Natural Selection against Europeans: Why the Silence?

At his blog West Hunter, Greg Cochran writes 

Natural selection is not an odd, unusual, poorly understood phenomenon like ball lighting. It is not something that last occurred 50 million years ago, like a kimberlite pipe eruption. And, of course, it applies to human behavioral traits, which are significantly heritable. Unless you think that the optimum mental phenotype (considering costs and payoffs) was the same in tropical hunter-gatherers, arctic hunter-gatherers, neolithic peasants, and medieval moneylenders (which would strongly suggest that you are an idiot), natural selection must have generated significant differences between populations. Differences whose consequences we see every day, and that have been copiously documented by psychometricians.

This notion that ongoing natural selection is not the default – that it only happens on national holidays or whatever – is fairly common among biologists. Obviously untrue, because you can’t even have things stay the same without ongoing selection – otherwise mutations and drift would gradually ruin everything. Only selection lets horseshoe crabs outlast mountain ranges.

Sure, some of this is because the topic of human psychological differences makes biologists upset, or threatens to impose unemployment and/or celibacy – but it also shows up in topics that don’t seem to have much emotional or political charge.

He’s right, of course. Natural selection is ongoing. But a foundational dogma of evolutionary psychology was that natural selection stopped in the Pleistocene somewhere, resulting in the set of adaptations possessed by all humans, the only differences being between genders. This view allowed them to safely ignore group differences in traits because for all practical (and scientific) purposes humans are identical — a view that is tailor made to fit into the left/multicultural academic milieu.

It goes without saying that no evolutionary psychologist with this mindset could possibly have any concern about immigration. Humans are interchangeable. They seem to think that fitness doesn’t matter for humans —  forgetting that the title of the first five editions of Darwin’s masterpiece was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 

A bedrock aspect of evolutionary theory has always emphasized competition between genetic variants and ultimately — because races are biological clusters that differ systematically in their genetic variants — competition between biological clusters, such as ethnic groups and races. Recently, as Cochran also notes, we have the case of the Inuits replacing the Dorset culture, quite possibly by exterminating them. That’s natural selection, and it inevitably had genetic consequences.

Thinking in terms of competition between different biological clusters was central to evolutionary theory, at least until the race denial movement removed such thinking to the fringes.

But now even after Nicholas Wade has done his best to resurrect the concept of race, it’s rare indeed to find academic biologists of European descent willing to write and act on the implications of displacement-level immigration into European societies for the biological  fitness of people like themselves — certainly not including Greg Cochran. Quite simply, like the Dorsets, Whites are being replaced in all the lands they dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, for many thousands of years. And that is natural selection. And it has genetic consequences.

But it’s a lot safer these days to write about the Inuits replacing the Dorset culture than about Europeans being replaced by Asians and Africans. After all, publicly worrying about natural selection against Whites  definitely “threatens to impose unemployment and/or celibacy.”