I’ve discussed this before: Back when I was just a high school kid (I’m now in my 30s), I started phoning up the late great J.P. Rushton, who I regard as the Darwin of the 20th century, at the University of Western Ontario. One of his theories was that blacks were the most primitive race, in part because they were the first race to branch off the human evolutionary tree. Another of his theories was that humans (and other animals) are more altruistic to genetically similar others.
One day I asked Rushton if one of the reasons why the black community was having so many problems is that blacks, being the oldest race, were the most genetically diverse, and thus were the least internally altruistic.
“You’ve stumbled upon an inference that never even crossed my mind,” he said. “Very astute of you to connect the two concepts like that.”
To me it made perfect sense. When one looks at the lack of social organization in black populations, you could just say that blacks are more primitive, but an additional explanation is that blacks are just too genetically diverse to get along, and thus you see a lot of black on black violence, a lot of back self-hatred (skin bleaching), a lot of black on black jealousy (crab in the barrel syndrome).
For how can blacks be a unified people when they’ve been evolving in sub-Saharan Africa for 200,000 years, and there’s been all that time for genetic mutations to accumulate, causing different black tribes to be genetically very different?
And yet eventually these extremely different tribes mixed, and so you would have parents raising kids who have genetic variants very alien to their own, and this probably contributed to the breakdown of the black family: it’s harder for kin altruism to get selected when the kids you are altruistic to, don’t resemble you that much genetically because their other parent is so unlike you that they don’t inherit your high degree of kin altruism or inherit it as a recessive unexpressed trait. And when kin altruism gets only weakly selected for, racial loyalty (which is probably just an outgrowth of kin loyalty) is probably weakly selected for too.
Of course, being an old race can probably be negated if there’s a lot of cousin marriage, which brings us to HBD Chick’s theory: ethnic groups that historically engaged in a lot of cousin marriage are more clannish, which she defines as:
clannishness is (and i reserve the right to alter this definition) a set of behaviors and innate behavioral traits and predispositions which, when found in a population, result in the members of that population strongly favoring, in all areas of life, themselves, their family members — both near and extended, and even closely allied associates (esp. in clannish societies which are not arranged into clans), while at the same time strongly disfavoring those considered to be non-family and all unrelated, non-allied associates.
So is she saying clannish people are more racist? I can’t tell from her definition. But I would argue that clannish people are indeed more racist, because it sounds like clannish people are just people who were more efficiently selected to favour kin (since doing so confers more fitness benefits if your kin are inbred and thus more related to you via the cousin marriage HBD Chick describes) and I argue that people who are selected to favour kin are also selected to favour their own race, because the same instinct that gets you to favour your sister over your cousin over your second cousin, would likely also get you to favour your race over another race, even if racial favoritism was not the reason it evolved and even if the fitness benefits are fewer.
So for example, HBD Chick argues that Northwest Europeans are very low in clannishness because they historically had a low rate of cousin marriage. And doesn’t she use this to argue that Northwest Europeans are especially accepting of outsiders (high rates of non-white immigration)? Meanwhile Arabs, who are very high in cousin marriage, are also very high on ethnocentrism (i.e. Palestinian suicide bombers).
Thus, it would seem groups that are low on clannishness are low on ethnocentrism and vice verca.
But I would argue that it’s not just the rate of cousin marriage that allows a group to be selected for “clannishness” but also the age of the group. Ethnic groups that emerged very recently are going to be more genetically homogenous because they have very recent common ancestors, just as ethnic groups that practiced a lot of cousin marriage will be genetically homogenous. So it seems in both groups, kin favoritism would be especially fitness enhancing.
So ethnic groups that are BOTH extremely young, AND extremely incestuous, are going to be especially clannish, and thus especially ethnocentric. Does that make sense?
Of course I’m no expert, but this is a very confused post.
First of all, modern sub-Saharan blacks (and the diaspora) are not that old evolutionarily speaking. Blacks didn’t even exist before a few thousand years ago. The Bantu expansion that left West-Central Africa 3000 years ago was a evolutionarily new group that replaced the older hunter-gather Khoisan tribes that inhabited most of Sub-Saharan Africa at that time. The Bantus of course were much darker skinned, larger, more robust, and practiced subsistence farming instead of hunting/gathering, so they nearly wiped out the previous inhabitants.
But even if it’s true that Sub-Saharans are genetically diverse compared to other races, you still have to prove that’s why they’re self-hating, or whatever you’re trying to argue. As Jayman argues, you share less than 1% of your genes with anyone.who’s not your second cousin or closer, regardless of their race. There’s no benefit to sacrificing yourself or your wealth for someone that shares that little genetic material with you, unless potentially you were helping maybe thousands of people of your race with little or no cost to yourself.
Black violence can mostly be explained in terms of low IQ, high impulsiveness, and perhaps high psychopathy. You don’t need to introduce EGI arguments to explain it; blacks spend most of their time around other blacks, so blacks just end up killing the people they happen to interact with the most.
First of all, modern sub-Saharan blacks (and the diaspora) are not that old evolutionarily speaking. Blacks didn’t even exist before a few thousand years ago.
Well you’re using a kind of narrow definition of black, but regardless of how long they’ve existed, a study claimed African Americans have more genetic diversity than white Americans:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3326376/African-DNA-has-more-genetic-diversity.html
But the study may be conflating similarity with mutation load, so it could be wrong.
But even if it’s true that Sub-Saharans are genetically diverse compared to other races, you still have to prove that’s why they’re self-hating, or whatever you’re trying to argue. As Jayman argues, you share less than 1% of your genes with anyone.who’s not your second cousin or closer, regardless of their race.
Less than 1% of genes that are identical by descent. All humans share about 99.8% of genes. If a black causes more of his coethnics to reproduce than a white does, he’s done nothing to increase his genetic fitness relative to other blacks, but he has increased his fitness relative to whites, because there are now more alleles and combinations of alleles shared with the black that aren’t shared with the white. It might be just a drop in the genetic ocean, but then, so is having kids.
There’s no benefit to sacrificing yourself or your wealth for someone that shares that little genetic material with you, unless potentially you were helping maybe thousands of people of your race with little or no cost to yourself.
Well it depends how you define and measure genetic benefits; but I’m not even necessarily arguing it’s beneficial in this post.
If I recall, your an HBD Chick fan, correct? Now, her argument (if I understand it) is that genetically homogenous people are more likely to be selected for kin favoritism, because in more genetically similar populations, you have more genes in common with your siblings, uncles, etc, thus there’s a greater payoff to favoring family and extended family.
HBD Chick argues the genetic similarity is caused by cousin marriage. All I’m doing is asking whether an additional source of genetic similarity (age of the ethnic group) might play a role.
HBD Chick argues that extreme kin selection makes people more clannish. All I’m suggesting (and HBD Chick kind of hints at this), is that clannish people would also be more racist, because the same evolved mechanism that allows you to prefer kin over non-kin, would also cause you to favour your race over another race, even if it didn’t evolve for that purpose, and even if there were no fitness benefits at all to doing so. Not everything that evolves, evolved to benefit us. As Mugabe has said, some things just came along for the ride (spandrels):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
Black violence can mostly be explained in terms of low IQ, high impulsiveness, and perhaps high psychopathy. You don’t need to introduce EGI arguments to explain it; blacks spend most of their time around other blacks, so blacks just end up killing the people they happen to interact with the most.
Your right, it may be a superfluous theory, and I might be completely wrong about where blacks fit on this spectrum anyway since I only looked at one variable (genetic age) and even that I could be misinterpreting.
Nonetheless, the model I’m invoking might be useful for explaining other groups, or not…I agree it’s kind of confused at this point.
Less than 1% of genes that are identical by descent. All humans share about 99.8% of genes.
Argh, of course. That’s what I meant.
If I recall, you[‘]r[e] an HBD Chick fan, correct?
Yep!
All I’m suggesting (and HBD Chick kind of hints at this), is that clannish people would also be more racist, because the same evolved mechanism that allows you to prefer kin over non-kin, would also cause you to favour your race over another race
I don’t think the kin recognition mechanism would cause you to see everyone in your race as a cousin. Clannishness causes one to behave to selfishly (psychopathically) through less reciprocation of reciprocal altruism, but this selfishness is directed equally towards everyone who is non-related.
If you behave selfishly/psychopathically, you may regard your race as superior to others, or more worthy of help, but that’s contingent on an environment (like modern day North America) where people consider race to be important from a social or political point of view. You don’t instinctually recognize other members of your race as kin, you just support giving more benefits to them because policies in place make one race-aware. The people that clannish/psychopathic types want to give benefits to is arbitrary; it can be based on race in one environment or some other factor in another environment.
I don’t think the kin recognition mechanism would cause you to see everyone in your race as a cousin. Clannishness causes one to behave to selfishly (psychopathically) through less reciprocation of reciprocal altruism, but this selfishness is directed equally towards everyone who is non-related.
Well, one has to ask what type of kin preference mechanism was likely to have evolved. I’m guessing it was some sort of crude genetic algorithm like the following:
1) Rank everyone in your environment in order of how similar they are to the people you grew up around.
2)The higher they rank, the nicer you will be to them. The lower they rank, the meaner you will be to them.
Now historically, and prehistorically, when people just lived in small villages or small tribes where everyone was an extended family member, this algorithm would have been very efficient at getting folks to share resources with people who shared the greatest copies of their genes by descent.
Now once people moved out of these genetically homogenous environments, it would have caused them to make distinctions even among very distant strangers. You can argue that’s maladaptive if, like JayMan, you think all strangers are too unrelated to bother with such distinctions.
I’m inclined to disagree, but even if it is genetically pointless to discriminate at the level of race, the mechanism would still do so because it evolved in a genetically homogenous environment and wouldn’t be able to evolve quickly enough when the environment became heterogeneous. In other words, if there are no ethnic genetic interests, the mechanism would just be seen as malfunctioning when it caused racism.
Now you could argue that the mechanism is so nuanced that it allows for discrimination between close kin, but not between very distant kin (ethnic groups, races) but this seems unlikely because even if racism is maladaptive, the lack of exposure to even distant members of your own ethnic group, let alone other races, means that until recently, there was never an evolutionary need for such nuance, so it wouldn’t have been selected for.
As for clannish people being more psychopathic, I’m not sure I understand why, but perhaps I’m missing something. Clannish people have been selected for high kinship favoritism, but I’m not sure if this is a psychopathic trait. No one says that mothers who really love their children are more psychopathic than mothers who don’t. Just the opposite.
”Racism definition”, all words have their good and bad meaning. Race-ism may be ”enphasis in race”.
The controllers give a meaning to words and followers internalize the pseudo- semantic- causality, ”look, racism is bad”. Even homicide is not a bad thing, for example, if you is the great danger and kill your predator. It is not a bad thing. Is not about lack of morality, exactly the otherwise, the improvement of it.
prejudice. ”I think PP is smart after our conversation”. It is a pre-judgment, a positive pre-judgment. Socially liberals are positively biased with blacks and socially conservatives are negatively biased with them. ALL blacks are good, lack equal opportunity and integration. ALL blacks are bad, lack of moral capacity and intelligence.
Amish are racist ”because” they are clannish**
In legal terms, racism is defined as deny opportunities for someone just because their race.
@PP – You did say this above, indirectly, but it might be worth a whole post to bring out the difference between evolved/ adaptive genetic diversity – and the pathological diversity of mutation accumulation.
in other words, lack of group coherence could be because that group evolved to be individualistic (because individualism was what ‘worked’ during their evolutionary history), or a group may be individualistic because it has lost (or is losing) its adaptations to enable and enforce group living.
The first is adaptive-evolved, the second is pathological-a consequence of damage.
I think this is a problem with regarding the behaviour of current Europeans – e.g. their willed/ accepted self-extinction by population replacement – as if it was an adaptation. I have instead come to regard this as pathological, and a consequence of mutation accumulation – since mutational damage will (I have argued) first show up in damaging social and sexual adaptations.
NOTE – Mutation accumulation is assumed to be happening mostly because child mortality rates have dropped from more than half to about one percent – therefore with each generation more deleterious genes accumulation that would in the past have been eliminated by extremely harsh natural selection (including sexual selection) that would have ‘sieved’ out the newly occurring mutations.
So what we are seeing in the West is partly (only partly, but significantly) a consequence of generation by generation mutation accumulation which is incrementally destroying our social (and sexual) adaptations.
This means this aspect of modern behaviour is not (or mostly not) an expression of our past selective environment.
Mutation accumulation affects every population in the world, but for different durations, with different degrees of severity, and starting from a different baseline – so the underlying picture is both extremely complex and continually changing – too complex to understand except in broad outline.
But the picture resembles a race to the bottom, a rapid stripping away of multiple slowly-evolved adaptations – with different populations all racing into ‘mutational meltdown’ but in different ways and at different speeds.
The single fact that I find most convincing in assuming the importance of mutation accumulation is the bland indifference of modern Western people (individually and en masse) to social and sexual trends that will very obviously first damage and then destroy them. This affect seems like damage – specifically brain damage.
Bruce, excellent point!
I find it absolutely fascinating that the rise of socially liberal attitudes, which is generally regarded as a sign of progress (I’ve tried to link it to the Flynn effect) or some admirable evolved trait of whites, might actually be an early sign of rising mutation load in the West.
And I don’t know if you saw it, but I cited your views on this as one of six theories to explain the rise of universalism:
https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/06/28/jayman-talks-about-the-rise-of-universalism/
The mutation theory is perhaps the most interesting of the six, though it may be interacting with some or all of the other causes.
”pathological diversity of mutation accumulation.”
God told it for you***
Lol.
”PSYCHOlogy” is populated by very retard people. Greater ”technical” skills (memorization and recovery of this accumulated informations) but real brain damage in empathetic potential.
Information is different than knowledge, knowledge is something that you can use correctly, internalized and understood information.
Pumpkin,
you already think about possible polygamous effects in black behaviour** Blacks seems gravitates in universalistic and clannish attitudes. I think, a men marry with many women and have many kids with them. Look, by paternal lineage, the genetic diversity is more reduced. By maternal lineage, the genetic diversity is maintained.
The myth of black self-hatred has been debunked multiple times by empirical research. Most black people primary socialize with other blacks, prefer black media over white media, despise any black that shows pro-white views and overwhelmingly prefer other blacks as role models, celebrities sex symbols, even when living in more diverse and wealthier environments. All data on race and self-esteem shows that black people have the most self-love and racial loyalty of all groups, with Asians having the least.
Black on black crime is not evidence of self hate since the overwhelming majority of crime committed by any ethnic group is against their own kind due to the fact that most people mainly socialize with with their own people and the fact that violent criminals for the most part don’t value the lives of anyone besides their own. Also, White criminals are more likely to target their own race than Black and Latino ones. Black violence can mostly be explained in terms of low IQ, high impulsiveness, and perhaps high psychopathy.
Neither can skin – bleaching be used as evidence either. The preference for women lighter than yourself has proven to be a natural taste and a human universal throughout history, even in pre-colonial Africa, because light skin and long hair are feminine traits, and the more feminine a woman appears, the more attractive she is to men in general. Skin whitening is not self-hatred, it’s common sense. That’s why it’s so prevalent all over world for thousands of years.
Good counter-arguments.
Also, most of the black on black violence in Africa is of tribal and religious origin, rather than racial. In fact, you failed to account for black on white violence in Africa (white genocide).