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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

PIERRE L. VAN DEN BERGHE is the recipient of the Spivak Award from the American Sociological Association for sustained scholarly contributions throughout his career.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0275927091
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Praeger
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 19, 1987
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 318 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0274636816
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0274636815
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9 x 5.94 x 0.8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,780,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,185 in Anthropology (Books)
- #6,245 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #11,535 in Cultural & Ethnic Studies
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Warren G
A great work on Sociobiology.
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2009
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Despite having been written nearly 30 years ago this book stands as a landmark in the field of sociobiology. It is an exceptional book and I highly recommend it. The book covers the topic of Kin Selection, which is a hallmark of evolutionary psychology/ sociobiology. While some scientists do disagree as to whether sociobiology is the be-all and end-all for explaining human behavior, it is still interesting and helpful in certain situations. (Edward O. Wilson is the founder. You can learn more by reading Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition or On Human Nature: Revised Edition)
For an introduction to this discussion, or just further reading, I recommend: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Human Nature: Fact And Fiction - Literature, Science And Human Nature or The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition).

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VEL – The Contemporary Heretic
Ethnocentrism As Nepotism Among Extended Kin
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2009
Format: Paperback
At the core of Pierre van den Berghe's theory of ethnocentrism and ethnic conflict is the sociobiological theory of 'kin selection'. According to van den Berghe, racism, xenophobia, nationalism and other forms of ethnocentrism can ultimately be understood as kin-selected nepotism, in accordance with biologist William D Hamilton's theory of 'inclusive fitness' (Hamilton 1964).

According to inclusive fitness theory, organisms evolved to behave altruistically towards their close biological kin, even at a cost to themselves, because close biological kin share genes in common with one another by virtue of their kinship, and altruism towards close biological kin therefore promotes the survival and spread of these genes.

Van den Berghe extends this idea, arguing that humans have evolved to sometimes behave altruistically towards, not only their close biological relatives, but also sometimes their distant biological relatives too – namely members of the same ethnic group as themselves.

Thus, for van den Berghe "racial and ethnic sentiments are an extension of kinship sentiments [and] ethnocentrism and racism are... extended forms of nepotism" (p18).

Before reading the book I was doubtful as to whether the degree of kinship shared among fellow-ethnics could ever be sufficient to invoke the application of 'Hamilton's Rule', whereby, for altruism to evolve, the cost of the altruistic act to the altruist must be outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, multiplied by the degree of relatedness of the two parties (Brigandt, I. 2001; but see Salter 2004 or On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration).

However, contrary to both critics of his theory (e.g. Brigandt, I. 2001) and others developing similar ideas (e.g. Rushton 2005; Salter 2000), van den Berghe is actually agnostic as to whether ethnocentrism is ever actually adaptive in modern societies, where he admits the shared kinship of large nations or ethnic groups is largely fictive.

Thus, he acknowledges, “clearly, for 50 million Frenchmen or 100 million Japanese, any common kinship that they may share is highly diluted” and “when 25 million African-Americans call each other 'brothers' and 'sisters', they know that they are greatly extending the meaning of these terms” (p27).

Instead, van den Berghe suggests that nationalism and racism may reflect the misfiring of a mechanism that evolved when our ancestors still lived in small kin-based groups of hunter-gatherers (p35; see also Tooby and Cosmides 1989).

“Until the last few thousand years,” he writes, “hominids interacted in relatively small groups of a few score to a couple of hundred individuals who tended to mate with each other and, therefore, to form rather tightly knit groups of close and distant kin” (p35).

Therefore, in what evolutionary psychologists now call the 'Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness' or 'EEA', "the natural ethny [i.e. ethnic group] in which hominids evolved for several thousand millennia probably did not exceed a couple of hundred individuals at most" (p24) and "the primordial ethny is thus an extended family" (p25).

Certainly, van den Berghe emphasizes that ethnic sentiments are vulnerable to manipulation – not least by exploitative elites who co-opt kinship terms such as 'motherland' and 'brothers-in-arms' to encourage self-sacrifice, especially during wartime (p35; see also Johnson et al 1987).

However, he cautions, "kinship can be manipulated but not manufactured" (p27).

Thus, "Queen Victoria could cut a motherly figure in England; she even managed to proclaim her son the Prince of Wales; but she could never hope to become anything except a foreign ruler of India; [while] the fiction that the Emperor of Japan is the head of the most senior lineage descended from the common ancestor of all Japanese might convince the Japanese peasant that the Emperor is an exalted cousin of his, but the myth lacks credibility in Korea or Taiwan" (p62-3).

Racism vs Ethnocentrism
Whereas ethnocentrism is therefore universal, adaptive and natural, van den Berghe denies that the same can be said for racism.

"Racism is," he observes, "the exception rather than the rule in intergroup relations" (p33).

It is moreover a rather modern phenomenon.

This is because, prior to recent technological advances in transportation (e.g. ships, aeroplanes), members of different races (i.e. groups distinguishable on the basis of heritable physiological traits such as skin colour) were largely separated from one another by the very geographic barriers (e.g. deserts, oceans, mountain ranges) that reproductively isolated them from one another and hence permitted their evolution into distinguishable races. Moreover, when they did make contact, then, in the absence of strict barriers to exogamy (i.e. miscegenation), they typically interbred and become indistinguishable within a few generations.

However, van den Berghe denies that racism is, as some have suggested, a peculiarly Western invention. On the contrary, he points to the relations between the Tuzi, Hutu and Twa in Rwanda as “a genuine brand of indigenous racism” (p73).

Since racism is the exception rather than the rule, cultural rather than racial markers are typically adopted to distinguish ethnic groups (p35).

These include clothing (e.g. hijabs, turbans, skullcaps), bodily modification (tattoos, circumcision etc.) and behavioural criteria, especially language or dialect (p33).

The latter criteria are particularly useful because they are difficult to fake, bodily modification because it is permanent and hence represents a costly commitment to the group (in accordance with Zahavi’s 'handicap principle'), and language or dialect, because this is thought by linguists to be acquirable only during a 'critical period' during infancy, after which it is difficult to acquire fluency in a second language without an accent.

However, the most permanent and immutable ethnic identifiers are, of course, racial characters.

Perhaps for this reason, van den Berghe argues that, where racial differences do exist within a population, these are likely to be especially salient and impermeable.

For van den Berghe, this then explains the failure of African-Americans to wholly assimilate into the US 'melting pot' in contrast with successive waves of more recently arrived European immigrants.

“Blacks who have been English-speaking for several generations," he observes, "have been much less readily assimilated in both England… and the United States than European immigrants who spoke no English on arrival” (p219).

Language barriers often break down within a generation, as the children of first-generation immigrants who spoke no English on arrival and continue to speak their own native tongue in the family home, nevertheless often grow up to speak the language of their host culture better than that of their parents.

However, whereas one can learn a new language, it is not usually possible to change one's race (the efforts of Rachel Dolezal and Michael Jackson notwithstanding), although, due to the 'one drop rule' and the history of miscegenation in America, 'passing' is sometimes possible. Instead, phenotypic (i.e. racial) differences can only be eradicated after many generations of miscegenation, and perhaps not even then (e.g. Brazil and the USA).

Meanwhile, van den Berghe observes, often the last aspect of immigrant culture to resist assimilation is culinary differences, though even this is often a 'ceremonial' difference reserved for family gatherings (p260). Meanwhile, just as sausages have long ceased to be conceived of as distinctively German, so pizza in America is fast shedding its association with Italians.

Are Harmonious Multi-Ethnic States Possible?
Yet if racially-based ethnic hierarchies are particularly intransigent and impermeable, they are also, van den Berghe observes, "peculiarly conflict-ridden and unstable" (p33).

He therefore controversially concludes, "There has never been a successful multiracial democracy" (p189).

However, he acknowledges that racially diverse societies have lived in "relative harmony" in places such as Latin America, where government gives no political recognition to racial groups and where the latter do not organise on racial grounds, such that government is, in van den Berghe's terminology, "non-racial" rather than "multiracial" (p190).

However, this is perhaps a naïvely benign view of race relations in Latin American countries such as Brazil, which is, despite the fluidity of racial identity and lack of clear dividing lines between races, nevertheless now viewed by most social scientists, not as a model 'racial democracy', as much as a racially-stratified 'pigmentocracy'.

Indeed, even societies divided by ethnicity rather than race are highly conflict-prone.

Aside from assimilation or perhaps separation (combined, if necessary, with forced displacements of populations), perhaps fairest and least conflictual solution is what van den Berghe terms 'consociationalism' – namely a form of ethnic 'power-sharing', whereby elites from either group agree to share power, each group retains a veto power for major decisions, and there is proportionate representation for each group in all important positions of power.

This is indeed perhaps the model to which states such as the USA are moving, with quotas replacing appointment by merit or freedom of association, and 'multiculturalism' replacing the earlier ideal of assimilation.

Perhaps the model consociationalist democracy is van den Berghe’s own native Belgium, where “all the linguistic, class, religious and party-political quarrels and street demonstrations have yet to produce a single fatality” (p199).

However, consociationalism can be maintained only in a limited range of circumstances (p188-193).

Moreover, it represents a precarious balancing act. Just how precarious is illustrated by the fate of other formerly stable consociationalist states. Thus, van den Bergh notes the irony that earlier writers on the topic had cited Lebanon as “a model [consociationalist democracy] in the Third World” just a few years before the Lebanese Civil War (p191).

His point is only strengthened by the fact that two of his own examples, namely the USSR and Yugoslavia, have themselves since descended into civil war and fragmented along ethnic lines.

Slavery and Other Recurrent Situations
In the central section of the book, van den Berghe discusses such historically recurrent racial relationships as "slavery", "middleman minorities", "caste" and "colonialism".

In large part, his analyses of these institutions and phenomena do not depend on his sociobiological theory of ethnocentrism, and are worth reading even for readers unconvinced by his thesis – or even by readers sceptical of sociobiology altogether.

Nevertheless, the sociobiological model continues to guide his analysis.

Take, for example, his chapter on slavery.

Slavery often has an ethnic dimension, since slaves are often captured in warfare from among enemy groups, the very word 'slave' being derived from the ethnic term 'Slav'.

In particular, van den Berghe argues that "an essential feature of slave status is being torn out of one's network of kin selection" typically by "forcible removal of the slave from his home group by capture and purchase" (p120). This then explains why European settlers were far less successful in enslaving the native inhabitants of the Americas than in exploiting the slave labour of Africans who had been shipped across the Atlantic, far from their original kin groups.

Van den Berghe also observes that "all chattel slave regimes developed a legitimating ideology of paternalism" (p131). Thus, in the American South, the "benevolent master" was portrayed a protective "father figure", while slaves were portrayed as childlike and incapable of living an independent existence and hence benefiting from their own enslavement (Ibid.).

In sociobiological terms, exploitation was therefore disguised as kin-selected paternal benevolence.

Ironically, racism became particularly virulent in the West precisely because of Western societies’ ostensible commitment to notions of liberty and the the rights of man. Whereas other cultures simply took the institution of slavery for granted, western societies therefore felt a constant need to justify slavery. Thus, “if it was wrong to enslave people, but… at the same time… vastly profitable to do so, then a simple solution… presented itself” – namely to deny that those enslaved were truly 'people' at all (p115).

However, despite the dehumanization of slaves, the imbalance of power between slave and master, together with the men's innate and evolved desire for promiscuity (see The Evolution of Human Sexuality), made the sexual exploitation of female slaves by male masters inevitable.

As van den Berghe observes, "dominant group men, whether racist or not, are seldom reluctant to maximise their fitness with subordinate-group women" (p33). In other words, when it comes to slavery, think less 'Gone with the Wind', 'Roots' or 'Twelve Years a Slave' and more Mandingo.

The result was that the fictive ideology of 'paternalism' that served to justify slavery often gave way to genuine paternity of the next generation of the slave population. This meant that the exploitation of this next generation of slaves by their owners potentially violated the logic of kin selection – "if slaves become kinsmen, you cannot exploit them without indirectly exploiting yourself" (p134).

The result, van den Berghe explains, was "a close association between manumission [i.e. granting slaves their freedom] and European ancestry" (p132).

Thus, in the American South in 1850 "an estimated 37% of free 'negroes' had white ancestry, compared to about 10% of the slave population" (p132). The former were, he surmises "thus, presumably often blood relatives of the master who emancipated them or their ancestors" (p129).

For van den Berghe, this means that "western slavery literally contained the genetic seeds of its own destruction" – because, whereas other slave systems relied on the capture or import of new slaves to maintain the slave population, the American slave system was unique, at least after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, in attempting to 'breed' slaves (p134).

Synthesising Marxism and Sociobiology?
Given the potential appeal of his theory to racialists, it is perhaps surprising that van den Berghe draws heavily on Marxist theory.

Although Marxists were unanimously hostile to sociobiology, sociobiologists frequently emphasise the potential compatibility of Marxist theory and sociobiology (e.g. Sanderson 2001). However, van den Berghe remains the only figure to actually successfully synthesise the two forms of analysis to produce novel theory.

For example, he argues that class exploitation is disguised by an 'ideology' (in the Marxist sense) that disguises exploitation as either kin-selected nepotistic altruism (e.g. dictator as 'father' of the nation) or mutually beneficial reciprocity (the 'social contract' or democracy) (p60).

However, contrary to orthodox Marxist theory, van den Berghe regards ethnic sentiments as more fundamental than class loyalty since, whereas the latter is "dependent on a commonality of interests", the former is often irrational (p243).

Thus, "it seems a great many people care passionately whether they are ruled and exploited by members of their own ethny or foreigners" (p62).

In short, "Blood runs thicker than money" (p243).

Another difference is that, whereas Marxists view control over the so-called 'Means of Production' (i.e. the means necessary to produce goods for sale) as the ultimate factor determining exploitation and conflict in human societies, Darwinians instead focus on conflict over access to what we might term the 'Means of Reproduction' – in other words, the means necessary to produce offspring (i.e. fertile females, their wombs and vaginas etc.).

This is because, from a Darwinian perspective, "the ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction" and "economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves" (p165).

Thus, for all his ostensible radicalism, Marx, in his emphasis on economics rather than sex, was just another Victorian prude.

Another area of conflict between Marxism and Darwinism is the assumption of the former that somehow all conflict and exploitation will end in a future posited communist utopia.

Curiously, although healthily cynical about exploitation under Soviet-style communism (p60), van den Berghe describes himself as an anarchist (van den Berghe 2005). However, anarchism seems even more hopelessly utopian than communism, given humanity's innate sociality and desire to exploit reproductive competitors. In short, a Hobbesian 'State of Nature' is nobody's utopia.

Mating, Miscegenation and Intermarriage
Van den Berghe argues that "the subordinate group in an ethnic hierarchy invariably 'loses' more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa" (p75). This, of course, reflects the fact that, in Darwinian terms, the ultimate purpose of power is to maximise reproductive success.

The result is that, whereas "the men of the subordinate group are always the losers... the women of the subordinate group... frequently have the option of being reproductively successful with dominant-group males" (p27).

Indeed, “hypergamy (mating upward for women) is a fitness enhancing strategy for women, and, therefore, subordinate-group women do not always resist being 'taken over' by dominant-group men”, but rather are all to ready to intermarry with their country's conquerors (p75). This is because, by so doing, they thereby obtain access to both the greater resources that dominant group males are able to provide in return for sexual access or as provisioning for their offspring, as well as the 'superior' genes which facilitated the conquest in the first place.

As a result, “this sex asymmetry in fitness strategies in ethnically stratified societies often creates tension between the sexes within subordinate groups”, which represents an impediment to group solidarity, because “the female option of fitness maximization through hypergamy is deeply resented by subordinate group males” (p76).

According to van den Berghe, this explains “even today, much of the ambivalence in relations between black men and women in America”, since during the 'Plantation era', “slavery drastically reduced the fitness of male slaves [yet] it had little or no such adverse effect on the fitness of female slaves whose masters had a double interest – financial and genetic – in having them reproduce at maximum capacity”, such that “slavery was much tougher on men than on women… who had a much easier time of it” (p133).

Miscegenation and Intermarriage in Modern America
Curiously, however, patterns of interracial dating in contemporary America call into question this claim.

Certainly, genetic data confirms that, historically, matings between white men and black women were more frequent than the converse, since African-American's mitochondrial DNA is overwhelmingly African in origin, whereas their Y chromosomes are often European (Lind et al 2007).

However, with regard to contemporary mating patterns, recent census data suggests that black men are about two and a half times as likely to marry white women as black women are to marry white men (Fryer 2007).

This seemingly suggests white American males are losing out in reproductive competition to black males.

How then can this anomaly be accounted for?

One explanation is simply that whites in America are no longer dominant over blacks. This is the conclusion of controversial behavioural geneticist Glayde Whitney, who concludes, "by many traditional anthropological criteria African-Americans are now one of the dominant social groups in America – at least they are dominant over whites" since "there is a tremendous and continuing transfer of property, land and women from the subordinate race to the dominant race" (Race, Genetics & Society: p95).

However, this conclusion is difficult to square with the continued economic deprivation of many African-Americans.

Instead, perhaps the beginnings of an explanation can be sought in van den Berghe's later collaboration with anthropologist Peter Frost, where they argue that, across cultures, there is a general sexual preference for females with somewhat lighter complexion than the group average (van den Berghe and Frost 1986).

However, as Frost explains in a more recent work, Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice, preferences with regard to male complexion are more ambivalent (see also Feinman & Gill 1977).

Thus, whereas, among females, blondes famously 'have more fun', the idealised male romantic partner is instead 'tall, dark and handsome'.

In subsequent work, Frost argues that ecological conditions in sub-Saharan Africa permitted high levels of polygyny, because women were economically self-supporting, and this increased the intensity of selection for traits (e.g. increased muscularity, masculinity and athleticism) which enhance the ability of African-descended males to compete for mates and increase their attractiveness to females (Frost 2008).

In contrast, Frost argues that there was greater selection for female attractiveness in areas such as northern Europe, where, to successfully reproduce, women were required to attract a male willing to provision them during cold winters throughout their gestation, lactation and possibly beyond (Frost 2008).

This then suggests that African males have simply evolved to be, on average, more attractive to females, whereas European and Asian females have evolved to be more attractive to males.

This speculation is supported by a couple of recent studies of facial attractiveness, which found that black male faces were rated as most attractive to members of the opposite sex, but that, for female faces, the pattern was reversed (Lewis 2011; Lewis 2012). These findings, it is suggested, could go some way towards explaining interracial dating patterns (Lewis 2012).

"The Most Explosive Aspect of Interethnic Relations"
However, if confirmed, such a discovery is likely to be popular neither with racists, for whom miscegenation is anathema, nor with racial egalitarians, for whom, as a matter of sacrosanct dogma, all races must be equal in all things, even aesthetics and sex appeal.

When evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa made a similar claim in 2011 in his blog, then published at 'Psychology Today', it was swiftly deleted, his blog dropped and the author reprimanded by his university. However, this occurred within a year of the publication of two papers largely corroborating Kanazawa's finding (Lewis 2011; 2012).

Such a reaction is little surprise. As van den Berghe points out, "it is no accident that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines" (p75).

From a sociobiological perspective, competition over reproductive access to fertile females is Darwinian conflict in its most direct and primordial form.

Thus, van den Berghe observes, although "dominant group men, whether racist or not, are seldom reluctant to maximise their fitness with subordinate-group women", they nevertheless are jealously protective of their 'own' women and enforce strict double-standards (p33).

Van den Berghe’s claim that interethnic sexual contact is “the most explosive aspect” of interethnic relations also has support from the history of racial conflict in the US and elsewhere.

For example, the spectre of interracial sexual contact, real or imagined, has motivated several of the most notorious racially-motivated 'hate-crimes' of American history, from the torture-murder of Emmett Till for allegedly propositioning a white woman, to the various atrocities of the reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in defence of the ostensible virtue of 'white womanhood', to the recent Charleston church shooting.

Meanwhile, the spectre of interracial sexual relations is also implicated in some of American history's most notorious miscarriages of justice, including the 'Scottsboro Boys' and 'Groveland Four' cases, which involved allegations of interracial rape.

Indeed, allegations of interracial rape seem to be the most common precursor, not just of 'hate crimes', but also of full-blown race riots.

Thus, in America, the Springfield race riot of 1908, the Tulsa race riot of 1921 and the Rosewood massacre of 1923 were all ignited, at least in part, by allegations of interracial rape.

Meanwhile, Britain's first modern 'race riot', the 1958 Notting Hill riot, began with a public argument between an interracial couple, when white passers-by joined in on the side of the white woman against her black Jamaican husband/pimp before turning on them both.

Meanwhile, Britain's most recent race riot, the 2005 Birmingham riot, was supposedly set off by the allegation that a black girl had been gang-raped by South Asians.

In short, in sociobiological terms, Robert, a character from one of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, has it right when he claims, “What is really at stake in racial struggles… is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: It is competition for the [genitalia] of young women (Platform: p82).

References
Brigandt (2001) 'The homeopathy of kin selection: an evaluation of van den Berghe's sociobiological approach to ethnicity.' Politics and the Life Sciences 20: 203-215.
Feinman & Gill (1977) 'Sex differences in physical attractiveness preferences', Journal of Social Psychology 105(1): 43-52.
Frost (2008) 'Sexual selection and human geographic variation.' Special Issue: Proceedings of the ND Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4), pp. 169-191
Fryer (2007) "Guess Who's Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage over the 20th Century", Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2), pp. 71-90
Hamilton (1964) The genetical evolution of social behaviour Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-52
Johnson, Ratwik and Sawyer (1987) 'The evocative significance of kin terms in patriotic speech' pp157-174 in Reynolds, Falger and Vine (eds) The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism, and Nationalism (London: Croom Helm)
Lewis (2011) 'Who is the fairest of them all? Race, attractiveness and skin color sexual dimorphism' 50(2): 159-162
Lewis (2012) 'A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage' PLoS One. 2012; 7(2): e31703.
Lind et al 2007 'Elevated male European and female African contributions to the genomes of African American individuals.' Human Genetics 120(5) 713-722
Rushton, (2005) Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory Nations and Nationalism 11(4): 489-507
Salter (2000) "A Defence and Extension of Pierre van den Berghe's Theory of Ethnic Nepotism". In James, P. and Goetze, D. (Eds.) Evolutionary Theory and Ethnic Conflict (Praeger Studies on Ethnic and National Identities in Politics) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Sanderson (2001) The Evolution of Human Sociality Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield
Tooby & Cosmides (1989) Kin selection, genic selection and information dependent strategies Behavioral and brain sciences 12(3): 542-544
Van den Berghe (2005) Review of On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in the Age of Mass Migration by Frank Salter Nations and Nationalism 11(1) 161-177
Van den Berghe & Frost (1986) Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9: 87-113.

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Steve Sailer
Masterpiece of disillusionment: Marx meets E.O. Wilson
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 1998
Format: Paperback
Van Den Berghe is a white sociologist born in the old Belgian colony of the Congo. Disgusted by white oppression of Africans, he became a fairly conventional liberal on race relations. But, as he overcame his Eurocentric focus on white crimes, he realized that race-based exploitation and violence are universal human curses. This lead him to sociobiology, and its bedrock finding: the theory of kin selection: The more genes we share with another individual, the more altruistic we are toward him. And the less kind we are toward our more distant kin.
Since there is no fundamental boundary between family, ethnic group, and race, Van Den Berghe coined the brilliant term "ethnic nepotism" to describe the human tendency to favor "our people" at the expense of others.
This is the most significant advance ever in the Marxist analysis of economic exploitation. By substituting kinship for class as the great engine of history, Van Den Berghe has invented a neo-Darwinian Marxism with enormous explanatory power and predictive power. This 1981 book's accuracy was confirmed by the subsequent breakup of the communist world into clashing ethnic groups.
Steve Sailer

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5.0 out of 5 stars A great work on Sociobiology.

5.0 out of 5 stars Ethnocentrism As Nepotism Among Extended Kin

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece of disillusionment: Marx meets E.O. Wilson

A great work on Sociobiology.

Ethnocentrism As Nepotism Among Extended Kin

Masterpiece of disillusionment: Marx meets E.O. Wilson