ONE of the reasons why immigration is so destructive to the West we hardly dare discuss. We are genetically different. We have followed a very different evolutionary strategy from everywhere else in the world. I call it the ‘Genius Strategy’. It neatly explains, of course, why almost every invention you can think of – why almost the whole of the modern world, 85 per cent of important innovations – have emerged from a tiny area in Northern Europe and it explains why that same area is now allowing itself to be overrun by people from Africa and Asia.
Most peoples adopt what is called an ethnocentric strategy. Computer modelling has shown that, all else being equal, the group that is high in positive ethnocentrism (in-group co-operation) and negative ethnocentrism (out-group hostility) will, eventually, always come out on top, displacing its rivals. However, things are not always equal and, clearly, some Western peoples have developed a very different strategy.
What if a group developed relatively high intelligence (because it was adapted to a cold ecology with myriad complicated survival problems to solve), high positive ethnocentrism but relatively low negative ethnocentrism? Then you would have, as research has shown, Europeans, who are responsible for 97 per cent of the innovations catalogued in Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment. Eighty-five per cent of these innovations are from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia (which does not include Finland).
Low negative ethnocentrism would permit the group a greater ability to trade, learn from other groups, pool resources and so, ultimately, it would permit the creation of an extremely large coalition with a very large gene pool. This low negative ethnocentrism is why we developed the household system, where youngsters went off and trained with unrelated families, something unthinkable in a clannish society. This group would be more likely than a less genetically diverse one to produce geniuses; people who would come up with amazing inventions that benefit the group, especially in warfare.
Why is optimum genetic diversity so important? There is much research on the nature of genius but it is widely agreed that there is a specific ‘genius’ type, as I explore in my book Sent Before Their Time. The genius is characterised by the (highly genetic) traits of extremely high – outlier – intelligence and moderately high psychoticism; that is to say moderately low agreeableness and moderately low conscientiousness. This is because original, ground-breaking ideas will always cause offence and involve thinking outside the box. Low conscientiousness predicts breaking the rules, while low agreeableness predicts not caring if your ideas cause offence. Very high intelligence predicts the ability to solve extremely difficult problems. This is an extremely rare combination and it goes together, as with DNA pioneer Jim Watson, with being eccentric and being prepared to say things that are ‘offensive’ simply because they are true.
For this reason, genius will occur due to unlikely, but possible, combinations of genes, and geniuses will usually be born to parents who are not themselves geniuses, though they may have relatively high intelligence. Hence, a relatively large gene pool will be necessary to produce a significant number of geniuses, but they will also be more likely to occur in societies that have evolved relatively high intelligence. But that isn’t sufficient. There has to be a large gene pool – and an optimum level of anti-social people – for genius to manifest.
As such, the genius contributes at the ‘group level’ and a group that produces the optimum relatively low number of geniuses will be more successful than a group that is otherwise the same but produces fewer geniuses. Such a group will come up with amazing inventions – at the hands of its geniuses – that will permit it to dominate other groups and to spread. The flip side of the genius is the low IQ psychopath or the useless dreamer, but these – for the group – are a price worth paying the genius.
This is the European strategy. The Japanese are evolved to an even harsher ecology. As a Japanese colleague and I showed, they are also more intelligent than Europeans, but they produce far lower levels of per capita genius. Their gene pool is smaller (due to the harshness of the ecology, there’s less room for deviation), their levels of psychoticism are very low (as co-operation is so vital in such harshness), they have lower levels of genes associated with curiosity (as this is more likely to kill), and there are few high IQ outliers due to this smaller gene pool. Hence, their strategy is to be intelligent and ethnocentric, but not to produce geniuses. For a people who were so ‘up against it’ in their evolution, the flipside of genius – the disruptive psychopaths and useless dreamers – were simply not a price which they could afford to pay (all of this can also be said about the Finns, by the way).
The ‘genius’ group evolutionary model will involve a trade-off between ‘genius’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. Groups with high levels of genius but low levels of ethnocentrism will triumph over even intelligent groups with high levels of ethnocentrism but low levels of genius so long as certain conditions are met. Specifically, the effectiveness of the genius-driven innovation combined with the genius group’s (low but activated) level of ethnocentrism must be sufficient to triumph over the higher level of ethnocentrism present in the more ethnocentric group. As long as this is the case, the genius group will be able to win in situations of group conflict. However, this is less likely to be the case when the ethnocentrism of the genius group drops too low in comparison to that of the ethnocentric group.
Under normal, harsh Darwinian conditions, this ‘genius strategy’ has clearly been triumphant. British geniuses set off and continued the Industrial Revolution, British people spread around the world, the British Empire constituted a quarter of the globe and English is the international language. However, ethnocentrism is an instinct that is induced by stress and, in particular, by mortality salience. We are evolved to a situation in which we are surrounded by death and where child mortality is about 40 per cent. We now live in a Europe where it is less than 1 per cent.
In such circumstances, evolved instincts – such as ethnocentrism and also religiosity – tend to be induced to a much lesser extent. For this reason alone, many Western peoples are dangerously low in ethnocentrism; they are in an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ where their low ethnocentrism allows them to be increasingly occupied by people who are adapted to be very high in ethnocentrism, especially in negative ethnocentrism. To make matters worse, as I explore in my book Breeding the Human Herd, until the Industrial Revolution we were under harsh selection for a ‘fitness factor’ which included the significantly genetic trait of being group-oriented (ethnocentric). These harsh conditions collapsed much earlier in Western Europe than in the rest of the world.
However, the other situations that seem to induce ethnocentrism and religiosity – which often sanctifies group-adaptive traits – is general uncertainty, feeling under stress, and feeling excluded and disempowered. It may be that the uncontrolled mass immigration that much of Europe is currently experiencing may be enough even for the ‘genius strategy’ countries to return to an optimum level of ethnocentrism.
In addition, my research has shown that when you control for intelligence it is the highly genetic factor of conservatism that predicts fertility, so we may start to move back towards a conservative (and religious) society. Of course, this will not necessarily be the best place to be a norm-questioning genius.
