by Lorna Salzman (January 2016)

A recent reading of Richard Moore’s “Escaping the Matrix” (chapter 2), from the 2005 Cyberjournal Project, had a welcome evolutionary perspective, which is rare these days. But one important part was left out, which has relevance to the refugee problem, namely the issues of kin selection and altruism. That there is a big void is evident by comparing the famous photo of the drowned Syrian boy to the photos of the hundreds of thousands of refugees marching into Europe and facing detention at the borders. (Note the similarity to the mistreatment of individual animals which raises outrage vs. the animal rights’ movement’s absence from the fight to save whole species).

If you are related to someone, or know an individual well, you are highly likely to respond to appeals for help or rescue. This tendency, which has been retained throughout human evolution and was adaptive in small tribal societies, does not extend to modern mass society and the millions of faceless humans we do not know, humans whose background, profession or intentions are unknown. For all we know most of them could be indicted criminals, thieves, rapists, crooked businessmen, terrorists, men fleeing military conscription, etc. But even if only a few of them are, there is no way of distinguishing the good from the bad, much less determining the true cause of their flight (except in the case of Syria). (Note: this is why  veiled Muslim woman is looked on with suspicion; it is impossible to know whether she is a nonviolent observant Muslim or a terrorist. Muslim women should remove the veil if they don’t like being associated with terrorists.)

Altruism and humanitarian assistance are built in to human morality but rarely if ever to the point of self-sacrifice, which is most likely to occur if it involves your children, spouse, parents or siblings. A hard-headed examination of the present refugee situation unavoidably leads to the conclusion that admission of large numbers of Muslims to stable, secular democratic Europe, heir to Enlightenment values, equality and the rule of law, will spell the end of Europe, economically, politically and socially. This must be understood and must be argued strenuously with those who see the immigrants as potential labor to facilitate economic growth or those demented liberals who think that admitting millions of people with no experience with or fondness for western values will “diversify” European society. 

These immigrants, with a few exceptions (Syrian Christians or secularists), do not seek freedom or equality. They are not escaping oppression in order to free their daughters from the heavy hand of Islam, much less to give them a secular education in western universities or to learn skills or to allow them the freedom to choose their future. They still have large families (families with five children among the migrants are common). Their women still wear veils, and some of them have already mocked the notion of assimilation into what they consider an alien society which offers them financial security; they have no interest in its other benefits whatsoever.

Kin selection and altruism operate according to the genetic distance. Immediate family (parents, siblings, children) get immediate and unconditional assistance or protection. Those once removed who share fewer genes with you (cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents) get lesser consideration depending on circumstances. Western society has extended its concentric circles by developing other relational institutions: churches, sports teams, the military, schools, social clubs, professions, unions. These relationships provide protection and stability in other spheres of life, not just those involving survival from physical attacks. They provide solidarity of interests, status, professional advancement and appproval. (The really crucial extension of identity and empathy with nonhuman Nature is the next and far more urgent task, more because we depend on them for survival, a fact that most people still do not understand). 

But there will never be any team or club with millions of people thousands of miles away, none of whom you know personally or professionally, none of whom share your values or interests, none of whom have grown up in egalitarian, secular democratic societies but rather patriarchal, theocratic or authoritarian tribal societies where murderers can get off scot free by paying their victim’s family money or domestic animals. These are societies most of whose members (except the educated professionals) have no notion of how the west (much less Christians) lives, eats, reads and conducts itself in daily matters. They have lived under deprivation and oppression in all aspects of life, including the denunciation of the “corrupt” west where women are, in their view, nothing but whores because their head, arms and legs are not covered, hence the rape epidemic in Sweden where 80% of rapes are committed by Muslims, or the Pakistani pimp networks in Great Britain that enslaved hundreds of thousands British teenagers in sex rings (and which were ignored by the police for years).

These are the views of most Muslims, not just of Boko Haram and ISIS, both of which proclaim fealty to the original Salafist religious cult that wants to return all of Islam and the upcoming caliphate to the original principles. While western Muslims claim that they do not represent the “real” Islam, they, the western ones, still practice sharia, honor killings, censorship, child marriage, killing of apostates and gays, victory over the Jews…..only mass premeditated global-scale murder seems to be lacking (at least so they say) in the list of “modern” “real” Islamist behavior.

Outside of western civilization, and with a few exceptions like Korea, Japan and occasionally to a lesser extent Malaysia, there is nothing but a medieval patriarchal way life that rejects not only western culture and law but modern science and technology. It is folly and naÏveté to think that millions of people who know nothing but political and social barbarism as well as hatred for the west and Christianity are going assimiliate or even become loyal supporters of secular democracy and egalitarianism. In fact, we already know how they will behave. All you have to do is look at the Muslims who were born Europe in the past several decades, the second generation, not the first. Some of the more educated and secular Muslims have integrated and accepted western society. But the rest are the ones who rape young Swedish women, torture and burn Jews, riot and destroy property in Paris, blow up buildings and trains, and become suicide bombers to exterminate publishers, writers and young French people enjoying themselves at concerts and in nightclubs.

Had the present Muslim population of Europe proven its assimilation by education, self-monitoring and religious sermons (not to mention self-advancement), you would not have post-Charlie Hebdo graffiti declaring “We are not Charlie.” You would have no longer seen veiled women on the streets of Paris. You would no longer have young children harassing women teachers and refusing to obey them. You would no longer have Muslim nurses refusing to abide by sanitary medical procedures. You would no longer see schools knuckling under to demands for halal food. You would no longer see health clubs segregating men and women or providing foot baths. The list goes on and on.

Evolution that demands we accommodate millions of unknown aliens is, in a word, Suicide. Suicide is NOT altruism if committed for something that will not benefit the genes of those committing suicide. Genuine altruism confers a reward: the altruistic individual’s genes get passed on to future generations, perpetuating the altruistic behavior. This is not and will not be the case with Muslim immigrants. 

Suicide to protect our children means our genes and cultural memes will be passed on by them. Suicide to protect the genes of the unrelated whose culture, values and belief systems will actually DESTROY the principles of freedom, democracy and egalitarianism, not to mention the millennia of priceless western culture and arts, is COUNTER-EVOLUTIONARY. It is not altruism. 

The Muslim survivors of the new misguided, misnamed Humanitarianism will pass on their genes and memes for the same barbarism they pretend to be escaping, and for the same objectives: the destruction of European society and western civilization. 

Kin selection

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The co-operative behaviour of social insects like the honey bee can be explained by kin selection.

Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction. Kin altruism is altruistic behaviour whose evolution is driven by kin selection. Kin selection is an instance of inclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can produce by supporting others, such as siblings.

Charles Darwin discussed the concept of kin selection in his 1859 book, The Origin of Species, where he reflected on the puzzle of sterile social insects, such as honey bees, which leave reproduction to their sisters, arguing that a selection benefit to related organisms (the same “stock”) would allow the evolution of a trait that confers the benefit but destroys an individual at the same time. R.A. Fisher in 1930 and J.B.S. Haldane in 1932 set out the mathematics of kin selection, with Haldane famously joking that he would willingly die for two brothers or eight cousins.^[1][2] In 1964, W.D. Hamilton popularised the concept and the major advance in the mathematical treatment of the phenomenon by George R. Price which has become known as “Hamilton’s rule.” In the same year John Maynard Smith used the actual term kin selection for the first time.

According to Hamilton’s rule, kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor. The rule is difficult to test but a study of red squirrels in 2010^[3] found that adoption of orphans by surrogate mothers in the wild occurred only when the conditions of Hamilton’s rule were met. Hamilton proposed two mechanisms for kin selection: kin recognition, where individuals are able to identify their relatives, and viscous populations, where dispersal is rare enough for populations to be closely related. The viscous population mechanism makes kin selection and social cooperation possible in the absence of kin recognition. Nurture kinship, the treatment of individuals as kin when they live together, is sufficient for kin selection, given reasonable assumptions about dispersal rates. Kin selection is not the same thing as group selection, where natural selection acts on the group as a whole.

In humans, altruism is more likely and on a larger scale with kin than with unrelated individuals; for example, humans give presents according to how closely related they are to the recipient. In other species, vervet monkeys use allomothering, where related females such as older sisters or grandmothers often care for young, according to their relatedness. The social shrimp Synalpheus regalis protects juveniles within highly related colonies.

 

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Lorna Salzman’s career as an environmental activist and writer began when the late David Brower hired her to be the regional representative of Friends of the Earth in NYC. Later she worked as an editor on National Audubon’s American Birds magazine and as director of Food & Water, an early opponent of food irradiation, and then spent three years as a natural resource specialist in the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection. She co-founded the New York Green Party in 1984 and in 2004 she sought the U.S. Green Party’s presidential nomination. She is the author of “Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy. 

 

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