We have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. Those allow us to drastically curtail what might otherwise be instinctive behaviors.
I know there are some determinists who say that free will is illusory and we're as much slaves to our genetics and instincts as lobsters are.
But it certainly seems as if, in practice, tribalism (at least the clear-cut type you're describing where we exclude people who don't look like us) is recognizable and avoidable.
In a social setting, with people around having conversations, your brain cortex fires off. It's spinning like crazy. And the cortex is all about logic. It's all about intellect, a sense of morality, about a will, and group hierarchy, and talking, and relaxation. You get the picture. When the phobia kicks in... guess what... the first thing that will happen is that cortisol will turn off your cortex. In the stressful situation, in fight or run situation, your cortex is switched off brother. That's why this spider is dead. That's why after 30 years of perfect marriage you might do stupid things when 23 year old hot blonde is sexually provoking you. That's why live isn't white and black. Even in 2017.
Just because some people react with their emotion doesn't mean everyone does and it doesn't mean we have to.
Now, I don't fear spiders and also don't mind them as long as they don't wreak the place with their filaments. I was surprised when a cousin of mine was freaked out by one of them and wanted to insta-kill it.
Now if there is a bug... that's a whole different story. Even though, logically thinking, these beasts are the same.
Given how many spiders are only inside or only outside spiders, you basically just said you seen him sending the spiders to their death. The person smashing the spider isn't much different than the person putting it outside.
Not the best source, but a good starting point: https://www.livescience.com/48479-spider-myths-busted.html
>Just because some people react with their emotion doesn't mean everyone does and it doesn't mean we have to.
And yet consider the example you gave in light of the current body of evidence.
One can easily espouse something like that while not wanting a big spider scurrying around in your house. Also, plenty of people (myself included) escort such spiders outside alive instead of smashing them, not the least because I don't want to smear their guts everywhere, creating more work.
How is that not logical? Spreading your genes to healthy young women seems like a straightforward choice.
Actually you have to make a number of conscious decisions to have an affair. "It just happened" is an excuse.
An excerpt from Julian Jaynes's 'Origin of Consciousness' comes to mind here:
> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.
There exist a great deal of subconscious processes that effect behavior in ways that an 'individual' cannot necessarily perceive. Often, a person does something, then post-hoc uses narratization to fit those actions within their preexisting belief system and story of themselves. The important thing to note is that your perception of yourself is not you, and the world you perceive around you is not the world itself. Both act as very helpful mental models that help you navigate your world effectively. As with all models, however, they have holes, and the really damaging ones are the ones you're not aware you're not aware of (as you cannot even adjust for those weaknesses).
Non-consciously accessible processes play an important role in our ability to reason, predict and control behavior in a manner Evolution could not anticipate. They are no less us.
[0] - Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"
Further, while there may be a correlation, it's far from deterministic. Experiences count for a lot in developing values.
Examples:
- I had a friendship which originally started over shared nostalgia for a cantonese children show
- I was excluded from a group because I didn't know enough american pop culture references to get their jokes
- I stopped eating dinner with another group because I felt awkward being the only one not praying before the meal
- In another group, we only ever talked about programming puzzles and non-programmer friends (such as their girlfriends) learned quickly to leave us alone
All of these groups came together and/or left each other due to unwritten emergent social dynamics. You can never stop these clusters from forming. As long as you have groups/tribes, there will be people excluded based on the that tribe's values. Is that really so bad?
No, it doesn't. I don't know anyone that has come even close to escaping tribalism.
So instead of doing hard work, we decided to make tools to circumvent the bugs, for example by avoiding buggy routine executing personal communication - and instead discuss that paper online.
Work with the smart, no matter what skin colour, instead of doing the PC-Dance.
In case you think I'm arguing against a strawman, the blank slate view is _extremely_ popular, and likely even more so in the circles that this commentariat likely run in.
Thank you for saying this.
As history has shown, it's only too easy to take a scientific research paper and draw some godawful conclusions from it.
We can - and must - do better.
Sounds like something a plantation owner from the antebellum south would agree with.
Now obviously anti-racism isn't "the real racism", but I think it's kind of funny that many commentators here seem to think that by defining certain sects of people based on cherry picked attributes will somehow prove that we've moved beyond the biological impulses of discrimination.
There are no moral imperatives to be found in genes or epigenetics, only moral factors. Hume's observation about is -> ought is as pressing as ever, despite what Sam Harris might have you think. It's particularly dangerous to believe the former is true, since we make such a habit of expanding and distorting the scope of empirical results to ideological fantasy-land near instantly.
Whether we tightly and uniformly prefer genetically similar friends, whether we conversely happen to like genetically diverse mates, or whether all of these are more generally attendant to environmental factors like diet and disease -- it remains that we can collaboratively use reason to decide on our 'oughts', not just pick the interpretation and scope of 'is' that we prefer at the time. Issues of justice and responsibility seem much more interesting than endlessly turning the wheel of sciencey-tribalism. We struggle enough to figure out how best to treat each other already.
If you read the article, it's actually not at all about people looking the same.
In the study, people had friends with similar smell genetics, and different immunity system genetics.
That's exactly what it means. Knowing what we know about sexual reproduction and trait heredity what else could it mean? It's not like half your genome spontaneously arises in a zygote in some random location half way around the world.
Additionally:
> formal analysis has shown that selection for group adaptations requires special circumstances, with negligible within group selection (Fig. 4), such as when (a) the group is composed of genetically identical individuals (clonal groups, r=1), or (b) there is complete repression of competition between groups (i.e., no conflict within groups; Gardner & Grafen, 2009). It is useful here to distinguish adaptation and design from dynamics of how selection leads to design. The dynamics of selection can be examined with either an individual (inclusive fitness or kin selection) or group selection approach. However, only the individual level approach provides a general model of adaptation. The idea that individuals strive to maximise their inclusive fitness holds irrespective of the intensity of selection operating within and between groups (Section 2; Fig. 4). In contrast, as discussed above, group adaptations or maximization of fitness at the group level are only expected in the extreme case where there is no within group selection.
I really doubt your view is consistent with the conditions for selection in the group. If non-tribe-member competition caused significant competition between groups, then it far outweighs the pressure of in-group adaptation. If "friends are genetically similar" is a genetic adaptation from tribalism, then it has to be an enhancement from within the group when it lacks competition - you benefit from the adaptation relative to people within your tribe that don't have it. FYI the paper disagrees with the notion that friend similarity is likely a result of decision.
Personally I think that 1% relative similarity could easily be explained in the ambiguous language they use to explain why it was "mostly" homogenously European - why would it surprise me that the non-Europeans would tend to have less DNA in common with the friends they have while also likely having fewer friends per capita?
Though, possibly, because the most likely to be similar SNPs were related to smell (and therefore taste), and to linoleic acid, maybe it reaffirms that people who break you bread are your companions - and that there is a real difference between butter cultures and olive oil cultures :P
[0] https://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/west/pdf/WestElMoudenGardner_...
More to the point, though, racism is an obvious manifestation of the kind of tribalism I think we are talking about and I don't think it's really controversial to argue that it is harmful at least to the marginalized groups. I'd personally even go further and say it harms all parties involved.
It's a factor way too often ignored with this issue: If "hurting people's feelings" will become a crime, then we will see no end of regulating "undesired behaviors" because people get their feelings hurt in the most subjective and unintended ways [0].
So much about "obvious examples of racism".
[0] http://thedmonline.com/greek-life-retreat-ends-abruptly-bias...
Urbanization isn't unnatural and it agrees with our tribal instincts.
Look at Tokyo: extremely high density with extremely small social unrest. Paris, now a collection of different tribes, can't say the same.
On another note, I think Japan ends up with kind of a distorted picture since so much of the crime is associated with organized criminal groups with ties to legitimate business and government operating with a degree of openness that I think would surprise most Western observers. Dubro's Yakuza book is a great primer on the topic.
I'm not claiming that. I am claiming that multiculturalism plays a role, which many people refuse to acknowledge.
And for murder, that can be a bit of a tautology as socially unacceptable killing is murder and anything else isn't considered on the same level as murder. But if we consider killing that isn't considered murder and if you consider forms of killing that, if not legal, are punished lighter than murder, it becomes clear that our society does allow some forms of killing others.
It does if there are enough nitpicks showing that natural behaviors are becoming more accepted because they are natural. That isn't to say they are acceptable, but they are more accepted. And this doesn't have to be true of all behaviors, because there are many factors at play. It is even possible there could be a trend where behaviors are becoming more acceptable because they are natural even if all behaviors were becoming less acceptable, if there was another stronger force acting to make all behaviors less acceptable.
But if we want to get to the actual argument first presented, we would have to realize that comparing it to murder, adultery, or sexual assault is a strawman to begin with. The OP wasn't defending going around and murdering people who didn't look like you. They were saying that millions of years of evolution will influence our behaviors in small ways. It would be compared to other preferences, such as preferences in intimate partners. So, is wanting to have a specific gender, race, etc. in an intimate partner wrong? Is it socially unacceptable?