More on Social Epistasis and Genetic Effects

A second review of two papers.

See here.

Social Epistasis Amplifies the Fitness Costs of Deleterious Mutations, Engendering Rapid Fitness Decline Among Modernized Populations

    June 2017Evolutionary Psychological Science 3(2)

    DOI: 10.1007/s40806-017-0084-x

Michael Anthony Woodley of MenieMichael Anthony Woodley of MenieMatthew A. SarrafRadomir N. PestowHeitor B. F. FernandesHeitor B. F. Fernandes

Deleterious mutations are typically understood exclusively in terms of their harmful effects on carrier organisms. But there are convincing reasons to think that such adverse effects are not confined to the individual level. We argue that in social species, interorganismal gene-gene interactions, which in previous literatures have been termed social epistasis, allow genomes carrying deleterious mutations to reduce via group-level pleiotropy the fitness of others, including noncarriers. This fitness reduction occurs by way of degradation of group-level processes that optimize the reproductive ecology of a population for intergroup competition through, among other mechanisms, suppression of free-riding. Such damage to group regulatory processes suggests a hidden role for the accumulation of behavior-altering “spiteful” mutations in the dynamics of the demographic transition—these mutations may have contributed to the maladaptive outcomes of this process, such as widespread subreplacement fertility. A structured population model is presented describing aspects of this social epistasis amplification model. This phenomenon is also considered as a potential explanation for the results of Calhoun’s mouse utopia experiments, which provide an opportunity to directly test a major prediction stemming from the model.

I have mentioned this work before, but I would like to add additional commentary here. This new work is a re-review, an update, with some fresh perspectives.

Social epistasis describes gene-gene interactions between organisms, mediated by their phenotypes, or, more properly, extended phenotypes, the effects of which extend beyond the organism expressing that phenotype.

An example from the animal kingdom given by the authors is that of eusocial insects, where the size of members of the worker caste is influenced by the phenotypes of other castes.  Thus, a genetically influenced trait – worker caste size – is affected by genetically influenced traits of other members of the broader group.  The idea is that this occurs in humans and that relaxed natural selection (due to easier ecological conditions, technology, improved medical advances and hygiene, as well as ways of masking physical defects and unattractiveness – as well as a hyper-capitalist economy that rewards dark triad traits) among modern (Western) populations gives rise to a larger mutation load in the population, leading to aberrant phenotypes that negatively affect the fitness of the entire society.  Thus, the genes of those with these spiteful mutations not only results in a maladaptive phenotype in those individuals, but, through social epistasis incurring negative influences in the society, spitefully reduces the (genetically influenced) fitness of others.  Indeed, by altering the environment, the mutant unfit may create conditions that promote higher mutational loads in society at large, causing a dysgenic positive feedback loop. In such cases, mutational meltdown from the consequences of an excessive mutational load can occur.  The demographic collapse of Western populations, coupled with replacement-level immigration (from populations less affected by these trends) may result from these processes, and thus social epistasis would have a devastating effect on the ethnic genetic interests of Western populations. In this sense, we observe the triumph of Bioleninism and the collapse of Western civilization. We can speculate if similar processes were linked to the collapse of previous civilizations that had relatively high standards of living and relaxed selection, such as the Classical. Genetic pacification and other influences of social epistasis may have made those societies easy prey for barbarians with lower mutational load and fewer social pathologies.

As the authors point out, in a healthy society, high status individuals would promote social cultural norms that enhance group fitness, such as ethnocentrism and the suppression of free riders.  On the other hand, relaxed selection leads to high status individuals with spiteful mutations that produce behaviors that promote social abnormality and destructive cultural artifacts. Pathological altruism increases, ethnocentrism is pathologized, free riding is encouraged, and “clever silly” ideas are pushed into society with negative results.

From the “clever silly” paper:

My hunch is that it is this kind of IQ-advertisement which has led to the most intelligent people in modern societies having ideas about social phenomena that are not just randomly incorrect (due to inappropriately misapplying abstract analysis) but are systematically wrong. I am talking of the phenomenon known as political correctness (PC) in which foolish and false ideas have become moralistically-enforced among the ruling intellectual elite. And these ideas have invaded academic, political and social discourse. Because while the stereotypical nutty professor in the hard sciences is a brilliant scientist but silly about everything else; the stereotypical nutty professor social scientist or humanities professor is not just silly about ‘everything else’, but also silly in their professional work…The results of cognitive stratification and IQ-advertising are therefore bad enough to have destroyed the value of whole domains of the arts and academia, and in the domain of public policy the results have been simply disastrous. Over the past four decades the dishonest fantasy-world discourse of non-biological political correctness has evolved to dominate the intellectual arena of whole nations – perhaps the whole developed world – such that wrong and ridiculous ideas have become not just mainstream, but compulsory

Thus, narcissistic egoists, through extended phenotypes and social epistasis, lowers the fitness of society as a whole, causing the genetic representation of their ethny to decrease.  Even more troubling, a positive feedback loop is established in that social epistasis allows for the behavior derived from spiteful selection to change the environment to select for the further accumulation of mutational load and selection for more egoist freaks.  In the short term, it would seem like the botched now have an adaptive advantage but they do not for two major reasons.  One, as mutational load increases and its consequent behavior spreads through the population, a threshold is reached in which mutational collapse and social collapse occurs.  All sorts of social pathologies follow in the wake of spiteful mutations and social epistasis and the center will not hold. Second, and related to the first, populations not affected by these trends will continue to select for ethnocentric and more adaptively sound people, and in competition with the Bioleninist freaks, the more sound will win the game of adaptive fitness. Thus, any advantage the mutants may have via an altered advantage would be temporary. In the long run, over time, fitness collapses.

A model system by the authors demonstrates that the situation cane be stable only as long as the death rate among the mutants is high enough to sufficiently engage purifying selection against the misfits. This does not seem to be occurring and the situation is exacerbated by migration of populations lacking such spiteful mutations.

The authors make a connection between the human social epistasis situation and Calhoun’s rodent utopia experiments and they propose an experiment in which CRISPR-mediated genetic modification of genes known or suspected to control abnormal behaviors in Calhounian mice can be used to artificially purify the population and stabilize the situation.  Understanding the entire social epistasis process is important since, as the authors state, the human situation is a “potentially significant threat.” One could also speculate positive social epistasis, where the genetically influenced extended phenotypes of some in the population enhanced societal fitness and promotes a more robust environment in which more adaptive genetic suites and the consequent traits are selected for. That is akin to the discussion by the authors of high status individuals lacking spiteful mutations promoting adaptive social norms. That is what should be aimed for.

One interesting point for my perspective is that social epistasis means that we may need to extend our understanding of ethnic genetic interests even further than genetic structure and genetic integration of individuals forming a population and then the results averaged over the population (or, in a similar vein, e.g. the consensus SNPs for a population being used).  Perhaps the genepool of the entire population, taken together, with all if its interactions, needs to be considered as one suprapersonal entity, with multilocus genotypes extending over the entire ethny, co-adapted gene complexes being ethny-wide, and the genetic epistasis of the ethny feeding into social epistasis.  We will need to consider the genetic integration, the structure, of the entire “ethnic’ genome, representing one giant organism (each ethny member being akin to one cell). This begins to fit in to my ethnotype idea, with a particular focus on those genes controlling the relevant extended phenotypes.

See also this.

I can also speculate a memetic interpretation, in which fitness and reproduction is associated with numbers of recruits, followers, and supporters, and that mutational load can allude to memes as well as genes – although all of this can be ultimately linked to genetic social epistasis, since biologically defective egoists may be responsible for the negative memes occurring. In a dissent movement, narcissistic rent-seeking egoist grifters can alter the environment to satisfy their needs and to create a context in which destructive memes and other egoists thrive.  This selects against honest, authentic, capable activists and their healthier memes.  But just like the situation with genetic social epistasis, this seeming adaptive fitness of the Memetoleninist freaks is an illusion; it is temporary.  As the memetic “mutational load” increases, collapse is ultimately inevitable, and particularly so when the movement comes up against competing systems and ideologies. The relevance to the Dissident Right should be obvious.

See this, which I discussed previously as well, but deserves re-mention. Emphasis added:

Abstract

Assessing the impact of the social environment on health and disease is challenging. As social effects are in part determined by the genetic makeup of social partners, they can be studied from associations between genotypes of one individual and phenotype of another (social genetic effects, SGE, also called indirect genetic effects). For the first time we quantified the contribution of SGE to more than 100 organismal phenotypes and genome-wide gene expression measured in laboratory mice. We find that genetic variation in cage mates (i.e. SGE) contributes to variation in organismal and molecular measures related to anxiety, wound healing, immune function, and body weight. Social genetic effects explained up to 29% of phenotypic variance, and for several traits their contribution exceeded that of direct genetic effects (effects of an individual’s genotypes on its own phenotype). Importantly, we show that ignoring SGE can severely bias estimates of direct genetic effects (heritability). Thus SGE may be an important source of “missing heritability” in studies of complex traits in human populations. In summary, our study uncovers an important contribution of the social environment to phenotypic variation, sets the basis for using SGE to dissect social effects, and identifies an opportunity to improve studies of direct genetic effects.

Author Summary

Daily interactions between individuals can influence their health both in positive and negative ways. Often the mechanisms mediating social effects are unknown, so current approaches to study social effects are limited to a few phenotypes for which the mediating mechanisms are known a priori or suspected. Here we propose to leverage the fact that most traits are genetically controlled to investigate the influence of the social environment. To do so, we study associations between genotypes of one individual and phenotype of another individual (social genetic effects, SGE, also called indirect genetic effects). Importantly, SGE can be studied even when the traits that mediate the influence of the social environment are not known. For the first time we quantified the contribution of SGE to more than 100 organismal phenotypes and genome-wide gene expression measured in laboratory mice. We find that genetic variation in cage mates (i.e. SGE) explains up to 29% of the variation in anxiety, wound healing, immune function, and body weight. Hence our study uncovers an unexpectedly large influence of the social environment. Additionally, we show that ignoring SGE can severely bias estimates of direct genetic effects (effects of an individual’s genotypes on its own phenotype), which has important implications for the study of the genetic basis of complex traits.

In both inbred and outbred mice, SGE influenced traits, particularly those related to “anxiety, wound healing, immune function, and body weight.” In some cases, changes in gene expression in the brain were observed.

If we extend these findings to humans, and further extend it to society-level interactions of population groups living in a defined territory, we are faced with the possibility with those we are forced to live amongst are, through SGE, changing our phenotype, via altered gene expression (and possibly through epigenetics and other effects). Consider the traits identified as strongly affected by SGE in the mouse study. Anxiety has wide-spread effects on human behavior and can explain many social pathologies extant today. Wound healing obviously has health-related effects, including, possibly, cancer. Immune function is of great importance, particularly in an era in which diversity, immigration, and globalism exposes us to novel pathogens.  Body weight as a factor raises alarms about the obesity epidemic.

It is bad enough when this occurs as a result of exposure to, e.g., co-ethnic spiteful mutants, but even worse when enforced diversity via multiculturalism and mass migration exposes us to genetically alien peoples whose presence may be (negatively) affecting us at the level of genes, gene expression, and genetically-determined phenotypes.  Our fundamental physical and behavioral being may be deformed, damaged, twisted, by diversity. It is paramount that we return to more homogeneous conditions that are congenial to our genetic-phenotypic well-being.

Further, these findings, particularly concerning behavior, is supportive of my thesis that increasing diversity is associated, in a causative manner, to high rates of autism observed in recent decades. The presence of genetically divergent human populations in the same territory can induce behavioral changes, and alteration in brain-specific gene expression, resulting in autism and other mental disorders (anxiety, depression, addiction, transgender and suicidal ideation) in vulnerable individuals. People concerned about autism perhaps should concentrate more on reducing diversity than on opposing vaccination.

In addition, SGE can result in overestimation of heritability estimates in twin studies, which may induce a nervous breakdown or two among the HBDers.

Revising On Genetic Interests

Initial suggestions.

If Salter’s On Genetic Interests was to be revised, which I believe would be a good idea to do, what would be some suggestions that I have for the revision?  I list some below, in outline form, for the three main sections of the book.

Section One (genetics and general arguments)

Comments about ancient European genetic ancestry are wrong/misleading and also irrelevant. Change or delete them. Perhaps discuss findings from archaeogenetics and what they tell us about how past peoples dealt with their own ethnic genetic interests (without knowing about them of course, but how did historical outcomes affect group genetic adaptiveness, and what lessons are there for today?).

Acknowledge that the genetic data used to calculate child equivalents are outdated, but state that newer data would give similar results (show such data?).

Emphasize the need for genetic kinship data – actually solicit such?

Genetic structure and integration – discuss its importance and call for such analysis of human data – actually solicit such?

Discuss the concept of ethnotype and its implications for the book’s theory.

Can discuss in more detail how things like HBD (and even Nordicism) value phenotype over genotype and can be corrosive of ethnic genetic interests.

Answer critics such as Lawrence of Affirmative Right.

Section Two (political and other pragmatic implications)

Discuss the intersections of the book’s theory with political movements such as Yockeyism.  Could also comment about pan-Europeanism vs. ethnonationalism, Nordicism, etc.

Expanding the charts of genetic investments – more ideologies and permutations/iterations of these.

Hybrid children – genetic structure and integration demonstrate that no number of hybrid children can compensate for the loss of parental kinship for parents, and ethnic kinship for the co-ethnics of the parents, resulting from miscegenation.  No number of hybrid children can recapitulate the original genetic structures.

Updates based on current events – any changes of biopolitical strategies and implications resulting from current trends?

More on democratic multiculturalism, and worse is better vs. Suvorov’s Law, etc.

Update the section on homosexuality – there is no (descriptive) sign that they are following prescriptions to focus on ethnic genetic interests  to compensate for individual maladaptive behavior (that doesn’t change the prescription but makes it more necessary and/or puts a prescription on society to suppress homosexuality.

Analysis of male vs. female mating strategies, competition, effects on ethnic (and other) genetic interests and societal politics.

Section Three (ethics and the overall philosophy of the concept)

I believe that this section requires the least revision, as ethics are timeless, but perhaps some of the issues I have discussed here can be dealt with. One way of doing this is to consider different philosophical tenets, and their ethical implications, and how the theory of ethnic genetic interests would fit in. What would Salterian existentialism look like for example?

I am sure I can think of more, but this is a solid start.

Some Thoughts on Separation

Consider.

Consider this:

…since reducing the non-White proportion of the U.S. population to 10% would still require the separation and removal of over 100 million non-Whites, or over three-quarters of them, it raises the question, “Why stop there, at that point, instead of going all the way when you’re most of the way there.” It seems arbitrary…

By the same logic, since achieving McCulloch’s objective would require a massive upheaval of American society, possibly even a civil war, then why stop at the point of sacrificing part of the USA for multiracial and Amerindian nations?  Isn’t that arbitrary?  Why not go all the way and take it all, send the non-Whites back to their homelands, including the Amerindians back to Siberia (albeit Russia may have objections)? An argument would be that White Americans have an innate sense of fairness and would not want to deprive non-White “Americans” of an American homeland, or that such a homeland or homelands would lessen non-White resistance to separation. 

With respect to the second consideration, I do not buy it. Any time Whites want to separate, even in the informal manner of de facto residential segregation, non-Whites (implicitly) insist that they have a fundamental human right to have access to Whites. That’s why we have forced racial integration. I doubt that some homeland out in the desert will lessen resistance. With respect to the first consideration – White perceptions of “fairness” – that is undoubtedly the main issue here, let us be realistic where we are right now. About half of the White American population are masochistic leftists who believe that even multiracial “America First” civic nationalism is “racist” and “fascist.”  A large fraction of the other half of the White American population are aracial civic nationalists; like Tucker Carlson they believe we are all “stuck with each other” and they would reject separation as unrealistic, evil, or insane. Further, demographic change means that even if you can convince a majority of White Americans to support separation, a democratic and orderly solution is unlikely. The solution likely requires physical resistance, a scenario that bodes ill for a declining and aging White American population as time goes on.  

In any case, given these realities, in order for White Americans to support separation, and to make the necessary sacrifices, the situation for White America will by necessity have degenerated to such a point of desperation that it is unlikely that even “High Trust” Whites would care much about “fairness” to non-Whites.  At that point, where outcomes would be determined by blood and iron and not by debates and voting, these detailed plans and non-White homeland maps, never mind the phenotype charts and the to-the-decimal-point 23andMe “data,” would all be irrelevant. At that point, the efforts needed to convince Whites, in conjunction with the bad negative conditions that would make Whites amenable to be convinced, making them willing for extreme measures, would be such that “why stop there, at that point, instead of going all the way when you’re most of the way there,” would be a fair assessment with respect to the division of territory.  If Whites would be willing to fight for most of America, why not for all of America? If conditions get so bad that even cucked Whites are willing to fight for survival, would they really care about being “fair” to non-Whites or to White leftists and other traitors who brought us to this condition? (Note: Many of these same arguments hold with respect to repatriation of non-Whites from Europe; but here I focus on the American White ethnostate scenario.)

I’m not trying to be obstructionist – I support the ethnostate idea and have written about it previously (although I disagree with others on the details).  But we must be realistic.  First, we are far, far away from having any significant number of Whites even thinking about supporting the idea. To get to that point will take time and, unfortunately, much White suffering. Talk about “winning the hearts and minds of Whites” does not impress me, since the people saying such things have failed for decades, and lack the self-awareness to realize that their bizarre ideas (phenotype charts, decimal point test measurements, etc. – denounced as “Nuremberg Law-like” even by some TOO commentators: “Phenotype this” and “autosomal that” and soon we’re off to the races with phrenology and the Nuremberg laws. No one is going to accept this stuff. Look at the world we’re operating in. This kind of rhetoric is just not going to fly) are not attractive, and are unlikely ever to be attractive (even in the dire conditions discussed above, to most White Americans.  

Second, considering that if the ethnostate does happen, it will likely happen in chaos, in blood and iron, and not through parliamentary debates and scholarly white papers, whatever plans and ideas we develop need to be as fundamental, simple, and streamlined as possible. It is possible that even what I outline below is too complex for the coming reality. In the dark future ahead it is possible that “look White, think White, and act White” will be sufficient (although in my opinion, that would allow for too many Jews, White traitors, and other undesirables to slip through). Whatever the case, I doubt that the Whites of tomorrow will have much use for calipers, phenotype charts, or 23andMe “spit tubes,” while they are fighting for racial survival, or after the struggle is over and a new homeland needs to be built.

This comment about McCulloch’s third section is I think relevant to my own comments:

Some White Guysays:

January 28, 2021 at 8:40 pm

I read the third part of the article yesterday and have been thinking about it since. I have to say I am disappointed in the offered “solution”. It is a rehash of past proposals to divvy up the USA, which will never happen. Texans and others are not going to agree to having their states made into the corral areas for the mixed race peoples of North America. Absurd.

The people who run every element of our countries have a firm grip on all they control. They are making it very clear at present that we have no power and no control over any of it. Anyone who has spoken up is currently being arrested and/or ostracized from society.

They are not going to just let us do what we want. These types of “solutions” are beyond ridiculous. Anyone advocating for such things will be squashed like a bug by those who rule us. It is cruel and immature to suggest to people that such things are possible.

Call me a defeatist if you will, but I prefer realistic realism to fairy tales.

And in response to that comment:

Canadianersays:

January 28, 2021 at 9:20 am

Good post.

Lots of people have pie in the sky fantasies about ethnostates and seem to forget that we are a powerless ethnic group with no evidence that we are able to work together to achieve big goals.

You are absolutely right that the first order goal is to survive. We can do that by building strong communities. Big political schemes come second to survival and the basic process of “re-tribalizing” where we basically learn what it means to act tribally and how to achieve tribal goals.

As a side note, I agree that we do need to have contingency plans for Whites surviving as a stateless people in the event that the ethnostate idea is not actualized, or is not actualized for a very, very long time.  

With respect for the ethnostate, simplified considerations for the ingroup:

Biological:

To simplify and streamline, and to be most fair and reasonable, we consider as follows. Individuals who derive familial/genealogical ancestry from any or several of the native, indigenous peoples of Europe would be included in the ethnostate. The vast majority of White Americans know their ethnic background and their genealogy can be traced back to Europe, to a satisfactory degree, if required. That is sufficient. What if such cannot be determined? People may be adopted, or there may be a lack of knowledge for another reason, or there may be a good reason to suspect someone is being dishonest. For those specific cases, genetic testing can be considered, in the rational comparative manner described below.

What about “White Hispanics” or individuals who may have some low-level fractional Amerindian (or other) New World admixture (or whatever other low level admixture)?  This can be judged on a case-by-case basis, judging based on overall assimilability (phenotype, identity, intelligence and behavior).  In some cases, genetic testing could be considered, also  as described below.

The vast majority of determinations can be very simple and streamlined – of European ethnic genealogical ancestry or not? The minority of other cases can then be judged as indicated in the preceding paragraph, above. Thus, for most cases, there will be no need for bizarre alphabetical phenotypic charts or “testing” or whatever.

Cultural:

Only people who are part of the Western/Orthodox civilizational background – the Western High Culture with Eastern European Orthodox added on – should be included. From a religious perspective, what’s compatible with this background would be: Christian, pagan, agnostic, or atheist. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. are not compatible. Unfortunately, I do not advise excluding homosexuals, since they would be regenerated each generation. It is my opinion that the vast majority of homosexuality (particularly for men, but for some women as well) is biologically determined. So, unless you exile homosexuals every generation, a strict exclusion makes no sense. However, we should not accept gay cabals or general sexual degeneracy.

Political:

Individuals who have in their private and/or public histories significant anti-White activities should not be included. While the bulk of White liberals are probably redeemable, hardcore activists and political figures are not. Would we want the likes of Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel in a White ethnostate?

Comparative Genetic Testing:

In general, the large majority of the White population have clearly defined genealogical roots in Europe and that is sufficient.  

For other specific cases, any genetic testing must be performed in a comparative not absolute manner. It is childishly naive and unscientific – and I have pointed out many times beyond the capability of the methodology – to set some hard-and-fast base-line (e.g., 91.567%) and then make distinctions based on that (91.658% good, 91.566% bad). Instead, comparative evaluations should be made – establishing what the “ethnotype” range of different European ethnies are and then observing whether the “unknown” is in the same general range.  For example, there are no European ethnies whose members would be 15% Amerindian and 10% sub-Saharan African.  Anyone with such a profile is obviously not of Old World European stock. Again, this would not be a case of rigid boundaries, but a common sense evaluation. If someone is 1% past the range of an ethny they claim membership in, that’s reasonable. 15% is not. If one wanted to be more objective, one could establish the standard deviation of genetic variation within an ethnotype range, but this possibly gets to the point of nitpicking.  It is fairly simple to ascertain if the genetic profile of an unknown sample is generally consistent with what would expect from various European ethnic groups. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that, e.g., someone who is ~40% South Asian is either recently admixed or a Roma (and the timing of admixture could be determined – but in either case, 40% South Asian is obviously not consistent with any European ethny).

The relative objectivity of this approach derives from the fact that any flaws and imprecision in the methodology (that exist and will always be present to some extent) apply to both the known and unknown samples equally, and as long as the comparisons are done in a “fuzzy” manner, without absolute strict boundaries, then the inherent imprecision is not a barrier for making useful comparisons.

The other advantage of this approach is that it, by necessity, includes all European ethnies as the known reference samples. Thus, if a person claims to be of ethny X then they must be compared to X, not to Y or Z or any other group.

What about Hispanics and other groups that may have New World admixture, etc.?  The approach applied there would be to determine a set of “knowns” – for example “White Hispanics” determined to be acceptably assimilable based on chosen characteristics (phenotype, for example) – then determine the genetic range of these “knowns” and, finally, compare, in a general sense, whether the “unknowns” are similar to that range. 

But, my views and proposals may well as be as unrealistic as those promoted by others. However, I stand by my comments as being somewhat more reasonable; at the very least, the proposal, re: genetic analysis is the only semi-objective rational one I’ve seen. The only way to deal with imprecision and the myriad flaws inherent in these genetic approaches is to use a comparative analysis, utilizing fuzzy boundaries, and making sure each and every European ethny – and this includes regional sections of nations (East vs. West England, North vs. South Germany, North vs. South Italy – with Sicily and Sardinia each being separately represented – North vs. South Russia, Flemish vs. Walloons, North vs. South France, etc.) – are represented as “known” reference samples.  In summary, besides offering my own ideas on the subject, a major criticism I have of “movement” separation schemes revolve around them being unrealistic and somewhat delusional based on the current situation we find themselves in, and the lack of self-awareness with respect to some of the bizarre and esoteric aspects of some of the obsessions of the individuals in question. There is also a lack of self-awareness with respect to decades of unending failure; none of these people seem to ever ask why their target audience rejects their message.

It is possible my ideas are all wrong as well. However, I argue otherwise, which is my right (and others will argue for their own ideas, as is their right). 

Of course, there is a difference between prescriptive and descriptive. It is certainly true that if the ideas of McCulloch or of myself or anyone else is prescriptively necessary than that argument should be made, even if the current descriptive situation with respect to White attitudes makes the prescription seem unrealistic. We cannot rely on description to make policy. After all, a purely descriptive approach – basing policy on what White public opinion currently is – would be to promote the “racial status quo” (like Weissberg) or to promote Sailerian “citizenism” (aka civic nationalism). However, I argue that McCulloch and others are also prescriptively wrong and I promote my own prescription instead, for all the reasons given here and in all my previous work on the subject.

But description should not be ignored.  Although we should not let description determine what we offer in general as a prescription, it does affect the form in which our prescription can take and also definitely influences the probability of success for our prescription, and, most practically, affects the approach we should take in achieving our prescriptive objectives. 

Ultimately, we need things like opinion polling and other empirical methods for understanding why Whites reject separation, what would make them change their minds, and if they would accept separation, in what form would they accept it? Again, that should not change our prescription if we believe our prescription is right and the White masses are currently wrong; instead, we can try and educate them and/or await for more propitious times.

But, again, description can tell us what approach we should take for that education and tell us what non-essential details of our prescription can be changed to make it more palatable, without changing the essentials. Who knows?  Maybe people would want to be evaluated by calipers and DNA tests; I doubt it – but let’s find out. Of course, those opinions shouldn’t ultimately influence whether those things are good or bad from a racial perspective, but if we deem them to be non-essential then at least we’ll know if that correlates with White opinion, and we can proceed from there.

We need data.

More on the Ethnotype

More thoughts.

A correspondent has shown interest in my ethnotype idea and has made two major suggestions, one I mostly agree with and the other I have some reservations about but partially agree with.

First, the suggestion was made that the ethnotype is best conceived as a normal distribution. Thus, while all the possible (and, of course, existing) genotypes of an ethny contribute to the ethnotype, some are more possible, or more frequent, than others.  Therefore, one will observe a cluster of more common genotypes defining the central or median part of the normal distribution curve, with outliers (the y axis is of course frequency, the x axis may be defined in various ways; perhaps a 3-D rather than 2-D distribution is best; in any case the genotypes making up the ethnotype can be distributed both relative to each other and relative to those of other ethnies).

This has certain advantages.  One can observe how the central tendency varies with time.  If one wanted, one could break up the genotypes to look at various traits (see second point below, but this in my opinion deviates from what I’m considering here, which is the entire genotype as an integrated genetic unit.  Another important advantage is how it handles the question of miscegenation and assimilation, including the assimilation of hybrids (this assumes that hybrids would be assimilated and not ejected from the population, which could be favored).  Consider mixing across wide racial lines.  Assume small-scale mixing that affects only a small fraction of the population.  This would increase the range of possible, and actual, genotypes, but would not really alter the mass of more central genotypes that make up the median ethnotype.

On the other hand, more massive miscegenation, assimilation, etc., particularly with widely divergent populations, would indeed shift the entire normal distribution and alter the central/median types, indicative of more serious effects on genetic interests.

In general, this may not be a bad idea.

The second idea, of which I am less enthusiastic, is to tie the ethnotypes to phenotypes, stressing functional genes (and, as above, possibly dividing the ethnotypes, if desired, into more specific traits).  Now, this confuses my use of the ethnotype concept – that is genetic – with the more anthropological phenotypic view.  I’m not defining ethnotype to describe a racial phenotype or set of phenotypes.  I’m using it to express the reality that while individual phenotypes are ephemeral, the range of possible genotypes of an ethny can be reasonably stable over long periods of evolutionary time.  And by genotype, I consider the entire genetic integration of individuals of a population, not individual alleles in isolation.  Further, while I am willing to grant (true) functional genes a higher per-allele value than (true) non-functional genes (since the functional ones influence their own replication, I do not – for reasons I have discussed many times – relegate non-functional genes to irrelevance.  It is the entire distinctive genome that contributes to genetic interests.  One must be careful that a sole focus on form, function, and phenotype does not lead to a John Ray-like memetic attitude that large scale miscegenation and genetic replacement is acceptable as long as certain phenotypic traits are maintained (e.g., “White-looking” heavily admixed mestizos of Latin America).

Again, a focus on form, function, and phenotype (while it has its relevance in particular contexts) deviates from the objective of my ethnotype definition: to capture the reality of a relatively stable set of (genetically integrated) genotypes (genetic structures) that define an ethny and its genetic interests, and to distinguish the ethnotype from an individual and unique “one-shot” genotype.