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Evolution and Moral Community
Paul Rubin argues that our evolutionary heritage biases us against seeing larger moral communities.
Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another.
This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others. Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else the exchange wouldn't occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics of immigration -- immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that they then exchange for the products of other people's labor -- is positive sum. Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers must lose.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on May 10, 2007 at 02:39 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Primitive societies are hardly zero-sum when bounty and scarcity are bestowed by nature. Try again.
Posted by: Lord at May 10, 2007 3:15:03 PM
It is precisely because "bounty and scarcity are bestowed by nature" that primitive societies are zero-sum.
Posted by: ricardo at May 10, 2007 4:18:15 PM
Mr. Tabarrok, I tried to picture what you are writing about in:
"Work"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8-XlWaVahgc
and
"Elementary Social Studies"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Rpv0DoTCag4
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at May 10, 2007 4:18:28 PM
Evolution is why we favor our kin over those with whom we are unrelated. We share genes with our kin, thus we maximize our reproductive success by favoring our kin over outsiders. A similar argument can be made for ethnic groups.
Posted by: Justin at May 10, 2007 4:31:45 PM
There is evidence for trade among very primitive peoples going back quite a long way--for example, rocks, shells, and so forth found associated with human habitation far from their natural areas of distribution. An assertion that our ancestors lived in zero-sum conditions is something that cannot be accepted casually without evidence. This sounds like just another careless bit of amateur evolutionary psychology.
Posted by: y at May 10, 2007 4:39:31 PM
Mark Seecof's comments on EconLog on this topic should be read and pondered by all economists:
http://econlog.econlib.org/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=2481
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 10, 2007 4:48:35 PM
So immigrants are always good for the society they immigrate to? Even when they send the dollars earned back to "my country," in the process draining the host country? Why? I'll tell you why. Because you want it to be so. Sophist.
Posted by: ricpic at May 10, 2007 5:47:05 PM
In the original article, the author uses the evolutionary 'zero-sum argument' along with EP arguments for EP-based 'in group/out group' thinking and EP-based difficulty in evaluating risk and harm. I don't think it's meant as a stand-alone argument.
That said, I'm in agreement with Y above, and would be reluctant to believe that any sufficiently large group of humans living together would stay in a completely static state, with no technology, trade, or social change. Because remember, it takes only a very small bit of 'nonzerosumness' to motivate (at least some) individuals to get past whatever EP-based biases they have.
Posted by: LP at May 10, 2007 6:28:01 PM
ricpic said "...Even when [immigrants] send the dollars earned back to "my country," in the process draining the host country?"
So someone goes to live in another country, and does useful work in exchange for pieces of paper which they then send back to their home country ... sorry, I'm confused, who is it you think is losing out here?
Posted by: Robert Scarth at May 10, 2007 6:54:58 PM
If we're going to talk about evolution, mating will matter more than trade. An increase in out of group mating opportunites is a huge win for both sides, and excessive inbreeding is clearly negative sum.
And in today's world, any evolutionary distrust of trade is IMHO dwarfed by our instinctual love of novelty, travel, and exotic people.
Posted by: DK at May 10, 2007 7:13:18 PM
Wow, not only are Sailer's own posts awful, so are the ones he recommends.
"Even an economist must agree that (a) immigrants themselves only move because they expect to be better off in their new homes than their old, and (b) once they arrive they will compete with natives for existing economic resources."
And of course B is exactly the zero-sum fallacy that Rubin was talking about.
Pondering done. That was fun.
Posted by: Keith at May 10, 2007 8:31:53 PM
Mark Seecof's remarks:
Rubin shows how desperately some economists wish to reinforce their ideological position by borrowing ideas from other disciplines. Sadly, Rubin shows that stealing a few buzzwords from another discipline isn't the same as drawing real understanding from it. Rubin wants to hitch his no-borders wagon to evolutionary psychology, but hasn't read much of it--or he would have learnt that humans are capable (have evolved to be capable) of a variety of more or less selfish or cooperative behaviours. He would also have learnt that groups of humans scattered around the world are very different in capabilities, attitudes, and behaviours and that many of those differences are genetically mediated (that is, they cannot be altered much by economic education).
Rubin's supposition that a world with little sociological or technical change must be one of zero-sum economics is false. All of recorded history abounds with examples to the contrary and anthropologists will testify to the eagerness with which many peoples have traded with outsiders--even in eras of "little change."
Equally false is Rubin's supposition that everyone is really the same, so people viewing others as members of (in- or out-groups) is arbitrary. Evolution depends on differences--it cannot act without them--so any economist who wishes to draw on evolutionary theory must acknowledge and account for real differences among people. At the same time, evolutionary pressures (almost certainly) cause people to vary their amount of cooperation with their degree of kinship. Cooperative phenotypes act on socially-mediated pseudo-kinship as well as actual genetic kinship. It's not hard to get people to cooperate, if you persuade them to treat each other as kin. In fact, that's the point of the Golden Rule.
Look, Rubin's own discipline can explain why many people want to restrict trade. Those who wish to restrict trade are those who expect, personally, to gain by such restrictions! Economists often call them "rent seekers" and they include producers and merchants more often than "common folk." Does the term "Corn Laws" mean anything to you?
Rubin's op-ed falsely suggests that the prejudices of ordinary voters result in trade restrictions, but anyone who looks into the matter will discover that industrial interests drive lawmaking in this area. Virtually every restriction on trade in the USA is a triumph by rent-seeking incumbents in some industry.
We can theorize both "classical economic" and "evo-psych" reasons why people would like to restrict immigration. For the first, people who will personally suffer from immigration (that is, to a first approximation, workers rather than employers) would like to restrict it. This is not irrational, because (Rubin's purely ideological assertion to the contrary notwithstanding), economic gains from immigration are not evenly distributed. As for the second, evo-psych predicts people would be wary of immigration, because most immigrants are not kin (note that this theory perfectly explains the special case of people favoring immigration from their own ancestral regions). Evo-psych predicts, on a very strong basis, that people would rather preserve the economic bounty where they are for their own kin.
Even an economist must agree that (a) immigrants themselves only move because they expect to be better off in their new homes than their old, and (b) once they arrive they will compete with natives for existing economic resources. To genes competing in evolution's rat-race, there is no reason to help immigrants better themselves, and every reason to discourage local competition from immigrants.
(It's true that immigrants may help expand economic resources--in a society where greater availability of labor fuels economic expansion. However, the notion, oft-repeated by economists, that labor availability necessarily fuels industrial expansion is obviously false (if it were true, Bangladesh would be rich). History shows that industrial economic growth depends on high-IQ labor, and is retarded where chiefly low-IQ labor is available no matter how cheaply.
Since IQ is at least 60% heritable, only an ideologically-blinded economist would suppose that unlimited immigration by low-IQ people would certainly fuel economic expansion. In fact, there are strong economic reasons to think otherwise, because in the presence of many low-IQ people, society diverts the labor of many high-IQ people from industry to simply managing (or exploiting) the low-IQ crowds.
An economist who really wants to reconcile his discipline with evolutionary psychology should ask "why should people follow abstract theories rather than behave in the ways that promoted the survival of countless generations of their ancestors?"
He should then return to Rubin's notion of education, but educate people to discern rent-seeking proposals and oppose them.
As for immigration, once the economist clears his mind of the notion that all immigration is an unalloyed blessing, he can promote a rational policy of encouraging immigration only by people who would promote the industrial economy. Those people could/would be accepted as "kin" and so engage our evolved capacity for cooperation.
(Note that demands by particular industries to import cheap labor (regardless of externalities) may properly be regarded as a form of rent-seeking.)
The one area of economics which has been pretty-much zero-sum from ancient times right up through today is competition for land. Even if you slept through everything else I wrote you should agree that to the extent immigrants compete for land, they really are zero-sum competitors and a rational economic actor would seek to exclude them, the more vigorously as he cared more about land. In former times when many people depended directly on their own land for their own and their family's subsistence, both "economic" and "evo-psych" reasons would teach them to oppose immigration.
Only those parts of our modern industrialized economy for which land is not a major factor of production can look upon immigration with complacency. You shouldn't expect (reasonable, as opposed, say, to Marxist) "economic education" to persuade other people to irrationally favor immigrants entering a zero-sum competition for land.
(This is probably why people readily see non-kin immigrants as "invaders." For all time, a bunch of non-kin moving into the area meant greater (zero-sum) competition for food, because food was directly proportional to land. So immigrants are invaders.
(Today a bunch of immigrants means zero-sum competition for pleasant suburban homes. This is why rich people who want low-wage immigrants to serve them favor immigration and everyone else in America rationally opposes it.)
Posted by: jim at May 10, 2007 8:35:06 PM
"It's not hard to get people to cooperate, if you persuade them to treat each other as kin. In fact, that's the point of the Golden Rule."
As somewhat of an aside, I was reading an article in The New Yorker - a feature on Barack Obama who, I will go ahead and assume, is not universally adored by this crowd.
Anyway...he had an interesting quote: "If everyone is family, no one is family." 'Universalism is a delusion.'
We congretate in families, relligious affiliations, political circles, nations, (etc.) because the lack of these structures would render us rudderless as a species. Thus, trade/resource imbalances - and I think most of us understand that they have existed since the dawn of mankind - need not necessarily be at the person level, but are always at least at the group level.
Posted by: fustercluck at May 10, 2007 11:14:12 PM
As biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped when asked if he would lay down his life for his brother, "No, but I would for three brothers or nine first cousins!" We share 50% of our variable genes with our siblings, 12.5% with first cousins, and so forth outward through the family tree. So, from the point of view of our "selfish genes," we are constantly confronted with deciding between selfishness and altruism, individualism and nepotism, between going it alone and building a bigger coalition. There are no final, always correct answers.
Probably the most instructive book that economists could read to help them develop a more realistic mental model of how the real world works would be Pierre L. van den Berghe's 1981 masterpiece on "ethnic nepotism," "The Ethnic Phenomenon."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 11, 2007 12:08:27 AM
And of course B is exactly the zero-sum fallacy that Rubin was talking about.
Nonsense. Even the most fervent open borders enthusiast acknowledges that there is some loss in native wages due to immigration. They merely argue that it is worthwhile due to a net gain to the economy as a whole.
It is far more naive to believe that there is no competition than to believe that it is a zero sum proposition. It is elementary after all that for a benefit to ber realized an exchange has to occur (see complementarity).
Posted by: Dennis at May 11, 2007 12:31:52 AM
Why do I get the feeling that when Chinese professors start delivering lectures to American students via the internet for $1 an hour, tenured American professors will start explaining to us why our primitive beliefs are preventing us from seeing the value of destroying the data pipes that connect us to the rest of the world?
Posted by: alphie at May 11, 2007 1:13:43 AM
This post points out a general problem with economists today: they are too quick to expound upon morality before they understand reality. Less moralism and more realism would be a good motto for economists.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 11, 2007 1:32:35 AM
I remember reading something similar on the evolution of "economic" thinking and why economic arguments often dont reach the people: It was argued that 4 major exchange schemes can be identified, e.g. reciprocity, violence, and, as the fourth one, the market mechanism with relaticve prices as major indicator for relative scarcity. Now, the market as exchange scheme evolved, anthropologically speaking, as the last of all schemes and is therefore not (yet) hard-wired into our brains...
Posted by: Stefan at May 11, 2007 4:47:27 AM
Steve,
I do not believe that economists are the "moral" ones. Actually, economists try to disentangle "moral" or "opinion" from facts, which is NOT done by politicians, e.g.
Posted by: Stefan at May 11, 2007 4:50:27 AM
If more people had an economic mindset, the world would be a better place. Jealousy would disappear along with racism etc... Sadly most people, including those who claim to be enlightened and educated are at their core plagued by religious and tribal/national biases. I wonder if natural selection will kill them off or if economists are doomed to live in their hateful world.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at May 11, 2007 6:58:23 AM
Evolution explains our preference for helping kin... and what explains our ability to think this preference might not be ideal? Magic? God?
Posted by: Barbar at May 11, 2007 7:21:53 AM
"Mark Seecof's comments on EconLog on this topic should be read and pondered by all economists:"
Yeah Steve we will all get right on that . Any other recommendations... hold on let me get my pen so I can write this down.
Posted by: GoodnessOfFit at May 11, 2007 9:11:44 AM
Chairman Mao:
And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass a-hoppin'.
But when the conversation has degenerated to this:
I wonder if natural selection will kill them off or if economists are doomed to live in their hateful world.
it can safely be described as spent. Just as well, I've run out of Kleenex pondering the tribulations of our morally chaste economists. It's all so emotionally taxing.
Posted by: Dennis at May 11, 2007 10:19:06 AM
Justin,
Kin selection doesn't explain ethnic identity the way you're talking about. The math doesn't work out--for a gene under selection, it pays to make you trade X expected offspring to increase your brother's offspring by 2X, because you share half your genetic material. For a second-cousin, with 1/16 shared genetic material, it pays to make you trade X expected offspring for 16X expected offspring.
Evolution gave us ingroup/outgroup distinctions, which get applied across all kinds of categories--my tribe, my church, my family, my race, my party, my nation, whatever. You can't say ahead of time which of these will be more important; that's a cultural thing, at least once you get past close family. Sometimes, nation trumps church, or church trumps race, or race trumps nation, or whatever.
Posted by: albatross at May 11, 2007 10:31:17 AM
Distinguish between:
a. I lose from immigration, but the economy gets better and so the wins outweight the losses.
b. I lose from immigration short-term, but the economy gets better and the rising tide lifts my boat too, so I end up better off.
c. I lose from immigration, and the economy sees no change.
(c) is zero sum, but (a) is certainly an argument for why some people will oppose immigration. A lot of the claim of the anti-immigration movement is that open immigration is a mechanism for redistributing wealth inside the US, from people at the bottom to people at the top.
Another claim, which doesn't fit here as well, is that the effects of added immigration aren't simple additive effects--there's some function of total immigrant population, or unassimilated population, or whatever, that doesn't appear important for individual immigrants, but which becomes important when we get to some threshhold, say by becoming a destabilizing force in US ethnic identity politics.
I'm not sure either of these concerns is right, though it seems pretty obvious that immigration does redistribute wealth within the country in the short run. I don't even know how you'd go about looking into the threshhold ideas.
Posted by: albatross at May 11, 2007 10:45:51 AM
I found this quote this morning, and it seems appropriate:
"One can always tell a pseudo-intellectual by their willingness to use "evolution" as a way of explaining everything under the sun."
http://bagginsandco.blogspot.com/
The deepest fallacies of Rubin's argument are that he:
A) reifies 'change' as an absolute and measurable entity that signifies another absolute and measurable entity of 'progress'.
B) that our cultural obsessions with the internet and free trade is more somehow more challenging than the innovations of agriculture, fire, and bipedalism on the human psyche.
C) that rationalism is the key to understanding the human interactions and the universe, all evidence to the contrary.
D) and that somehow trade magically escapes the first law of thermodynamics, and now live in an age of endless and perpetual bounty.
I love ponzi schemes, especially when tied to wistful hyper-rational evolutionary behavioralism
Posted by: social science at May 11, 2007 11:22:53 AM
Albatross,
Evolution gave us ingroup/outgroup distinctions, which get applied across all kinds of categories--my tribe, my church, my family, my race, my party, my nation, whatever. You can't say ahead of time which of these will be more important; that's a cultural thing, at least once you get past close family.
That last clause says it all, my man. Dead-on.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 11, 2007 12:06:26 PM
It is precisely because "bounty and scarcity are bestowed by nature" that primitive societies are zero-sum.
Silly. The fruits of nature are perishable and variable in location and time. This promotes sharing and exchange, as much as conflict and war, none of which are zero-sum. Zero-sum is a much later concept.
Posted by: Lord at May 11, 2007 2:46:45 PM
There is evidence for trade among very primitive peoples going back quite a long way--for example, rocks, shells, and so forth found associated with human habitation far from their natural areas of distribution.
This is of course qualitatively true but quantitatively it's pretty small. Yes, there was trade and technological progress in the pre-industrial era. But compared to what came afterward it was essentially zero. So think of the "zero sum" assumption as an approximation.
And let's be honest, the Steve Sailer/Mark Seecof argument pretty much amounts to "given that I'm white, and that for evolutionary reasons I care more about my brother and sister than my cousin, and more about my cousin than further relations, all I really should care about is white people".
Posted by: notsneaky at May 11, 2007 3:54:22 PM
I think Steve's position is about valuing citizens more highly than noncitizens. He also talks a lot about the importance of nepotism, cousin-marriage, etc., in various societies, but that always seems descriptive, not prescriptive, to me.
As a sideline, if any identifiable ethnic group is harmed by widespread illegal immigration, it's not whites, it's blacks.
What's the evidence on the importance of trade for prehistoric peoples, anyway? It's clear they did a lot less trading than we do, because they had a lot less to trade. Was it less important? I don't even begin to see how to answer that question, though probably someone out there does.
Posted by: albatross at May 11, 2007 4:20:07 PM
notsneaky - and what of it? Who does Jesse Jackson care about?
albatross - Steve deals with the world as is, not what we would like it to be. Marxists deal with a prescriptive world, Steve deals with the real one.
Lord - "The fruits of nature are perishable and variable in location and time."
So one tribe taking all the oranges of another is irrelevant because oranges grow back? What if said tribe dies in the interim?
Posted by: adrian at May 11, 2007 7:36:23 PM
Dennis,
Using less dramatic words, people with an economic mindset may not be morally superior but they do display a more dignified and rational way of interacting in society. There was a post on this blog some time ago that referred to a study done showing three or four personality types and one was an economics-based mindset. The study made a lot of sense. It is not economists (as a profession/trade) that deserve recognition - many economists are not able to think intuitively as economists and other non-economists can. It is a personality type.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at May 11, 2007 8:18:31 PM
notsneaky - and what of it? Who does Jesse Jackson care about?
That's true, Sailer has always considered Jesse Jackson to be a role model.
Posted by: Barbar at May 11, 2007 8:30:07 PM
"Using less dramatic words, people with an economic mindset may not be morally superior but they do display a more dignified and rational way of interacting in society."
There is a word for this: frigidity.
From a conceptual perspective, the dialog is fascinating. From a human standpoint, not so much. What you call 'dignified' I would call 'emotionaly distanced.'
Posted by: fustercluck at May 11, 2007 8:38:25 PM
Albatross. You can dress it up as you like.
Adrian. You're an idiot. I'm no marxist, and neither is Alex. As for Jesse Jackson, take it up with him. But basically your argument is the old stupid one: "White power isn't about racism, it's about being proud of your race!". Uh huh. Did I mention you were an idiot?
Posted by: notsneaky at May 11, 2007 10:11:04 PM
Not frigid or distant fustercluck. Just better at allocating emotional resources. However it is common for people to use such words in their defense against economist-type personalities. These folks aren't numb to the world, they just don't see the point in useless theatrics.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at May 12, 2007 2:39:32 AM
notsneaky = Whiny + Little + Bitch.
Posted by: adrian at May 12, 2007 12:54:41 PM
"Not frigid or distant fustercluck. Just better at allocating emotional resources."
My point exactly. Exactly what kind of person allocates emotional resources? And is that kind of person ultimately qualified to comment on the human condition?
Posted by: fustercluck at May 12, 2007 1:52:37 PM
So one tribe taking all the oranges of another is irrelevant because oranges grow back? What if said tribe dies in the interim?
It is many things but it certainly isn't zero-sum. I think the main problem here is confusing a game theoretic notion of zero-sum with an economic notion of low growth. There was growth in prehistory, but it was in population; there was wealth but it was in hands. Population grew rapidly, especially after the development of agriculture. Sure growth was low by modern standards, but it was certainly much faster than pre-agarian times. An addition pair of hands added to production. There is nothing zero-sum about that. An additional person did not make the rest poorer which is what zero-sum really means. By this measure of wealth, we are doing far worse than our ancestors despite our advanced civilization and are becoming more a zero-sum society, not less.
Posted by: Lord at May 12, 2007 3:30:52 PM
Chairman Mao,
Sorry to tease you with my last, but it's just that whenever someone says, "if only everyone got on board with ____", what they are essentially saying is, "if only everyone could stop being so damn human."
It sort of illustrates for me the essential silliness of Rubin's selective use of evo psych to smear his opponents; economics should, like evo psych, like any discipline really, be descriptive, not prescriptive. The latter is left, one hopes, to a democratically enfranchised public to behave as wisely or unwisely as it will.
Trying to marry these two disciplines is nothing less than trying to fashion a rigid ideology. There's simply no need for it.
Posted by: Dennis at May 12, 2007 5:23:30 PM
Lord - but the point is that the anti-immigration position of most humans in the world is simple pleioscene gene expression, ie pre-economic growth gene expression, and no amount of 'tell them how the economy works' rationalization will make it go away. I've studied economics for four years, and yet I'm not cool with the idea of France becoming majority Muslim, or the US becoming an extension of Latin America. Simple gene expression? Da. Do I care? Nyet.
Posted by: adrian at May 12, 2007 7:14:02 PM
Especially when you consider that minority communities have not tempered their gene expression like whites have. The racism of Mexicans vs Whites, and North Africans vs Whites, is well known. Muslims in Europe racially target white women to rape. So I don't think the west should import overt racists either.
Posted by: adrian at May 12, 2007 7:25:27 PM
Dennis:
Any useful prescriptions had better start with a good description of reality, right? Consider international trade and global climate models. In both cases, we use them to both describe reality and to guide future policy. If the models are good descriptions of reality, we're likely to get good guidance from them.
And this matters, as Keynes pointed out. Decisionmakers *are* strongly affected by these models, sometimes without even knowing where they came from.
Posted by: albatross at May 12, 2007 8:04:36 PM
notsneaky:
I don't think I'm dressing it up any way at all, that's just what I've gotten from the stuff I've read by him.
For what it's worth, the argument that says "evolution makes us favor our own race" is wrong--the math doesn't work out. Once you get out past near relatives, the advantage to your genes of favoring people who look like you over others is very, very small. Further, most of history has been with people all around who were more-or-less related to you, and very little of history has involved interactions between obviously different races in the sense we normally think of them in the US.
Historically, people band together in various ways that have to do with race, but aren't dominated by it. Americans of German descent fought Germany in two world wars, because their primary loyalty wasn't race/genes. Abolitionists in the US and UK incurred high costs for people who were about as far from them, genetically, as it was possible to be. American Indians routinely (and disasterously for them, though they were doomed no matter what) sided with European powers against their annoying, but closely genetically related, neighbors.
Posted by: albatross at May 12, 2007 8:25:57 PM
What's missing here is the new data offered by recent research; evolutionary pressures have been acting on us recently, that is to say in the 40,000 years since humans split into the geographical regions that forged the racial differences we see in pigmentation, body types. This of course is a very frightening prospect for many, particularly of Rubin's philosophical persuasion, because it also suggests that evolution has been acting on geographically, hence racially, distinct populations, contrary to the comforting notion of stasis in human evolution, now rendered quaint and seemingly designed to spare us the reality of race.
From this we have to confront the specter of not just cultural but racial differences in sociality and cooperation, just the elephant squatting amidst Rubin's paltry thesis. Careful where you tread, Professor. Never mind, I'm sure your will to put unpleasantness out of mind will triumph.
Rubin would selectively apply pre-historic adaptation as an explanation why people favor their own; useless really and as likely to explain why too much immigration can break up a polity into intractible factions, but okay, fine.
What drives the rest of us batty when confronting this "let's presuppose X" mentality is that immigration, like nearly every other issue, is not solely an economic issue, it is also a social, political and environmental (in every sense of the word) issue.
What Rubin will never understand, perhaps because he doesn't live with the vertiginous effects of massive immigration inflows rendering parts of our cities and suburbs less and less desirable and beyond the means of working class folk, is that some of us do not believe that the sun rises and sets on economic growth, however essentially beneficial it is. It is a beneifit, not the raison d'etre of civilization.
Sociality and cooperation are traits that have been selected for, and recently (that cold breath on the back of your neck is IQ); we in fact have remarkable and beneficial capacity for it. Rubin sees imperfection and calls it deficiency, because our ability in this regard is not absolute and confounded by other traits favoring kin. It is the same old ideological rigidity that measures man against an imaginary standard of perfection and finds him lacking but for the introduction of a liberating ideology. Coercion always follows.
It furthermore is a fundamental misunderstanding not only of how the world works, but its very nature, and it always ends badly.
And still these other traits favoring kin haven't lost their usefulness as a means of genetic propagation, and can't be expected to. Who's to say an individual doesn't have every right to seek his genetic perpetuation? Recognizing the "sticky" nature of immigrant populations, that is the tendency for immigrants to establish and rely on contacts within it, and for the tendency for these populations to resist assimilation the larger they become, as it becomes less necessary, the favoring of kin begins to undermine the health of the body politic. That's what you see (those who allow themselves to look) when protesters take to the street waving the flags of substandard foreign nations they risked life and limb to emigrate from, protesting the slight possibility that the nation they escaped to might timidly expect to enforce its laws regarding immigration. Reason, as we understand it, is nowhere to be found. Those are kinship flags, as much as anything else.
This is fundamentally human behavior, confounding, exasperating, difficult, but any cure for it inevitably is far worse. All we can do is recognize the limitations imposed on us thereby, and proceed with caution, not the carelessness of "immigration is good, hence unlimited immigration is unlimited good."
Of course, this perpetual impulse toward ideological coercion too can be explained in evolutionary terms, as we chase our tail in circles.
Whatever insights offered by evo psych, and I do believe they will eventually be many if the ideologues outside of it leave it be to develop along with the remarkable advances in genomics to come, the only reasonable inference to draw from it is that to preserve liberty we should proceed with caution because human nature is far from perfectly malleable (in fact it appears less and less so the farther we get from the behaviorist school of thought that is rapidly fading before our eyes), and never will be.
Posted by: Dennis at May 12, 2007 8:26:09 PM
Albatross, actually I agree with you. Saying that evolution and our genes determine race relations is like saying that we are incapable of flight just because we don't have wings.
Posted by: notsneaky at May 12, 2007 8:54:22 PM
but the point is that the anti-immigration position of most humans in the world is simple pleioscene gene expression, ie pre-economic growth gene expression, and no amount of 'tell them how the economy works' rationalization will make it go away. I've studied economics for four years, and yet I'm not cool with the idea of France becoming majority Muslim, or the US becoming an extension of Latin America. Simple gene expression? Da. Do I care? Nyet.
Of course the point is wrong to begin with, but even then you're basically saying "I can't help being prejudiced, my genes made me do it!". Not only you're a racist schmucko but you won't even take resposibility ofr your moronic opinions. WLB indeed.
The racism of Mexicans vs Whites, and North Africans vs Whites, is well known. Muslims in Europe racially target white women to rape.
Ah, here we get to the real problem, which is all those racist Mexicans oppressing the down trodden white man. Does it really need to be pointed out how idiotic this is?
Posted by: notnseaky at May 12, 2007 9:02:35 PM
We need more precise language (I know, I'm a fine one to talk); To say that there exists some genetic predispositon toward favoring kin in no way means that "genes determine race relations", as if it's an absolute. It is a factor.
Albatross makes some great points in his last; the question is, how do we preserve and encourage more of the sort of cooperation across these lines of kinship and race?
It seems our present system of redistributing wealth among racial groups, based on an unrealistic expectation of proportionate representation, and pitting political blocs against one another by race and ethnicity, a natural byproduct of electoral politics, would be among the worst ways to go about it.
Posted by: Dennis at May 12, 2007 9:05:43 PM
"What Rubin will never understand, perhaps because he doesn't live with the vertiginous effects of massive immigration inflows rendering parts of our cities and suburbs less and less desirable and beyond the means of working class folk, is that some of us do not believe that the sun rises and sets on economic growth, however essentially beneficial it is. It is a beneifit, not the raison d'etre of civilization."
Bingo.
Posted by: fustercluck at May 12, 2007 11:47:06 PM
"Once you get out past near relatives, the advantage to your genes of favoring people who look like you over others is very, very small."
Conversation between Frank Miele and Richard Dawkins:
["Miele: Could there be selection for a mechanism that would operate like this--"those who look like me, talk like me, act like me, are probably genetically close to me. Therefore, be nice, good, and altruistic to them. If not avoid them?" And could that mechanism later be programmed to say, "Be good to someone who wears the same baseball cap, the same Rugby colors, or whatever?" That is, could evolution have a produced a hardware mechanism that is software programmable?
Dawkins: I think that's possible."]
"Americans of German descent fought Germany in two world wars, because their primary loyalty wasn't race/genes"
Actually before WWI German and Irish Americans were opposed to intervention (Germans for obvious ethnic kinship reasons, Irish didn't want to help Britain, again for ethnic kinship reasons)
"it also suggests that evolution has been acting on geographically, hence racially, distinct populations"
This should be obvious to anybody without a postmodern education, recent selection has resulted in races looking REALLY different. Their is no soul, the mind is a physical thing, so there is no reason why it should not have been impacted by recent selection as well.
"Careful where you tread, Professor."
Cowards are afraid of the Truth.
Posted by: adrian at May 13, 2007 6:33:32 AM
Perhaps using a more descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) approach to conveying economic information to the masses (i.e. other personality types) would make it more palatable.
Moreover, one is qualified to comment on the human condition using logic and economics with a little sugar rather than playing on people's passions. Either way, poverty remains, hard work can be painful and death is a reality. We must evolove out of the age when we tucked ugly facts under the carpet.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at May 13, 2007 6:51:19 AM
Especially when you consider that minority communities have not tempered their gene expression like whites have.
How many wars have been fought in Europe between different groups of white people?
How many wars have been fought in Africa between different groups of black people?
How many wars have been fought in the Middle East between different groups of swarthy Muslims?
Of course in America today we have "white" people such as Italians, Irish, Poles who had an easy time immigrating here because they were white and evolution made it easy for other white people to accept them, right?
Gotta love the idiots.
Posted by: Barbar at May 13, 2007 8:08:45 AM
Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese people all rely on the "if you look like me, you are my friend" module that was built by natural selection (evidence: a conversation with Richard Dawkins), which is why no one would ever think that there could ever be any racism between them.
Posted by: Barbar at May 13, 2007 8:11:34 AM
"Moreover, one is qualified to comment on the human condition using logic and economics with a little sugar rather than playing on people's passions. Either way, poverty remains, hard work can be painful and death is a reality. We must evolove out of the age when we tucked ugly facts under the carpet."
I can appreciate the kind of person who operates from a predominantly logic-based mindset and, in spite of my provocation, I do wish there were more like this in the world. My point though isn't that we need to sugar-coat whatever messages economists think "the masses" ought to be hearing; it is that economists often don't factor human issues into their prescriptions.
Posted by: fustercluck at May 13, 2007 12:28:27 PM
adrian:
Thanks for providing the Dawkins quote! I'd seen it before, and was thinking of it when I wrote my comment.
The point of my examples is that genes/race/ethnicity don't *always* dominate. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and the situation is quite mixed historically. I haven't tried to do any kind of analysis (and don't have enough history to do such an analysis), but I think it's very common to have groups A and B, closely related and hostile, in a fight in which one or both are fighting on the side of unrelated outsiders, against their more closely related but hostile neighbors.
Posted by: albatross at May 14, 2007 11:08:54 AM
