Evolutionary Psychology

Race as a biological reality and social construct

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I was pleasantly surprised to see an article on a radical website that actually says something positive about biological approaches to ethnicity, citing Frank Salter and me (Jay Knott, “Invention, Imagination, Race, and Nation,” posted on Dissident Voice). A couple comments:

Shlomo Sand: I really don’t know how anyone can take Sand seriously given that he simply dismisses the data on Jewish population genetics. But Knott is right:

Sand accepts that his work has had no effect on Israeli nationalism nor on Jewish identity worldwide. Why is this so? If you expose a delusion, wouldn’t you expect significant numbers to abandon it, and thank you?

Good point. Jewish ethnocentrism is legendary—I use the term ‘hyper-ethnocentrism’ to describe it (here are some contemporary examples from Israel). It’s beyond rational discussion and cries out for a biological explanation. Sand’s rational arguments, whatever their merit, are not going to persuade rabbis who are convinced that non-Jews are a lower life form.

The Ethics of Ethnocentrism: Knott accepts that there is a biology of ethnocentrism, but regards it as immoral. Commenting on Frank Salter’s opposition to immigration to Australia, he writes “Considering how white Australia was founded, it’s unethical to try to stop third world refugees settling there.” And he goes on to note that

American evolutionary historian professor Kevin MacDonald is also a right-winger. His Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior9 argues that “ethnic affiliations are extraordinarily robust” and that this is because racial identity is biologically beneficial to the genes which cause it.

But the notion that racial identity is adaptive does not imply that it is morally justifiable, any more than accepting the obvious fact that heterosexuality is more adaptive than homosexuality has any consequences whatever for one’s views on gay rights.

From an evolutionary point of view, moral idealism is a very dangerous idea because it may well lead to altruism and evolutionary death. A moral idealism that results in displacement-level immigration is obviously an evolutionary dead end. Evolution is a game that, if one decides not to play, one automatically loses. Read more

Chinese infanticide and polygyny

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Ron Unz has commented on my comments on China in my article on monogamy as a unique aspect of European civilization. First, I hope I didn’t give the impression that the only source for my views on China came from a novel. Actually, China was much on the minds of evolutionists when I got into the field in the early 1980s, particularly with the work of Mildred Dickemann, Richard Alexander, Bill Irons (and later Laura Betzig) on how elite males were able to have very high reproductive success via polygyny. Evolutionary anthropologists like Dickemann (“The ecology of mating systems in hypergynous dowry societies” [Social Science Information 18(2), 163-195) were showing that the stratified societies of Asia — China was an exemplar — were typified by wealthy males having large numbers of wives of different rank as well as concubines.

For example, in China during Former Chou Dynasty, the king was permitted one queen, three consorts, nine wives of second rank, twenty-seven wives of third rank and eighty-one concubines. One Tang Dynasty text reports that there were 3,000 women in the Palace seraglio; other estimates range from 1200 to 10,000 (van Gulik, 1974, p. 17, 206). …

Van Gulik’s (1974, pp. 17-18) description of Chinese Imperial Harem procedures, involving copulation of concubines on a rotating basis at appropriate times in their menstrual cycles, all carefully regulated by female supervisors to prevent deception and error, shows what could be achieved with a well-organized bureaucracy. Given nine-month pregnancies and two- or three-year lactations, it is not inconceivable that a hardworking Emperor might manage to service a  thousand women.

Such societies are hypergynous—that is, women tend to move up the social ladder, while men tend to move down. Families compete to purchase inheritance rights for their daughters via dowries; but dowries are expensive, contributing to high rates of female infanticide.  Poor families would be unable to provide dowries, but would be paid brideprice—their daughters becoming concubines with much lower prospects of inheritance. This is precisely the situation portrayed in the novel Jin Ping Mei mentioned in my article. Read more

Psychological Mechanisms of White Dispossession

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I discuss three mechanisms basic to the psychology of White dispossession — runaway displays of White guilt and abasement, social learning, and being a member of a moral ingroup. Self-interest is often front and center, or at least in the background. For example, it’s pretty clear that many if not most Whites who make effusive declarations of allegiance to the multicultural reign of terror are acting out of self-interest. Such people are plugging into the contemporary structure of rewards and punishments created by our hostile elites. Even White heterosexual males have much to gain by making such displays; simply attending a job talk at a university, especially for an administrative position, makes it clear that explicit affirmations of allegiance to multiculturalism, White guilt, and acquiescence to White dispossession are de rigueur.

Runaway Displays of White Guilt and Abasement

So part of the psychology of displacement among Whites is simply self-interest. Anthony Hilton’s article (“Giving away the farm: Why?”)  adds the suggestion that there can be a runaway process resulting from competition among displayers to the point that their declarations become more and more grotesque and removed from rationality. Just as peahens select for more and more cumbersome, costly tail feathers in peacocks, we can expect that the bar for successful displays of White self-deprecation and guilt to be continuously raised.

One might suppose then, that the White Privilege Conference to be held in Seattle in April would be an ideal arena for such displays. Here are some quotes from some of the presentations that caught my eye. 

“The Color of Empire / The Cost to Our Humanity: Dismantling White Privilege and Class Supremacy Using Cellular Wisdom” … The session begins with mind and body grounding in processes, proceeds to examining the biological wisdom of the human cell  [???], moves to an analysis of race and class oppression / liberation dynamics in the U.S. (with particular attention to class supremacy and white privilege), and concludes with a range of applications of cellular wisdom to participants’ racial and economic justice work personally and professionally. … Read more

Giving away the farm. Why?

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A frequent preoccupation of our ilk (TOO) is why Europeans and N. Americans of Euro stock have so easily allowed Europe and N. America to be invaded by so many immigrants from around the world.  After all, it’s not as though they first sent armies to conquer us, à la Genghis Khan. The Indians were over-run, too, but they lacked firepower if not the desire to defend their territories. We have had plenty of firepower but little desire to protect our interests. Why?

An interesting take on the matter may reside in the 2000 book by Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, the relevance of which, for our purposes, will take several steps to show. The book is an exceedingly entertaining and amusing analysis of many features of human and other animals’ behavior from the standpoint of “sexual selection.”  Charles Darwin discussed this extensively and Miller provides a grand opportunity for practicing “selection thinking” in that regard. Males choose females and females choose males for reproduction. What they choose is what gets reproduced, at least if it’s genetically influenced. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. It’s very costly to grow and it’s a handicap in defending against predators. But they grow them anyway because peahens found them attractive (for unknown reasons locked in their little heads, i.e., some sort of “sensory bias”). The more peahens liked them, the more males were “selected” for growing them, and the more peahens were “selected” for liking them — since their daughters would be best off being attracted to the most successful males, i.e., those with the “best tails.” As long as the sexual reproductive advantages outweighed the costs of big tails, there would have been a sort of “runaway” selection for big tails. Read more

Ethnocentrism is normal and rational

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The most often heard accusation by liberals against white nationalists and critics of mass immigration is that they are bedevilled by “irrational fears”.  White nationalists are parochial and unsophisticated, outside the standards of morality, lacking in sympathy and compassion for others and for “humanity” itself.

But none of this is true. Science is now educating us that White nationalists are normal humans beings who happen to exhibit a healthy and “positive” evaluation of their own ethnic group consistent with evolutionary theory. This is the argument white nationalists can opportunely take from a scientific paper published in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (January 2011), with the fitting title: “Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism”.

It is not an argument liberals wanted to hear. Written by a research team at the University of Amsterdam, directed by Dr. Carsten de Dreu, this article shows that oxytocin is a molecule associated with in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Through a series of experiments in which participants were administered doses of oxytocin,   the researchers learned that “a key mechanism facilitating in-group cooperation is ethnocentrism, the tendency to view one’s group as centrally important and as superior to other groups” at the expense of an out-group. Read more

Pornography’s Effect on the Brain, Part 2 of 2

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(Go to Part 1 of 2)

4.  PORN ADDICTION AND FRONTAL  LOBE  SYNDROME

It seems that frontal lobe damage, caused by long-term porn addiction and the compulsive masturbation that accompanies it, will give rise to a constellation of behaviors called “frontal lobe syndrome”. These include four main behavior patterns:  (1) Impulsive behavior with little regard to consequences. (2) Compulsive behavior, often leading to total loss of control. (3) Emotionally labile behavior, i.e., sudden and unpredictable mood swings. (4) Impaired judgment, leading to disastrous decision making.

All these conditions, it is now clear, are caused by frontal lobe damage. Though they can be produced instantaneously by a car crash or other serious trauma to the brain, they can also occur as a gradual process by the habit of compulsive masturbation to pornography over a long period of time. “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” the Roman satirist Juvenal noted long ago. “No one became extremely wicked all at once.” It happens by slow degrees, step by painful step. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny. Whoever said that was certainly on to something. Read more

Pornography’s Effect on the Brain, Part 1 of 2

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NEMO REPENTE FUIT TURPISSIMUS
“No one became extremely wicked all at once.” — Juvenal, Satires

The aim of this essay is a controversial one: to provide evidence in support of the thesis that porn addiction, especially when accompanied by compulsive masturbation over a long period, alters brain chemistry and can eventually produce brain damage. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an intellectually defensible thesis for which there is now a growing body of scientific evidence.

Perhaps the quickest way to tame and tranquilize an unruly nation is to turn its citizens into sex addicts: for just as children are easily taken in by predators who tempt them with candy, most people are only too pleased to live under governments that offer them the seductive pleasures of porn: that is to say, cheap and easy orgasms as substitutes for happiness.

Sex addiction, especially when fueled by internet pornography, has been likened to crack cocaine or heroin addiction, only much worse. It allows its victims no respite. It is a sickness of the soul that drives many to suicide, transforming its worst sufferers, like Ted Bundy and Gary Bishop, into serial killers. (See here and here). Read more