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Old September 25th, 2006, 03:16 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Default Chagnon, Wright, Buchanan

title changed 10/4/06: JB

"'Wanted, young skinny wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.' Pony express (Nebraska, 1860-61)" Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, K Heuer, (Ed.) 1987, p. 156).
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You need a little caffeine and three ideas...

1) Steven Suomi (2006) finds that certain transporter genes for serotonin reuptake occur in two forms - a long and a short - but only in two species that happen to have nasty children and grow everywhere: humans and rhesus monkeys. All the Lord's other chilluns are pacifists with restricted ranges and in danger of extinction. They also have only one kind of allele, the long form. And there are recurring suggestions that short serotonin alleles when combined with impulsive behavior, whether in humans or rhesus, also appear with self-destruction, excessive aggression, rejection by females, and eviction from adult groups (Suomi, 2006; Lesch, 2003.) And it may be that short alleles catalyze robust societies when mixed with long alleles in smart people with good impulse control and a sense of the future.

Chagnon described similar patterns of behavior but without the genetics in his study: Yanomamo: The Fierce People. The pattern seemed to be that of non-impulsive, brighter males with females in the tribal center and around it a ring of impulsive, not so smart, immediately combative males who did drugs and collected scars. Chagnon's model applies to our noisy competitors east of the Mediterranean and south of the Rio Grande.

2) Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower) and Pat Buchanan (State of Emergency) don't mention Chagnon but discuss the same pattern: the influence of ambitious core individuals, whether delusional or spiteful, on the guys at the periphery who spend lifetimes fighting and scheming, either in jail or out in the brush, and with whom sensible females (rhesus or human) never go to a school dance.

The organization that Chagnon, Wright, and Buchanan discuss also resembles those described by modern physics (Watts & Strogatz, 1998; Barabasi, 2002): self-assembled emergent networks have the advantages of relatively short paths between all members, no matter how many, and high degrees of clustering. (Picture a bunch of grapes but imagine that each big grape consists of 6-8 tiny ones!) Clusters specialize because the closeness within them encourages intense conformity and focus but the cluster also remains in rapid contact with, and therefore, in synchrony with other clusters.

3) Breznitz (2001) told of "the boy who called wolf" in his comparison of immune systems and social behavior. Give a signal twice without confirmation and no one hears your third warning. Breznitz mentioned two successful invasion strategies: A) go slow, become accepted as "family," and then reproduce massively or B) overwhelm local defenses from Day One. Bacteria make these choices, most gangs should be able to manage them.

Now put the three together...

Europe faced Breznitz Strategy A against Islam and probably has lost because its own rationalist nature (too many long alleles?) assumed that integration follows relocation. Europe could not conceive that invaders who came as helpers would seize vital centers and rebel. European and American arrogance also hide an infectious deranged sibling who believes in racial differences. The kid in the attic however may not be so crazy. There may be truth to instinctive beliefs in racial differences and national pride may follow genetic batons (Rushton, 2005). Buchanan, however, points out that Caucasians are the only group forbidden to have racial pride and compliant enough to give it up. We try to be superior to what we were by accepting as equal or better whatever anyone else is. (We know now that tactic always invites disrespect and cheating from tough-minded traders who are sometimes known as cheaters or defectors.)

That is, Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) compares local genetic variation with global variation and concludes that any two randomly chosen ethnics within a common boundary have an average relationship of half-siblings (Rushton et al, 1984). "A general rule would be: If a fellow ethnic looks like you, then on average, he or she is genetically equivalent to a cousin." (Rushton, 2005, p. 499.) WD Hamilton's acclaimed inclusive fitness theory may explain our hate for whomever is just over the mountain or the new kid on the block. (So could Brody's recent speculations about regression-to-the-mean! High IQ is correlated with national rates of suicide: being "different" is the problem rather than being "defective.")

Combine GST and the effects of shared heritable traits such as IQ on mating and friendships, no amount of public school will make people with an average IQ of 104 take as long term buds, lovers, or threats people who average 85.

The United States now faces Breznitz Strategy A both from the south and overseas. Buchanan, for example, warned us of the Mexican invasion for perhaps twenty years but we ignored him only because the Mexicans never did anything dramatic. (He, however, annoyed some of us into calling him "racist.")

Huge numbers lately give Mexicans courage and Buchanan credibility. For example, Mexican flags hanging in Los Angeles upset some of us, we bitched, and they got quiet for a while longer but have not changed their leadership's goal of taking back our southwest border states. Mexican gangs have even scared the Crips and Bloods in LA to unite for personal safety! (There is also extraordinary Hispanic gang activity in the affluent counties around Washington, DC. Columbia is no longer a gem of the ocean!)

A second example: Massachusetts hates George Bush but Chavez's bluster at the UN elicited three hours of phone calls last Saturday evening in the People's Republic of Boston. The host, Pat Desmaris on radio station WBZ, was shocked. It seems that Citgo Corporation is owned by Venezuela and 75 percent of the callers demanded removal of the Citgo sign above Kenmore Square because WE can insult our President but a visitor cannot! (One very creative lady, "Keep the sign but put a red circle and diagonal red bar on top of it!)

Uneasy gray ghosts rattle drums from Lexington to Concord...

Although we rationalists distinguish "good guys" from "bad," both Mexican and the Muslim leaders provide drum beats for assaultive individuals, many of them impulsive in the sense of reacting first to instinct. Moderates who cement revolutions and possibly carry fewer copies of that short allele also hear the drum. The underlying genetics may be such that moderate females will make nasty children and find status and honor when they do so. And western strategists may feel better when they insist on shooting soldiers but not women and children but those strategists fight without limiting the enemy's access to fresh troops.

Further, the Muslim and Mexican invader organizations share tactics that Watts & Strogatz attribute to epidemics and it can be hard to beat them. Attacks on peripheral clusters have little effect and we cannot get at their cores. On the other hand, lots of opposed hubs manage American power and resources. The organization that gives us trouble making up our minds also makes us relatively invulnerable to a knockout punch. We and our invaders will annoy each other for a very long time and eventually discover tit-for-tat arrangements.

A Sense of the future...

1) Rational determined brown women will stop making babies when they have careers. It happened to the Brits, Russians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Italians, and Spanish. It happened to us. Irrational impulsive brown women will also stop making babies when they no longer compete with each other to make soldiers, bombers, or voters. As for territory, the Muslim males want all of what they think they deserve plus some more; they also want to control what the Pope and I say and the tuner on our HDTV.

2) Suomi reports that nasty little rhesus become reasonable adults when reared by a foster mother; the madrassas, differently taught, could become a social antacid. He also remarked informally that fish oil supplements in the monkey chow cut into a lot of his experimental effects. We would need a lot of C135s and mothers on the ground who want less violent kids. In the meantime, a more certain road to cooperation - and I want cooperation, not love - is probably Generous Tit-for-Tat: cheat me once, OK. Cheat me again and I will beat the hell out of you.

3) A Mexican in a Nike T-shirt, NY Yankees cap, and Maxim magazine just sat opposite me in the mall where I write. He also has a cell phone and a disc player. Some of us want similar things and Bob Wright may be correct in both his optimism about peace through trade and his cautions about super-empowered resentful males. The Mexican leadership wants Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, south California, and Texas: let them have the territory and but those who now occupy them will disregard their history and fail to unite with Mexico. (The kid across from me probably doesn't give a damn and, frankly, neither do I. On the other hand, a scrawny White guy with cane needed a seat and the Mexican moved his bags in order to share the couch. I thanked him. He rolled his eyes. A cognitive challenge: he obviously rolled his eyes because I am White and he is brown or because, less obvious, he is 18 and outnumbered by a pair of oldsters? The gap between generations surely rivals that between ethnicities!)

Europe and Russia balkanized: barring a dictator, so will North America. The South and New England will rise again and Appalachia for the firs time: in return for the southwest, the Nuevo Mexicanos will make fewer babies and jail and medicate some of them. We also get to wash in the Colorado's water before they do. And because IQ often moderates impulsiveness and synchronizes compatible friends and mates, Ivy League feminists will be drawn to male terrorist alphas.

On your backs, ladies, and raise your knees: you all deserve each other and the rest of us desperately need a little hybrid vigor...

Now smile...

JimB

REFERENCES
Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Breznitz S (2001) Immunoalienation: A behavioral analysis of the immune system. In A Damascio, A Harrington, J Kagan, B McEwen, H Moss, & R Shaikh (Eds.) The Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Science. Annals of the NY Acad. Sciences, 935: 86-97.
Brody, J.F. (2006) Suicide: "Mother May I?" (Inclusive Fitness, Maternal Investment, and Regression to the Mean. (25 pp, 61 refs) Poster session, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, July 30-Aug 3, 2006.
Buchanan P (2006) State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. NY: St. Martin's Press.
Chagnon, N. (1968) Yanomamo: The Fierce People. NY: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
Lesch, KP (2003) Neuroticism and serotonin: A developmental genetic perspective. In Plomin, R., DeFries, J. Craig, I. & McGuffin, P. (Eds) (2003) Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Assn. pp. 389-424.
Rushton JP, Russell R, & Wells P (1984) Genetic similarity theory: beyond kin selection. Behavior Genetics 14: 179?193.
Rushton P (2005) Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory. Nations & Nationalism. 11(4), 489-507.
Suomi S (1997) Nonverbal communication in nonhuman primates: Implications for the emergence of culture. In Segerstrale, U. & Molnar, P. (Eds.) Nonverbal Communication: Where Nature Meets Culture. Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 131-150.
Suomi S (2000) How gene-environment interactions shape individual development trajectories in rhesus monkeys. Presentation at The Relationship System, Georgetown Family Center, Washington, DC, April.
Suomi S (2006) How gene x environment interactions can shape berhavioral and biological development in rhesus monkeys, humans, and other primates. Presentation at XVII Biennial Congress, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, MI, August 2.
Watts D. & Strogatz S (1998) Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature. 393: 440-442.
Wright L (2006) The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. NY: Knopf.
Wright, R. (2000) NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. NY: Pantheon.

Copyright, James Brody, 2006, all rights reserved.

Last edited by James Brody; October 4th, 2006 at 02:50 PM..
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