On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass MigrationFrank Salter (December2003). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishing. 388 pp. USD $32.95 (paperback) ISBN 0820460648

Abstract

Thomas Huxley, a man adroit with words, penned that memorable promotion of Darwin’s Origin by chiding his stupidity for not having thought of natural selection himself. I find myself in like circumstances in recommending Frank Salter’s new book. A brief historical reference will place things in perspective. Three decades ago, a band of plucky malcontents established the Politics and Life Sciences Association to assist patching the findings of the biological sciences, especially evolutionary science, into the analysis and interpretation of politics. The catchcry was “forward to human nature”, in contrast to the culture-only fashion. The Association slowly caught on and its journal, Politics and Life Sciences, climbed the ladder to professional respectability. Sociobiology, the new kid on the block in those days, was examined for its possible contribution to our efforts. It was used to help elucidate, inter alia, nepotism and nationalism, but none believed that a set of principles for “biopolitics” could be extracted from it. Salter thinks otherwise. His response to objections about what cannot be done is to just do it. He has constructed a model biopolitical science using William Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory, supplemented by contributions of Richard Alexander, E. O. Wilson, D. S. Wilson and others. Given this unexpected development, it would be apposite for Politics and Life Sciences to organize a full dress summary article and peer commentary of Salter’s book. Alas the journal’s new management rejects all content deemed to be “unnecessarily controversial”, and the genetics of ethnicity falls afoul of that prohibition. Thus, it transpires that the one academic journal dedicated to the promotion of biopolitical science is unlikely to take serious notice of the first offering with a credible claim to have achieved that goal. In mitigation of the unkind epithet that I have applied to myself and to old colleagues, let it be said that Salter’s innovation depends on recent developments unavailable at the initial evaluation of sociobiology. The first is the genetic assay data compiled by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and collaborators over a period of decades, together with recent amendments by Bryan Sykes. These data establish a fine-grained empirical warrant for the perceptions of ethnic groups that their differences are not arbitrary preferences. Since ethnic boundaries often intergrade, these data are essential to establish the natural reality of ethnies. The second factor is the emergence of ethnic/nationality differences on the collapse of the Soviet Union. In its heyday, the Soviet Union appeared to vindicate the melting pot idea together with its lesson that ethnic differences are merely accumulated cultural preferences that may be displaced by fervent socialism. Although Soviet specialists knew that the reality did not quite match propaganda, even they were surprised by the sudden vigor and assertiveness of ethnic identities once 70 years of enforced melting pot persuasion fell away. Former Yugoslavia, where it was taboo to mention the words “Serb” and “Croatian”, provided yet another illustration of the life-and-death significance of ethny. If the collapse of socialism was a practical proof that social identity is insufficient to create a harmonious nation-centered multiculturalism, it was also indirect evidence that political identity may be sustainable only on the basis of a dominant ethny. That this is indeed the case is a key premise of Salter’s biopolitics. Sociobiology holds that the driving force of organisms is the optimal reproduction of each. This ultimate goal sets the parameters for proximal mechanisms of mating, nurturing, foraging, social structure and so on, construed as adaptations promoting optimal reproduction, or fitness. Adaptations emerge and are fine-tuned by natural selection operating on a population of phenotypes. From this premise set Salter extracts his controlling normative principle that the ultimate interest (or “good”, in moral idiom) of individuals is the continuity of their genes in successive generations; in street-wise idiom, parenthood, not personal fulfilment, is the ultimate good. Parental altruism is expanded to the extended family by the addition of inclusive fitness to individual fitness. How far does the expansion extend? The classic expression of the rate of diminishing altruism is J. B. S. Haldane’s quip that it is adaptive to give one’s life for two sibs or eight cousins, but not fewer. This suggests that in a nation of cousins, the relatedness of two randomly chosen individuals is vanishingly small. Nevertheless, nations of cousins have repeatedly engaged like nations in wars of extirpation, which suggests that high amplitude ethnocentric response, bearing no real relationship to actual kinship, is driven by culturally magnified tribal instincts adaptive for small kin groups. If so, the key discipline for understanding ethny is ethology rather than sociobiology. Salter responds to this challenge by developing a method for estimating the degree of relatedness of randomly chosen individuals even in large populations. This is done by translating On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration