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Strategies for mitigating risk among Jewish groups
Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION: JUDAISM AS A GROUP EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY Mainstream Darwinism has emphasized natural selection at the level of the gene or the individual, not the group. As a natural corollary of this model of individual selection, applications of evolutionary theory to human behavior have tended to focus on the individual. Individuals are viewed as free agents whose self-interested behavior has been shaped by evolutionary forces acting on psychological mechanisms. Human social relationships are viewed as permeated by conflicts of interest, but research has tended to focus on the individual actor confronting an infinitely fractionated social space. Within that social space, individual strategy is viewed as depending crucially on biological relatedness to other individuals (the result of kin selection theory [Hamilton 1964]), as well as on several other individual difference variables such as sex, age, and resource control. Within this individualist perspective the group is nothing more than a concatenation of self-interested individuals. Cooperation among individuals is understood as depending on perceived benefits to each individual. The result is that we have paid scant attention to groups and how they are able to structure themselves in order to become an important force so that it is meaningful and important to talk about the group as the vehicle of selection (Wilson & Sober 1995). Within this conceptualization there is no requirement that human group evolutionary strategies have evolved as the result of natural selection favoring altruistic groups. The idea is that humans are able to create and maintain groups that minimize the differences between group and individual interests. I argue that in some of the more interesting examples, the fundamental mechanisms involved rely ultimately on human abilities to monitor and enforce group goals and to create ideological structures that rationalize group aims both to group members and to outsiders. This perspective is consistent with the idea that natural selection has been most powerful at the individual level. The difficulty confronting those attempting to develop theories of groups is that there would always be natural selection within groups for selfish individuals. However, humans, presumably unlike other animals, are able to monitor the behavior of other members of the group and enforce sanctions against those who fail to adopt behaviors agreed to by other members of the group. In fact, traditional Jewish groups developed a wide range of sanctions against behaviors viewed as inimical to group goals (MacDonald 1994). Within this perspective, the evolved goals of humans, such as achieving social status, were determined by our evolutionary past. But there are few, if any, constraints on how humans can attempt to achieve these goals. Of critical importance for understanding human adaptation in uncertain and novel environments is the evolution of domain-general cognitive abilities (MacDonald 1991; MacDonald & Geary 2000). There is little doubt that humans have evolved a set of domain-specific psychological mechanisms designed to solve recurrent problems in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA)—the environment humans evolved in and
Kin selection, the popular name given to William Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, has been successful in predicting variation in human altruism shown towards kin of different proximity. Kin-selection theory interprets the behavioural universal of nepotism to be a product of evolutionary history. In that theory, the rigors of natural selection meant that altruism-including the unreciprocated giving of resources to another individual-was only viable when practiced between close kin. The theory of evolution underlying ethnic nepotism is not well developed. There are two main approaches. The first is to portray ethnic nepotism as a literal extension of the family variety, with shared homologies in emotions, psychological mechanisms, and releasers (such as perceived attacks on the group). The second approach is to allow for ethnic and kin motivation to be different.
In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.
A model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior. The model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system. Three instances of altruistic behavior are discussed, the evolution of which the model can explain: (1) behavior involved in cleaning symbioses; (2) warning cries in birds; and (3) human reciprocal altruism. Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that the details of the psychological system that regulates this altruism can be explained by the model. Specifically, friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies, the expression of which is sensitive to developmental variables that were selected to set the tendencies at a balance ap...
“Know yourself” is one of the most ancient of all injunctions. Although some primates possess the ability to recognize their own faces, and therefore must possess a rudimentary sense of self (Gallup, 1977), humans appear to be unique among animals in their ability to know themselves. What is the nature of this ability? How did it evolve, and why? How effective are the processes through which people acquire self-knowledge, and how valid are the story by telling its end, we will conclude that it often is maladaptive to perceive oneself accurately, that people are at least as adept at self-serving way, and that people are at least as adept at self-deception as they are at self-perception.
The Jews of Poland tells the story of the development and growth of Polish Jewry from its beginnings, around the year 1200, when it numbered a few score people, to about six hundred years later, when it totaled a million or more people. This books records the development of this Jewish community. It attempts to capture the uniqueness of each period in the history of this community. In recounting the saga of Polish Jewry, the book endeavors to see Polish Jews as human beings acting and reacting humanly to the exigencies of life with courage and weakness, high ideals, beliefs, and sacrifices, on one hand, and human frailty, passions, and ambitions, on the other.
A study of Judaism from an evolutionary perspective. The author argues that Judaism has grown with an evolutionary strategy characterised by endogamy, resistance to genetic and cultural assimilation, sacrifice between Jews and eugenic practices aimed at high intelligence.
PREFACE Lt. Gen, George E. Stratemeyer, USAF (ret.), says: "I congratulate you on your book and the service you have performed for our country. If my health would permit it I would go on a continuous lecture tour gratis and preach your book and recommendations. My Iron Curtain Over America will be on loan continuously and I intend to recommend its reading in every letter I write." Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, USA. (ret.), says: "It is an inspiration to me to find an author with the courage and energy to research and to secure the publication of such information as you have assembled in order that the poorly informed average American may know wherein the real threats to our Country lurk. Your book is a magnificent contribution to those who would preserve our American ideals." "I think it ought to be compulsory reading in every public school in America." Senator William A. Langer, former Chairman, Judiciary Committee. Vice Admiral T. G. W. Settle, U.S.N. (ret.), says: "The Iron Curtain Over America is a most pertinent and excellently presented treatise on the cancer on our national set-up. "I hope this book has had, and will have, the widest possible dissemination, particularly to our leaders-in Washington, and in industry and the press, — and that our leaders who are "uncontaminated" will have their serious attention engaged by it." Lt, General P. A. Del Valle, USMC (ret), says: "I am impelled to write to you to express my admiration of your great service to the Nation in writing this truly magnificent book. No American who has taken the oath of allegiance can afford to miss it, and I heartily recommend it as an honest and courageous dispeller of the fog of propaganda in which most minds seem to dwell." John Beaty The author of The Iron Curtain Over America has written, or collaborated on, a dozen books. His texts have been used in more than seven hundred colleges and universities, and his historical novel, Swords in the Dawn, published originally in New York, had London and Australian editions, and was adopted for state-wide use in the public schools of Texas. His education (M.A., University of Virginia; Ph.D., Columbia University; post-graduate study, University of Montpellier, France), his travel in Europe and Asia, and his five years with the Military Intelligence Service in World War II rounded out the background for the reading and research (1946-1951) which resulted in The Iron Curtain Over America.
A new theory of attraction and liking based on kin selection suggests that people detect genetic similarity in others in order to give preferential treatment to those who are most similar to themselves. There are many sources of empirical and theoretical support for this view, including (1) the inclusive fitness theory of altruism, (2) kin recognition studies of animals raised apart, (3) assortative mating studies, (4) favoritism in families, (5) selective similarity among friends, and (6) ethnocentrism. Specific tests of the theory show that (1) sexually interacting couples who produce a child are genetically more similar to each other in blood antigens than they are either to sexually interacting couples who fail to produce a child or to randomly paired couples from the same sample; (2) similarity between marriage partners is most marked in the more genetically influenced of sets of anthropometric, cognitive, and personality characteristics; (3) after the death of a child, parental grief intensity is correlated with the child's similarity to the parent; (4) long-term male friendship pairs are more similar to each other in blood antigens than they are to random dyads from the same sample; and (5) similarity among best friends is most marked in the more genetically influenced of sets of attitudinal, personality, and anthropometric characteristics. The mechanisms underlying these findings may constitute a biological substrate of ethnocentrism, enabling group selection to occur.
In this paper a theory of Darwinian psychological adaptations as motive dispositions with an affective core is developed, and it is argued that 1) there is significant plasticity in these mechanisms; 2) in addition to domain-specific evolved motive dispositions, there are a variety of domain-general cognitive and emotional mechanisms; 3) humans are capable of developing motive dispositions which are not adaptations; 4) the relationship between evolved motive dispositions and behavior is very tenuous so that the explanatory power of Darwinian psychology is very weak; 5) individual differences in human psychological characteristics are evolutionarily meaningful and are linked to mechanisms which assess the resource value of intraspecific genetic and phenotypic diversity.
2nd Ed, repr Bibliogr. s. 275 - 297
In this provocative book, Benjamin Ginsberg examines the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack throughout the history of the Diaspora, with a concentrated focus on the "special case" of America. For Ginsberg, the essential issue is not anti-Jewish feeling, but the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena. The Fatal Embrace identifies the political dynamics that, historically, have set the stage for the persecution of Jews.
1st Schocken Paperback Ed Bibliogr. s. 409-416