Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 15:43:10 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Racism & genes (reply to Joe Flanagan)


Hey, apologize to WF if my own rhetoric got out of hand. What I meant to
say is not the cooperative gene would have helped our hypothetical island
population. My whole argument is that we can think of evolution as a
teleogical process. All I meant to say is that interactions among early
hominoids would have conferred evolutionary advantages--to wit. groups
that interacted had a more diverse gene pool than those who did not. If we
go back to the initial discussion "What would be the evolutionary
advantages of racism?" I thought your example claimed that if islanders
had a kind if instinctual wariness about interacting with white settlers,
they might not have been wiped out. I just don;t buy that explanation--I
think is far easier to claim that if islanders HAD interacted with various
gropus, they would not have had so homogenous a gene pool and thus it
would be likely that some of them would have had immunity to smallpox and
other diseases brought to them (i.e. as much as plague ravaged parts of
the world, it never wiped out entire populations where there is evidence
of much group interaction. I don't understand how nursing fits into this,
but that might be my own fault.  My only point is that the evolutionary
advantage of avoiding other groups is far from clear...and, in many cases,
it is easier to see the disadvantages of such isolation (more homogenous
gene pool, less exposure to "foreign" contagions). 

About the feminist point, many (social) evolutionary scientists privilege
of model of conflict over cooperation in nature. I've read critiques of
that that assume aggressive masculine conflict (or, to settle everyone,
the cliche of aggressive masculine conflict) over other models of
interaction have plagued many models of (social) evolution. 
  
Finally, I don't know if I even get why people want to assign an
evolutionary explanation to such social phenomon as racism. Probably,
we'll never be able to prove it one way or the other, But I do think it is
dangerous assuming a continuity between modern forms of racism and early
hominoid behavior. There's a lot of assumptions that early behaviour is
simply a more primitive model of advanced, so they start with the present
and then can trace the "evolution" (from barbaric to civilized, as I think
was implicit in the post concerning the Aztecs) in a linear, progressive
way.  So my objections are not against the genetic component of racism per
se--it's more the way I think some rather suspect notions of evolution get
deployed. So it's the model of evolution I have been asking about in these
posts...not the question of racism per se (although, as stated before, I
am a bit skeptical about its value). And I still don't quite see the
evolutionary advantages of racism--but I've a;lready explained my reasons
for that. Joe




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