This idea that harmony
between the races is impossible--let's call it the "National Review
fallacy"--rests largely on confusion about a form of natural selection known as
"kin selection." The issues are a bit arcane, but I'll try to provide a rough
sketch of some of them.
"Kin selection" accounts for
the evolution of altruistic impulses toward close relatives. The textbook
example of kin selection is a newly minted gene that inclines a ground squirrel
to stand up and give an alarm call upon seeing a predator. At first glance,
this gene would seem to have no chance of proliferating via natural selection,
since it attracts the predator's attention and thus endangers the organism in
which it resides. But remember: The gene will also reside, on average, in half
of that organism's siblings--and their survival prospects are enhanced
by the gene's effect (i.e., by the warning call). So, even if this "warning
call" gene occasionally causes the death of its possessor, the gene itself may
still flourish by natural selection, as long as more than two siblings are
saved for every one ground squirrel that is lost. (If this Cliff Notes
version of kin selection doesn't seem to make sense, then please go and read
the excerpt from the chapter titled "Families" on the Web site for my book,
The Moral
Animal, then come back, and keep reading.) In our species, the result of
this evolutionary process seems to be a kin-directed altruism that is roughly
proportional to the closeness of relatives. Most people would be more inclined
to risk their lives for a sibling than for a cousin, and for a cousin than for
the average Joe. (This assumes, among other things, that these people have been
reared in close enough proximity to these relatives to develop the emotional
bonds that mediate kin-selected altruism.)
Here is where confusion
enters the minds of people eager to believe that whites and blacks are innately
hostile toward one another. They try to extend the logic of kin selection
beyond the scope of the family and carry it all the way up to the level of
whole races. They are assuming, in other words, that there is a universal law
dictating that altruism between individuals be proportional to their degree of
genetic relatedness--and that natural discord among people thus will be
proportional to their genetic difference.
There are at least two major
problems with this logic. The first is a fairly technical (though
consequential) analytical flaw, first identified in another context by Richard
Dawkins and labeled "Washburn's fallacy." (See his "Twelve Misunderstandings of
Kin Selection." Zeitschr. Tierpsychol, no. 51 [1979]: 184-200). I won't
even try to explain the fallacy here, except to say that a) It consists of
assuming that kin selection would make altruism proportional to overall
genetic relatedness--that is, the percentage of all your genes that you
have in common with another organism; and b) This assumption has been memorably
characterized as implying that humans should, in theory, be "nicer to mosquitos
than to marigolds." That characterization was made by Martin Daly, Catherine
Salmon, and Margo Wilson. For their explicit application of Dawkins' analysis
to the National Review fallacy (they don't call it that, of course), see
their chapter in the forthcoming textbook Evolutionary Social
Psychology , edited by Douglas Kenrick and Jeffrey Simpson, and published by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
The second problem with the
idea of some iron law correlating altruism with genetic relatedness--and thus
correlating natural discord with genetic difference--is at least slightly more
accessible. Kin selection isn't some inexorable force of evolution. It's just a
theoretical possibility, one that will only be realized if the circumstances of
evolution are conducive to its realization. In the case of altruism directed
toward close relatives, we know that circumstances were indeed so conducive:
Throughout human evolution, people were reared a) near close relatives; and b)
near people who weren't close relatives. Thus there was lots of opportunity for
the flourishing of genes that led humans to discriminate between the two,
favoring the former at the expense of the latter. But in the case of comparable
discrimination between members of one's own race and members of other races,
there was no significant opportunity for the evolution of such a trait. Because
during human evolution (that is, during that short span of human evolution that
took place after distinct races began forming), there was roughly zero
contact among different races; people in Africa didn't vacation on the Riviera
back then. Saying that white people evolved an innate aversion to blacks, or
blacks an innate aversion to whites, is like saying people evolved an innate
aversion to some poison plant that grows only on Mars; the opportunity simply
wasn't there.
None of this is to suggest
that human nature doesn't vastly complicate race relations. People are
obviously inclined to derogate groups whose interests seem to clash with those
of their own group, and to identify those groups by whatever means are
available. Skin color can be an unfortunately handy means of doing the
identifying. What's more, kin selection itself may complicate race relations in
various subtle ways. For example: Nepotism, one legacy of kin selection, is
often de facto racial discrimination, since your close relatives are usually
members of your race. When a white boss promotes his niece, he is
discriminating against some whites (the ones who aren't in his family), but
against all blacks.
All told, the obstacles to
intergroup harmony posed by human nature are big enough that there is little
exaggeration in saying that xenophobia is a part of human nature, at least in
this sense: Uncritical hostility toward an identifiable group of
people--identifiable by language, dress, color, whatever--is an inherent
capacity, activated under certain predictable circumstances. But that is very
different from saying we are designed to automatically dislike people with
particular skin colors, and that racial harmony therefore is impossible--which
is what the National Review article said.
Full-disclosure paragraph:
The article in which the "National Review fallacy" appeared was a review
of my book, The Moral Animal . One of the review's major complaints was
about my alleged failure to realize that Darwinism is a thoroughgoing
vindication of the reviewer's various political beliefs (e.g., the
impossibility of racial harmony). No doubt some of my animus toward the article
is related to these comments about my book. Still, I'm not inventing the idea
that the "National Review fallacy" is indeed a fallacy. The same opinion
is held by, for example, George Williams, one of the greatest evolutionary
biologists of this century and arguably the chief architect of evolutionary
psychology. By the way, his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection
(Princeton University Press), which laid the theoretical foundation for the
modern Darwinian study of social behavior in animals, still is in print.
