty years, collecting their comments and observing the fireworks.

She concludes that the debates were good for neo-Darwinists, and that they perfected their scientific methodologies faster because of the attacks from the left -- attacks that if looked at carefully were contradictory and without substance. But the book concludes that it was not a battle for truth, but rather a battle for status, positioning, morality, etc. Even for those scholars who were eventually made to look rather foolish in their Marxist attempts to discredit neo-Darwinism, and especially determinism, they won big time for their stalwartness in the face of facts. That is, they could not be shaken in their beliefs. And this is why this book, excellent in every way, stops short of answering the question -- What was it all about?

Actually, the author almost stumbled upon it once in the book, when she noted that the neo-Darwinists seemed to be "rural" in their outlooks, and the Marxists "urban." She then noted the rural Christians, but fails to mention the urban Jews. Was this book really about group evolutionary strategies all along? Of course the players did not fall neatly into ethnic or political categories. And yet in many ways the battle lines did seem to be drawn between a Jewish and a gentile viewpoint.

I will suggest that when reading this book, keep "group evolution" in mind. It seems to be playing itself out in academia and the media in these genetic wars. That is, this book looks only at the proximate causes of the debates -- status, morality, self-deception in serving the tribe, aggression, intolerance of other's belief systems, etc. What is not seen, because humans have a great deal of difficulty with seeing themselves as loyal tribesmen, is the ultimate cause of the debate -- the cultural warfare between Jewish and Caucasian intellectuals who are about equal in numbers in academia, even though Jews only make up about 3% of the U.S. population. This is a battle for power by the elites from two different tribes.

Then after reading this book, read Kevin MacDonald's recently published trilogy on Jewish-gentile evolutionary strategies. The same players are discussed, but with the ultimate causes included in the warfare. And it portends that these battles are again flaring up, and in reality they only subsided briefly after WWII and are likely to return with a full head of steam. As yet, many scholars are side-stepping the real issue of multiculturalism, diversity, and what it means if humans did in fact evolve with strong tribal ethos in place of any universal moral system. So let the games begin!

[3] As I was writing this article, I was also debating issues on Salon's Table Talk, an online open discussion group -- so I thought. First, I used "fuck" in a sarcastic way in one of my replies. I was warned by the moderator. Ok, may be they scan for certain words. At the time, I was absolutely trouncing some Jews with regards to their intelligence as they kept maintaining it was their culture, and not their genetics. They were really pissed because I never stooped to their level of name-calling, I just kept pummeling them with facts. Finally, I was permanently removed from all the forums. What had I done? I was off topic. I was discussing issues that were supposedly not germane to that particular thread. Of course, I was only following them in argument -- I was not changing the subject. But all the Jews had to do was turn me into the Jewish moderator and I was history. This is how it is done in an open forum. Now imagine a newspaper, a movie, etc. If you criticize Jews, you are history.

But what was really interesting is that the ten or so Jews I was debating collectively took up a radical environmentalist argument that is not supported by any academics that I am aware of. That is, collectively they all began to argue that in essence, the world was flat. It was really eye-opening to see one start, and the rest join in to keep me from making my point. These forums are a good way to get a feeling how Jews act instinctively as a collective.

Appendix A: supporting quotes from The Extended Phenotype
Pg. 19 'Genes for conformity, xenophobia, and aggressiveness are simply postulated for humans because they are needed for the theory, not because any evidence for them exists' (Lewontin 1976b). This is a fair criticism of E. 0. Wilson, but not a very damning one. Apart from possible political repercussions which might be unfortunate, there is nothing wrong with cautiously speculating about a possible Darwinian survival value of xenophobia or any other trait. And you cannot begin to speculate, however cautiously, about the survival value of anything unless you postulate a genetic basis for variation in that thing. Of course xenophobia may not vary genetically, and of course xenophobia may not be a Darwinian adaptation, but we can't even discuss the possibility of its being a Darwinian adaptation unless we postulate a genetic basis for it. Lewontin himself has expressed the point as well as anybody: 'In order for a trait to evolve by natural selection it is necessary that there be genetic variation in the population for such a trait' (Lewontin 1979b). And 'genetic variation in the population for' a trait X is exactly what we mean when we talk, for brevity, of 'a gene for' X.

Pg. 21 A few workers have, indeed, flung just such a challenge at the whole neo-Darwinian modern synthesis, and have claimed not to be neo-Darwinians. Goodwin (1979) in a published debate with Deborah Charlesworth and others, said, '...neo-Darwinism has an incoherence in it ... we are not given any way of generating phenotypes from genotypes in neo-Darwinism. Therefore the theory is in this respect defective.' Goodwin is, of course, quite right that development is terribly complicated, and we don't yet understand much about how phenotypes are generated. But that they are generated, and that genes contribute significantly to their variation are incontrovertible facts, and those facts are all we need in order to make neo-Darwinism coherent. Goodwin might just as well say that, before Hodgkin and Huxley worked out how the nerve impulse fired, we were not entitled to believe that nerve impulses controlled behavior. Of course it would be nice to know how phenotypes are made but, while embryologists are busy finding out, the rest of us are entitled by the known facts of genetics to carry on being neo-Darwinians, treating embryonic development as a black box. There is no competing theory that has even a remote claim to be called coherent.

Pg. 26 The conclusion of the previous paragraph is inevitable, provided only that we are evolutionists who agree to the proposition that once upon a time our ancestors were less clever (by whatever criterion) then we are. Yet in spite of all that, it still does not follow that there is any genetic variation in mental abilities left in the human population today: the genetic variance might all have been used up by selection. On the other hand it might not, and my thought experiment shows at least the inadvisability of dogmatic and hysterical opposition to the very possibility of genetic variation in human mental abilities. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that even if there is such genetic variation in modern human populations, to base any policy on it would be illogical and wicked [like set-asides, affirmative action and quotas?].

Pg. 36 Returning to the time-lag effect itself, since modern man has drastically changed the environment of many animals and plants over a time-scale that is negligible by ordinary evolutionary standards, we can expect to see anachronistic adaptations rather often. The hedgehog antipredator response of rolling up into a ball is sadly inadequate against motor cars.

Lay critics frequently bring up some apparently maladaptive feature of modern human behavior -- adoption, say, or contraception -- and fling down a challenge to 'explain that if you can with your selfish genes'. Obviously, as Lewontin, Gould and others have rightly stressed, it would be possible, depending on one's ingenuity, to pull a 'sociobiological' explanation out of a hat, a 'just-so story', but I agree with them and Cain that the answering of such challenges is a trivial exercise; indeed it is likely to be positively harmful. Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected. The question, about the adaptive significance of behavior in an artificial world, should never have been put; and although a silly question may deserve a silly answer, it is wiser to give no answer at all and to explain why.

Pg. 52 One of the main messages of this book is that, for 'many purposes, it, is better to regard the level at which selection acts as neither the organism, nor the group or any larger unit, but the gene or small genetic fragment. This difficult topic will be debated in later chapters. For the present, it is sufficient to note that selection at the level of the gene can give rise to apparent imperfections at the level of the individual. I shall discuss 'meiotic drive' and related phenomena in Chapter 8, but the classic example is the case of heterozygous advantage. A gene may be positively selected because of its beneficial effects when heterozygous, even though it has harmful effects when homozygous. As a consequence of this, a predictable proportion of the individual organisms in the population will have defects. The general point is this. The genome of an individual organism in a sexual population is the product of a more or less random shuffling of the genes in the population. Genes are selected over their alleles because of their phenotypic effects, averaged over all the individual bodies in which they are distributed, over the whole population, and through many generations. The effects that a given gene has will usually depend upon the other genes with which it shares a body: heterozygous advantage is just a special case of this. A certain proportion of bad bodies seems an almost inevitable consequence of selection for good genes, where good refers to the average effects of a gene on a statistical sample of bodies in which it finds itself permuted with other genes.

Pg. 55 One of my purposes in this book is to question the 'central theorem' that it is useful to expect individual organisms to behave in such a way as to maximize their own inclusive fitness, or in other words to maximize the survival of copies of the genes inside them. The end of the previous chapter suggests one way in which the central theorem might be violated. Organisms might consistently work in the interests of other organisms rather than of themselves. That is, they might be 'manipulated'.

The fact that animals frequently cause other animals to perform some action that is against their own best interests is, of course, well known. Obviously it happens every time an angler fish catches prey, every time a cuckoo is fed by its foster mother. I shall make use of both these examples in this chapter, but I shall also emphasize two points that have not always been stressed. Firstly, it is natural to assume that even if a manipulator gets away with it temporarily, it is only a matter of evolutionary time before the lineage of manipulated organisms comes up with a counter-adaptation. In other words, we tend to assume that manipulation only works because of the 'timelag' constraint on perfection. In this chapter I shall point out that, on the contrary, there are conditions under which we should expect manipulators to succeed consistently and for indefinite lengths of evolutionary time. I shall discuss this later under the catch-phrase of 'arms races'.

Pg. 67 We only have to accept the general plausibility of such asymmetries in order to answer the question raised by our discussion of manipulation. We agreed that if one organism could get away with manipulating the nervous system of another, and exploiting its muscle power, selection would favor such manipulation. But we were brought up short by the reflection that selection would also favor resistance to being manipulated. Should we, then, really expect to see effective manipulation in nature? The life/dinner principle, and other such principles as the rare-enemy effect, provide us with an answer. If the individual manipulator has more to lose by failing to manipulate than the individual victim has to lose by failing to resist manipulation, we should expect to see successful manipulation in nature. We should expect to see animals working in the interests of other animals' genes.

Pg. 84 A replicator may be said to 'benefit' from anything that increases the number of its descendant (germ-line) copies. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival. A large number of adaptations are of this type. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group. But all these adaptations will exist, fundamentally, through differential replicator survival. The basic beneficiary of any adaptation is the active germ-line replicator, the optimon.

Pg. 90 Natural selection can cause changes in frequency only at nucleotide loci that are heterozygous in the population. If there are large, intervening chunks of nucleotide sequences that never differ among individuals, these cannot be subject to natural selection, for there is nothing to choose between them. Natural selection must focus its attention on heterozygous nucleotides. It is changes at the single nucleotide level that are responsible for evolutionarily significant phenotypic changes, although of course the unvarying remainder of the genome is necessary to produce a phenotype at all.

Pg. 112 If the organism is not a replicator, what is it? The answer is that it is a communal vehicle for replicators. A vehicle is an entity in which replicators (genes and memes) travel about, an entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it, an entity which may be seen as a compound tool of replicator propagation. But individual organisms are not the only entities that might be regarded as vehicles in this sense. There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.

Pg. 146 The essential difference between the green-beard effect and the armpit self-inspection effect is as follows. The armpit self-inspection behavioral rule will lead to the detection of other individuals that are similar in some respect, perhaps in many respects, but it will not specifically lead to the detection of individuals that possess copies of the gene mediating the behavioral rule itself. The armpit rule might provide an admirable means of detecting true kin from non-kin, or of detecting whether a brother was a full brother or only a half brother. This could be very important, and it might provide the basis for selection in favor of self-inspecting behavior, but the selection would be conventional, familiar kin selection. The self-inspection rule would be functioning simply as a kin-recognition device, analogous to a rule like: 'Behave altruistically towards individuals that grew up in your own nest.' . . .

To return to Hamilton's comparison with assortative mating, we can see that it does not really provide good grounds for optimism over the plausibility of the green-beard effect. Assortative mating is much more likely to involve self-inspection. If, for whatever reason, it is an advantage in general for like to mate with like, selection would favor an armpit type of behavioral rule: Inspect yourself, and choose a mate that resembles you. This will achieve the desired result -- an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding or whatever the advantage may be -- regardless of the exact nature of the characteristics by which individuals differ.

Pg. 153 Mastery of the green-beard model will convince him that altruism towards kin is not an end in itself, something that animals are mysteriously expected to practice in accordance with some clever mathematics that field workers don't understand. Rather, kinship provides just one way in which genes can behave as if they recognized and favored copies of themselves in other individuals. Hamilton himself is emphatic on this point: '...kinship should be considered just one way of getting positive regression of genotype in the recipient, and ... it is this positive regression that is vitally necessary for altruism. Thus the inclusive fitness concept is more general than "kin selection"' (Hamilton 1975a, p. 140-141).

Pg. 162 Brought up as he is in a trusting Utopia, it might require a major flash of revolutionary insight for our Martian to see that much of human technology only makes sense when you realize that humans distrust each other, that some humans work against the best interests of other humans. There is a struggle between those who wish to obtain illicit information from a communication system and those who wish to withhold that information from them. Much of human technology is the product of arms races and can only be understood in those terms.

Pg. 184 Hamilton, in a pair of papers which we can now see to have marked a turning point in the history of evolutionary theory, made us aware of an important deficiency in classical fitness, the measure based on the reproductive success of an organism. The reason reproductive success matters, as opposed to mere individual survival, is that reproductive success is a measure of success in passing on genes. The organisms we see around us are descended from ancestors, and they have inherited some of the attributes that made those individuals ancestors as opposed to non-ancestors. If an organism exists it contains the genes of a long line of successful ancestors. The fitness of an organism is its success as an ancestor, or, according to taste, its capacity for success as an ancestor. But Hamilton grasped the central importance of what, previously, had been only glancingly referred to in stray sentences of Fisher and Haldane. This is that natural selection will favor organs and behavior that cause the individual's genes to be passed on, whether or not the individual is, himself, an ancestor. An individual that assists his brother to be an ancestor may thereby ensure the survival in the gene-pool of the genes 'for' brotherly assistance. Hamilton saw that parental care is really only a special case of caring for close relatives with a high probability of containing the genes for caring. Classical fitness, reproductive success, was too narrow. It had to be broadened to inclusive fitness, which will here be called fitness.

Pg. 86 Hamilton clearly saw this fallacy, and therefore his concept of inclusive fitness was more subtle. The inclusive fitness of an organism is not a property of himself, but a property of his actions or effects. Inclusive fitness is calculated from an individual's own reproductive success plus his effects on the reproductive success of his relatives, each one weighed by the appropriate coefficient of relatedness. Therefore, for instance, if my brother emigrates to Australia, so I can have no effect, one way or the other, on his reproductive success, my inclusive fitness does not go up each time he has a child!

Pg. 195 Our statement is that there is a statistical tendency for individuals with G1 to be more likely than individuals with G2 to show P1 (rather than P2). Of course there is no need to demand that P1 should always be associated with G1, nor that G1 should always lead to P1: in the real world outside logic textbooks, the simple concepts of 'necessary' and 'sufficient' must usually be replaced by statistical equivalents.

Such an insistence that phenotypes are not caused by genes, but only phenotypic differences caused by gene differences may seem to weaken the concept of genetic determination to the point where it ceases to be interesting. This is far from the case, at least if the subject of our interest is natural selection, because natural selection too is concerned with differences. Natural selection is the process by which some alleles out-propagate their alternatives, and the instruments by which they achieve this are their phenotypic effects. It follows that phenotypic effects can always be thought of as relative to alternative phenotypic effects.

It is customary to speak as if differences always mean differences between individual bodies or other discrete 'vehicles'. The purpose of the next three chapters is to show that we can emancipate the concept of the phenotypic difference from that of the discrete vehicle altogether, and this is the meaning of the title 'extended phenotype'. I shall show that the ordinary logic of genetic terminology leads inevitably to the conclusion that genes can be said to have extended phenotypic effects, effects which need not be expressed at the level of any particular vehicle.

Pg. 233 It will be remembered that the 'central theorem' of the selfish organism claims that an animal's behavior tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes 'for' that behavior pattern maximizing their survival. We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene 'for' a behavior pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, 'for' a behavior pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism. Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behavior tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behavior, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

Pg. 248 But I have not the wings to fly in mathematical spaces. There must be a verbal message for those that study animals in the field. What difference will the doctrine of the extended phenotype make to how we actually see animals? Most serious field biologists now subscribe to the theorem, largely due to Hamilton, that animals are expected to behave as if maximizing the survival chances of all the genes inside them. I have amended this to a new central theorem of the extended phenotype: An animal's behavior tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behavior, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing the behavior. The two theorems would amount to the same thing if animal phenotypes were always under the unadulterated control of their own genotypes, and uninfluenced by the genes of other organisms. In advance of a mathematical theory to handle the quantitative interactions between conflicting pressures, perhaps the simplest qualitative conclusion is that the behavior we are looking at may be, at least partly, an adaptation for the preservation of some other animal's or plant's genes. It may therefore be positively maladaptive for the organism performing the behavior.

Once when I tried to persuade a colleague of this -- he is a staunch believer in the power of Darwinian selection, and a good field investigator of it -- he thought that I was making an anti-adaptation point. He warned me that time and again people had written off some quirk of animal behavior or morphology as functionless or maladaptive, only to discover that they had not fully understood it. He was right. But the point I am making is different. When I say here that a behavior pattern is maladaptive, I only mean it is maladaptive for the individual animal performing it. I am suggesting that the individual performing the behavior is not the entity for whose benefit the behavior is an adaptation. Adaptations benefit the genetic replicators responsible for them, and only incidentally the individual organisms involved.

Appendix B: The power and wealth of the Jews from the book The Jewish Phenomenon by by Steven Silbiger, 2000

That closer look revealed a picture of a very small group with a great deal of economic and social success. Of course, that was no surprise to me. My parents raised me as a Jew with expectations of economic achievement, education and success. In addition, I had no shortage of role models from my family, my community, the media and the world. Economic success was the norm in my Jewish community.

Did I buy into a stereotype perpetuated out of ethnic pride, or was there a truth to it? Being critical by nature, I quickly uncovered some compelling facts that prove Jewish success is indeed a fact in America:

1.) The percentage of Jewish households with income greater than $50,000 is double that of non-Jews.

2.) On the other hand, the percentage of Jewish households with income less than $20,000 is half that of non-Jews.

3.) "The Jewish advantage in economic status persists to the present day; it remains higher than that of white Protestants and Catholics, even among households of similar age, composition and location."

4.) Forty-five percent of the top 40 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans are Jewish.

5.) "One-third of American multimillionaires are tallied as Jewish."

6.) Twenty percent of professors at leading universities are Jewish.

7.) Forty percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington are Jewish!

8.) Thirty percent of American Nobel prize winners in science and 25 percent of all American Nobel winners are Jewish.

It didn't end there. In his book Ethnic America, Dr. Thomas Sowell, an African-American economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, created a point-scale index that graphed Jewish economic success compared with that of other ethnic groups:

ETHNIC HOUSEHOLD INCOME

(U.S. Average = 100)

JEWISH 172

JAPANESE 132

POLISH 115

CHINESE 112

ITALIAN 112

GERMAN 107

ANGLO-SAXON 107

IRISH 103

U.S. AVG. 100

FILIPINO 99