In Defense of Group Evolutionary Strategy

An argument in defense of the concept.

This essay is a defense of the concept of a group evolutionary strategy (GES).  In contrast to various long, rambling, and incomprehensible essays unfortunately extant on the Internet, I will be more succinct and comprehensible. I will first define GES, clarify some basic issues, and then discuss implications for MacDonald's idea of a Jewish GES, in toto constituting a general defense of the GES concept.  An addendum will briefly discuss the problem of over-extending the GES idea.

With respect to humans, a GES is simply the manner in which a group of people (however defined) interacts with each other, with other groups, and with the environment, to affect, positively or negatively, the continuity of the group. As humans are evolved biological organisms, and group continuity can imply genetic continuity, a GES has an evolutionary dimension, hence the “E” in “GES.” All of this is (or should be) straightforward and easy to understand, even by non-specialists.

A GES can be stable or unstable, to varying degrees. A GES does not imply stability, hence the “negatively” mentioned above. For example, the Shaker movement was an example of an unstable GES that negatively affected the biological fitness of its members. You will notice that that movement is no longer extant.  In contrast, Amish society is a more stable GES and is still extant today. Thus, a GES does not imply anything about the success of a group; the existence of unstable, maladaptive GES does not invalidate the overall GES concept. One critical response to this definition of GES may be to invoke MacDonald’s comment of:

…in order to qualify as an evolutionary strategy, genetic segregation must be actively maintained by the strategising group.

My own response is that I disagree with MacDonald here. What MacDonald actually refers to in that quote is one component of a stable and adaptive GES.  However, with respect to the broad definition of what a GES could be, genetic segregation is not fundamental.  What about Gypsies?  In the cultural sense they are segregated, and do not typically freely intermarry, but they have absorbed, at least in the past (as have Jews), significant genetic material from outsiders. Historically, in this case, "genetic segregation" was not always “actively maintained.” One can also envision GES that are unstable and maladaptive, encouraging assimilation and panmixia.

Further, a GES could fall anywhere on the individualist-collectivist spectrum. A group being hyper-individualist is not an invalidation of the GES concept; it is not an absence of GES, but is itself a GES. It may be adaptive or maladaptive under particular circumstances. For example, a moderate degree of individualism can be adaptive for a society that is able to safeguard its uniqueness by preventing immigration influx of more collectivist peoples and by defending its territorial integrity from invasion; in this case, individualism could foster innovation and greater achievement and economic productivity, all of which would enhance the competitiveness of the group. Of course, extreme individualism that would lead to an erosion of the defensive measures stated above would likely be maladaptive. 

The point is that not only can individualism be part of a GES, but in certain circumstances it can be adaptive. However, the general MacDonaldite paradigm that collectivists (often) outcompete individualists tends to be valid, particularly in a globalist, “small-world” environment in which different peoples are in constant contact (either within or between states), and that is quite different from the original environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (in which individualism developed and was adaptive). While all of that is true, it does not invalidate the GES concept (even for very individualist Western societies). Indeed, one can even say that a conscious decision to dispense with any pretense of a GES – e.g., a borderless, stateless anarchy of completely atomized individuals – is itself a GES (at least when the decision is originally implemented), albeit a very unstable and maladaptive one.

The Jews, particularly from the original MacDonaldite perspective, have been cited as a prime example of a successful GES.  This has received criticism not only from the Left and/or Jews and/or philo-Semitic cuckservatives, but, interestingly enough, from members of the Gentile Far Right, particularly those who espouse anti-scientific, anti-materialist, anti-evolutionary, and anti-rational paradigms. 

One criticism of the Jewish GES concept is the “high outmarriage rate” of (American) Jews. However, the fact that there is extensive Jewish outmarriage does not invalidate the concept of a Jewish GES. I have long ago pointed out that a Jewish outmarriage rate of ~50% is actually lower than expected when compared to European-American outmarriage rates for groups of similar size. So, this rate of Jewish-Gentile intermarriage is actually reflective of resistance to assimilation, and reflective of at least partial adherence to a Jewish exclusivist GES, rather than a repudiation of it.  As well, the idea of some degree of “permeability” of Jewish society may be beneficial to a Jewish GES if it decreases “anti-Semitism” while at the same time maintaining a more “pure” and ethnocentric Jewish core group. Intermarriage entangles Gentile interests with those of Jews, also decreasing hostility to Jews, and, from a biological standpoint, allows Jews to “steal” Gentile genes of utility, such as those coding for phenotype, to allow for greater mimicry of the host population. Needless to say as well, outmarriage allows the Jewish core to shed less ethnocentric, less committed Jews, increasing the ethnocentric and collectivist nature of the core group. To the extent the core group for the most part rejects hybrids, the intermarriage would be mostly one-way gene flow from Jews to Gentiles.  Note that this is not inconsistent with the idea of “gene stealing,” as I stated that this involved mostly (not completely) one-way gene flow, and those genes obtained from the more limited Gentile to Jewish gene flow could be subject to selection within the Jewish core group, amplifying the frequency of those genes without necessarily reflecting a concomitant increase in overall Gentile genetic ancestry within the Jews core group.

Besides the issue of Jewish-Gentile intermarriage, some will cite various examples of how Jewish behavior does not seem to be in accordance to what we could reasonably assume are long-term Jewish interests (although one wonders if we make an error in interpreting Jewish interests through the lens of a European-derived raciocultural mindset).  Such people would argue - "but actual Jewish behavior in America can be viewed as counter-productive to Jewish interests, such as the importation of people genetically different from, and hostile to, Jews."

I have actually dealt with these issues long ago (as with the breathless attacks on “Salterism” we observe individuals who believe that their “analyses” are somehow something new and fresh, in contrast to the reality that these issues have been repeatedly discussed and debated in the past). It is possible, but not definite, that the Jewish GES is no longer stable and adaptive in the environment of today’s America – an environment in large part created by the Jewish GES itself (so if the Jewish GES is no longer adaptive, it has itself to blame). Even if that is the case, it does not invalidate the general concept of GES (for the reasons explained above; i.e., a GES does not have to be stable or adaptive), nor does it invalidate the idea that the Jewish GES was in fact adaptive for most of its existence (albeit constantly provoking reactions from the host peoples that have had negative impacts on Jewish fitness, possibly compensated for by promoting Jewish continuity by inhibiting assimilation). Further, even if the Jewish GES is currently self-destructing, it will take European-derived peoples and the West down with it. Thus, we observe that many of the attacks against GES conflate to strawman arguments.

In addition, a GES does not have to be some conscious, grand plan – that is another strawman argument.  No one is saying that every Jew gets a pamphlet at birth - a condensed Protocols of the Elders of Zion for example - to guide them in their lives to follow the Jewish GES. In some cases, a GES may be at least in part a conscious planned decision by group leaders; more often it may just be an emergent property of mass group behavior, in some part inherited, in some part due to culture, tradition, history – with flexible strategizing in different contingencies, particularly for the more conscious aspects of the GES. A GES need not be rigid for all time; adaptiveness implies the ability to meet the new requirements and novel challenges of environmental change.

Another issue is that people need to understand that discussion of GES should not be purely descriptive but, more importantly, also prescriptive. Discussing whether or not a people have, or do, follow a particular GES is not as important as discussing what GES our people should pursue.

Addendum

Things can of course be taken too far and that usually occurs when academics fall in love with their own theories and try to shoehorn all of reality into the parameters of a hypothesis or a paradigm. For example, the idea that national GDP should roughly correlate with the intelligence of the national population is fairly straightforward and reasonable, and has some data in support; the problem occurred when Lynn et al. became obsessed with the idea and tried to explain every degree of difference in development and achievement as deriving from heritable IQ differences (in some cases, IQ being wrongly “estimated” rather than directly measured, coupled to factually wrong inventions, re: population genetics) – with of course certain favored populations, like the Chinese, getting a “pass” for a relative lack of achievement through an unprincipled exception invocation of environmental influences (i.e., effects of communism). Likewise, the broad idea of group evolutionary strategies has explanatory power; unfortunately, MacDonald started to extend that idea into bizarre HBD-Nordicism, and stretching facts to fit into some overarching theory of heritable group differences to explain even relatively shallow differences in national behavior.  In both cases, instead of following the scientific method of hypothesis falsification, we instead observe cherry picking, hand waving, obfuscation, and “just so stories” to defend ideas that have run long past supporting data (and in fact have run into a wall of falsifying data).  These errors and excesses however do not invalidate some of the core ideas that in their broadest interpretation have so far survived critical analysis. Just because the idea of group evolutionary differences in intelligence and behavior has been over-interpreted does not invalidate the core concept.