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Race Differences in Ethnocentrism
When ‘The Great Migration’ began in 2015, over a million Africans and Arabs entered Europe. Many Western European countries welcomed them with open arms, while the countries of Eastern Europe reacted with horror at the prospect of accepting them, as did countries in the Middle East and Far East. Why are some nations so much more welcoming to immigrants than others? Why are some ethnic groups more ethnocentric than others, and why do Europeans seem to be so low in ethnocentrism? This highly original book sets out to answer these crucial questions. This is the first book to look at race differences in ethnocentrism, as well as the first to survey cutting-edge genetic research on differences in ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, Dutton concludes, is predicted by almost everything Europeans have cousin marriage, religiousness, a small gene pool, high levels of infant mortality. And his research suggests that, eventually, the more ethnocentric groups almost always dominate…
276 pages, Hardcover
First published April 11, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 19, 2021
9/10.
This book is a venerable cornucopia of evolutionary detective stories. Much more information is explored than I expected. You'll learn about Rushton's r-K theory, learn how different populations got to different levels of ethnocentrism, learn about the evolutionary tradeoff between the genius and the ethnocentric strategy, and much more. Some of the behavioral genetic correlations presented are not the most relevant, but I found lots of great information in here.
Some things I learned:
If you take a random Jewish person and compare them with another random Jewish person, their interrelatedness will average out so that they are fourth cousins. The reason that the Ashkenazi Jewish populations has very high rates of certain genetic disorders (e.g. Tay-Sachs disease) is that all Ashkenazi Jews are related to 350 of their ancestors who made up an isolated breeding population c. 1400. This breeding population practiced lots of consanguinity (i.e. cousin marriage), which let to higher disease rates due to inbreeding.
The Jewish population has an average IQ of around 112, but this is heavily weighted towards verbal IQ. Their visio-spatial IQ is at or slightly below 100. Dutton explains this via the historical selection pressure of the Jewish population, being as they were bankers and merchants which required verbal ability to talk to and persuade others to complete a financial deal. Furthermore, because fertility was highly correlated with income in the Middle Ages (eugenics), the best merchants and bankers of Jewish descent had the most children, thereby increasing verbal IQ as time went on. Apparently there is no mention of higher than average Jewish intelligence in antiquity. But by the time of Jewish emancipation, their IQ had reached levels of 112, as mentioned above.
---
You cannot lose from religion. There are two options: either (a) God exists and makes His believers more evolutionarily successful or (b) God does not exist and joining a religion will make you more evolutionarily successful by increasing your chances of finding a good mate. Why do I say this?
Religiousness linearly correlates with fertility. The more religious you are, the more children you have. Religion correlates with: having a symmetric face (part of beauty), having good physical and mental health, higher ethnocentrism, lower divorce rates. Atheists have higher rates of: homosexuality, left-handedness, asymmetric faces, autism, childlessness, left-wing political beliefs.
Why is this all so? The prime factor is mutations. In our evolutionary environment, we would have been selected to be ethnocentric, to protect our genetic interests. Religion does the same by distinguishing between saved believers and hell-bent non-believers, as well as other measures that increase ethnocentrism. Religion is the evolutionary norm. So mutations would cause one to deviate from religiousness, from ethnocentrism (leading to the modern Liberal), from good physical and mental health, and all of the other factors I just listed.
So joining a traditional/fundamentalist religion is essentially joining a community full of evolutionarily normal people. The only difference is that religious people, on average, have lower IQ than the population average. The reason this occurs is because high IQ people have gotten mutations faster than average, as they were the first ones to be released from natural selection after the industrial revolution. These mutations lead them to atheism and to behaviors which destroy their own ethnic group. Another reason is that more intelligent people can better suppress their evolutionary impulses, one of which is ethnocentrism, and ethnocentrism correlates with religion at .4. Religion, argues Dutton, is also an evolutionary impulse as it has been the norm for thousands of years. Therefore, more religious, but lower IQ people, unconsciously know what is good for them (evolutionarily), even if they may not be able to justify their behavior to Liberal journalists and professors who profess ideologies which destroy their own people.
I like the title of one of Dutton's articles. It expressed the above view wonderfully: "The mutant says in his heart, 'there is no God!'".
---
Populations can pursue the ethnocentric/conformist or the genius strategy.
The first strategy is exemplified by East Asians, who are very high in positive ethnocentrism and high in IQ (105). They try to win the game of reproduction through ethnocentric behaviors and by conforming to what their leaders tell them to due, this occurring through very high social anxiety among Asians.
The other strategy is exemplified by NW Europeans. The "genius strategy" is an evolutionary strategy where you have moderately low rates of group conformism and ethnocentrism at the population level. This can actually lead to evolutionary success vis-a-vis other groups. How this works is that a small percentage (but higher than the first strategy) of people of NW European descent historically were super high IQ, very non-conformist people, but conformist enough to help their group succeed. This is the "special recipe" which makes geniuses and inventors, who can propell their civilization forward via navigational, military, scientific, philosophical, artistic, or economic creations/inventions. They either unify their nation or offer a technology which blows other nations out of the water. A prime example is the steam engine which propelled Europe to worldwide dominance.
But the problem with this end strategy is that it can lead to maladaptive behavior, given that the "genius strategy" is premised on low levels of group conformism and ethnocentrism. The maladaptive behavior happens when the group gets too non-ethnocentric, leading to its own demise. Witness multiculturalism, political correctness, and the inability to justify one's own existence.
---
The downfall of Rome and Greece can be partially explained by the upper classes using contraception, thereby reversing natural selection of IQ and causing societal decay starting at the top level. As Roman history goes on from around 250 BC, we see the increasing failure of the upper and middle classes to reproduce and to have solid families. At the same time, this elite created its own very comfy conditions (low stress), and lower stress leads to lower ethnocentrism, as you don't need to worry about fighting for your own people. Anyways, the Roman elite, with this lower ethnocentrism due to its own success, starts importing hundreds of thousands of foreign, Middle Eastern slaves to its cities. And then it has to keep playing the "bread and circuses" games, debasing the currency, and raising taxes in order to pay for this massive underclass of foreigners in its ranks. See any comparisons to today?
This book is a venerable cornucopia of evolutionary detective stories. Much more information is explored than I expected. You'll learn about Rushton's r-K theory, learn how different populations got to different levels of ethnocentrism, learn about the evolutionary tradeoff between the genius and the ethnocentric strategy, and much more. Some of the behavioral genetic correlations presented are not the most relevant, but I found lots of great information in here.
Some things I learned:
If you take a random Jewish person and compare them with another random Jewish person, their interrelatedness will average out so that they are fourth cousins. The reason that the Ashkenazi Jewish populations has very high rates of certain genetic disorders (e.g. Tay-Sachs disease) is that all Ashkenazi Jews are related to 350 of their ancestors who made up an isolated breeding population c. 1400. This breeding population practiced lots of consanguinity (i.e. cousin marriage), which let to higher disease rates due to inbreeding.
The Jewish population has an average IQ of around 112, but this is heavily weighted towards verbal IQ. Their visio-spatial IQ is at or slightly below 100. Dutton explains this via the historical selection pressure of the Jewish population, being as they were bankers and merchants which required verbal ability to talk to and persuade others to complete a financial deal. Furthermore, because fertility was highly correlated with income in the Middle Ages (eugenics), the best merchants and bankers of Jewish descent had the most children, thereby increasing verbal IQ as time went on. Apparently there is no mention of higher than average Jewish intelligence in antiquity. But by the time of Jewish emancipation, their IQ had reached levels of 112, as mentioned above.
---
You cannot lose from religion. There are two options: either (a) God exists and makes His believers more evolutionarily successful or (b) God does not exist and joining a religion will make you more evolutionarily successful by increasing your chances of finding a good mate. Why do I say this?
Religiousness linearly correlates with fertility. The more religious you are, the more children you have. Religion correlates with: having a symmetric face (part of beauty), having good physical and mental health, higher ethnocentrism, lower divorce rates. Atheists have higher rates of: homosexuality, left-handedness, asymmetric faces, autism, childlessness, left-wing political beliefs.
Why is this all so? The prime factor is mutations. In our evolutionary environment, we would have been selected to be ethnocentric, to protect our genetic interests. Religion does the same by distinguishing between saved believers and hell-bent non-believers, as well as other measures that increase ethnocentrism. Religion is the evolutionary norm. So mutations would cause one to deviate from religiousness, from ethnocentrism (leading to the modern Liberal), from good physical and mental health, and all of the other factors I just listed.
So joining a traditional/fundamentalist religion is essentially joining a community full of evolutionarily normal people. The only difference is that religious people, on average, have lower IQ than the population average. The reason this occurs is because high IQ people have gotten mutations faster than average, as they were the first ones to be released from natural selection after the industrial revolution. These mutations lead them to atheism and to behaviors which destroy their own ethnic group. Another reason is that more intelligent people can better suppress their evolutionary impulses, one of which is ethnocentrism, and ethnocentrism correlates with religion at .4. Religion, argues Dutton, is also an evolutionary impulse as it has been the norm for thousands of years. Therefore, more religious, but lower IQ people, unconsciously know what is good for them (evolutionarily), even if they may not be able to justify their behavior to Liberal journalists and professors who profess ideologies which destroy their own people.
I like the title of one of Dutton's articles. It expressed the above view wonderfully: "The mutant says in his heart, 'there is no God!'".
---
Populations can pursue the ethnocentric/conformist or the genius strategy.
The first strategy is exemplified by East Asians, who are very high in positive ethnocentrism and high in IQ (105). They try to win the game of reproduction through ethnocentric behaviors and by conforming to what their leaders tell them to due, this occurring through very high social anxiety among Asians.
The other strategy is exemplified by NW Europeans. The "genius strategy" is an evolutionary strategy where you have moderately low rates of group conformism and ethnocentrism at the population level. This can actually lead to evolutionary success vis-a-vis other groups. How this works is that a small percentage (but higher than the first strategy) of people of NW European descent historically were super high IQ, very non-conformist people, but conformist enough to help their group succeed. This is the "special recipe" which makes geniuses and inventors, who can propell their civilization forward via navigational, military, scientific, philosophical, artistic, or economic creations/inventions. They either unify their nation or offer a technology which blows other nations out of the water. A prime example is the steam engine which propelled Europe to worldwide dominance.
But the problem with this end strategy is that it can lead to maladaptive behavior, given that the "genius strategy" is premised on low levels of group conformism and ethnocentrism. The maladaptive behavior happens when the group gets too non-ethnocentric, leading to its own demise. Witness multiculturalism, political correctness, and the inability to justify one's own existence.
---
The downfall of Rome and Greece can be partially explained by the upper classes using contraception, thereby reversing natural selection of IQ and causing societal decay starting at the top level. As Roman history goes on from around 250 BC, we see the increasing failure of the upper and middle classes to reproduce and to have solid families. At the same time, this elite created its own very comfy conditions (low stress), and lower stress leads to lower ethnocentrism, as you don't need to worry about fighting for your own people. Anyways, the Roman elite, with this lower ethnocentrism due to its own success, starts importing hundreds of thousands of foreign, Middle Eastern slaves to its cities. And then it has to keep playing the "bread and circuses" games, debasing the currency, and raising taxes in order to pay for this massive underclass of foreigners in its ranks. See any comparisons to today?
August 13, 2023
This was my first intro to Dutton and so holds a special place within his many great (and obviously overlapping) books. It's a great primer on the subject - clearly defining what race and ethnicity is, what intelligence and personality traits are (and to what extent they are biologically determined) and what ethnocentrism is (expressed positively and negatively), and why it all matters. I've since come to appreciate how Dutton is a great popularizer of the evolutionary biological/psychological approach - albeit as limited as the audience is for such ideas in the modern world - all with great wit and intelligence, compiling and duly footnoting a vast amount of primary research, which has in turn led me to various further and more academically rigorous studies. I don't even remember now how I came across him (or this book), but I'm so glad I did!
March 17, 2020
There are many interesting points the author made in this book. Nevertheless, considering his irrelevant academic background in this field, it's really difficult to take what he's writing about seriously.
Moreover, i highly suspect that he's cherry picking studies to support his position & opinions 🍒
Moreover, i highly suspect that he's cherry picking studies to support his position & opinions 🍒
February 20, 2021
Good
I 'only' gave it four stars because I recognise some of the info in his earlier works. He is always good, though, and I would recommend Mr Dutton even if he published his shopping list. As far as I'm concerned we could do with far more writers of his calibre writing on this subject.
I 'only' gave it four stars because I recognise some of the info in his earlier works. He is always good, though, and I would recommend Mr Dutton even if he published his shopping list. As far as I'm concerned we could do with far more writers of his calibre writing on this subject.
Read
October 19, 2021So, there are a few issues with the book, and EP in general.
The first generic issue is that EP take what is the case today, and they assign that to everyone for all time. Relevant to this book: Religion is what religion is during this very modernist time. Modernism in a feminist ecology will drive some people away, and the remainder will differ systematically. I don't know how Ed doesn't get this, since his PhD is a theology degree, and his wife is a Lutheran minister, but he doesn't seem to. There's also this weird mainly-generic concept of religion that ep believe in, which necessarily causes problems.
The gamble of intelligence, that Ed ignores, is that you're more capable of reorganizing around new ideas, and you also put yourself into places with intellectual requirements. In today's world, that means being subjected to social engineering through the Gen Ed courses at college/university. These courses use mid 20th century brainwashing techniques to process undergrads into neo-liberal global chattel.
They're scraped from traditional belief systems and offered up to the slaughter of being Global Citizens(tm) eating fake meat in a pod. That isn't the trait. That's the "susceptibility" issue that the specific phenotypic plasticity presents.
Outside of a special exception, he doesn't seem to believe covert coordination, worldview warfare, and top down influence on society exist. If I had to put the issues onto anything, and call it a day, I'd just say that. Conspiracies exist. If you don't think conspiracies are cooked up and applied on the populace on a massive scale, you'll fall into these errors.
That's not to say it's without value. There are good observations in here, it's just that the entire time, I found myself saying "but what about the herd of elephants in every room you walk into?"
The first generic issue is that EP take what is the case today, and they assign that to everyone for all time. Relevant to this book: Religion is what religion is during this very modernist time. Modernism in a feminist ecology will drive some people away, and the remainder will differ systematically. I don't know how Ed doesn't get this, since his PhD is a theology degree, and his wife is a Lutheran minister, but he doesn't seem to. There's also this weird mainly-generic concept of religion that ep believe in, which necessarily causes problems.
The gamble of intelligence, that Ed ignores, is that you're more capable of reorganizing around new ideas, and you also put yourself into places with intellectual requirements. In today's world, that means being subjected to social engineering through the Gen Ed courses at college/university. These courses use mid 20th century brainwashing techniques to process undergrads into neo-liberal global chattel.
They're scraped from traditional belief systems and offered up to the slaughter of being Global Citizens(tm) eating fake meat in a pod. That isn't the trait. That's the "susceptibility" issue that the specific phenotypic plasticity presents.
Outside of a special exception, he doesn't seem to believe covert coordination, worldview warfare, and top down influence on society exist. If I had to put the issues onto anything, and call it a day, I'd just say that. Conspiracies exist. If you don't think conspiracies are cooked up and applied on the populace on a massive scale, you'll fall into these errors.
That's not to say it's without value. There are good observations in here, it's just that the entire time, I found myself saying "but what about the herd of elephants in every room you walk into?"
unfinished
December 16, 2024The book was weirdly segmented, and I didn't feel like reading all of it. I couldn't find the important parts, and didn't really get the core argument. As far as I remember his theory is largely something that doesn't match my thinking.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews