reviews

HISTORY

History and human nature
Nicholas Humphrey was enjoying Niall Ferguson’s “punk Gibbon” account of the horrors of the 20th century—until his semi-educated foray into evolutionary psychology
WRITING IN RESPONSE to history,” so be it. It certainly THE WAR OF THE WORLD Germany’s invasion of makes for good reading. Niall Ferguson Belgium in 1914, James Barr, Punk Gibbon is fine, provid(Allen Lane, £25) a physician and former presed there’s enough Gibbon— ident of the British Medical and there is. Association, had this to say: “The German Kultur So, I would gladly have left my review of the must be exterminated, and this savage breed as book at this point, with a wholehearted recomfar as possible wiped out… Germany has promendation of it as an important new analysis of duced no genius, there is no scope for individualthe social, economic and political causes of the ism, her work is the collective wisdom of combreakdown of civilised values, if only Ferguson monplace savants, she has never produced nor is had left it there himself. But he has not. He has ever likely to produce a super-man… The Allies written an introduction of 70 pages, in which he have shown their manhood and the capacity to reaches out to evolutionary psychology for furrule, we must therefore… raise healthy men and ther scientific insights into the historical process women who will hold their own in the battle of he describes. He regards this not just as an extra life… This can all be rapidly attained by intelliafterthought but possibly as the most important gent artificial selection, and the nation which contribution he has to make (see his Guardian produces the finest, noblest and most intellectuarticle of 11th July 2006). And, to judge by other al race will win in the long run.” reviews, his peers have taken him at his own As Niall Ferguson relates, by the first years of word as a bridge between history and scientific the 20th century the idea that human races must psychology. I and others on the psychology side struggle for biological supremacy—the “meme” have certainly been hoping for just such a rapof racism, he calls it—was spreading round the prochement between our science and theirs. world. Ways of thinking about humans that The racial world view, Ferguson writes, is “a would have been inconceivable 100 years earlisingularly successful ‘meme’ that was already er—survival of the fittest, selective advantage, replicating itself all over the world by the start of biological dead ends and supermen—were being the 20th century.” But here, I’m afraid, he is touted as scientific truths. already off to a bad start. For what is he adding of Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, explanatory value by calling it a “meme”? Well, came up with the idea of eugenics; Herbert what he might be adding would be the alarming Spencer championed social Darwinism. Yet it possibility that racist ideas are self-serving: that was not in Britain that these ideas found greatthey owe their success to their peculiar capacity est favour. Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, to turn men’s minds to serve the ends of racist Turkey and Serbia were soon showing how the ideology rather than human beings themselves. racist game could be played once people got That is roughly what Richard Dawkins meant really serious about it. when he coined the term “meme”—an element of The War of the World tells what happened next. culture that works in the mind something like a In this long but gripping survey of “history’s age virus, changing the behaviour of the individual it of hatred” Ferguson piles fact upon fact, horror infects in such a way as to help spread itself from on horror, to make the case that racism was a key one mind to another, even though the carrier may ingredient in most if not all of the 20th century’s get no benefit and may actually be harmed. In his uniquely devastating wars across the globe. He Guardian article Ferguson explicitly uses the does not say that racism was ever the sole cause: phrase “a virus of the mind,” suggesting he does economic uncertainty, the breakdown of empires, indeed think of racism as something that has accidents of history all played a part. The tecspread between people, not because it benefits tonic plates of the old world order were already people but because it benefits racism. on the move. But racial antipathy was a big comThis suggestion is not such an outlandish one, ponent of the subsequent conflicts. in theory. Daniel Dennett, for example, has The history is raw, revealing, carefully argued argued persuasively that just such an analysis and surprising. This is a revisionist account, with might help explain certain aspects of religious little respect for what have become standard belief. But could it possibly be a helpful explanaassumptions. The writing is opinionated and tion in the case of racism? On the evidence of laced with withering criticism of those with Ferguson’s book, the answer is no. As he shows whom the author disagrees. If this is “right-wing again and again people have in fact adopted racist

66 PROSPECT September 2006

REVIEWS/ HUMPHREY

“Alarmist and irresponsible” misreader of evolutionary psychology

attitudes because it has suited them all too well as individual human beings to do so—out of naked egotism, the pursuit of economic advantage, the desire to eliminate competitors and so on. So racism, far from being a troublesome invader that people might have wanted to throw off, takes hold because it appeals to rational selfinterest. That’s precisely the problem, and Ferguson’s use of the term “meme,” by hinting at a quite different dynamic for racism, misses the central point (which is actually his own point). Still, the concept of a meme is a slippery one, and some evolutionary theorists would say an unsatisfactory one. So perhaps we should not be too hard on Ferguson for nodding in the direction of a fashionable concept, even if he gets it wrong. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of his flirtation with a body of research he does not understand. For it turns out that Ferguson wants to have it several ways at once about racism. While on the one hand he calls it a meme, he also claims elsewhere in the introduction that it is not a cultural product at all but an instinct that is hardwired into human nature. Human beings, he suggests, have evolved to fear and hate other humans who are physically—and genetically—dissimilar, because this is a way of increasing their own reproductive success. How so? Because, he assures us, breeding with distant strangers is a bad strategy if we want our own genes to prosper. “For there is evidence from the behaviour of both humans and other species that nature does not necessarily favour breeding between genetically very different members of the same species.” The phrase “does not necessarily favour,” is, for Ferguson, uncharacteristically weak. And, as it happens, so it should be. For the evidence that in human beings breeding with distantly related members of the human species has any deleterious biological consequences is almost non-existent. Ferguson cites just one possible example, and gets it back to front. “When a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that their blood groups may be incompatible, so that only the first child they

conceive will be viable.” The problem at issue is the possibility that a rhesus-negative (Rh-) woman will mate with a rhesus-positive (Rh+) man and so—since the Rh+ gene is dominant— have a Rh+ baby with which she is incompatible. But in reality almost no Chinese people are Rh-, so the chance of this happening when a Chinese woman mates with a European man is negligible (less than 1 per cent). Europeans however are 15 per cent Rh-. So when a European woman mates with a Chinese man the risk is certainly important (15 per cent), but hardly greater than when she mates with a European man (13 per cent). Ferguson’s claim here is not just wrong, it is alarmist and irresponsible. The reality is that in general, humans run no significant additional biological risks from interracial breeding for the simple reason that, compared to most animal species, human beings are extraordinarily homogeneous genetically. In his bibliography Ferguson cites a paper in support of his ideas that deals with “optimal outbreeding” in quails. But what goes for quails is simply not what goes for homo sapiens. There may have been a time, earlier in human evolution, when distinct biological species of hominins, all descended from the same ape-like stock, were living together in Africa, and interbreeding might have been unproductive. But even then there is no reason to think that some kind of instinctive race or species-hatred was required to limit sexual relations. In general the boundaries between biological species can be, and are, maintained by a combination of positive sexual preferences and historical opportunity. Horses and donkeys don’t have to hate each other, even though mules are a dead-end for their genes: it’s enough that typically—in nature—they prefer their own kind. This is not to deny that human beings have at times seen racial miscegenation as a threat. Ferguson provides chapter and verse that it has often been so. But it is to deny that this has anything to do with an evolved taboo against having sex with people who may have slightly different genes. When Ferguson says, following his discussion of the supposed genetic risks: “We should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilised men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and again after 1900. They were… what made the second world war so ferocious,” he is talking in a way that no scientist would. This is Konrad Lorenz or Robert Ardrey talk, not modern evolutionary psychology. Ferguson then gives his faltering evolutionary thesis a further twist. For it turns out he does not believe that human beings always instinctively recoil from interracial mating. In fact, he admits, sometimes the opposite is true: the exotic is erotic. “The ‘hatred’ so often blamed for ethnic conflict is not a straightforward emotion. Rather, we encounter time and again that volatile ambivalence, that mixture of aversion and attraction.”
PROSPECT September 2006 67

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