[tosser350]

People need to realize we are built on hardware that is hundreds of millions of years old. We share a similar hormonal dominance hierarchy system with fucking lobsters. You can't just say it's </CURRENT YEAR> and expect these things to disappear. Tribalism was important for survival, trusting someone who didn't look like you could mean death and thus was selected for over long periods of time.

[jawns]

And then we became human and started not acting like lobsters.

We have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. Those allow us to drastically curtail what might otherwise be instinctive behaviors.

I know there are some determinists who say that free will is illusory and we're as much slaves to our genetics and instincts as lobsters are.

But it certainly seems as if, in practice, tribalism (at least the clear-cut type you're describing where we exclude people who don't look like us) is recognizable and avoidable.

[SirensOfTitan]

> We have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. Those allow us to drastically curtail what might otherwise be instinctive behaviors.

An excerpt from Julian Jaynes's 'Origin of Consciousness' comes to mind here:

> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

There exist a great deal of subconscious processes that effect behavior in ways that an 'individual' cannot necessarily perceive. Often, a person does something, then post-hoc uses narratization to fit those actions within their preexisting belief system and story of themselves. The important thing to note is that your perception of yourself is not you, and the world you perceive around you is not the world itself. Both act as very helpful mental models that help you navigate your world effectively. As with all models, however, they have holes, and the really damaging ones are the ones you're not aware you're not aware of (as you cannot even adjust for those weaknesses).

[vidarh]

Even though it's far from precise, I like Jonathan Haidt's suggestion in The Happiness Hypothesis that our conscious mind is like someone riding an elephant: He can nudge it in this direction or that, and a lot of the time that works. But if the elephant wants to go a different direction, it will, and you're just along for the ride. At which point you can acknowledge you're not in control, or decide where the elephant went is where you really wanted to go all along. Often we choose the latter to retain the illusion of control.

[Cybiote]

That a process is non-conscious does not necessitate that it is primitive or incapable of sophisticated inference and computation. Sophistication and conscious reportability are absolutely not anti-correlated. Indeed, if I were to lean one way, it would be against the things we consciously perceive as difficult, inferring from the Moravec Paradox.

Non-consciously accessible processes play an important role in our ability to reason, predict and control behavior in a manner Evolution could not anticipate. They are no less us.

[bykovich2]

One might go so far as to say that substance and sustenance of life dwells in those holes. I won't go so far, but someone (not me, of course) might.

[wutbrodo]

Sure, of course we curtail these behaviors. It's uncharitable to read the parent comment as suggesting that we ignore our conscious, moral minds. I understood him as simply saying that the dogmatic belief in humans-as-blank-slates is going to keep being belied by the way humans act in practice, even those who have as much a claim to conscious morality as anyone else. Something as subtle as why you get along with someone and choose to keep seeing them isn't fully-specified, and whenever something isnt fully-specified, our lizard brains have a strong chance to fill in the gap.

In case you think I'm arguing against a strawman, the blank slate view is _extremely_ popular, and likely even more so in the circles that this commentariat likely run in.

[graphitezepp]

Tribalism is harder to avoid than just recognizing it, much harder. I think you underappreciate how incredibly emotional irrational creatures we all are, and how much how we behave is informed by cognitive biases.

[colordrops]

> But it certainly seems as if, in practice, tribalism (at least the clear-cut type you're describing where we exclude people who don't look like us) is recognizable and avoidable.

No, it doesn't. I don't know anyone that has come even close to escaping tribalism.

[rawnlq]

If you choose friends who share values with you, "tribes" will naturally self segregate based on those values. Is that really so bad?

[emodendroket]

I, uh, do not see what that has to do with your friends being genetically similar.

[tomsthumb]

If one considers that the conservative vs. liberal spectrum in America has a statistically significant genetic [0] why would it not?

[0] - Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"

[emodendroket]

I have not found little correlation between sharing my values and phenotypes, and short of DNA testing my friends that's all I have to go on.

Further, while there may be a correlation, it's far from deterministic. Experiences count for a lot in developing values.

[bluthru]

We aren't blank slates. Genes inform a lot about who we are.

[emodendroket]

That vague truism doesn't seem like enough to justify racially- or otherwise genetically-based separatism to me.

[pdeuchler]

The fact that you can't discern between justifying racism and pointing out that racism comes from deep seated biological impulses is pretty scary

[HenryTheHorse]

> And then we became human and started not acting like lobsters.

Thank you for saying this.

As history has shown, it's only too easy to take a scientific research paper and draw some godawful conclusions from it.

We can - and must - do better.

[pdeuchler]

Drawing your argument to its logical conclusion, those that act on such impulses based on their genetics and instincts are less evolved than those who don't.

Sounds like something a plantation owner from the antebellum south would agree with.

Now obviously anti-racism isn't "the real racism", but I think it's kind of funny that many commentators here seem to think that by defining certain sects of people based on cherry picked attributes will somehow prove that we've moved beyond the biological impulses of discrimination.

[rwnspace]

It seems 'evolved' means whatever people want it to mean very early on into these types of discussion. Usually there's a notion floating around of 'more- or less-evolved' that's not very well thought-through. And often this kind of muddying is committed alongside wishful thinking in the first place ('Despite science, I am free will incarnate; it is that which separates man from beast, nobles from savages, wealthy from beggars!').

There are no moral imperatives to be found in genes or epigenetics, only moral factors. Hume's observation about is -> ought is as pressing as ever, despite what Sam Harris might have you think. It's particularly dangerous to believe the former is true, since we make such a habit of expanding and distorting the scope of empirical results to ideological fantasy-land near instantly.

Whether we tightly and uniformly prefer genetically similar friends, whether we conversely happen to like genetically diverse mates, or whether all of these are more generally attendant to environmental factors like diet and disease -- it remains that we can collaboratively use reason to decide on our 'oughts', not just pick the interpretation and scope of 'is' that we prefer at the time. Issues of justice and responsibility seem much more interesting than endlessly turning the wheel of sciencey-tribalism. We struggle enough to figure out how best to treat each other already.

[theWatcher37]

I'm not so sure, as it seems anti-tribalism can become it's own tribe.

[BearGoesChirp]

Even if we stop all overt biases, there is plenty of sub-conscious bias that is impossible to recognize as the personal level because of how small the effect is verses the sample size (and how poor we are at doing mental statistics). Until we get to the point that we have personal AIs letting us know every time we begin to favor in-groups slightly more than out-groups, there isn't the ability to correct for this.

[matkoboska]

You are on a cocktail party. Have had a few drinks with friends. You all start talking about spiders. How they are these wonderful tiny creatures to be protected. You know, they got rid of insects and it's actually good to be above this. After all we have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. We're not some freaking lobsters driven by phobias. And you know what? At this wonderful evening party, we all agree, that this is just the case. And then we all go home. Where, right after opening the door, you see this diguisting, big spider crawling on the floor. Without thinking twice you crash it with your shoe. And then -- using toilet paper perhaps -- pick up its remains and flush it in the toilet. Just to be sure that the motherfucker is really dead. Not to mention your 3 year old and 5 year old living in this house. And then, then, you realize. What happened? Just talked about it an hour ago. And then I got rid of this poor bastard anyway...

In a social setting, with people around having conversations, your brain cortex fires off. It's spinning like crazy. And the cortex is all about logic. It's all about intellect, a sense of morality, about a will, and group hierarchy, and talking, and relaxation. You get the picture. When the phobia kicks in... guess what... the first thing that will happen is that cortisol will turn off your cortex. In the stressful situation, in fight or run situation, your cortex is switched off brother. That's why this spider is dead. That's why after 30 years of perfect marriage you might do stupid things when 23 year old hot blonde is sexually provoking you. That's why live isn't white and black. Even in 2017.

[atapaiea]

Or, like my father-in-law, you go and grab a paper towel, pick up the spider, and let it go outside on front lawn. I have never seen him kill a spider. And some percentage of the time, more and more with each passing year, even though I am terrified of spiders, I don't kill them because of conversations like the one you describe.

Just because some people react with their emotion doesn't mean everyone does and it doesn't mean we have to.

[csomar]

This depends on your up-rising for the most part. When I was very young, there was this spider that had its house below my small desk. I grew up accustomed to these spiders and didn't allow my mother to clean them up.

Now, I don't fear spiders and also don't mind them as long as they don't wreak the place with their filaments. I was surprised when a cousin of mine was freaked out by one of them and wanted to insta-kill it.

Now if there is a bug... that's a whole different story. Even though, logically thinking, these beasts are the same.

[BearGoesChirp]

>I have never seen him kill a spider.

Given how many spiders are only inside or only outside spiders, you basically just said you seen him sending the spiders to their death. The person smashing the spider isn't much different than the person putting it outside.

Not the best source, but a good starting point: https://www.livescience.com/48479-spider-myths-busted.html

>Just because some people react with their emotion doesn't mean everyone does and it doesn't mean we have to.

And yet consider the example you gave in light of the current body of evidence.

[danans]

Most serious people who talk about preserving insects and arachnids do so because these animals provide the feed-stock for other animal populations, similar to plankton in the oceans, and they are an indicator of the health of an ecosystem, not because they are taken with their appearance (although of course some people do genuinely love their appearance).

One can easily espouse something like that while not wanting a big spider scurrying around in your house. Also, plenty of people (myself included) escort such spiders outside alive instead of smashing them, not the least because I don't want to smear their guts everywhere, creating more work.

[drewmol]

After the phobia kicks in, after the threat is neutralized, I encourage you to thoughtfully consider not wasting a flush to dispose of the dead spider/toilet paper combo.

[csomar]

> That's why after 30 years of perfect marriage you might do stupid things when 23 year old hot blonde is sexually provoking you.

How is that not logical? Spreading your genes to healthy young women seems like a straightforward choice.

[vidarh]

It might be beneficial to the propagation of your genes and still really bad for your personal life.

[ionised]

If spreading your genes is your only goal in life, sure.

[emodendroket]

> That's why after 30 years of perfect marriage you might do stupid things when 23 year old hot blonde is sexually provoking you.

Actually you have to make a number of conscious decisions to have an affair. "It just happened" is an excuse.

[rublev]

Nobody said that. They're saying you cannot reason yourself out of your boner. Just that the impulse will always be there, I just choose to ignore it.

[emodendroket]

My reading of the post above yours, in the context of the conversation it appears in, is that you cannot overcome your instincts so there's no point in even trying to rein them in. If it just means to say we don't live up to our ideals all the time, well, OK, that's true, but I don't see where it's going.

[honestoHeminway]

Yes, but its hard work- and maybe that hard work is not always worth the effort.

So instead of doing hard work, we decided to make tools to circumvent the bugs, for example by avoiding buggy routine executing personal communication - and instead discuss that paper online.

Work with the smart, no matter what skin colour, instead of doing the PC-Dance.

[BurningFrog]

>...trusting someone who didn't look like you could mean death...

If you read the article, it's actually not at all about people looking the same.

In the study, people had friends with similar smell genetics, and different immunity system genetics.

[Ultimatt]

You understand genetic similarity does not mean you look similar or come from the same tribe necessarily? Especially since the age of heavier than air flying machines.

[canoebuilder]

You understand genetic similarity does not mean you look similar or come from the same tribe necessarily?

That's exactly what it means. Knowing what we know about sexual reproduction and trait heredity what else could it mean? It's not like half your genome spontaneously arises in a zygote in some random location half way around the world.

[Practicality]

Evolution doesn't move fast enough for any technology to be relevant to the discussion of how this works.

[pizza]

You've confused kin selection with kin discrimination. The idea "because friends are genetically similar, an individual with the opposite genotype at a specific allele poses a bigger threat to your survival/fitness than someone with the same genotype at that allele."

Additionally:

> formal analysis has shown that selection for group adaptations requires special circumstances, with negligible within group selection (Fig. 4), such as when (a) the group is composed of genetically identical individuals (clonal groups, r=1), or (b) there is complete repression of competition between groups (i.e., no conflict within groups; Gardner & Grafen, 2009). It is useful here to distinguish adaptation and design from dynamics of how selection leads to design. The dynamics of selection can be examined with either an individual (inclusive fitness or kin selection) or group selection approach. However, only the individual level approach provides a general model of adaptation. The idea that individuals strive to maximise their inclusive fitness holds irrespective of the intensity of selection operating within and between groups (Section 2; Fig. 4). In contrast, as discussed above, group adaptations or maximization of fitness at the group level are only expected in the extreme case where there is no within group selection.

I really doubt your view is consistent with the conditions for selection in the group. If non-tribe-member competition caused significant competition between groups, then it far outweighs the pressure of in-group adaptation. If "friends are genetically similar" is a genetic adaptation from tribalism, then it has to be an enhancement from within the group when it lacks competition - you benefit from the adaptation relative to people within your tribe that don't have it. FYI the paper disagrees with the notion that friend similarity is likely a result of decision.

Personally I think that 1% relative similarity could easily be explained in the ambiguous language they use to explain why it was "mostly" homogenously European - why would it surprise me that the non-Europeans would tend to have less DNA in common with the friends they have while also likely having fewer friends per capita?

Though, possibly, because the most likely to be similar SNPs were related to smell (and therefore taste), and to linoleic acid, maybe it reaffirms that people who break you bread are your companions - and that there is a real difference between butter cultures and olive oil cultures :P

[0] https://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/west/pdf/WestElMoudenGardner_...

[emodendroket]

Adultery and murder have happened in just about every human society in the history of time but nobody thinks we shouldn't bother trying to suppress those impulses.

[libdong]

When murdering someone or cheating on your partner, you probably have a lot more time to second-guess your motives. When subconsciously judging a passer-by, you don't. In my case at least, they are long gone before I even realise that I've judged someone.

[emodendroket]

Yeah, but that's more akin to fantasizing about someone. Actually committing adultery is more akin to, say, refusing renters based on their race.

[bluthru]

I don't think you could ever make an argument that murder is good, but tribes have their benefits. For example, we know that homogenous societies have less conflict, a greater sense of community, and higher social trust.

[emodendroket]

So do smaller towns, but that doesn't seem to stop people from advocating urbanization here.

[bluthru]

Urbanization doesn't necessarily regress the issues I'm talking about, especially since cities can still have their own neighborhood and block communities.

Urbanization isn't unnatural and it agrees with our tribal instincts.

Look at Tokyo: extremely high density with extremely small social unrest. Paris, now a collection of different tribes, can't say the same.

[emodendroket]

Is that the only thing that's different about Tokyo and Paris? Beijing is over 95% Han Chinese and yet I don't think things look as harmonious.

On another note, I think Japan ends up with kind of a distorted picture since so much of the crime is associated with organized criminal groups with ties to legitimate business and government operating with a degree of openness that I think would surprise most Western observers. Dubro's Yakuza book is a great primer on the topic.

[bluthru]

>Is that the only thing that's different about Tokyo and Paris?

I'm not claiming that. I am claiming that multiculturalism plays a role, which many people refuse to acknowledge.

[BearGoesChirp]

Adultery has become vastly more socially acceptable. It isn't considered nice, but it doesn't get you killed anymore.

And for murder, that can be a bit of a tautology as socially unacceptable killing is murder and anything else isn't considered on the same level as murder. But if we consider killing that isn't considered murder and if you consider forms of killing that, if not legal, are punished lighter than murder, it becomes clear that our society does allow some forms of killing others.

[emodendroket]

Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument? Use sexual assault if you prefer. The point is that a behavior being natural or instinctual doesn't make it moral or desirable.

[BearGoesChirp]

>Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument?

It does if there are enough nitpicks showing that natural behaviors are becoming more accepted because they are natural. That isn't to say they are acceptable, but they are more accepted. And this doesn't have to be true of all behaviors, because there are many factors at play. It is even possible there could be a trend where behaviors are becoming more acceptable because they are natural even if all behaviors were becoming less acceptable, if there was another stronger force acting to make all behaviors less acceptable.

But if we want to get to the actual argument first presented, we would have to realize that comparing it to murder, adultery, or sexual assault is a strawman to begin with. The OP wasn't defending going around and murdering people who didn't look like you. They were saying that millions of years of evolution will influence our behaviors in small ways. It would be compared to other preferences, such as preferences in intimate partners. So, is wanting to have a specific gender, race, etc. in an intimate partner wrong? Is it socially unacceptable?

[emodendroket]

This is a philosophical question as much as anything else, but I believe that, whether we are successful in perceiving it or not, there is such a thing as objective right and wrong as distinct from social acceptability. I'm hesitant to say anything about how people should pick romantic partners, but it seems to me as though that is actually rather considerably narrowing the scope of what we're talking about. I do think it is wrong to intentionally seek to form an ethnically homogenous group of friends and associates.

[castis]

Most of us would agree with you, I think what OP is saying is that it's irrational to say things like "It's 2017, who murders people anymore!?". People still murder, but we should definitely continue to try suppress that behavior.

[emodendroket]

Usually a post like the OP's is a lead-in to an argument about why discrimination is actually fine and shouldn't be fought, so I guess I let my previous experiences get ahead of what the post actually says.

[colordrops]

It's more nuanced than that though. The question is where to draw the line about which behaviors are bad and which ones aren't. Things like murder are obviously bad in most cases and should be suppressed, but social structures are not so clear cut. If there aren't any clear consequences to a instinctual behavior then it's probably better to not suppress it.

[emodendroket]

There are lots of clear consequences to "tribalist" behavior, especially if we mean the obvious example of racism.

[freeflight]

Depends on the behavior and even the consequences are not as "clear" as you make it sound because reactions to behavior can be rather subjective. Context actually matters even tho it's too often ignored these days in favor of generating drama.

It's a factor way too often ignored with this issue: If "hurting people's feelings" will become a crime, then we will see no end of regulating "undesired behaviors" because people get their feelings hurt in the most subjective and unintended ways [0].

So much about "obvious examples of racism".

[0] http://thedmonline.com/greek-life-retreat-ends-abruptly-bias...

[emodendroket]

Redlining. School segregation. Unequal economic opportunity. Disproportionate use of force in encounters with police. You get the picture. These are all negative effects of racism.

[colordrops]

there are countless facets to tribalism, and racism doesn't have to be one of them. But in any case my point is more general in nature and not about tribalism.

[emodendroket]

It's really hard for me to see how you can treat "genetically similar tribes" and races as unrelated concepts.

[colordrops]

The concept of races and racism are completely orthogonal.

[BurningFrog]

Am I the only one not seeing the adultery/murder connection here?

[emodendroket]

If it is true, as is often claimed, that racism is universal and therefore fighting it is pointless or should not be done, then the same should be true of other universally-occurring antisocial behaviors.

[BurningFrog]

Aha. Several non obvious steps there for me :)