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July 2007 

The Genetic Advantage of the Oil Industry

Birth Rates and Occupation

Besides high profits, and probably because of them, the oil industry seems to be supporting a substantial reproductive advantage for its employees. Adding insult to the injury of high gasoline prices, based on a recent Neuropolitics.org survey, those employed by the oil industry had more children than any other industry, while those employed in journalism and hotel service had the lowest.

Our surveys attract a highly educated community, and their reproductive rates tend to be lower than population averages. Higher education levels are particularly devastating to female reproduction, especially if females obtain a post-graduate degree. Males are not nearly as impaired by advanced educations, which can indeed be a reproductive advantage if they coincide with higher income.

But let's take a look at some of the occupations of our 3,501 respondents and their associated number of offspring. We cannot, with any assurance, say that these reproductive rates maintain their relative ratios when compared to the general (but less educated) population. However, the trends are still interesting, and warrant some discussion. In the graph below, see the average number of children by industry for selected occupations.

Average Number of Children by Industry of Occupation

In the Secret Symbiosis, we noted that Conservatives, especially Conservative males, are much more likely to be in the manufacturing, energy, construction, transportation, and trade industries, while the Liberals gravitate towards the education, information processing, health care, journalism, and the arts.

And as can be seen, the "Conservative" industries have higher birth rates, while the "Liberal" industries have lower birth rates. But the oil industry is unusually elevated, and stands apart from the other "Conservative" industries.

What is the significance of the oil industry having exceptionally high reproductive rates? The occupations that children choose are correlated with parental occupation, and this implies that humans are regulating the composition of their own labor supply analogous to the way ants pheromonally modulate the proportions of their castes to match the demands of their environment.

But over and above this simple economic modulation of reproductive rates to support the varying demands of industry, it may indicate a variation of collusive behavior not too unlike religious groups that practice economic endogamy.

Economic endogamy is a common practice among tightly-knit religious groups, where they collude to promote economic advantages among religious insiders. This collusion provides a reproductive advantage, and is particularly successful when organized religious groups maintain a solid foothold in secular economies.

The fact that reproductive advantages are also obtained within the confines of an industrial sector certainly makes it an interesting candidate in the study of population biology. We will go through the interesting religious propensities of the various industries in a later edition of Neuropolitics.org.

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The Politics of Genetic Distance

Do White Populations in Racially Mixed Regions Become More Conservative Over Time?

One of the more prominent variations in Conservative and Liberal behavior lies in their diverse preferences for the sizes of their social groups. On average, Conservatives prefer smaller and behaviorally coordinated groups.

This is especially true for females, which isn't surprising, as social group sizes relate directly to genetic distance, sexual selection, and reproduction (see Conservatives, Liberals, and Social Networks). Conservative females have the greatest preferences for smaller, face-to-face social groups, and have, on average, the lowest political awareness of the outside world. They are also the most genetically selective when it comes to reproduction, that is, they tend to mate with genes most similar to their own.

While the variations in Liberal and Conservative preferences for group size implies that evolutionary game theory has run amok, there is a method to this madness. The smaller social and genetic bandwidth of the Conservative facilitates altruistic behaviors and defense in new or sparsely populated territories.

The Disadvantages of Small Breeding Populations

But this preference for small groups has also been a bit of a problem for conservatism--especially religious conservatism. Evolution tends to favor subpopulations within a species that maintain high population densities. The Conservatives, and in particular the religious Conservatives, ever trying to avoid the "decline" in morality of the secular world, frequently attempt to make large populations behave like smaller religious groups, which is a tall order for a large multi-ethnic urban population.

This creates a strong desire to emigrate, which not only relieves pressure on the parent urban population, but also improves birth rates and lowers genetic distance among the emigrants. Conservatives are "pressure release valves" for dense urban populations. Historically, new colonies have had high rates of extinction, unless they maintain close ties with the parent population to facilitate technological change and defense.

The advent of the modern-day suburb has made emigration a much less risky and reproductively advantageous move, and the genetics of the surrounding suburbs are less racially mixed than the parent urban population, though not as racially pristine as long-distance emigration into rural areas. Distance from urban centers and genetic distance are inversely correlated variables.

The advent of the city has been an evolutionary wildcard that liberalism has held over conservatism. Liberalism adapts better to larger group sizes, which have substantial economic and military advantages over dispersed rural populations. The survival value of cooperative and specialized urban life has been an inducement for social behavior to be organized around wider genetic distance.

The Reproductive Value of Genetic Distance

Humans seem to be assigning some sort of reproductive value to genetic distance. This assignment is the foundation of racism, as the lower the assessed reproductive value of a race, the greater the tendency towards spiteful racial prejudice. Based on all the data we have collected to date, Caucasian Liberals maintain, on average, a higher reproductive value for other racial groups.

Caucasian Liberals are more likely to reproduce with non-white partners, at least when compared to Conservatives. While Conservative females are the most genetically restrictive political-gender cohort, Conservative males are especially interesting, in that they break rank, and apply racial restrictions in mating that are on a par with females.

Females, who invest the most time in child care, are more genetically exclusive than males. The Conservative male is the only male that emulates the higher female tendency for racial exclusiveness. Caucasian genes are "leaking" out of the Caucasian gene pool primarily due to non-Conservative males. The white Moderate, Libertarian, Nonpolitical, and Liberal males seem quite willing to mix up their genes with non-whites.

Trends in White Conservatism and Racial Mixing

Given the tendency for the genetic heredity of political attitudes, the Caucasian component of racially mixed areas will "leak" primarily on the non-Conservative side of the political spectrum. Over the long run, this should result in a steadily increasing genetic disposition towards conservatism among the remaining Caucasians.

Neighborhood segregation by race, ethnicity, and economic status is one of the more ubiquitous features of dense populations. Based on our data, (see Cultural Integration and Political Affiliation), Caucasian Conservatives live in whiter neighborhoods than Caucasian Liberals (or any other political affiliation).

Among Caucasians, the race of their current partner is highly correlated with the racial composition of the neighborhoods they live in, therefore, Conservatives are more likely to maintain lower reproductive genetic distance within a multi-ethnic metapopulation.

While the maintenance of the Caucasian gene pool within mixed-race metapopulations seems to be more effectively managed by white Conservatives, all political cohorts contribute to some degree, even Liberals. However, over the long run, we would expect a stronger genetic disposition towards conservatism among the remaining whites that have managed to reproduce many generations within a multi-racial metapopulation.

However, so many factors are at play, and the preference to mate within or outside one's own racial group has numerous environmental influences, and appears to vary with age. Of all the political affiliations, Conservatives are the most influenced by social cues, that is, their racial attitudes adjust more quickly to the environment.

This phenomenon was on display after 9-11, when Caucasian Conservatives shifted rapidly against Middle Eastern ethnicities and Islam, while Liberals hardly budged an inch (see 9-11-2001: Ethnic and Religious Attitudes Five Years After).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Exclusive Fitness

The Evolution of Mass Murder

Cho Seung-Hui prepares for his entry into Hamiltonian Inclusive Fitness history. Was he a highly-functioning autistic?

Every now and then, the underworld of human evolution rises violently to the surface. Such was the case with the recent massacre at Virginia Tech. When Cho Seung-Hui declared "you decided to spill my blood" in his pre-massacre diatribe, what was he talking about? Cho would elaborate: "for my children, for my brothers and sisters that you fuck, I did it for them." As Cho implied, genetic selection and the all too frequent practice of mass murder are not such odd bedfellows.

Cho was cleaning house for his genes, and the elevated propensity for non-reproductive males to commit "altruistic" suicide, also on display in Iraq, is one more demonstration of Hamiltonian inclusive fitness gone wild. Of course, the "altruism" committed by Cho was for the benefit of his genes, and if he couldn't reproduce, he was going to reduce the numbers of competing genes that were standing in the way of his "brothers and sisters".

Cho's first victim was Emily Hilscher, the pretty white coed that was the trigger point for his murderous rage. With nothing more than a simple romantic rejection, something that most males have encountered more than once in their lives, Cho plunged headlong into Hamiltonian Inclusive Fitness history. Even if Cho seemed normal to Emily, Caucasian females have low preferences for Asian males, while Caucasian males have high affinities for Asian females--putting the reproductive squeeze on Asian males living in predominately Caucasian areas.

Prior to his romantic rejection, Cho's behavioral inhibition mechanisms were already teetering on the brink, most likely due to his undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a form of high-functioning autism. AS victims can marginally function in society, but have poor social skills, and a noted inability to detect and empathize with the emotional states of others.

The violent rage of AS victims is not uncommon, and a number of mass-murderers have been diagnosed with the disease. But AS, and autism spectrum disorders in general, give us a window into this neural assignment mechanism of human "value" that occur so naturally that we are not even aware that it is happening.

On average, humans maintain a slightly dark and suspicious view of other humans, and this dark view is remarkably consistent regardless of political affiliation--although Conservatives are slightly less generous than Liberals. This dim view of human nature is no doubt warranted, as evolution has been not-so-secretly under the influence of zero-sum game theory, that is, the ability to gain a reproductive advantage at the expense of others.

But this low "value" of others is usually coupled with a "high" value of a smaller subset of the population--usually a genetically close subset. One of Darwin's problems with his own theory were the social insects, and in particular--the bees. Why were the worker bees sterile? Further, why were they sacrificing their lives for their queen?

To resolve this, Darwin would toy with the idea of group selection, whereby the unit of natural selection became the group, and superseded individual selection. However, the proliferation of genes favoring group selection required a special set of circumstances which were not always applicable in the evolution of altruistic behavior in most species.

Enter William Hamilton. With the science of genetics fully in hand, Hamilton derived the rules for Inclusive Fitness, or Kin Selection. Technically, inclusive fitness is defined as the individual's relative genetic presence in the gene pool in the next generation. Thus, the evolution of parental care and altruism towards close kin were following the same rules as individual selection, factored by Hamilton's coefficient of relatedness.

Exclusive Fitness

The evolution of empathy was founded on genetic closeness, and would owe much of its existence to the evolving behaviors associated with both mating and parental care. The neurology that supports child care, sexual attraction, and mating would make its way into affiliative social group behavior on a larger scale.

But while Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory would provide the connection between the evolution of social altruism and individual selection, the evolutionary biologists were somewhat quiet about a wide variety of behaviors that were working inclusive fitness from the other, and much darker side--the deliberate interference with the reproductive capacity of "different" genes--exclusive fitness.

The propensity for species to engage in exclusive fitness, that is, the increased presence of one's own genes by the violent or non-violent elimination of "different" genes, is one of the consequences of the Hamiltonian inclusive fitness model. Altruistic behaviors towards genetically close conspecifics are correlated with selfishness and spiteful behaviors towards genetic distance.

The tactics employed in exclusive fitness would fall under the generic category of reverse altruism, and would vary by gender--from the male propensity for warfare and the extermination of populations, to the tacit and barely noticeable female tendency to be genetically restrictive in sexual selection. Ironically, both tendencies came face-to-face in the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

The Neurobiology of Mass Murder

Mass murder, when perpetrated by an organized group of humans, is fundamentally about genetic distance. With individuals, this is less clear. But the descent into cannibalism highlights the relationship between genetics and murder, which, among the vertebrates, occurs more readily with genetic distance.

Human cannibals tend to follow the same rules of genetic distance as do the more primitive vertebrates. Jeffrey Dahmer's victims were typically minorities, usually African-Americans. Interestingly, Dahmer exhibited many of the symptoms associated with Asperger's Syndrome. The more recent mammalian additions to the brain interfere quite well with the tendency towards cannibalism, except in the case of persistent starvation.

Millions of years of neural evolution can be broken down by a few weeks of hunger. The progressive deterioration of the behavioral inhibition mechanisms during starvation has some correlates with the behaviors associated with autism spectrum disorders, and in particular, Asperger's Syndrome.

Autistic symptoms are rather generic to a myriad of neurological problems, which has led to a rather large number of theories, from excess opioids to the lack of "mirror" neurons. There is no single neurological substrate of "autism", as is also the case with "depression", and "schizophrenia".

While severe autism disrupts social behavior to a great degree, the high-functioning autistic is engaged in social life just enough to make repeated attempts at reproduction, and is therefore susceptible to the problems of frustrated mating. Cho's behavior was certainly consistent with a poorly functioning serotonergic system, and not surprisingly, he was a periodic user of antidepressants.

Cho's fixation with Emily Hilscher was also consistent with an elevation in dopaminergic activity. The dopamine system is highly associated with romantic attachment. Elevations in dopaminergic activity have been associated with victims of AS, along with schizophrenia, another diagnosis that has symptomatic overlaps with AS, and has also been associated with Cho.

The activated dopaminergic system contributes heavily to motivational states and reward seeking, and when those expected rewards are delayed, the dopaminergic neurons prolong their activity, increasing the levels of dopamine and the corresponding levels of motivation. The serotonergic system is suppressed during these dopaminergically-fueled motivational states, which increases the probability of impulse violence.

Spurned reproduction produces strong frustration responses, and a considerable strain on the behavioral inhibition neural networks, particularly those managed by the serotonergic system. Further, it was the month of April, a period of increasing testosterone levels in males. Testosterone promotes increases in dopaminergic activity to facilitate mating.

All the elements were present for Cho's impulse aggression, but how did it escalate into the mass murder of people that had nothing to do with Cho's romantic rejection? The functioning of the nervous system is often exposed at the extremes of the human behavioral spectrum, and Cho's murderous rage exposes both the neural mechanisms associated with the complex neural rendering of genetic distance, and the "reward" or "harm" values associated with that rendering.

In humans, the resolution of genetic distance seems to be centered around the amygdala and hippocampus, in the left hemisphere in particular. Templates for physical attraction are established between birth and six years of age, and in later life, are more recallable from the left hemisphere. This certainly fits the profile of AS victims, as they tend to be more shifted towards left-hemispheric, dopaminergically-oriented cognition. They also seem to be more aware of ethnic cues.

Fortunately, it is a long way from the resolution of genetic distance and to the door step of mass murder. In mammals, predatory aggression adapts some of the same regions involved in the resolution of genetic distance, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, along with the striatum, cingulate cortex, temporal cortex, and prefrontal cortex. In short, it is a "wide-path" neural activity, integrating a large quantity of sensory information, activating memory retrieval networks, and constantly updating of the reward prediction networks to execute the behavior.

Mass murder is indeed facilitated by the evolutionary advancements in neural architecture. Not surprisingly, more sophisticated pictures of genetic distance and reproductive competition have wired human males with an extreme approach to altruism and spite, and a correspondingly greater propensity for altruistic suicide, the likes of which have not been seen on the planet since the arrival of the haplodiploid insects.

Altruistic suicide is mainly the domain of the male, as females are unlikely to sacrifice their lives except in cases of their own children. Males maintain a much wider genetic spectrum of self-sacrifice, a punishment laid out by the relatively low reproductive value of sperm relative to the ovum. A lone male can father thousands of children, while a female has a practical limit of about 20.

The Demographics of Suicide Bombers

The political significance of the male tendency for altruistic suicide is now being played out in the Middle East. Societies that generate large numbers of young, unreproductive males have a corresponding tendency towards social unrest and ethnic conflict. In a study of Hamas suicide bombers, 50% came from households of 8-15 members. Other studies have reported similar results with other terrorist groups. The reproductive potential of suicide bombers is low, and not so coincidentally, they tend to have a large number of siblings.

So there we have it, the human brain, almost like a Hamiltonian Fitness Calculator, seems to be evaluating the underlying probabilities of reproducing one's own genes against one's "brothers and sisters". This shows up more frequently in males, as they have, on average, the least valuable gamete. The lower the reproductive potential of that gamete and the greater the number of siblings--the greater the propensity for "altruistic" suicide. As America has found out in Iraq, it is hard to fight a war against a large number of surplus males.

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Charles Brack and Xi Zhang, July 2007

Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
           Zhang@neuropolitics.org