Here’s a very concrete example of how ethnocentrism can evolve. The Batwa Pygmies of Africa’s Great Lakes region are a small population numbering only about 80,000 people. Their future is at risk because their traditional way of life has been destroyed and they are often hunted by other Africans.
Now let’s say a mutation randomly appeared in the Batwa Pygmies causing ethnic loyalty. Let’s say it was extremely rare, and only 0.01% of the 80,000 Batwa Pygmies had it (8 individuals). Now suppose one of these 8 individuals was intelligent enough to become a globally famous civil rights activist, winning the admiration of president Obama and giving speeches to the American congress, and inspiring them to send financial aid and military support for the Batwa Pygmies. As a result of this assistance, the Batwa Pygmy population quadrupled from 80,000 people to 320,000 people. Still only 0.01% of the Batwa pygmies had the ethnocentric mutation, but because that mutation caused the overall Batwa pygmy population to grow, now there were 32 ethnocentric mutants, instead of 8.
Now let’s say the 320,000 population split in half, and all 32 of the ethnocentric mutants were in one half. The half with the ethnocentric mutants continued to get protection from the United States because of the strong activism from a few of the ethnocentric mutants, but the half that didn’t was slaughtered by other Africans. Now the overall population of Batwa pygmies has shrunk to 160,000, but the percentage that have the ethnocentric mutation has increased from 0.01% to 0.02% because all 32 of the mutants were in the half of the population that didn’t get slaughtered.
Now let’s assume that some of the ethnocentric mutants use the fact that half the Batwa pygmy population was slaughtered to lobby for even more support from America. The population quadruples again but this time from 160,000 to 640,000, but now the ethnocentric mutants are 0.02% of the population, so their numbers jump from 32 to 128. Now let’s assume the population splits again, and the half without the ethnocentric mutants gets slaughtered again. Now the ethnocentric mutants are 0.04% of the surviving Batwa pygmies.
So as we can see, over evolutionary time, the number of genetically ethnocentric people increases, especially in absolute numbers, but even as a percentage of their ethnic group.
And all of this ignores the individual fitness benefits that likely accrue to the ethnocentrics. Because they saved their people from extinction, they and their closest kin would likely be lionized by the Batwa pygmy community and showered with numerous sexual partners, have a great many children, who themselves would likely be protected by the Batwa community. As a result of all this goodwill, the ethnocentric gene could spread far more rapidly than my example implies. Indeed all through history, warriors and activists who fight for their people have been elevated to God-like status.
Pumpkin Person 
Very good illustration of how genes for ethnic loyalty can rapidly multiply .
Ashkenazim intelligence
Or, alternatively, that intelligent Batwa pygmy could just stash all his earnings in a Swiss bank account, and live high off the ignorance and naivete of his tribesmen while siring 20 children with six different women. Which is pretty much how nearly all African elites behave. (Most pygmy tribes actually have a tendency toward monogamy, but my point stands.)
I’m still waiting to hear what exactly Barack Obama Jr. has done to improve the plight of the Luo tribe in Kenya. Why haven’t his genetic imperatives kicked in yet?
Your second mechanism is indeed plausible — but again, you wouldn’t expect this to be a universal phenomenon. There are multiple ways to be “sexy” in every culture, who’s to say that the generous philanthropist is guaranteed to receive higher admiration from his peers than the violent rapper with Swarovski crystals embedded in his front teeth? A general in-group bias is easy to evolve through individual selection, and exists in pretty much every tribe and culture. But that’s not exactly the same thing as a race preserving instinct.
Also, it seems that worldwide, some ethnicities are a lot more loyal to their own kind than others. There an important lesson to be learned here.
I’m still waiting to hear what exactly Barack Obama Jr. has done to improve the plight of the Luo tribe in Kenya. Why haven’t his genetic imperatives kicked in yet?
Obama is mixed race so that may make him less ethnocentric. But he passed universal health care which arguably disproportionately benefits African Americans. Although African Americans are of largely West African ancestry & Obama is half East African, he may share with them a broader sub-Saharan gene pool, hence they’re his most loyal supporters.
That’s a very convoluted way of admitting that he’s done nothing.
Has Mugabe fled for good? Or has he been spotted trolling elsewhere? What about that swank guy?
misdreavus has lost.
Your scenario isn’t describing altruism.
Altruism there as well racial altruism, period. The differences here is when a group of influent racial altruistics or a lot of them produce a culture that emphasize race as part of a shared culture. Remember, most human beings are followers. You are trampling most of human psique particularities like mamarian conformism.
The scenario above doesn’t describe any sort of altruism. It seems to describe a gene that makes one an intelligent and charismatic politician and thus increases one’s individual fitness. That’s not an altruistic gene.
No it describes an intelligent charismatic politician who just happens to have an ethnocentric gene.
He thus uses his intelligence to advance his ethnic group causing its population to grow. And since a tiny percentage of his coethnics carry the gene too, causing the population of his ethnic group to grow causes the number of people with the gene to increase too.
You haven’t described ethnocentric altruism.
Ethnocentric altruism would be if, say, the intelligent charismatic politican decided to eschew the safe and personally highly lucrative world of international politics and instead personally led a cavalry charge against the Africans and died in battle defeating them.
Well I’m arguing ethnocentricism can evolve. Sacrificing your life for your race is just an extreme form of ethnocentricism.
Your scenario doesn’t describe any sort of altruism whatsoever. You’re begging the question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Well lets say the civil rights activist I described gets assassinated for his activism & knew that was the price he would pay for his activism (see martin luther king). Then it becomes an example of ethnic altruism.
In that case the frequency would go down.
It would go down by one person yet still increase in the long run
The frequency would go down because you would go from 8 out of 80,000 to 7 out of 79,999. You would go from .01% to .009%
The first scenario you describe is indeed not a form of selection, as the frequency of the allele has not increased (as you rightly recognize): people do not tend to behave any more ethnocentric than before, on average. If there is any cost to this ethnocentrism (making it altruism), then it would decrease in frequency within the group, and would go extinct.
The second and third scenarios you describe are extremely strong group selection: the presence of a few altruists in one population prevented its destruction, whereas the other died off completely. All of this depends on the outcome that one population happens to get all the altruists, every time, as opposed to the (more likely) even split. I don’t know of any evolutionary theorist who thinks this has been an important force in human history, for large ethnic groups.
You are right, of course, that OTHER mechanisms can favor ethnocentrism. That’s sort of the point of all these critiques. No one doubts that ethnocentrism exists – we only question the theory you’re using to explain it.
In the second and third scenarios, the altruists would be the American taxpayers or soldiers. The politican advancing his individual fitness would not be an altruist.
“The first scenario you describe is indeed not a form of selection, as the frequency of the allele has not increased (as you rightly recognize):”
While pumpkinperson’s exact scenario is not realistic, you’re missing the fact that although the frequency of the Pygmy allele has not changed in Pygmies, its frequency in the total population has increased.
If ethnocentric groups are able to expand at the expense of less ethnocentric groups, ethnocentric altruism can be selected for even while being selected against within populations.
Hamilton:
“The favouring of altruism in subdivided populations can be seen as due to
the fact that drift tends to bring about assortation. Chance concentrations of
altruists, due to drift, will tend to grow rapidly. Within subdivisions, apart
from the influence of immigration, the frequency of altruists may be every-
where tending to decrease, but if the vigour of the altruistic groups can some-
how counteract the backward drift and selection in other groups, positive
selection may hold overall. [. . .]
Vigorous groups could grow in numbers and then divide when some critical
size was reached. To keep the total population and the number of groups
roughly constant, the smallest groups could be removed, or, in the ‘stepping-
stone’ model, the smallest neighbouring group could be ‘overrun’ and
replaced by an emigrant portion of the vigorous neighbour. Groups which
increase rapidly, due to fortunes of initial constitution, immigration, and
drift also divide often and so spread the gene in spite of its average tendency
to decrease within groups. This is the one type of selection process that can
reasonably be called ‘group selection’. Haldane 64 discussed the selection of
altruism with this sort of process in mind, “
The scenario doesn’t seem to illustrate altruism though, except perhaps on the part of the American taxpayers and soldiers, in which case the scenario would show altruism decreasing.
I’m not concerned with pumpkinperson’s actual example. Hamilton provides more cogent examples of how group selection probably acted in human evolution.
This is right. I suppose we disagree on the extent to which this mechanism mattered in human evolutionary history. It depends strongly on maintaining variation between groups – otherwise the expansion of one cannot change global allele frequencies. Between-group selection, within-group selection, and interbreeding with neighbors all reduce between-group variance, so models usually suggest that the mechanism you mention will be quite transient. Now, reshuffling among small groups can indefinitely maintain enough between-group variance (by introducing lots of drift) to maintain substantial group selection (DS Wilson’s “trait-group” models). Ethnic groups don’t seem to reshuffle the way those trait-group models require, and they’re too big for the reshuffling to introduce enough between-group variation anyway. In short, I doubt the mechanism could have an appreciable effect on human behavioral evolution. Maybe I’m wrong.
Pingback: Brilliant Ted Cruz towers as the smartest presidential candidate | Pumpkin Person
Pingback: Congratulations JayMan! | Pumpkin Person
Pingback: Altruism and Ethnocentrism « NotPoliticallyCorrect