Against the lies of the Left and of HBD.
Re:
Max Hartshorna, Artem Kaznatcheeva and Thomas Shultzb (2013), McGill University Psychology, Canada; McGill University, Canada, The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7, https://www.jasss.org/16/3/7.html, DOI: 10.18564/jasss.2176
I have discussed this body of work before. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at it now. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, the original paper, for yourself, and use my analysis as a guide to point out the most important biopolitical points and interpretations.
Excerpts (emphasis added), with my commentary:
Abstract
Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies.
The paper using computational modeling to determine the adaptiveness of four evolutionary strategies: selfish, traitorous, ethnocentric, and humanitarian. These are defined in the paper as follows:
Selfish A strategy of defecting against all other agents.
Traitor A strategy of cooperating with agents of a different tag and defecting against agents of one’s own tag.
Ethnocentric A strategy of cooperating with agents of one’s own tag and defecting against agents with a different tag.
Humanitarian A strategy of cooperating with all other agents.
By “agents” they mean individuals and by “tags” they mean the groups to which the individuals are associated. We can consider “tags” to be “ethnies” in the human context.
Note that the “selfish” strategy is essentially free riding, which has been described by leftists and HBDers as an alleged major impediment to ethnocentric ethnic nepotism, although Kevin MacDonald and Frank Salter have effective argued against that as have I. The “traitorous” approach, which I consider an alternative form of free riding, and which can be defined as cooperating with outgroups and betraying your own ingroup, is, in practice, confined only to European-derived peoples; no other groups actually do this (although isolated individuals of such groups may, but these examples are vanishingly rare). The traitorous approach can also be associated with HBD and Racial Proximity Theory (RPT).
In general, the findings are that ethnocentrism not only can be selected for but that it is ultimately the preferred evolutionarily stable outcome, outcompeting its major rival of humanitarianism “as world population saturates.” Note that selfish and traitorous strategies fare poorly, in contrast to the lies told to us by the Leftist and HBD crowds, with selfish typically doing better than traitorous with the exception of when ethnocentric strategies are excluded. It is perhaps not surprising that traitorous approaches do so poorly, which reflects real world experience.
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to favor one’s own group at the expense of other groups. It is implicated in a variety of important phenomena from voting patterns to ethnic discrimination and armed conflict. It is widely believed in social science that ethnocentrism involves extensive social learning and considerable social and cognitive abilities (Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis 2002; LeVine & Campbell 1972; Sherif 1966). However, there is also evidence that ethnocentrism is common throughout a diverse range of animal (Chase 1980) and even plant (Dudley & File 2007; Runyon, Mescher & De Moraes 2006) species. Such evidence suggests that ethnocentrism may be rooted in biological evolution, and that its essential cognitive component is quite simple: the ability to distinguish in- vs. out-group members and select different behaviors based on that distinction.
We already see the authors essentially eviscerating the Leftist/HBD arguments that ethnocentrism/ethnic nepotism/ethnic altruism could not have evolved, with lots of huffing and puffing by the Left and by HBD about free riders. Although (as Frank Salter and I have exhaustively argued) the evolution of ethnocentrism is NOT required for a conscious, rational pursuit of EGI, it is nevertheless useful to note that ethnocentrism can, and has, evolved, is more adaptive than competing strategies, and thus is an optional and important addition to the toolkit of those who want to promote EGI
Recent computer simulations with simple abstract agents demonstrate that ethnocentrism can indeed originate through evolutionary processes (Hammond & Axelrod 2006a, 2006b). The agents in these simulations can either defect against, or cooperate with, other in-group or out-group agents, generating four possible strategies: (a) a selfish strategy of constant defection, (b) a traitorous strategy of cooperation with out-group, but not in-group, agents, (c) an ethnocentric strategy of cooperation within one’s own group but not with agents from different groups, and (d) a humanitarian strategy of indiscriminate cooperation. From a random starting point, ethnocentrism evolves to become the dominant strategy under some variation in parameter settings, eventually characterizing about 75% of the world population.
Indeed. In the real world, the other 25%, the unfit, would include European-derived peoples.
The average proportions of the four strategies during the last 100 of 2000 evolutionary cycles were .08 selfish, .02 traitorous, .75 ethnocentric, and .15 humanitarian (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b). Systematic doubling and halving of key parameters (e.g., lattice size, number of cycles, number of tags, cost of cooperation) did not alter this distribution much, suggesting that evolution of ethnocentrism is not a knife-edge phenomenon but is instead quite robust. In fact, (Kaznatcheev 2010a) showed that the model is also robust to changes in the qualitative nature of the game matrix from PD to other competitive games.
There you go. A quantitative analysis provides to you evidence of the dominance of the ethnocentric approach.
Alternatively, one might focus on the dynamics of direct competition between humanitarian and ethnocentric clusters. As suggested by both previous results (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b) and present results, the chief competitor for ethnocentrism is humanitarianism rather than selfishness. Ethnocentrics of one cluster exploit humanitarians of another cluster, benefiting from the latter’s cooperation while donating nothing in return. There are thus two candidate hypotheses to explain eventual ethnocentric dominance: the mediation hypothesis that ethnocentrics out-compete free-riders more effectively than humanitarians do, and the direct hypothesis that ethnocentrics exploit humanitarians across cluster frontiers. We test these two hypotheses in Studies 1 and 2.
The second hypothesis turns out to be true.
We are also interested in explaining the lack of success of selfish and traitorous strategies, as well as the differences between the two. As noted, Hammond and Axelrod (2006b) reported the mean proportions of selfish and traitorous strategies across the last 100 of 2000 evolutionary cycles as .08 and .02, respectively. Are free-riders defeated by fitter strategies or are they self-limiting? In a viscous environment, with tags that come to correlate with strategy, one might well focus on the likelihood of interacting with in-group v. out-group members, as well as interaction strategy. Lacking any out-group cooperators to exploit, a spatially-clustered strain of selfish free-riders would be self-limiting. Traitorous agents would have the added disadvantage of being exploited in between-cluster interactions with out-group defectors. Study 2 attempts to tease out these dynamics by examining simpler worlds restricted to only some strategies.
Again and again, selfish and traitorous free riders do NOT prosper. Ethnocentrism is evolutionarily stable and outcompetes free riding strategies. Those who have been telling you that free riding is some sort of existential threat to ethnic nepotism are wrong. In fact, I believe they have been intentionally misleading you. Certainly if they continue to peddle these falsehoods in light of these findings, then you can be almost certainly assured that mendacity is involved.
In this study, we examine the possible temporal coincidence between population saturation and the establishment of ethnocentric dominance. Both the mediation and direct hypotheses predict a close temporal coincidence between population saturation and ethnocentric dominance. Both hypotheses also predict that the frequency of humanitarian agents decreases with ethnocentric growth, though the direct hypothesis predicts a direct relation not using the mediating influence of free-riders.
Our methodology is the same as in the original simulation (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b), except that we record strategy frequencies at every evolutionary cycle in 50 worlds and stop at 1000 cycles because solutions are always stable by then. We record results at every evolutionary cycle to provide a more complete picture of evolutionary processes and insights into the determinants of stable evolutionary outcomes.
To examine the unique predictions of each hypothesis, we perform a mediation analysis to determine whether the relation between ethnocentric and humanitarian strategies is mediated by suppression of selfish strategies. The direct hypothesis would be uniquely supported by finding an unmediated negative relation between ethnocentrism and humanitarianism, while the mediation hypothesis would be uniquely supported by finding evidence of such mediation through selfish free-riders.
These results indicate that the decline of humanitarians is due to direct exploitation by ethnocentrics and is not mediated by humanitarian deficiencies in out-competing selfish agents. As the world fills up and clusters of agents collide, ethnocentrism starts to dominate its closest competitor humanitarianism by virtue of ethnocentrics directly exploiting humanitarians across cluster boundaries. Strategies start to separate in frequency, whether ethnocentrics over humanitarians or selfish over traitors, when clusters collide as world population saturates.
Ethnocentrism wins. As population saturates territorial carrying capacity, and as mass migration brings groups into conflicts, ethnocentric populations prosper, humanitarian populations decline, and the selfish and traitorous crash and burn.
Most interesting for the mediation and direct hypotheses, however, is the extent to which humanitarians thrive in the absence of ethnocentrism. In simulations without ethnocentrism, humanitarianism dominates in a manner similar to ethnocentrism. This is evident in both three- and two-strategy simulations. Figure 4 shows mean strategy frequencies for three-strategy simulations that disallow either humanitarian (EST) or ethnocentric (HST) strategies, across 10 worlds averaged over the last 100 of 1000 cycles. Humanitarians perform similarly to ethnocentrics here, greatly outperforming both traitorous and selfish agents. A much smaller effect is that ethnocentrics out-compete traitors a bit more than humanitarians do, although this does not diminish the numbers of humanitarians relative to ethnocentrics, or the strong superiority of either humanitarians or ethnocentrics over traitors and selfish agents.
The fact that they can be outcompeted by milksop humanitarians tells you how bad the selfish and traitorous approaches really are. The idea that those failed strategies pose a real threat to ethnic nepotism is proved to be ludicrous.
There is the one anomaly in which traitors out-performed selfish agents in the HST simulation. Figure 6 shows that this is part of a more general trend in which traitorous agents fare significantly better whenever ethnocentrics are absent.
Well, yes, if they are not being exploited by the ethnocentrics that they would grovel to, traitors do better. If they betray to humanitarians, not much harm is done, while betrayal to benefit the selfish limits the damage to individuals, not entire groups.
The results of these restricted-strategy simulations contradict the predictions of the mediation hypothesis. In contrast to the notion that humanitarians cannot out-compete free-riders, humanitarians do very well against both selfish and traitorous agents. Selfish and traitorous agents limit growth of their own genotypes by not cooperating with them; although Laird (2011) noted circumstances where across-tag cooperation can sustain traitorous agents. Consistent with the direct hypothesis, the chief problem for humanitarians is ethnocentrism.
Thus, White humanitarian impulses were able to thrive until a growing world population, and mass alien immigration, brought ethnocentric non-White populations into the territories of humanitarian White ones.
The relatively poorer performance of traitors in the presence of ethnocentric agents can be explained by agent interaction across cluster boundaries. When traitorous agents of one cluster collide with ethnocentric agents of another, the ethnocentric agents earn outcome b, exploiting cooperating traitors by defecting against them. Just as ethnocentrism is poisonous to humanitarians, it is also poisonous to traitors, who incur a cost of c in such interactions.
Imagine here that the traitors are HBDers and the ethnocentrics are Asians. See how that works?
We find here that individual differences between evolving worlds are characterized mainly by early competition between the two fittest strategies: ethnocentrism and humanitarianism. Ethnocentrism always pulls away from humanitarianism by around cycle 300 as world population reaches its asymptote, while selfish and traitorous strategies never gain much of a foothold.
One can get away with humanitarian approaches in more sparsely populated scenarios, in which populations are more separated, and there is less existential struggle for resources. In the context of a more heavily populated world, with groups in proximity and constant competition, as we have today, humanitarianism is a losing strategy.
Regardless of these early immigration bias effects, in all four of these simulation sets, ethnocentrism dominates by roughly 300 cycles and maintains this dominance to the end, as in our other studies.
* General Discussion
The mediation analysis in Study 1 and the restricted strategy simulations in Study 2 support the direct hypothesis for ethnocentric dominance over humanitarianism. Across ethno-humanitarian cluster borders, humanitarians cooperate while ethnocentrics do not. This provides a reproductive advantage for border-dwelling ethnocentrics, who receive the benefit of humanitarian cooperation while donating nothing across cluster lines. In terms of the payoffs in Table 1, for such interactions, ethnocentrics increase their RPs by b, while humanitarians decrease their RPs by c. Ethnocentric agents are thus more likely to succeed in competition for empty locations along these borders.
This is what we see in the West today, as ethnocentric non-Whites outcompete more humanitarian Whites for niche spaces as world population saturates and population mobility increases.
The fact that traitorous and selfish genotypes perform just as badly against humanitarians as they do against ethnocentrics, and the lack of any mediation effect of free-riding contradict the alternative mediation hypothesis that only ethnocentrics out-compete selfish free-riders. Although ethnocentrics can exploit selfish agents in neighboring clusters, the self-limiting properties of defection against the free-riders’ own gene pool tend to diminish this advantage. Under many conditions, there are not enough free-riders to allow this potential ethnocentric advantage to be widely used. Notice that the dominance of ethnocentrism over humanitarianism, and the marginalization of selfish and traitorous strategies, can be explained purely via individual selection, without recourse to group-selection mechanisms.
But of course group-selection mechanisms can still occur. The bottom line is still that selfish and traitorous strategies are ultimately failures, evolutionary dead ends, AND that ethnocentrism outcompetes humanitarianism (although the latter is still better than the other two alternatives).
Unlike selfish free-riders, traitorous agents have the additional problem of being exploited by the very out-groups they cooperate with. This explains why traitorous genotypes typically do even worse than selfish genotypes, despite the traitors’ greater capacity for cooperation.
This is an EXTREMELY important point. This is consistent with one of my past arguments against the free riding problem. There, I put the selfish and traitorous approaches, along with free riding outgroup ethnocentrics, under a general free riding umbrella and asked why the critics of EGI and ethnic nepotism always concentrate on the damage done by free riding between members of the same ethny, but ignore cases where outgroups are involved. Free riding that involves outgroups will be more damaging than selfish free riding solely within the ingroup. In any case, ethnocentrism outcompetes all.
Our simulations suggest that very early stochastic bias in favor of either humanitarian or ethnocentric immigrants affects early competition between these two main strategies. Before worlds fill up, most interactions are with an agent’s own strain. Because the in-group strategy components of humanitarianism and ethnocentrism are identical, there is little in these early cycles to favor one over the other.
“Own strain” is problematic here. Compared to what? What degree of genetic differentiation is the boundary between own/other? This perhaps may depend on the population density and the types of populations available for comparison. The problem of RPT is instructive here. The environment in which RPT developed, Northwest European populations for the most part encountering and competing only with other Europeans, no longer exists. What may have been adaptively ethnocentric then is now a traitorous strategy of cooperating with genetically distant ethnocentric aliens at the expense of more closely related European peoples. And as this study shows, traitorous strategies do poorly, particularly in the presence of ethnocentric competition. Is this one reason why Northwest Europe (and the Anglosphere) is faring the worst with respect to multiracial replacement and multicultural madness?
Unlike previous simulations (Hammond & Axelrod 2006a, 2006b) that focus on stable evolutionary outcomes, we examine the entire course of evolution. This provides a more complete picture of evolutionary processes, as well as insights into the determinants of stable evolutionary outcomes. Despite eventual ethnocentric dominance under viscous environments and group tags, we found surprisingly strong early competition from humanitarians. In contrast, strategies that fail to cooperate with their own kind (selfish and traitorous) never gained much of a foothold. Examination of the full evolutionary course also helped to test hypotheses about the eventual ethnocentric dominance. To thrive early in evolution, it is useful for population clusters to support their own kind. Later, as the world fills up, it is useful to exploit the cooperation of neighboring clusters.
Here, “own kind” can mean humans in general.
As mentioned earlier, a relatively high benefit/cost ratio is a natural consequence of social specialization in abundant environments. For example, a healthful tip from your doctor or a free tuneup from a mechanic friend cost little to give, but can yield considerable benefit to the recipient. Interestingly, task specialization is not limited to humans, but can be found in a variety of social animal species, and not just the eusocial insects (Anderson & Franks 2001;Gazda, Connor, Edgar & Cox 2005).
Much of what Frank Salter suggested in On Genetic Interests was of the high benefit/cost ratio behavior, in contrast to the mendacious who harp on a single sentence about extreme self-sacrifice under theoretical conditions.
Importantly, our decision to study a one-shot PD framework, where agents have no memory of previous interactions, significantly reduces the cognitive assumptions placed on our agents. A number of simulations have demonstrated how cooperation may emerge in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma framework, where agents remember the outcomes of previous interactions (Axelrod 1997; Fogel 1993; Sandholm & Crites 1996). We opted for Hammond and Axelrod’s (2006) memoryless model because we are interested in ethnocentrism in its most elemental form.
The memory-emphasized form of such interactions may allow for some types of cooperation and alliances between ethnocentric populations against a common foe (is this how various non-White groups strategize and ally against Whites?). Also keep in mind that the definition of what is the ethny in question, the ethnocentric group, can vary upon context and the level of analysis. Ethnic group? Race? What?
The idea of cooperation based on memory can serve to allow for closely related groups, each practicing ethnocentrism, to come together as one unified ethnocentric group, opposed to more genetically distant constellations of ethnocentrics. This would include different European ethnic groups coming together to form an ethnocentric pan-European entity. But the cooperation must be genuine; betrayal and selfish/traitorous behavior will remembered.
A last point is that we can see how both the Leftists and HBDers have been LYING to you on this subject. That the Left does should not surprise you and their motives should be obvious, but what about HBD? You see, ethnocentrism and the pursuit of EGI by Whites threatens the status of Jews and Asians in the West; thus, HBD as a political movement, aimed at privileging Jewish and Asian interests and forming a Jeurasian community along with Nords (who would be second class Outer Party members in this scenario), must delegitimize the ideas of ethnocentrism and EGI via unmitigated mendacity. Among Whites, HBD is an example of the traitorous strategy that fails. Don’t get sucked into that loser’s game.
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