Killing the Unicorns

This is a response to Ryan Faulk. In one of his recent videos, he complained that white conservatives do not show racial solidarity. You might as well complain that white conservatives are killing all the unicorns. Racial solidarity doesn’t exist. It never has and it never will. That is an implication of evolutionary theory.

First of all, what is race? Race is a categorization scheme for human beings based on phenotypic similarity. Humans evolved differently in different parts of the world, and there are also founder effects due to small populations migrating to new areas and expanding. So, yes, there are meaningful ways to categorize people into racial groups. African blacks are not the same as Native Americans. East Asians are not the same as Europeans. There are real differences, which go beyond appearance.

On the other hand, race is somewhat vague and arbitrary. Racial categories are fuzzy, not discrete. The distinction between species is much bigger and more discrete than the distinction between races.

For example, consider the distinction between brown bears and polar bears. Polar bears evolved from brown bears but are now a different species. Polar bears and brown bears can mate and produce fertile offspring, but that doesn’t happen in the wild because they den at different times of the year. Polar bears mate on the pack ice in the spring when brown bears are still hibernating on land. Also, there is no intermediate niche that can be occupied by an intermediate kind of bear. Polar bears are pack ice hunters of sea mammals, brown bears are land-based omnivores. At some point in the past an isolated population of brown bears evolved into polar bears and added a new branch to the bear family tree. Eventually, the brown bear and polar bear genomes will diverge to the point that they cannot interbreed and produce viable offspring. Species are like branches on a tree, which go their own way after diverging.

Races are more like waves on a choppy sea. This metaphor is called “adaptive topography”. The bumpy surface represents the distribution of genetic variation. Each bump (or wave) is a cluster of similar individuals — a race — but the area between the bumps is not empty. There are intermediate forms, genes flow between the bumps, and the bumps change over time. Races mix, merge, split, appear or disappear for all kinds of complicated historical and geographical reasons.

If you go to Kazakhstan, you will see people who are intermediate between European, East Asian and Middle Eastern. If you go to Mexico or Colombia, you will see people who are intermediate between Native American and European. The former is mostly due to races not being discrete. The latter is due to migration and mixing.

A race is not really a “thing”. It is a descriptive category of things. A category is not an object. A rock is an object. It has many parts, but those parts are held together by forces, which give the rock coherence. That’s why I can pick it up and move it as a unit. A race is nothing like a rock. It is not a composite object, held together by forces. It is a category within a classification scheme.

A race is not a subject. It has no will or awareness. It does not act in the world. The white race doesn’t have agency any more than the set of all left-handed men over 6 feet tall has agency. Both are merely descriptive categories to which individuals can be assigned. That’s why it is stupid to blame whites as a class for slavery and colonialism. White people never did anything as a unit.

Group agency requires the coordination of individual actions. A society is an organized group of individuals, not a category of individuals. Social organization is not based on shared genes. It is based on cooperation between selfish individuals.

Some people believe that society is based on shared genetic interests. Let me explain why that is false. Suppose that you have a population of individuals who are altruistic (that is, self-sacrificing) for the good of the race or species (or any group — it doesn’t matter). Now, suppose that you introduce a variant individual who is purely selfish: he only works for the good of his children, not for the good of the group. As a member of the group, he will receive transfers of energy from others, but he will not give anything back. Thus, he will have more energy to invest in his offspring. The selfish strategy will always outcompete the altruistic strategy.

That’s why love is a very narrow thing. We care for our mates, our children, our grandchildren, and maybe a little for our nephews and nieces, but that’s about it. Even though we all share about 99% of our genetic information, we are still selected for reproductive selfishness.

Society is not based on altruism at any level: global, racial, national or even tribal. It is based on cooperation between selfish individuals. A society can act in the world as a unit because it has an internal power structure. That structure also gives it internal coherence. A society is a kind of object and a kind of subject. A race is neither.

And that is why you don’t see racial solidarity. You didn’t see it in the colonization of the Americas, when European societies fought each other alongside native allies. You didn’t see it in the American Civil War. You didn’t see it in WWI. You didn’t see it in WWII. You don’t see it today in the Congo. You don’t see it in Detroit. It doesn’t exist. It never has. It never will.

Nobody killed the unicorns. They never existed.