By • 2/12/10
My last article was an attempt to invalidate ethnic nepotism theory (ENT), or the use of kin selection theory to explain ethnic phenomena. While the thesis of that article was that this new application of kin selection theory was invalid because of differences between kinship and ethnicity, I have now realized that there is an even better argument against ENT: that it is founded on a misunderstanding of kinship itself. Since I myself, as well as most others working in the field of evolutionary psychology, suffered from the same misunderstanding of kinship as ENT partisans did, my critique of ENT was not as powerful as it could have been.
The essence of ENT, which has been championed by J. Phillippe Rushton, Frank Salter, Jared Taylor, $Kevin MacDonald$, Steve Sailer and others, is that self-sacrifice and other forms of altruism directed at one’s ethnic group are rational from an evolutionary point of view. Such altruism is, in the words of ENT partisans, in our “ethnic genetic interests” or “racial interests,” because it promotes the evolutionary success of those who share genes with us. As $Kevin MacDonald$ writes:
…it is very rational to make extreme sacrifices for our ethnic group…. Because of the large number of ethnic brethren, counted in the hundreds of millions, we are actually far better off from an evolutionary point of view if we have a positive influence on the future of our ethnic group than when we successfully rear our own children. Extreme self-sacrifice is entirely warranted and rational if it has a positive effect on our ethnic survival.1
According to Frank Salter, who has developed ENT most extensively, it is rational for people to risk death in conflicts between ethnic groups and to direct welfare, public services, and charity towards co-ethnics. Rushton believes that humans “have evolved a ‘cognitive module’ for altruistic self-sacrifice that benefits their gene pool” and that “suicide bombing can be viewed as a strategy to increase inclusive fitness.”2
ENT is based on the ideas of W.D. Hamilton, the biologist who revolutionized the study of kinship in the 1960s. According to Hamilton, altruism towards kin is adaptive when the following rule is true:
rB > C
where r is the relatedness between kin, B is the benefit conferred on kin, and C is the cost to the altruist. Since my sibling and I are 50 percent related, it is adaptive for me be altruistic towards him as long as the benefit to him is twice the cost to me. ENT partisans extend this logic to ethnicity: it is adaptive, they argue, for co-ethnics (people of the same ethnicity) to be altruistic to each other because of high relatedness relative to allo-ethnics (people of other ethnicities).
However, while Hamilton’s work has been enormously valuable to the study of behavior, more recent biological theory on kinship has pointed out the limitations of Hamilton’s rule, and these developments deal a fatal blow to ENT. It turns out that the conditions under which kin altruism can evolve are much rarer than previously believed. The new understanding of kinship undermines the key claim of ENT: that unreciprocated altruism towards one’s ethnic group is in our genetic interests. Consequently, ENT does not provide a valid rationale for behaviors like self-sacrifice in ethnic conflict and charity towards co-ethnics.
More broadly speaking, it is unlikely that acting on ethnic genetic interests is ever rational from an evolutionary point of view. ENT is, consequently, useless as a scientific tool for the study of human behavior and as a guide for action.
The essence of the Hamiltonian paradigm is that kin altruism evolved because of what biologists call “indirect fitness benefits.” An organism derives a direct fitness benefit from a behavior that increases its own fitness: eating brings a direct fitness benefit to an organism in that it aids its own survival and reproduction. However, indirect fitness benefits come from aiding those who share genes with you; feeding your brother thus brings an indirect fitness benefit. After all, if feeding your brother allows him to survive and reproduce, your own fitness will be increased because your nephew will contain 25 percent of your own genes. Hamilton called the total of direct and indirect fitness “inclusive fitness.” Inclusive fitness is a measure of an organism’s total propagation of its genes both through its own reproduction and its effect on the reproduction of those who share genes with the organism.3
Hamilton’s paradigm of kinship readily justifies self-sacrifice for kin. As he wrote, “an animal acting on [Hamilton’s rule] would sacrifice its life if it could thereby save more than two brothers, but not for less.”4 This idea was popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Geneand by a host of other writers on evolutionary theory,5 who constantly drummed into our brains that it was evolutionarily rational to sacrifice ourselves to save the lives of three siblings or even nine cousins. Hamilton’s theory became a basic assumption for two generations of biologists and evolutionary psychologists.
One consequence of this paradigm was the assumption that altruism among non-kin was of a fundamentally different nature from altruism among kin. While unreciprocated altruism could arise among kin due to indirect fitness benefits, altruism among non-kin could arise only when organisms derived net direct fitness benefits from altruism due to reciprocity.6
Among non-kin, altruism could be explained only by “reciprocal altruism,” or cooperation that brings a net benefit to each party. Simply behaving altruistically towards non-kin without a reasonable expectation of return is plainly not evolutionarily rational, as such altruism generates a cost for the altruist and a benefit for his evolutionary competitor. However, if cooperation is reciprocal, altruism can yield a net benefit when it is returned. Food-sharing is a form of reciprocal altruism that is common in pre-state societies, our best contemporary parallel to the environment in which the human mind evolved. When one family has abundant food, it shares the food with other families, but only on the condition that the generosity be returned when another family has abundant food. Networks of reciprocal altruism depend on the capacity to exclude and punish free riders, or individuals who accept the benefits of the altruism of others without reciprocating it.7
In sum, then, the dominant view among biologists was that it was rational to aid your kin even if they did nothing for you in return, but that it was rational to aid non-kin only if they reciprocated the aid.
ENT is dependent on this Hamiltonian paradigm of kin altruism. ENT partisans believe that unreciprocated altruism is evolutionarily rational because of indirect fitness benefits among closely related co-ethnics.
Co-ethnics are more closely related to each other than they are to allo-ethnics and are therefore kin in relation to allo-ethnics. Relative to Bantu Africans, two Englishmen are as closely related to each other as two siblings are relative to the ethny from which they are drawn. Consequently, if unreciprocated altruism is rational between siblings, it ought also to be rational among Englishmen in competition with Bantus.8
Accordingly, Frank Salter has argued that, as a consequence of Hamilton’s rule, self-sacrifice for his ethny can be in the individual’s genetic best interests.9 “After all,” he writes in On Genetic Interests, the most detailed account of ENT, “if it is adaptive for a parent to make sacrifices for a family containing a total genetic interest of a few children, it is easy to conclude that efforts to preserve a population carrying the equivalent of thousands or millions of children must be at least as adaptive.”10
Salter believes that it is rational to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of one’s ethny in interethnic conflicts. If we assume that an ethnic territory has a limited carrying capacity, or maximum possible population, then any incursion of allo-ethnics into another ethny’s territory represents a loss of the natives’ ethnic genetic interests, as 1,000 immigrants ultimately means 1,000 fewer natives. Consequently, “it would appear more adaptive for an Englishman to risk his life or property resisting the immigration of two Bantu immigrants to England than his taking the same risk to rescue one of his own children from drowning.”11
Because of the fitness benefits of ethnic altruism, Salter believes humans have instincts for self-sacrifice, as do most of the rest of ENT partisans. These instincts served the purpose of protecting ethnic groups in the small-scale primitive societies in which humans evolved.12 Humans have acted on this instinct throughout history. Salter cites the “self-sacrificial patriotism of warriors in societies primitive and modern,” particularly “Heracio on the bridge blocking the Etruscan army’s way to Rome and the 300 Spartans delaying the Persian at the Thermopylae pass,” both of which are examples “of heroes offering their people a collective good at the cost of their lives.”13
Salter also believes that it is in our best genetic interests to direct altruism in the form of charity towards co-ethnics. He believes humans have evolved instincts for such altruism; giving small change to co-ethnic beggars is an example of the operation of this instinct.14
Due to the novelty of the current environment, instincts that worked in the Stone Age environment in which the human mind evolved no longer promote optimal behavior. Consequently, Salter believes that evolution must now work through reason rather than instinct. We must go about the world with Hamilton’s rule in our heads and rationally calculate the inclusive fitness benefits of our actions.15 Conscious efforts to maximize our fitness will lead us to direct welfare and compassion specifically at co-ethnics because these behaviors will “[serve] the genetic interests of discriminating taxpayers.”16 A similar logic applies to public goods more generally, which are disproportionately funded by wealthier taxpayers. Salter believes a “balanced fitness portfolio, with altruism being distributed across all levels of kinship,” including co-ethnics, is “optimal.”17
During my debate with $Kevin MacDonald$ in December, it became clear that there is an important difference between his version of ENT and the standard one. MacDonald thinks that people have no instincts for ethnic altruism, but that such behavior is still evolutionarily rational. MacDonald erroneously attributes the same view to Salter. Therefore, on MacDonald’s version, even though we have no instinctive desire to sacrifice ourselves for our ethnic groups, we should nevertheless do so because our rational intelligence tells us this is the best course.18
However, this debate is irrelevant to this article, as my argument here is that the Hamiltonian logic behind all versions of ENT is mistaken. Relatedness among co-ethnics cannot justify ethnic altruism for rational actors; therefore, instincts for ethnic altruism cannot evolve on this basis, nor would a rational fitness maximizer sacrifice himself because of ethnic kinship.
At the basis of Salter’s theory of ethnicity lurks a conceptual confusion. Salter tells us that ethnic altruism is in our genetic interests because it is “adaptive.” However, the term is ambiguous. In one sense, “adaptive” means any behavior that tends to increase the fitness of an organism. However, the mere fact that a behavior is adaptive in this sense does not mean that the genes causing it will spread and become species-typical. Rather the strategies that win out are the ones that outcompete others. Biologists call such strategies “evolutionarily stable” because they cannot be undermined by competing strategies.
Thus, if an animal can survive by eating grass, then eating grass is adaptive in the sense that it increases fitness, but if the same animal can nourish itself better on tree leaves than on grass, and there are no other possible food sources, then the animal will become a species that eats tree leaves. Leaf-eating here is the evolutionarily stable strategy because it outcompetes others. So not all adaptive strategies evolve, but only optimal ones. “Adaptive” can also mean optimal, hence the confusion. In order to dispel this ambiguity, we should distinguish between behaviors that are “fitness-increasing” and those that are optimal or evolutionarily stable.
That Salter confuses these two senses of the term “adaptive” is manifest in his discussion of kinship. In introducing his thesis, Salter states that kin altruism is evolutionarily stable when Hamilton’s rule is true.19 This is a fundamental mistake, and many evolutionary theorists have warned against interpreting Hamilton’s rule this way.20 Hamilton’s rule states the conditions under which kin altruism is fitness-increasing, not the conditions under which it is evolutionarily stable. Salter thus misunderstands the very nature of evolutionary theory. In order to convince us that ethnic altruism is evolutionarily rational, he must prove that it outcompetes other strategies, not merely that it increases fitness.
Consequently, self-sacrifice for the ethnic group will evolve only if it is the optimal behavior, and a moment’s reflection will show that it never is. Consider the example that Salter himself gives, modified in the interests of avoiding excessive complexity: an Englishman (let’s call him “Hero”) gives his life in order to prevent the immigration of three Bantus. This behavior is indeed fitness-increasing and meets the conditions spelled out by Hamilton’s rule. If Englishmen are 50 percent related to each other relative to Bantus and the presence of three Bantu immigrants lowers the potential population of Englishmen by three, then by sacrificing his life, Hero gets a fitness benefit of 150 percent and pays a fitness cost of 100, a net fitness gain.
However, is this self-sacrifice the optimal behavior, in that it outcompetes others? Consider the perspective of other Englishmen: they too get a benefit from Hero’s sacrifice, and the benefit is larger than Hero’s. After all, the other Englishmen, who are 50 percent related to Hero, pay only a 50 percent fitness cost, and get the whole of the benefit from his sacrifice, which increases the number of their kin by three. Most importantly, the survivors get to survive and accrue the fitness benefits that their future life will bring. Thus, it is clear that the optimal strategy is not to sacrifice oneself.
ENT partisans will object that the kind of problem that I have described would often apply just as much to kin as to co-ethnics, so if what I am saying is true, then, contrary to the Hamiltonian paradigm, unreciprocated altruism cannot evolve among kin. As we will see below, there are some conditions under which unreciprocated altruism among kin can evolve, but they are indeed much rarer than the traditional paradigm makes out.
Imagine a scenario in which self-sacrifice for kin clearly meets Hamilton’s condition. There are five brothers, and one of them must sacrifice himself, or all will die. What is the evolutionarily rational thing to do? The same problem applies here as in the case of ethnic self sacrifice. If one of the brothers sacrifices himself, the behavior is certainly true on Hamilton’s rule and fitness-increasing. The altruist pays a fitness cost of 100 percent and receives a benefit of 200 percent since his four brothers are 50 percent related to him. However, all of the brothers who do not sacrifice themselves get a larger fitness benefit than the altruist. The surviving brothers are related by 100 percent to themselves and by 50 percent to their other brothers. So, because of the altruist’s sacrifice, they will pay a fitness cost of 50 percent of their genes and get a 250 percent fitness benefit. Moreover, the survivors get to survive. So the optimal choice is not to sacrifice oneself for one’s siblings.
Often when evaluating social science theories, it is a good idea to forget abstractions for a minute and do an intuitive gut check of the validity of competing theories. Intuition is sometimes wrong, but it is usually right. In the scenario proposed above, what do you think brothers would do in the real world? Do you think one of the brothers would nobly step forth and volunteer to go to death? Or would the brothers begin plotting against each other’s lives, seeking to persuade or coerce one of their other brothers to sacrifice himself? Wouldn’t the most likely outcome be that four of the brothers would gang up on the weakest or most unpopular and offer him up, kicking and screaming, for the sacrifice? The first option is the logic of Hamilton and ENT and the second is the logic of the real world and of sound evolutionary theory.
So it turns out that the validity of Hamilton’s rule is limited: it is not normally evolutionarily rational for an organism to lay down its life to save its siblings.
Before we examine the shortcomings of Hamilton’s theory of kin altruism, we should give him credit for what he got right. The kind of unreciprocated kin altruism that his theory predicted can evolve in some circumstances. Consider the case of parental care, in which parents lavish resources and effort on children who ordinarily never reciprocate this investment. Since our evolutionary success depends on raising viable offspring, unreciprocated altruism directed at related children is clearly evolutionarily optimal in many circumstances. (In the term parental care, I include care of children by non-parent kin, such as older siblings or uncles, in cases in which parents are absent or incompetent). Moreover, unreciprocated altruism towards siblings can be optimal when there are large differences in reproductive value among siblings. If an organism has a very low chance of reproducing and his sibling has a very good chance, it may be in the first’s best interest to help his sibling rather than devoting his energy to the fruitless task of his own reproduction. Because of such asymmetries, organisms designed to aid their kin, such as sterile worker castes of bees, can evolve. As humans become elderly, their reproductive value declines, especially among women, so one would expect the elderly to devote unreciprocated altruism to their closest reproductively viable kin.21
However, outside these cases, unreciprocated altruism towards kin may increase fitness, but it is not the optimal strategy. Consider the case of normal human siblings who have roughly equal chances of reproductive success. In this case, the optimal strategy is for each sibling to maximize his own reproductive success, not that of his sibling: after all, each one of our own children contains 50 percent of our genes, but our nephews and nieces only 25 percent. Unreciprocated altruism among siblings does bring indirect fitness benefits, but these benefits are not enough to make self-sacrifice a rational choice. Indeed, the free-rider problem can exist among siblings just as much as among non-kin: if sibling 1 directs unreciprocated altruism at sibling 2, then 2’s genotype will tend to out-reproduce 1’s, regardless of indirect fitness benefits.
Generally speaking, outside the case of parental care, it is rational for an individual to maximize his own reproduction whenever the reproductive value of kin is roughly equal. Unreciprocated altruism, therefore, ought to be rare and normally only to flow from older generations to younger ones. Since the pursuit of direct fitness benefits is clearly rational in the case of siblings, I will discuss the logic of sibling altruism in what follows, but the same dynamic also characterizes relations among other types of kin.
That reciprocity must be essential to sibling altruism becomes clearer when we think about the individual genes involved in this behavior. Organisms do not act altruistically towards each other simply because they share genes, but rather because they have genes specifically for altruistic behavior. A gene for kin altruism tends to spread if it promotes the survival of other copies of the same gene in kin. A gene for sibling altruism causes altruism to be directed at siblings who themselves have the same gene. Thus, the very genetic logic of altruism among siblings guarantees reciprocity: it is only rational to behave altruistically towards one’s kin provided that they themselves have genes for the same behavior.22
These facts have led biologist Jeffrey A. Fletcher to formulate a revolutionary hypothesis about the nature of altruism: rather than being distinct forms of altruism, sibling altruism and reciprocal altruism are identical in structure. That is, sibling altruism evolves not because of the indirect benefits that it brings to relatives, but because of the direct fitness benefits that siblings receive from reciprocal altruism among each other.23
Fletcher makes clear that a gene for suicidal altruism theoretically could evolve, but according to a very different rationale than that suggested by ENT partisans. Such a gene, in Fletcher’s framework, would evolve because of the direct fitness benefits that it brought to its bearers.24 Such a situation is theoretically possible. Imagine a group of 20 organisms all of whom carry a gene that causes them to be equally likely to commit suicidal self-sacrifice for other carriers of the gene under certain rare circumstances. If the probability that they will have to sacrifice themselves is small (say one in 20), and the benefit that the other organisms get from self-sacrifice is very large, then such a gene would, on average, bring large direct fitness benefits to its carriers, and they could conceivably outcompete non-carriers. After all, there is a 95 percent likelihood that the organisms will benefit from the sacrifice of another, rather than having to sacrifice themselves.
Fletcher’s conditions for the evolution of suicidal altruism are very different from those defined by ENT partisans and much more stringent. For the latter, suicidal altruism can evolve when it brings sufficiently large benefits to those who are related to the altruist. However, on Fletcher’s theory, a gene for suicidal self-sacrifice can evolve only if it brings large benefits on average to its bearer.
While the emergence of such a gene is theoretically possible, it is unlikely even among siblings and virtually impossible among a whole ethny. The reason is that it is essential that the only beneficiaries from the sacrifice be other carriers of the suicidal gene. If non-carriers of the gene can benefit from the sacrifice of carriers, then it is the non-carriers who would benefit the most by free-riding on the sacrifices of the carriers.
Those forms of altruism that are likely to be evolutionarily stable are those in which the likelihood of reciprocity can be assessed, non-cooperators can be punished, and the costs of altruism are not fatal.25 In real human societies, it is virtually impossible to know whether someone else carries a gene for suicidal self-sacrifice. If one makes a mistake in this respect and sacrifices one’s life for those who do not possess a sacrificing gene, then it is not possible to recuperate one’s loss.
For these reasons, it is only less extreme forms of altruism that have a realistic chance of evolving, even among siblings. While it is virtually impossible to know whether someone would give his life for you, it is easy to determine whether or not he will reciprocate a favor. Simply do him a favor and see whether he does you one back. If he does not reciprocate, you have lost little, and you still have a chance of out-competing the free rider. Your chances of beating out the free-rider in the evolutionary game are particularly good if you can punish him for his non-reciprocity by making his cheating ways known or in some other way.
The facts on sibling altruism confirm Fletcher’s insight that it evolves because of the direct fitness benefits brought by reciprocity rather than because of indirect fitness benefits. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the Hamiltonian paradigm has been mounting among biologists for years. As biologists Ashleigh S. Griffin and Stuart A. West point out in a summary of the limitations of Hamilton’s rule, it is likely that direct fitness benefits are more important in the evolution of sibling altruism than indirect fitness benefits.26
The facts on helping among human siblings confirm that the altruism that has evolved among them is both reciprocal and non-suicidal. One study found that people expected reciprocity among siblings just as much as they did among unrelated friends.27 An extensive study of helping among kin also found reciprocity among siblings, with unreciprocated altruism predominantly flowing from older generations to younger ones.28
The anthropologist Wesley Allen-Arave and his colleagues have argued that reciprocal altruism, rather than unreciprocated altruism, governs food-sharing among kin among the Ache Indians of Paraguay. Allen-Arave found that reciprocity is actually more common among kin than among non-kin, with unreciprocated altruism most likely to flow from older to younger generations. Moreover, kin favoritism was contingent on reciprocity: if an Ache’s brother refuses to reciprocate altruism, then altruism ceases.
Allen-Arave tested whether the motive for kin altruism was direct fitness benefits or indirect ones. If kin altruism evolves because of indirect fitness benefits towards kin, one should see a pronounced tendency for people to give to kin in need: the indirect fitness benefit to you is very large if you can prevent your brother from starving. However, Allen-Arave found that while Ache with plentiful food tend to share it with the needy, there was no pronounced tendency to favor giving food specifically to needy kin. Thus, the predictions of Hamiltonian paradigm were contradicted.29
There is also no evidence that people are willing to lay down their lives for their siblings. It has been found that experimental subjects report being more willing to perform high-cost acts of altruism towards siblings than towards non-kin. For example, people report being more likely to donate an organ to kin than to non-kin or to risk their lives to save a sibling than a non-sibling.30 However, no research has found that siblings are willing to go to certain death to save their siblings. Moreover, these studies provide little information on the type of risk involved: people may be willing to risk their lives to save siblings if the risk of death is low, but not if it is high. Attempting to rescue your sibling from certain death when your own likelihood of death is low may well bring high direct fitness benefits on average if your sibling reciprocates your altruism. Finally, none of these studies address the question of whether people actually perform the actions that they profess willingness to in psychological experiments.
If self-sacrifice is not evolutionarily rational among siblings, it is even less likely to be so among co-ethnics. When it comes to co-ethnics, unreciprocated altruism is virtually never the optimal choice. If it is possible for humans to reproduce themselves, then the optimal choice for them is furthering this reproduction. If humans are unable to reproduce themselves, then their optimal choice is helping their kin reproduce. It is hard to imagine cases in which altruism towards co-ethnics would be the optimal choice. Any gene that causes people to make any sacrifice at all for co-ethnics will, consequently, be an evolutionary loser.
The reason why laying down one’s life for one’s co-ethnics is irrational has already been discussed. It should also be clear that it is not rational to take any kind of risk or pay any cost for the ethny because of indirect fitness benefits. The same problem applies: taking the risk brings the greatest benefit to those who do not take risks. Nor is it rational to direct charity or welfare at co-ethnics on the grounds of relatedness, as such sacrifices raise the fitness of recipients while lowering that of the donors.
ENT partisans argue that it is rational for members of an ethnic group to restrict immigration of allo-ethnics because of ethnic genetic interests. However, this argument is bogus. If anyone derives an individual benefit from the immigration of allo-ethnics, it is rational for him to support this policy regardless of his ethnic genetic interests. Imagine the following scenario. Immigrant workers accept half the wages of native workers. One business owner hires immigrant workers, and the second hires native workers because he cares about ethnic genetic interests. What is the outcome? The answer is obvious: the second business owner goes out of business because he gets outcompeted by the first. Moreover, the ethnic altruist sacrifices his own profits for the good of the native workers that he hires. Some of those workers may themselves someday start businesses with the capital they earned as employees, and the business owners who will prosper the most are the ones who do not make the sacrifice that their former boss did. Therefore, the workers who outcompete others in the evolutionary game are the ones who free ride on ethnic altruism.
The bottom line is that maximizing individual fitness is always the rational strategy, and anyone who sacrifices individual fitness to ethnic genetic interests ends up the evolutionary loser. Consequently, ethnic genetic interests have no relevance to the study of human behavior and are useless as a guide to action.
If there were clear evidence that humans had evolved instincts to direct unreciprocated altruism at ethnies, we would have to abandon this conclusion. But there is no such evidence. All of the evidence that ENT partisans give as proof of instincts for self-sacrifice can be better explained in other ways.
For example, Rushton and Salter cite self-sacrifice for group defense as evidence of an instinct for self-sacrifice. Rushton gives as an example Muslims who suicide bomb enemy targets. However, there is no good reason to think that humans have any instinct to go to certain death in defense of their ethnies.
The first reason to doubt that people have an instinct for self-sacrifice in warfare is the rarity of this phenomenon. Normally, the behaviors biologists label instinctual are species-wide behaviors. All normal human beings feel sexual attraction or the desire to care for offspring. Yet hardly any of them willingly go to certain death in warfare. In fact, between the years 1981 and 2000, there was an average of just 10 suicide attacks per year.31 If we had an instinct for ethnic self-sacrifice, you would expect there to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of suicide-bombings per year.
Moreover, instincts work as spontaneous desires that arise without any training: we desire to eat or have sex or care for our children, and no one needs to teach us these desires. However, suicide bombing is the result of extensive indoctrination, and often suicide bombers feel such loathing for the prospect of carrying out their missions that they defect.32
It is quite unlikely, then, that people have instincts to go to certain death in warfare. Rather, suicide bombing is due to a misfiring of our instincts. Our instincts evolved because they increased the fitness of our ancestors on average, but this does not mean that they always increase fitness. One likely explanation of suicide bombing is the expectation of rewards in the afterlife, including the harems of virgins that are famously promised to suicide bombers. In support of this explanation, anthropologist Hector N. Qirko argues that the human mind is ill-equipped to grasp the concept of one’s own death. Even though on an intellectual level we understand death, we believe unconsciously in our immortality. Thus, natural instincts for luxury and sexual satisfaction misfire in the case of suicide bombers, leading to a maladaptive result.33
While humans have no instinct to go to certain death in warfare, they certainly have an instinct for inter-group warfare, which is a universal human behavior. Evolutionary psychologists have no trouble explaining risk-taking in warfare without reference to ethnic interests, however. Anthropologists have found across a wide-range of pre-state societies that successful warriors have substantially higher reproductive success than non-warriors.34 For example, a study of the Yanomamo Indians of South America found that the tribe distinguishes between men who have killed (called unokai) and men who have not killed in warfare. Unokais had two and a half times as many wives as non-unokais and three times as many children.35 Genes that cause large differences in sexual success can spread through a population even if they cause some of their carriers to die. If a gene for warfare grants carriers three times the reproductive success of non-carriers, carriers will have higher average fitness than non-carriers even if one half of carriers die without reproducing. Consequently, risking one’s life in defense of one’s ethny can be explained by fitness benefits to the individual without regard for ethnic interests.
Although the central claim of ENT is invalid, there is a form of ethnic nepotism that is not covered by the objections that I have raised so far: acts of ethnic nepotism in which there is no cost to the individual. For example, given a choice between patronizing two equivalent businesses, one owned by a co-ethnic and the other owned by an allo-ethnic, it would be rational for the ethnic nepotist to choose the former, as this would bring a benefit to genetically similar people without any cost. By the same token, it might well be rational to choose a co-ethnic as a cooperative partner or a mate over an equivalent allo-ethnic.
This kind of ethnic nepotism would be rational only in an extremely narrow range of conditions. First, the options would have to be exactly equal in all aspects except ethnicity. If a black man chose to patronize black-owned businesses despite the fact that they provide worse service than white-owned businesses, he would be sacrificing his own interests to ethnic interests and would be outcompeted by people who did not make such sacrifices.
Second, cost-free ethnic nepotism is rational only if one’s own kin are not available as potential beneficiaries of favoritism. All other things being equal, it is rational for a business owner to hire a co-ethnic over an allo-ethnic, but it is even more rational for him to hire his cousin or nephew, as kin are more closely related to him than co-ethnics.
Even if there are occasions in which ethnic nepotism is rational, then, they are likely to be so rare as to be negligible. It seems likely that life is complicated enough that, in choosing which businesses to patronize and which people to cooperate and mate with, all things are never equal, and one choice is always better for the individual than the other. Besides, in many such cases, kin will be available to benefit from favoritism.
Salter is aware that the free-rider problem poses problems for his theory of ethnic altruism and devotes a section of On Genetic Interests to countering this sort of objection. Salter’s first defense is that free-riders would not undermine ethnic altruism because of kinship among co-ethnics.36 However, as we have just seen, the free-rider problem can exist among kin just as much as among non-kin. Unreciprocated altruism directed at a brother is ultimately just as much of a losing strategy as unreciprocated altruism directed at a stranger.
Salter’s second response is that the free-rider problem does not exist among ethnic groups because it was “solved long ago in small-scale societies by monitoring and punishment.”37 So small-scale societies put in place social controls that guaranteed altruism was reciprocated: behavior was monitored and free-riders were punished.
This statement renders Salter’s argument incoherent. First, Salter has argued previously that unreciprocated altruism in the form of self-sacrifice for group defense is a feature of small-scale societies. Salter never proposes that such sacrifices were ever reciprocated.
Moreover, behavior in primitive societies is irrelevant to Salter’s main subject, which is behavior in contemporary societies. In his recommendations for supposedly adaptive behavior in the present, the free-rider problem is clearly unsolved. For example, Salter believes it is adaptive to give small change to co-ethnic beggars; it is unlikely that the beggars will ever reciprocate this generosity. Salter believes it is in our best interests to direct welfare spending at co-ethnics, but welfare itself would seem to be a form of mass, institutionalized free-riding in which the wealthy give unreciprocated benefits to the poor. Salter makes no argument that welfare donors get return benefits from their generosity that compensate their altruism.
Finally, if all altruism directed at ethnic groups were reciprocated, as Salter suggests here, then the whole idea of ethnic genetic interests would be unnecessary, as such altruism could be explained by the direct fitness benefits that flow from reciprocity rather than indirect fitness benefits to related people. ENT would seem to be either a theory of why it is in our genetic interests to direct unreciprocated altruism at co-ethnics or no theory at all. Salter makes no effort to straighten out this conceptual tangle.
The bottom line is that it is certainly never rational to make unreciprocated sacrifices for one’s ethny on the grounds of ethnic kinship and probably never rational to act according to ethnic interests at all. Rather, the rational course is for the individual to maximize his own fitness without regard for the well-being of his ethnicity. In short, “ethnic genetic interests” or “racial interests” will make no difference to rational actors.
To say that ethnic genetic interests are irrelevant does not mean that people do not or should not care about the well-being of their ethnies. Rather, it simply means that we should advance ethnic interests only to the extent that doing so is in our self-interest. According to ENT partisans, blacks join the NAACP because they desire to aid their race. My interpretation is that they do this because they stand to personally benefit from membership—for example, because they want to benefit from affirmative action or merely because they wish to bask in the moral superiority that comes from being a member of a designated victim group.
This insight has profound consequences for the way we think about ethnicity and race. ENT partisans view ethnies as super-organisms. For $Kevin MacDonald$ or Jared Taylor, ethnies are not collections of self-seeking individuals—rather each ethny is a collective entity with a collective interest and a collective will to power. Except for whites, who are pathologically individualist or universalist, people have deep concerns for the well-being of their ethny as a whole, are willing to make sacrifices to aid their co-ethnics, and ostracize those who do not make such sacrifices. It is this collective will to power that makes Jews so frightening to MacDonald or blacks to Taylor: they see whites in confrontation with a numerous, organized, and implacable enemy. Because of his belief in ethnic genetic interests, Taylor thinks Zimbabwe-style anti-white genocide is a likely outcome of diversity in the West.
The fears promulgated by ENT partisans are likely overblown. If races have no collective will to power, the probability of severe and destructive racial conflict is much lower than ENT partisans believe. Violence and other extreme forms of ethnic conflict are rarely rational from the perspective of self-interested individuals; it is generally better to live and let live and muddle through. Such a future of interracial compromise is far more likely than genocide.
More generally, it will be wise to seek alternative explanations of phenomena that ENT partisans attribute to ethnic genetic interests. An assumption common to all ENT partisans is that minority liberalism in America is a strategy for advancing ethnic interests. In The Culture of Critique, for example, Kevin MacDonald interprets 20th century Jewish liberalism as a strategy for ethnic power. MacDonald’s account is at odds with the facts. After all, Jewish liberals today are just as critical of Israel as of the United States. Jewish intellectuals have likely been attracted to liberalism because of its inherent philosophical merits, which I have pointed out in my articles on John Rawls, an explanation that appears never to have occurred to MacDonald. Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince, which interprets Barack Obama’s career as an obsessive pursuit of black power, is likely just as misguided.
The emptiness of ENT does not mean that there is no rational basis for a pro-white movement. There are plenty of valid reasons to be concerned about shifting racial demographics in America and the rest of the West. Previous articles on White America have documented racial differences in intelligence, capacity for deferral of gratification, and moral reasoning. The West is seeing increases in the populations of races that are characterized by low intelligence, short-term thinking, and unprincipled morality, such as blacks, Mexicans, and South Asians/North Africans. This development brings grave risks to the well-being of Western nations and may constitute adequate grounds for the emergence of a movement that seeks to preserve white majorities.
Disembarrassing ourselves of the idea of ethnic genetic interests will lead to a very different kind of pro-white movement than the one that currently exists: less hysterical, less bombastic, more sober, more in tune with the intellectual climate of our times, and, hopefully, more productive.