Rethinking Group Selection

So this is kind of my meta-political piece which placed my view of politics with a larger understanding of human nature within the natural sciences, particularly biology.

The Neo-Darwinian position is that individual organisms exist as vehicles for the propagation of genes, their own and of those related to them. The survival of the fittest thus is about more than the individual but towards kin too, the fuller view called inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is a much more restrictive criteria for certain adaptations which must have benefited the organism's genes. Thus, the altruistic behavior we observe in organisms is at the most basic level toward kin who share genes (our parents and siblings share half their DNA, Uncles/Aunts nieces/nephews grandparents and grandchildren share 25%, first cousins 12.5% and so on) and altruism towards others with the expectation of benefit in the future to one self or relatives. These are respectively kin and reciprocal altruism. Altruism means sacrifice or imposition of costs on the individual for the sake of benefit to another.

The question is whether altruism can be genetically toward a group of those who are not directly related to oneself, as more distant than cousins. There are altruistic species, called eusocial, who have members who exist for the good of the hive and do not reproduce and will sacrifice their life for the hive. These are Hymenoptera, ants bees termites and wasps. Eusocial species are rare, but when achieved can be very successful in terms of numbers as we see with Hymenoptera. These species are eusocial primarily because reproduction is limited to a single queen, so all members of the hive are directly related to one another and are thus still acting "selfishly" for their genes in the big picture.

Group selection has fallen out of favor since inclusive fitness. The incentive for developing group selection is competition with other groups. If certain traits allow the group to outcompete another group for resource conflict, then they will pass their genes on. This is seen as hard to function on a genetic level, as behavior which benefits the group doesn´t often impart genetic benefit to the actor, who may not pass their genes on.

Humans do not limit reproduction to a single pair of people. Couples have their own children and value them above other people's children, and so their altruism is limited and we are more altruistic towards direct relatives than to anybody we happen to live with. At first I did not think that humans were subject to group selection, though because our ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness most likely lived in small bands of 30-100 people who were probably closely related, they likely followed a coercive altruism imposed by the social group.

I have revised this view. My basic assumptions about human nature are not universal. I used to think, mostly implicitly, that most humans are by nature monogamous or at least pair-bonded given the long time it takes for offspring to develop, the amount of resource investment that takes, and that multiple partners would be expensive before agriculture. I don't think this is universally applicable. This mostly reflects my northwestern European nuclear family ideal.

My realization has been that the nuclear family structure, in which a male invests time and resources to his partner and offspring, is largely a social creation made to solve certain problems. The fundamental family structure is between a mother and her infant, which even the modern welfare has not been able to destroy. But male investment and involvement we have seen can be diminished or destroyed by decades of government policy and is not the same between ethnic groups. That the monogamous nuclear family unit is so fragile to government intervention means that it isn't totally hardwired into our nature.

Research I've seen suggests our prehuman ancestors could have been polygamous, given the sexual dimorphism between males and females we see today. Most human cultures have allowed some form of polygamy, even if most people didn't practice or couldn't afford it. Darwin came up with this hypothesis first studying the gorilla hordes, and Freud made incorporated it into his Oedipal Complex theory.

If polygamy has some basis in our nature and has mattered in our genetic endowment, that means it is possible some people are more closely related than others and this resembles some aspect of eusociality.

The extended family structure is something else that acts, the group in group selection. A genetic force I also came across which can act as group selection is consanguineous marriage, between cousins. This would mean members of a clan are closely related relative to other clans, and would give them more cohesion and interest in one another.

It is the understanding of the extended family and the factor of genetic relatedness for altruism towards the group that brought toward an evolutionary basis for ethnocentrism. Those who appear like us phenotypically are possibly related to us in some way and it would make sense to favor them above others, even if they aren't related to us.

I've thought of some mechanisms in addition to polygamy that would allow group selection to occur. All would have to increase the genetic relatedness of the group over time, relative to other groups. The most simple is reproductive isolation over time. People breeding amongst themselves for hundreds of generations will come to resemble each other genetically and in phenotype more than outsiders. They should favor those who look like them, because they are probably more related to them than other people. This we'd call ethnocentrism. This would work relative to other groups though, as individuals would still be as genetically related to others within their group as outsiders are related to their own ingroup. Presumably people would evolve different traits according to their environmental challenges over time other than just appearance which would differentiate them from other groups:

As humans moved latitudinally away from the equator's tropical climate into colder territory, paternal investment would become greater. Women couldn't gather year round, and men had to take up hunting meat. Those in the colder climate with changing seasons, eurasians, would develop: greater paternal investment, later sexual maturity, less sexual dimorphism, and greater intelligence to survive and plan in the regularly changing environment. Such persons would follow a K-selection reproductive strategy, K for competitive, which emphasizes quality of births over quantity, which is R-selection, R for rate.

Consanguinity, marriage between first cousins, would make individuals more genetically related within the group than strangers within their groups. Polygamy, mostly polygyny of several females to a male, would also produce more genetic similarity and approach something like the eusocial condition of insects who reproduce from a single queen. Even when polygamy is proscribed, it occurs de facto with adultery, bastards, with particularly powerful men, and also divorce where the same man can have several children from different women.

Modern Europeans with proscription of cousin marriage, legal monogamy, and k-selection would have less ethnocentrism than other groups, and the group selection pressures would be more from the environment than from competing with other people. This over time means more exogamy, more individualism, social egalitarianism, moral universalism, more social status for women.

The reality is if those who are of our ethnic or racial group are more related to us than those who aren't, then it is rational to favor them above others and we should expect to have evolved related psychological preferences. The sociobiology presented here means that it is rational to favor ones ethnic/racial ingroup. The political metaphor is the extended family as the larger political unit vis a vie other people.

Kevin MacDonald’s thesis of lower ethnocentrism for Europeans relative to those of the Middle East in the Culture of Critique caught my eye for its major political implications. European, particular northwest European, people have uniquely low ethnocentrism due to environmental challenges in the last Ice Age being the most important factor in evolving group strategies as opposed to competition with other groups, which MacDonald holds creates more ethnocentric cultures, such as in the Middle East.

“Current data indicate that around 80% of European genes are derived from people who settled in Europe 30–40,000 years ago and therefore persisted through the Ice Ages (Sykes 2001). This is sufficient time for the adverse ecology of the north to have had a powerful shaping influence on European psychological and cultural tendencies.”

It is this 80% of DNA from the last ice age going back 40,000 years which is responsible for the difference. The later 20% is a later addition which coincides with agriculture. Groups in the Middle East had pastoralism as a way of life and developed it in competition with other groups. Europeans would have spent most of their evolutionary history on the continent as hunter gatherers, rather than as pastoralists. Being a pastoralist meant having to protect herds from other groups, which would explain higher ethnocentrism. Such resources would be kept within the family, consanguinity, endogamy, the extended family, and also enable polygamy which would altogether make individuals in the group more related. European people would have a lifestyle more dependent on the environment, with a basic division of labor between men and women who would both cooperate as their respective roles hunting and gathering. The changing climate and migration of game would be the challenges to overcome. Monogamy, exogamy, and more of a simple nuclear household would be the norm which mean less genetic relatedness and less ethnocentrism. The Indo-Europeans are the ones who brought pastoralism to Europeans evolved evolved for the environment of the central Asian steppe. Their own kinship and property systems would be transplanted over the hunter gatherers and their evolutionary heritage.

The political consequence is that politics on a large level is a competition between different reproductive strategies. Different ethnic groups are oriented towards different political forms, our political ideology is influenced by ethnocentrism whether we are aware of it or not. White-European people particularly of northwest Europe and their colonial descendants have uniquely low ethnocentrism which manifests in individualist and egalitarian ideologies which face the danger of allowing highly ethnocentric/race-conscious groups to exact rents and come to dispossess white-European peoples. Those groups who favor their own above others have an advantage against those who do not.