Kevin MacDonald responds to “The Ethnic Nepotism Fallacy”
By • 12/15/09Kevin MacDonald has just responded to “The Ethnic Nepotism Fallacy,” my last article. Expect my response in the next couple of days.
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I just posted this as a comment on MacDonald’s blog:
I’ll be responding to this on White America in a couple of days.
“Jobling repeats several arguments that have long been refuted (see this paper for a more detailed discussion). As Salter notes no matter what the level of genetic commonality among humans, if this commonality negates the adaptiveness of favoring one’s ethnic group or race, then it must also negate the adaptiveness of parental love. This is absurd, both intuitively and theoretically. But you cannot have it both ways: if preserving genes in your children is adaptive, doing so with any concentration of your genes must be adaptive.”
I’ll just comment now that MacDonald seems to have missed the point of my article. I concede that ethnic nepotism can be adaptive, in the sense that it meets the conditions spelled out by Hamilton’s rule. My argument is that instincts for ethnic nepotism could not have evolved because co-ethnics are not the optimal vehicles of kin altruism. Not all adaptive behaviors evolve; only behaviors that outcompete others, and nepotism that confines itself to kin can be expected to outcompete broader forms of nepotism. The paper by Frank Salter that MacDonald links to doesn’t address this argument either.