Kevin MacDonald is Confused About Ethnic Altruism

“kin are the optimal vehicles of nepotism”

First degree relatives are more optimal “vehicles of nepotism” than other kin, does it follow that naturally selected nepotism can not extend beyond first degree relatives? No, favouring cousins would still be adaptive (and is common in fact).

The algorithms for recognizing and favouring more distant than first degree kin (and compared to other races co-ethnics are clearly more likely to be kin) are going to work to assess racial similarity and encourage or discourage altruistic behaviour as a result

Kevin MacDonald has written an even more deeply confused response to this article. I wonder if I should bother responding since MacDonald refuses to see the plain sense of my article and shows no willingness to deal seriously with the questions I raise. Instead of answering me, he obfuscates all the issues at stake, tries to bully me, and calls me “arrogant” and “hostile.”

I haven’t read it all yet and I’ll reserve my final judgment until I read the whole thing, but his final paragraph makes him seem like he’s doing what he’s accusing you of in regards to arrogance. Just an ad hominem there.

“My criticism was that kin are the optimal vehicles of nepotism so instincts for nepotism towards co-ethnics could not have evolved.”

That is not a valid criticism.

Obviously if an actor has a choice between favoring Close Kin versus favoring Ethnic Kin, he should choose to favor the close Kin.

However, what about the cases where the choice is whether you should favor Ethnic Kin or those that are, relatively speaking, Ethnic Aliens?

(Note that all below mentions of “Altruism” refer to Altruism on an individual level.)

In a War you have to choose between behaving Altruistically toward your Ethnic Kin versus behaving Altruistically to Ethnic Aliens. Which do you think would be the superior choice from the standpoint of maximizing Fitness?

If you were Joshua before the Battle of Jericho, wouldn’t it have been better for your genes if you had an instinct that caused you to side with your Ethnic Kin the Jews over the less related inhabitants of that walled City?

Now bear in mind that Wars that led to Genocide for the losers were the calling card of Human History until very recently.

Sometimes it even would make sense to sacrifice Close Kin for the sake of Ethnic Kin, if the scale adds up.

For example, Jephthah was an Israelite General who ended up sacrificing the reproductive life of his only daughter for the sake of giving his Ethnic Kin the Israelites a great victory over the Ammonites, who were racial rivals of the Israelites.

Here’s the thing, if Jephthah’s victory over Ammon led to just a hundred extra Jews being born in the next generation, the sacrifice of his daughter was well worth it from a Darwinian Perspective.

It would be unbelievable to me is EGI Maximizing Instincts did not evolve, even perhaps instincts that lead to suicidal behavior if certain triggers are set off.

Now perhaps they evolved to less of an extent in Europe, where low population density probably led to there being less intertribal warfare, and certainly less of it than you had in the Middle East.

However, what about the cases where the choice is whether you should favor Ethnic Kin or those that are, relatively speaking, Ethnic Aliens?

The thing that kills this theory is warfare. Look at World War II. The Axis was not composed of Germans, Swedes, and nordish people but Germans, Italians and Japanese.

The idea that political alliances are always formed based entirely on folk race is just non-sense.

Reginald — the various stories of the Old Testament are fictional and mythic, and thus they cannot form the basis of serious scientific or sociological arguments.

“The idea that political alliances are always formed based entirely on folk race is just non-sense.”

Of course Political Alliances aren’t formed entirely for racial reasons. There could be other factors driving you toward alliance with relatively non-related people or groups.

When it comes to the Axis, Germany and Italy were pushed into an alliance because Leftist Ideologues in America and Western Europe had a hostility towards Fascism that pushed the two Fascist Countries into each other’s arms.

With Japan joining the Axis, it was a simple question of a Race of people not in competition with Germany and Italy joining them in an alliance against their common competitor the Allies.

At no point did I say that EGI maximizing instincts are the sole determining factor in human behavior.

My point is that they are an important influence on how people behave, due to the fact that in many ancestral conditions it was of profound evolutionary importance to side with your Ethnic Kin

Now when it comes to whether a Tribe will, when given the choice, side with Tribes that are closer related to it; that’s another question as it is much more difficult to describe how Tribes could develop the instinct to only ally with closely related Tribes than it is to explain why Individuals developed the instinct to side with their Tribe.

Very often a Tribe will be at the throats of closely related Tribes for the simple reason that closely related Tribes tend to have greater geographical proximity to each other and thus compete more over the same resources.

It’s not that the Tribes “prefer” to fight with closely related tribes. It’s that it’s only with the closely related Tribes that there’s usually a reason to fight.

Reginald said: Sometimes it even would make sense to sacrifice Close Kin for the sake of Ethnic Kin, if the scale adds up.

Here’s the thing, if Jephthah’s victory over Ammon led to just a hundred extra Jews being born in the next generation, the sacrifice of his daughter was well worth it from a Darwinian Perspective.

Reginald’s argument for ENT, which duplicates Rushton’s logic, is a potent one and should not be lightly dismissed. In fact, it deserves a separate article or blog post. But here’s the short answer. I’ll grant you that Jephthah’s sacrifice increases his fitness because of his relatedness to other Jews. But in the scenario you describe, who makes out best? All the Jews that don’t sacrifice their daughters! They get all the inclusive fitness benefits from Jephthah’s sacrifice that Jehpthah himself does, but they additionally get to keep their daughters, so they don’t pay the fitness cost that Jephthah does. Consequently, sacrificing your own life or that of your family may increase your fitness, but it is never the optimal strategy. Human beings are undoubtedly descended from people who did not make the kind of sacrifices that Jephthah did.

Ian Jobling said: But in the scenario you describe, who makes out best? All the Jews that don’t sacrifice their daughters! They get all the inclusive fitness benefits from Jephthah’s sacrifice that Jehpthah himself does, but they additionally get to keep their daughters, so they don’t pay the fitness cost that Jephthah does

On the level of competition between Genes, you are correct and that is an excellent point.

However, on the level of competition between strategies, the situation is different.

Let’s say there are two strategies, the Jephthah Strategy and the Selfish Strategy. Of what benefit is it to the Selfish Strategy if a Tribe with a member following the Jephthah Strategy defeats a Tribe without any members following the Jephthah Strategy?

From the Standpoint of the Selfish Strategy, all the benefits Israeli followers of the Selfish Strategy got out of Jephthah’s victory were made up for by the harm done to Ammonite followers of the Selfish Strategy.

In contrast, the Jephthah Strategy benefited from the victory, because Genes that weren’t related to an example of the Jephthah Strategy were replaced by the Genes that were related to an example of the Jephthah Strategy.

Thus the Genotype of the average Human in the area was pushed at least a little towards the Jephthah Strategy, and at least a little further away from the Selfish Strategy.

Now, of course, in most cases out and out sacrifice is stupid from an evolutionary perspective because there’s usually no benefit from it, due to the fact that after you’re dead there isn’t anything you can do to help your Family and/or Tribe. (I suppose this may be changing somewhat in recent times because of the phenomenon of Muslim Suicide Bombing.)

However, there have been many cases in History people have been able to help their Ethnic Kin by risking their life and/or the lives of their family members.

It is this behavior that I think has been, to an extent, selected for.

On the level of competition between Genes, you are correct and that is an excellent point.

So you admit that the genes that cause people to sacrifice themselves tend to get replaced by genes that cause people not to. How can there be any Jephthah strategy then if there are no genes to cause people to behave like Jephthah does? It’s worse than that because the genes that survive will be the ones that shout at us, “No, don’t sacrifice yourself!”

And doesn’t the selfish strategy better describe how people really act? How many people actually do sacrifice themselves for their ethnies? Sure, there were the Kamikazes, and there are Muslim suicide bombers. But such people are vanishingly rare, too rare to suppose that people do have any adaptation for self-sacrifice.

The suicide-bomber example itself may not actually be an example of ethnic self-sacrifice because it is unclear whether these people are sacrificing themselves for the sake of their ethnies or for the sake of their religion.

And if you were placed in the situation of Jephthah and felt inclined to sacrifice yourself, wouldn’t your whole being and nature rebel against you and tell you to stop?

So you admit that the genes that cause people to sacrifice themselves tend to get replaced by genes that cause people not to.

I didn’t express myself quite correctly.

What I should have said is that you’re correct when it comes to individual genes frequencies within the Israelite Tribe.

Even though Jephthah increased his Genetic Fitness by sacrificing his daughter, the other Israelites who didn’t sacrifice their daughters improved their Fitness even more.

Thus within the narrow confines of the Israelite Tribe, the relative frequency of Jephthah’s Genes declined.

But the trouble is that the change in the frequency of Jephthah’s genes relative to selfish oriented genes in the Israelite Tribe is not the relevant thing here. The relevant thing is rather the change in the frequency of Jephthah’s genes relative to selfish oriented genes in the General Population.

Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that there were 100 Jews and 100 Ammonites. Then Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, making it so that instead of the average Jew adding 2 children to the next generation and the average Ammonite adding 2 children, the average Jew had 3 children and the average Ammonite 1 child.

This means that instead of having 100 Jews and 100 Ammonites in the next generation, you’d have 150 Jews and 50 Ammonites in the next generation.

Now let’s again say for simplicity’s sake that each Jew was as related to each other as a Grandfather and Grandchild, or 25%.

This means that the Jews other than Jephthah gained 49.5 extra co-racialists in the next generation as well as 1 extra child. This adds up to an increase of 12.875 extra Genotypes worth of Darwinian Fitness.

Jephthah himself gained 50 extra co-racialists while losing a child and half a co-racialist (the child being his daughter and the half of a co-racialist being the maternal dna of his daughter). This adds up to an increase of 11.75 extra Genotypes of Darwinian Fitness.

While this does mean that Jephthah lost some ground relative to his selfish co-racialists, he actually GAINED ground relative to the average practitioner of the Selfish Strategy.

You see, the average Ammonite practitioner of the Selfish Strategy lost 49.5 co-racialists and 1 child, which adds up to a staggering loss of 12.875 Genotypes worth of Darwinian Fitness.

Thus while the 99 Jews who practiced the Selfish Strategy gained a total of 1,274.625 Genotypes worth of Fitness, the 100 Ammonites who practiced the Selfish Strategy lost 1,287.5 Genotypes worth of Fitness.

Thus in net the Selfish Strategy lost 12.875 Genotypes worth of Fitness.

In contrast, the Jephthah Strategy actually gained 11.75 Genotypes worth of Fitness.

Therefore Jephthah’s action of sacrificing his daughter to gain a great victory for his Tribe paid off by increasing his fitness relative to the fitness of the average selfish person.

And thus his strategy won out, on average, over the strategy of selfishness.

And doesn’t the selfish strategy better describe how people really act? How many people actually do sacrifice themselves for their ethnies?

As I explained in my earlier comment, in Ancestral Conditions true Sacrifice, the undertaking of a behavior certain to cause death, to help your Ethny would not have evolved for the simple reason that it was almost impossible to undertake behavior certain to cause death that would also help your Ethny.

It most cases you were more valuable to your Ethny alive than dead (though risking your life to help your Ethny was something you had the chance to do quite frequently). And thus the instinct to want to die for your Ethny, as opposed to wanting to fight and risk your life for your Ethny, would not have had much or any chance of evolving.

Sure, there were the Kamikazes, and there are Muslim suicide bombers. But such people are vanishingly rare, too rare to suppose that people do have any adaptation for self-sacrifice.

It depends how you define self-sacrifice. I agree that people don’t have an adaptation for forms of self-sacrifice that are certain to cause death. Which perhaps explains why it will often take a tale of the afterlife to get someone to go through with a suicide bombing.

However, people certainly have an adaptation for less extreme forms of self-sacrifice such as risking their lives in Combat.

The suicide-bomber example itself may not actually be an example of ethnic self-sacrifice because it is unclear whether these people are sacrificing themselves for the sake of their ethnies or for the sake of their religion.

It is unclear, and it is an interesting question which it is.

On this point I think it may be relevant that Muslim Suicide Bombers tend strongly to come from Nationalities that have greater Geographic Proximity to the Palestinians and Iraqis than the average Muslim does. Look at Al Qaeda, they’re almost all Middle Eastern Caucasoids; and especially they‘re drawn from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, one a neighbor to the Palestinians and the other a neighbor to the Iraqis.

I‘m relying on my general impression here, though, as I haven’t looked at this issue in a quantified manner.

And if you were placed in the situation of Jephthah and felt inclined to sacrifice yourself, wouldn’t your whole being and nature rebel against you and tell you to stop?

Yes, but as I said my genes were selected in a time period where true sacrifice usually didn’t have a meaningful level of enhanced EGI go along with it.

Moreover, the people who said the true sacrifice would be worth it, such as Priests who demanded blood for Baal so the Rains would come, were lying.

Thus it is natural that a desire to rebel against the idea of true self-sacrifice would be programmed into my dna.

The people who believed it when they were told that their true sacrifice would be worth it ended up dead on the Altar, doing their Ethny no actual good.

But for all that, it doesn’t mean there aren’t specific cases where my instincts would be wrong about where my best genetic interests lay.

Reginald,

In your example above about the relative fitness of Jews and Ammonites, you fail to address the relevant question. What matters for the success of Jephthah’s self-sacrifice strategy is not how many Jews and Ammonites there are, but how many carriers of the self-sacrifice gene there are. If other Jews do not carry it, then that gene cannot spread no matter how many Jews there are. And if carriers of the self-sacrifice gene on average have lower fitness than non-carriers, then it always vanishes from the population.

And this same logic applies to any kind of self-sacrifice, great or small, and no matter how large the genetic differences between competing ethnies.

I would ask you if my logic here is not borne out by the facts about human behavior. Is an instinct for ethnic self-sacrifice required to explain any human behavior? That is, is there any human behavior of which one can say, “Without an instinct for self-sacrifice, people would never behave this way”?

I think not. Take warfare as one example. Certainly men do risk their lives in warfare, but such behavior can be explained on purely “kindividualist” grounds. If your ethnic group is about to be wiped out by an invading army, then that means that you and your kin will be wiped out. Thus, one would have sufficient Darwiniain motive to fight to the death in this case even if the fate of one’s ethny did not matter to one at all.

What about aggressive wars? Undoubtedly these do tend to aid the ethnies of the warriors as they result in the gain of territory where co-ethnics can increase their population. But are motives of ethnic nepotism necessary to explain these aggressive actions? The scholarship on primitive warfare makes two things clear. First, warriors tend to go to war in order to capture resources, like cattle or horses, and women—wife capture is very common in primitive warfare. Second, successful warriors tend to have much higher reproductive success than men who are not warriors. In order for a gene to spread, it merely needs to cause higher reproductive success in its carriers than competing alleles. Thus, a gene can spread even if it causes some of its carriers to die, provided that the carriers who survive have very high levels of reproductive success. Together, these facts indicate that our instinct for warfare evolved for purely selfish reasons—it allowed our ancestors to increase their reproductive success by increasing their wealth and the number of their wives or female slaves.

This is just one example, but I believe this rule will hold in all others: there is no human behavior that cannot be explained on purely kindividualist assumptions. Thus, ethnic nepotism is an unnecessary theory that can be eliminated by Occam’s Razor.

I will flesh all this out in my next article.

“What matters for the success of Jephthah’s self-sacrifice strategy is not how many Jews and Ammonites there are, but how many carriers of the self-sacrifice gene there are.”

I didn’t say there was a single gene that causes self-sacrificial behavior.

If there was a single gene that caused self-sacrificial behavior for the Ethny, you are correct that it would wipe itself out.

But this would apply even if there was a single gene that caused self-sacrificial behavior for the sake of close kin…

If most members of a Kin Group with the Self-Sacrifice Gene sacrificed themselves for the Kin Group, then most surviving members of the Kin Group would be the ones without the Self-Sacrifice Gene.

This wouldn’t exactly be a winning strategy for the Self-Sacrifice Gene.

But given that Kin-Based Altruism unquestionably exists, we must conclude that Altruistic Self-Sacrifice is not caused by a single gene.

Instead I think it’s more a of spectrum, like Autism, where certain families of gene combinations tend to cause more Self-Sacrifice and other families of gene combinations tend to cause less Self-Sacrifice.

Some people are extremely Self-Sacrificing for their Ethny like Jephthah, some people are extremely Selfish toward their Ethny like a white male who gets sex with brainless liberal chicks by badmouthing his own race, and most people are somewhere in between (though they’ll lean more in one direction than the other).

I’ll comment on your other points once you post your new article.

“I didn’t say there was a single gene that causes self-sacrificial behavior.”

That’s avoiding the point, Reginald. If there are a bunch of genes that cause self-sacrificial behavior, they will all be selected against.

And I don’t think self-sacrificing behavior like Jephthah’s can evolve even among families for the same reason. Who ever heard of someone killing his child for the good of the family? It’s not the sort of thing that humans or any other animals do.

Kin selection can create pure, unreciprocated altruism, such as the aid that a parent directs at a child, in some contexts. However, normally speaking, reciprocity is expected in families. Sister 1 babysits sister 2’s children and sister 2 does the same for sister 1 next week—that sort of thing. Kin preferentially cooperate with one another because the payoffs of cooperation are higher among kin than non-kin. In a successful cooperative venture among kin, each partner benefits himself but also derives inclusive fitness benefits from his partner’s success. However, if sister 1 is always helping out sister 2, and sister 2 never returns the favor, eventually sister 1 will tell her to scram. Altruism is rarely a one-way street even among kin.

Your missing my point that I think Self-Sacrifice is a genetically influenced Spectrum.

Let’s say there were 10,000 Alleles that all had an equal additive effect on Ethnic Altruism. And let’s also say that if you have only 1 of the Alleles that makes you very Selfish, if you have 5,000 that makes you average in Ethnic Altruism, and if you have all 10,000 that makes you Jephthah.

From the standpoint of the long term pervasiveness of Ethnic Altruism, the only thing that matters is the frequency of the 10,000 Alleles that have an additive effect on Ethnic Altruism.

It’s like if there were 10,000 Alleles with an additive effect on IQ. If the people with all 10,000 of the Alleles and IQs of 180 sacrificed their lives for the sake of a large enough number of Ethnic Kin, the average Intelligence of the Human Race would actually improve (even if the number of people with IQs of 180 would likely go down).

Let’s say there were 100,000 Whites and 100,000 Blacks, and the average White had 7,500 of the Pro-IQ Alleles and the average Black only 5,000 of them.

This discrepancy let to there being 9 Whites with all 10,000 Pro-IQ Alleles (and subsequently 180 IQs) and only 1 Black with all 10,000 of them.

Then the 9 Whites sacrifice themselves to each make it so the next generation had 10,000 more Whites and 10,000 less Blacks.

At the same time the 1 Black with all 10,000 Alleles sacrificed himself to make it so the next generation had 10,000 more Blacks and 10,000 less Whites.

The combination of the 9 Whites and 1 Black doing what they did would make it so the next generation would have 180,000 Whites and only 20,000 Blacks.

No what effect did these self-sacrificial actions by the people with IQs of 180 have on the average number of Pro-IQ Alleles in the General Population?

It had the effect of moving the Average Number of Pro-IQ Alleles in the General Population from 6,250 to 7,250!

The same thing happened in this example with the additive gene influenced spectrum called IQ could happen with the additive gene influenced spectrum called Ethnic Altruism.

“Who ever heard of someone killing his child for the good of the family? It’s not the sort of thing that humans or any other animals do.”

Oh yeah?

“In 1978, Laila Williamson, an anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History, summarized the data she had collected on the prevalence of infanticide among tribal and civilized societies from a variety of sources in the scientific and historical literature. Her conclusion was startlingly blunt:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.”

-A Brief History of Infanticide

http://www.infanticide.org/history.htm

“An under-sized runt bears just as many of his mother’s genes as this more thriving litter mates. But his life expectation is less. Another way to put this is that he needs more than his fair share of parental investment, just to end up equal to his brothers. Depending on the circumstances, it may pay a mother to refuse to feed a runt, and allocate all of his share of her parental investment to his brothers and sisters, or to eat him herself, and use him to make milk.”

-The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

Reginald,

Mothers don’t commit infanticide for the good of their families, but out of self-interest. Defective infants are less likely to reproduce than normal ones and require more care, so it’s often more adaptive for the mother to kill them and have another child than rear them, just as Dawkins says. The family may benefit from the infanticide in some ways—apparently, there are species in which the mother gruesomely eats the runt—, but such benefits are not the primary cause of infanticide, but mere byproducts.