A Darwinian Theory of Ethnicity, "Race," and Nationality

Abstract

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. Abraham Lincoln (1971:40) Introduction The figure summarizes this paper. The theory it proposes views large-scale human sociocultural evolution (aka world history) as a Darwinian speciation cycle that started with the origin of Homo sapiens somewhere in the Great Rift Valley of east Africa, proceeded to the worldwide dispersion of small populations of that species, and to their ethnic and racial diversification. But then, instead of driving straight ahead to the typical endpoint of the cycle (and the start of a new one) via the evolution of new hominid species from these populations -- i.e., speciation -- Homo sapiens suddenly reversed field and began fostering closer and closer contact and interchange among them all. Nations and nationalities, major instrumentalities in this process, remain dominant (though declining) features of our life today. This much is history -- past and present (solid lines in the figure). The rest is future (dashed lines), and no future is predictable with certainty. The theory offered here, then, proposes only a conditional and probabilistic, not an inviolably deterministic or prophetic, prediction: If the population contact just mentioned continues on its present course, it will very likely produce a global consolidation of Homo sapiens into a single population consisting of one ethnicity, one race, and one nationality. Darwin's explanatory mechanism for the evolution of all species of life -- namely, toward maximum species survival-fitness (Darwin [1859] 1968; see Klein 1999:3) -- is the basic theoretical support for this prediction (there is empirical support too, as we shall see). That is to say, insofar as global species consolidation would advance the survival-fitness of Homo sapiens far beyond that which any ethnic, racial, or nationality population could ever hope for as a separate entity, D arwinian natural selection will favor such consolidation. The theory that has just been outlined will be referred to hereinafter, for brevity's sake, as OD2C2 (with all due apologies to R2D2 and Y2K). The next section describes, and cites appropriate evidential grounds for, the five turning-points of OD2C2. Then, in the sections that follow, the discussion will focus on explaining the transitions from one turning-point to the next. Five Turning-Points Origin There is now a general consensus among paleoanthropologists and geneticists that the species Homo sapiens (latest product of the 2.5 million year-old evolution of the genus Homo), evolved roughly 200 thousand years ago, somewhere in the southern limb of the Great Rift Valley that stretches some 1500 miles through eastern Africa from the southern end of the Red Sea into present-day Tanzania (see Klein 1999:146, 257, 511-514; Ayala 1995:1935; Tattersall 1995:243-246; Marks 1995:17; Fagan 1989:81-120; 1990:15, 20; Wilford 1995; compare Wolpoff, Zhi, and Thorpe 1984:464-467; Norris 1999).'''''' Homo sapiens seems to have spent its first 150 thousand years eking out a precarious but mostly peaceful existence in small, nomadic, food-foraging bands that were slowly growing and dispersing locally -- that is, up and down the African Rift Valley -- and coexisting there with other hominid species that have not survived (see Tattersall 2000). Dispersion: Local and Non-Local However, about 50 thousand years ago (see Klein 1999:494; Stringer and McKie 1996:143-169) -- and almost surely under pressure of competition -- some of these bands began foraging beyond the valley itself, thereby taking the first steps in what would turn out to be a two-thousand-generations-long, leapfrog, push-me-pull-you, journey to the ends of the Earth. In the course of this journey, many bands would be killed off by one thing or another, but others would survive to establish settlements on all the major landmasses of the Earth except Antarctica: south, west, and north Africa, Arabia and the Middle East, Eurasia generally, Australia and Polynesia, Siberia, the Arctic, the Americas, and, less than 2 thousand years ago, New Zealand (see Fagan 1990:234; Molnar 1992:190). …