Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D.
CSULB, Department of Psychology
Human Behavior and Evolution Society Symposium
By Kevin MacDonald
Amherst College
Amherst, MA
June 9, 2000
Let me start by saying that religion has been viewed as a form of psychopathology -- a mind virus -- a renegade meme (Dawkins). It's also been considered for the benefits it gives assuaging our fears of death and the unknown. It certainly has served to reinforce and maintain, but sometimes to challenge, the existing political/economic order. Twin studies even show that there's a genetic predisposition to religiousity vs. skepticism.
The fact that religion is so pervasive, despite the fact that science has shown so many of its surface claims to be wrong or even silly suggests that it must serve some adaptive function. The particular case I have examined and which has elicited concern and even anxiety on the part of some, is that of Judaism. I'd probably have been better off to have stuck to the Hutterites or the Ancient Spartans. But the 3,000-year record of Judaism at least gave me a lot of data.. Let me just say that I can't see how the religion and the people could have survived 3,000 years, despite the best efforts of others, from trying to kill Judaism with kindness and conversion to killing Jews on a massive scale (the Holocaust and earlier pogroms) if I didn't raise some important issues of human adaptation.
Dan Kriegman sent me a 50-page, single-spaced paper discussing my many sins as a researcher, so it was a bit difficult to try to respond to all of them, especially since I was not at all sure what he would discuss in his presentation. So I decided to take this opportunity to discuss some common criticisms of my work, beginning with the idea of group evolutionary strategies. My position is that both cultural practices and evolved systems are important:
In my book I present a lot of evidence about cultural practices intended to maintain group boundaries, prevent intermarriage, punish defectors and cheaters. It seems obvious that any account of human groups will have to discuss ways in which groups regulate the behavior of members. My theory was developed on the assumption that individual-level selection was by far the most important force shaping human evolution. In a moment I will discuss mechanisms for group cohesion, but the point here is that there is no need to assume anything other than individual-level selection in their evolution. Nevertheless, cultural practices have to be discussed; indeed I suppose that cultural practices that maintain groups have to be discussed because selection is far more powerful at the level of the individual than at the level of the group. If one had a group of people or animals that were really group-selected to be altruists, it wouldn't be relevant to discuss ways in which members of the group monitor each other's behavior, check for cheaters or defectors, monitor marriage practices, etc.
In my first book, I discuss cultural practices related to keeping separate, preventing assimilation, and preventing intermarriage. If indeed there are genetic differences between groups, this immediately raises evolutionary issues because there are going to be persistent genetic differences between the group and the surrounding society. In fact, I believe that the population genetic data are clear that Jews have remained genetically distinct from the peoples they have lived among. The historical and cultural data indicate that this is at least partly the result of self-segregative practices, but at times the push against assimilation has also come from non-Jews. Whether the genetic segregation is the result of self-segregation or the result of anti-assimilatory pressure from outside (I tend to see it as a complex feedback loop), it then becomes relevant to look at interactions between groups because these interactions have genetic consequences. There is no need to suppose that Jewish groups are always superior competitors. The historical record shows a volatile mix of good and bad fortune. There have been expulsions, pogroms, an attempt at a massive genocide, economic restrictions, restrictions on where Jews could live, restrictions on how many Jews could marry, etc.'all of which presumably had negative effects on reproductive success of Jews because of their group membership, but there have also been times when Jews have prospered greatly. For example, there is wide agreement that until the demographic transition Jews in Eastern Europe had a much greater rate of natural increase than gentile populations (Deshen 1986, 46; see also Ritterband 1981; A. Goldstein 1981). Johnson (1987, 356) notes that in the period 1880-1914, the Jewish population of Europe grew at a rate of 2 percent per year, 'a rate of increase that exceeds all other European peoples for this period' (Katz 1986).
The other area where behavior within the group is important is regulating economic actions among group members'patronage and nepotism; regulating within-group charity, etc. It is of some importance to think about whether Jewish groups are higher or lower on these practices than other groups, perhaps because in particular times and places Jewish groups underwent population bottlenecks that influenced the degree of genetic relatedness. There is a small literature now on groups from an evolutionary perspective, including the work of David Wilson, Christopher Boehm, Tony Hilton at this conference on Hutterites, Frank Miele on the Puritans, and A.J. Figueredo who is embarking on several projects, including the Mormons. And I have been working on some other groups, including the Puritans, the Quakers and the Roma, and I look forward to studying the overseas Chinese. Nevertheless, having a lot of comparative data is not critical. What is important is to describe internal control processes that affected economic cooperation, mating practices, and charity within the group'how group membership conditioned interactions with fellow Jews and with non-Jews. An individualistic perspective that ignores groups and conceptualizes only individuals in an atomistic manner interacting with each other and the environment simply cannot make sense of the cultural forces that conditioned interactions among Jews and between Jews and non-Jews. Failure to provide charity for poor Jews, failure to pay communal taxes, marriage to a gentile, or informing on other Jews resulted in expulsion for self and relatives. Similar consequences were in store for Jewish businessmen who made alliances with gentile businessmen or who interfered with monopolies held by other Jews. And there was intensive socialization for submerging individual interests to some extent to the needs of the ingroup'another testimony to the power of individual-level selection. These features of historical Judaism were the result of social controls acting within the community, backed by a powerful religious ideology clearly articulated in canonical Jewish religious writings.
This does not imply that Jewish elites (wealthy Jews) were self-sacrificing. Nor does it imply that anything other than individually-selected mechanisms based on kinship and reciprocity were involved in producing these social controls within Jewish groups. Jewish society was an intensely competitive meritocracy with major payoffs in terms of reproductive success. The point is, the individualistic behavior of Jewish elites (wealthy, powerful Jews) was muted by the forces of community pressure.
But in the end, we have to talk about adaptations, because after all we are evolutionists, particularly systems that evolved for between-group competition. I never suppose Jews have any adaptations that the rest of us don't have as well. In attempting to develop an evolutionary theory of groups, I ended up believing that social identity theory was an important piece of the puzzle, although I am increasingly persuaded that other theoretical perspectives, including individualism/collectivism, genetic similarity theory, and rational choice mechanisms are important as well. Social identity theory is highly compatible with an evolutionary basis for group behavior, but there is no need to invoke group selection as a theory of its evolution. An early form of social identity theory was stated by William Graham Sumner (1906, 13), who concluded that
Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without'all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war.... Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.
Social identity research has found that people tend to discriminate against outgroups even when the groups are randomly constructed with no conflicts of interest. Current evidence indicates that these minimal group findings can be generalized across subjects of different ages, nationalities, social classes, and a wide range of dependent variables, and anthropological evidence indicates the universality of the tendency to view one's own group as superior, to denigrate outgroups, etc. Rather than dismiss the minimal group experiments as not meaningful, I would argue that they attest to the power of 'groupness' in the human mind'the tendency for even the most randomly constructed groups to elicit discrimination against outgroups. Social identity processes occur very early in life, prior to explicit knowledge about the outgroup; they also are exacerbated in times of resource competition, suggesting that this is an adaptation for between-group conflict. Lawrence Keeley (1996, War before Civilization; pp. 129, 138-141) has found that among pre-state societies, 'hard times' and expanding populations are often associated with warfare. As emphasized by people like Richard Alexander (1979) and Gary Johnson (1995), external threat tends to reduce internal divisions and maximize perceptions of common interest among group members. An evolutionary interpretation of these findings is also supported by results indicating that social identity processes occur among advanced animal species, such as chimpanzees (van den Dennen). The powerful emotional components of social identity processes are very difficult to explain except as an aspect of the evolved machinery of the human mind. The tendencies for humans to place themselves in social categories and for these categories to assume powerful emotional and evaluative overtones (involving guilt, empathy, self-esteem, relief at securing a group identity, and distress at losing it) are the best candidates for the biological underpinnings of participation in highly cohesive collectivist groups.
The empirical data derived from social identity theory indicate that perceptions of ingroups and outgroups have been the focus of natural selection, i.e., the mechanism evolved because humans were recurrently exposed to situations in which perceptions of ingroups and outgroups as groups rather than concatenations of individuals were adaptive. Social identity research indicates that people in threatened groups develop a psychological sense of shared fate. The fact that social identity mechanisms appear to be highly sensitive to the presence of external threat to the group is compatible with supposing that people continue to track individual self-interest; in the absence of threat people are more individualistic, and in times of threat, group and individual interests increasingly coincide and group members increasingly have a shared fate.
Shared fate in human groups is likely to occur during situations such as military conflicts and other examples of intense between-group competition in which defection is not individually advantageous or is not an option at all. Warfare is the most likely candidate to meet these conditions. Warfare appears to have been a recurrent phenomenon among pre-state societies. Surveys indicate over 90% of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, pp. 27-32). Moreover, 'whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials' (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and pre-historic societies engaged in warfare and 'saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime' (Keeley, 1996, p. 174).
Shared fate would be likely in situations where potential defectors were summarily executed or severely punished by the ingroup, or in situations were survivors were summarily executed by a conquering outgroup or lost access to women and other resources. There is little evidence for high levels of discipline and coercion in pre-state warfare, although it occurred at least in some cases (Hugh Turney-High, Primitive War: 1971). Nevertheless, cowards were often shamed and courage was a highly valued trait (Keeley 1996, pp. 42-44; Turney-High, 1971), so that defection from the fighting group did indeed have costs as a result of social pressure.
More important perhaps is that the slaughtering of conquered peoples, especially males, has been a persistent feature of warfare. In their rise to power, the Aztecs probably 'slaughtered those who opposed them, as all conquerors have always done' (Keegan (1993, p. 114). In pre-state warfare, while women were often taken as prizes of warfare, immediate death was often the fate of women and children and the certain fate of adult male prisoners: 'Armed or unarmed, adult males were killed without hesitation in battles, raids, or the routs following battles in the great majority of primitive societies. Surrender was not a practical option for adult tribesmen because survival after capture was unthinkable' (Keeley 1996, p. 84).
It is likely that enduring, bounded discrete gatherings of people have been a common feature of the social environment for many humans, as noted by Levine & Campbell (1972) a long time ago. The phenomenon is important because it would imply that a great many humans have in fact lived in group-structured populations where the status of ingroup and outgroup was highly salient psychologically. Examples that bear investigation include Gypsies (Roma), Armenians, Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians, and a variety of middle-man minority groups (e.g., overseas Chinese groups) occurring in several parts of the world.
Individual differences in evolved systems. One could just leave it at that and settle for a theory based on the above-mentioned cultural processes and an evolved psychological system that is a human universal. However, it seems at least worth speculating on possible individual differences in identification with groups as well as different selection pressures in different regions of the world. I want to stress that discussing individual differences is not critical to my theory. I would be reasonably happy with just stopping with my discussion of social identity theory as a human psychological universal.
Nevertheless, the theory of individualism/collectivism developed by Harry Triandis emphasizes individual differences in many of the same tendencies discussed by social identity theory, so much so that I often cited Triandis in my section on social identity theory. The theory of individualism/collectivism describes cross-cultural differences in the extent to which emphasis is placed on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. For individuals highly predisposed to collectivism, ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and subordinate individual goals to the needs of the group are paramount. Collectivist cultures develop an 'unquestioned attachment' to the ingroup, including 'the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities [i.e., authoritarianism], and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups' (Triandis 1990, 55). Like social identity processes, tendencies toward collectivism are exacerbated in times of external threat, again suggesting that the tendency toward collectivism is a facultative response that evolved as a mechanism of between-group conflict. Triandis explicitly describes Judaism as an example of a collectivist culture, while Western cultures tend toward individualism.
Because of the origins of Judaism in the Middle East and their continuing genetic links to that area, it is noteworthy that Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as 'segmentary societies' organized into relatively impermeable groups (e.g., Coon 1958, 153; Eickelman 1981, 157-174). Individuals in these societies have a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries, often accompanied by external markers such as hair style or clothing, and different groups settle in different areas were they retain their homogeneity alongside likewise homogeneous groups. Consider Carlton Coon's (1958) description of Middle Eastern society:
There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. (Coon, 1958; p. 153)
Between-group conflict often lurked just beneath the surface of these societies. For example, Dumont (1982, 223) describes the increase in anti-Semitism in Turkey in the late 19th century consequent to increased resource competition. In many towns, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even lived in the same areas, 'but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse' (p. 222).
If, as noted above, there are important individual differences in psychological mechanisms related to developing a sense of shared fate, it would not be surprising to find that some individuals are extremely prone to a sense of shared fate to the point that defecting from the group is not a psychologically available option. There are in fact examples of such people. Especially striking has been the phenomenon of individuals who readily undergo martyrdom or mass suicide rather than abandon the group. We see examples periodically in modern times, and there are many historical examples, ranging from Christian martyrs in ancient times to a great many instances of Jewish martyrdom over a two-thousand-year period. This is very hard to quantify, but it certainly does not seem to be a human universal'I don't find myself wanting to become a martyr. Nevertheless, the existence of martyrs is theoretically of some importance.
In my books I sometimes talked about what I called Jewish 'hyper-collectivism' (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8). Jewish groups have had a tendency to retain genetic and cultural separatism even when cut off for centuries from other Jewish groups, and even in the presence of prolonged intense anti-Semitism and enforced crypsis. In the ancient world, Jews alone of all the subject peoples in the Roman Empire engaged in prolonged, even suicidal wars against the government in order to attain national sovereignty. Many authors, especially Josephus, have noted the religious zealotry of the Jews in the ancient world and the willingness of some to die rather than tolerate offenses to Israel or live under foreign domination.
Martyrdom as a response to being required to betray religious law is a recurrent theme of canonical Jewish religious writings, beginning with the 'binding of Isaac' in Genesis (i.e., Abraham's agreement with God's command to sacrifice his son) to several stories in the later portions of the Hebrew Bible (Isa:40-55; the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Book of Daniel), the Apocrypha (e.g., the story of Hannah and her seven sons in IV Maccabees), the writings of Philo and Josephus, Midrashic commentaries, the Mishnah, and the Talmud (Agus 1997; Droge & Tabor 1992). The discussion in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Sanhedrin 74a'75a) provides conflicting opinions, with one group holding that martyrdom is required to avoid committing transgressions involving idolatry, incest, adultery, and murder, while a stricter group held that if a Jew is publicly required to transgress any law no matter how trivial (including the Jewish custom of wearing white shoe straps rather than the black shoe straps worn by the Romans), 'one must be martyred even for a minor precept rather than violate it.'
The reputation among writers, both friends and foes, to depict Jews as willingly suffering martyrdom rather than deserting the group suggests that among Jews there is a significant critical mass for whom desertion is not a psychologically available option no matter what the consequences to the individual. The response of groups of Ashkenazi Jews to demands to convert during the pogroms surrounding the First Crusade in several areas of Germany in 1096 shows that the ancient threats of martyrdom rather than transgression described by Philo and Josephus were not merely hypothetical: When given the choice of conversion to Christianity or death, a contemporary Jewish chronicler noted, that Jews 'stretched forth their necks, so that their heads might be cut off in the Name of their Creator.... Indeed fathers also fell with their children, for they were slaughtered together. They slaughtered brethren, relatives, wives, and children. Bridegrooms [slaughtered] their intended and merciful mothers their only children' (in Chazan 1987, 245).
It is very difficult to suppose that such people have an algorithm that calculates individual fitness payoffs by balancing the tendency to desert the group with anticipated benefits of continued group membership. The obvious interpretation of such a phenomenon is that these people are obligated to remain in the group no matter what'even to the point of killing their own family members to prevent the possibility of becoming a member of the outgroup. Such examples suggest that there are no conceivable circumstances that would cause such people to abandon the group, go their own way, and become assimilated to the outgroup.
I do not suppose that such an extreme level of self-sacrifice is a pan-human psychological adaptation. Jewish groups have at times undergone conversion, as many Spanish Jews did in 1391, although the tendency has been to engage in crypto-Judaism until the threat passes. As is the case for many other psychological adaptations (MacDonald 1991, 1995, 1998b; Wilson 1994), there are undoubtedly important individual differences in social identity processes. At one extreme end of this variation, it appears that there are a significant number of humans who are so highly prone to developing a sense of shared fate that they do not calculate individual payoffs of group membership and readily suffer martyrdom rather than defect from the group.
Finally another aspect of my books that people have questioned is the discussion of IQ and eugenics. People tend not to dispute that Ashkenazi Jews have a high IQ or that eugenic marriages in which scholarly ability as indicated by mastery of Jewish religious law was the summum bonum were prescribed in Jewish law or that Ashkenazi Jews in fact practiced such marriages. From what we know about the heritability of IQ it seems very likely that whatever cultural pushes there have been for IQ, there is also a strong genetic component. Arthur Jensen estimates a maximum of 10 IQ points for environmental manipulations like adoption.
These selection pressures were probably fairly strong. For example, Vogel and Motulsky (1986, 609) note that in mid-18th-century Poland prominent Jews had 4-9 surviving children, while poorer Jewish families had 1.2-2.4 surviving children. However, there are a couple of problems that people have brought up. I noted in my book that there were eugenic selection pressures in all traditional European societies (see, e.g., Herlihy & Klapische-Zuber 1985) and presumably elsewhere, so the Jews may not have been all that special in this regard. Families of wealthy Jews in the Medieval Islamic world were much larger than those of poor Jews, but recent data do not indicate a particularly high IQ for Oriental Jews (Goitein (1971, 140).
On the other hand, Ashkenazi Jews are not the only Jewish groups to show extraordinary economic and cultural success. By the start of the fourth century in the Roman Empire Jews seem to have been an economically dominant group. The Sephardic Jews in Spain also practiced the Talmudic marriage practices and had a similar emphasis on scholarly ability. The rise of the Spanish Jews in the 14th and 15th centuries before and after many of them converted to Christianity in 1391 is virtually unparalleled and is certainly on a par with the rise of Ashkenazi Jews in 19th and 20th century Europe and the U.S. The Sephardic Jews are interesting because the Jews that did not convert in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to come from the lower social classes and it is this group that eventually left Spain in 1492 and became the descendants of contemporary Sephardic communities. The upwardly mobile Jews who converted to Christianity suffered the wrath of the Inquisition and eventually either became absorbed into Spanish society (like A.J. Figueredo's ancestors) or they developed their own distinctive culture in the trading centers of the world. (For example, they were a major force behind the rise of Amsterdam and the Dutch as a world power.) This separation of the Sephardic elite could account for the undistinguished IQ of contemporary Sephardic populations. In other cases, particularly in the Muslim world where the bulk of the Sephardic population ended up, the rise intense anti-Semitism after an initial period in which Jews were welcomed undoubtedly resulted in a failure to build a highly literate culture'that, in effect, the clear mandate to develop such a culture was not carried out. This could have had genetic consequences. I guess I am acknowledging that important questions remain about Jewish IQ, as with other questions I deal with in the books.
To conclude, I think that the study of group processes from an evolutionary point of view is just beginning. Lots of questions remain and I urge others to get into it by studying other groups or providing alternate evolutionary theories about Jews and Judaism.
