Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We All Have Genetic Interests, April 24, 2004
The need to identify with others like oneself, and to be with one's own kind, is a major component of human nature and so ethnic identity is a powerful force in human affairs. Group members have "ties of blood" that make them "special" and different from outsiders. This is why patriotism is almost always seen as a virtue and an extension of family loyalty. It also explains why ethnic remarks so easily become "fighting words." Culture builds on genetic similarity and is bound together by it. Patriotism is preached in kinship terms. Nations are the "motherland" or the "fatherland" and unions and churches refer to their members as "brothers" and "sisters."Salter draws out the implications, however politically incorrect, for immigration policies, citizenship law, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and other ways of allocating resources within and between states. There are constraints on how much diversity can be appreciated. On Genetic Interests extends evolutionary theorizing, including my own Genetic Similarity Theory, to the new ground of interpersonal and ethnic relations such as within-group cohesion and between-group conflict. It discusses studies on likeness in social partners such as spouses and best friends. Most importantly, it applies genetic calculations and finds that the average coefficient of kinship within most ethnic groups is about as high as between half-siblings, aunt and nephew, or grandparent and grandchild. Thus, ethnic nepotism is no mere poor relation of family nepotism-it is virtually a proxy for it. Because we have many more co-ethnics than relatives, the aggregate mass of genes shared with the former dwarfs that shared with the latter. Frank Salter, a political scientists and ethologist at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, argues persuasively in this book that shared genes are the glue of sociality.On Genetic Interests goes so far as to refer to the mind as having an "innate descent-group module" (p. 102). It uses this concept to explain the universality of ethnic nepotism. This is heartening because many social scientists and sociobiologists alike have been reluctant to even consider applying gene-based similarity to ethnic and national preferences. Following World War II, few political scientists and historians have considered inter-group conflict from a Darwinian viewpoint. Partly in an effort to insure that they are perceived as in no way condoning racism, many evolutionists have minimized the theoretical possibility of a biological underpinning to ethnic, national, and racial favoritism. As the late, great, evolutionary biologist William Hamilton himself remarked in 1987, while noting why kin discrimination even among animals is not more readily expected, "in civilized cultures, nepotism has become an embarrassment." Social scientists and historians have been quick to condemn the extent to which political leaders or would-be leaders have been able to manipulate ethnic identity. But the questions they never ask, let alone attempt to answer is, "Why is it always so easy?" and "Why can a relatively uneducated political outsider set off a race riot simply by uttering a few well delivered ethnic epithets?" On Genetic Interests provides an illuminating answer.
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well done!, April 5, 2004
Frank Salter's book applies the concepts of sociobiology to the analysis of a demographic trend of the first importance. The trend is toward the displacement of European-derived populations by peoples of other ethnic origins in North America and Western Europe: in another four decades or so, Englishmen and Anglo-Americans will find themselves the minority ethnic group in their own territory. The trend is due to liberal immigration policy amplified by illegal immigration and to the fact that the new-comers handily outbreed the host population. Salter's offering is distinctive among the responses to this challenge, for he treats it as a natural phenomenon of breeding competition among populations. His argues that ethnic identity is a genetically straight-forward extension of familial identity; and that the family-ethnicity linkage is the locus of our species' evolved set of social behaviors. This thesis predicts that kinship is a weightier associative bond than contract; when the two forms of association conflict, kinship prevails. If this is so, the current wisdom about human association in ethnically heterogenous societies is in big trouble. The prevailing wisdom is the melting pot idea, according to which ethnic identity slowly dissolves as more of the children of each generation of immigrants marries out. The golden rule of the prevailing wisdom is that discrimination on the basis race, ethnic origin, gender orientation, religion, disability, etc. offends against the common humanity of each of us. The trouble with the golden rule is that it's at odds with the fact that mums and dads tend to favor their kids, and favor kin to non-kin, all the more when there are forced choices. The problem with the melting pot is that it doesn't do its job. Far from dissolving ethnic groups, it may multiply them, as the Hispanic ethnic identity is the off-shoot of Spanish--indigenous Indian identity. From this Salter draws the seemingly bland conclusion that it's OK to barrack for your own kind. Isn't that just the multiculturalist celebration of diversity? No, because multiculturalism strongly condemns barracking for one particular ethny--the Anglo-Saxon. Why this should be so is a higher mystery of multiculturalist metaphysics, but Salter's legitimation of ethnic competition means that it's legitimate for nations of European heritage to shut the immigration door and to cast out the illegals. Since an approximation of this position prevails nearly everywhere but in Europe and North America, the indifference of the dominant ethnic groups in those regions to their rapid decline calls for an explanation. The reader will need to look elsewhere for it, because Salter scrupulously avoids engaging ethnic-specific questions, perhaps because it would distract from his primary focus--the elaboration of a sociobiologically-based political science, including the normative principles of the 'universal nationalism' (a comity of ethnic-based nations) that he promotes. This is a worthy contribution to the understanding of one of he most important political and social questions of the day.
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