ProAntePenultimate Words on the Coelacanth

In that article, Andrew Fraser, following Kevin McDonald in Occidental Quarterly argues that

... Australians, like other ethnic groups tracing their ancestry to North-western Europe, are predisposed to individualism, exogamy and small nuclear families and, as a consequence, display a relative lack of ethnocentrism.

... [This] may actually be a defining characteristic of a distinctive European racial identity not shared by other peoples. Kevin McDonald explains Western "cultural" traits as an evolutionary adaptation to the rigours of life in cold, ecologically adverse climates. Natural selection worked there to favour the reproductive success of those individuals capable of sustaining "non-kinship based forms of reciprocity."

In the way of such things, that qualifying "may" soon gets forgotten as Fraser's argument proceeds - very soon he's taking it for granted that individualism, a disinclination to shag your sister and lack of ethnocentricism (which I'll refer to from hereon as racial tolerance - it's a much simpler expression) are the result of evolutionary adaptation to living in a cold climate.

Which raises an interesting question; how are we to explain Fraser's own, somewhat more ethnocentric views of the relative merits of different races? The answer occurred to me this afternoon: they're as much an expression of Fraser's genotype as "the deeply-ingrained ethnocentrism and xenophobia characterizing most non-European peoples". Assuming, for the nonce, that McDonald's thesis is correct, we can easily account for the occasional emergence of thinkers (I use the term loosely) like Fraser with the help of Mendelian genetics.

Imagine, if you will, our primitive forebears, happily wandering the Serengeti Plains and various other pars Africensis, organised into clannish tribes whose principal recreations were beating in the heads of strangers and shagging each other with complete disregard for the issue of consanguinity. As the tribes were essentially extended families, getting fussed about consanguinity would have been maladaptive, given that all the tribe's members would be blood relatives and attempts to mate outside the tribe would be greeted with a blow on the head.

Somehow, a group of these frankly sordid proto-humans made their way to Europe where a few interesting genetic events happened, among them, the mutation of one or more of the genes in the gene complex which predisposed our ancestors to deck non-shaggable strangers. The racial tolerance gene (T) emerged. Furthermore, it was dominant over the xenophobia gene (t) which hitherto had determined human responses to strangers.

In the relatively isolated environment of Europe, the racial tolerance gene rapidly prolifierated through successive generations of the population. Europeans actually come in three varieties: those who are homozygously racially tolerant (TT), those who are heterozygously racially tolerant (Tt) and those who, unfortunately, are homozygously xenophobic (tt). Of course, the more evolved racially tolerant phenotype (Tt and Tt) is the most widespread, but occasionally you will get throwbacks to the less evolved tt genotype. They're sort of living fossils, like the coelacanth.

This raises some interesting issues, which might be worth considering now that the whole kerfuffle over Andrew Fraser's rights to academic freedom has died down. For example, Fraser regards the racial tolerance of the European to be a mark of genetic superiority and has argued for racially realistic policies that recognise that some races are better than others. Perhaps we should also be looking at policies that would spread the T gene more widely into other racial populations and - somewhat controversially perhaps - programs aimed at reducing its occurrence among the European races. And perhaps not; perhaps instead we should be looking for ways to protect and conserve this sub-variety of Homo sapiens sapiens (europa).