Charles Darwin – Page 2 – THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

Warriors and wimps

The recurring theme of this book is that the opportunities created by sex differ from males and females. The reason of this asymmetry lies in the nature of their respective sex cells—sperm and eggs. Sperm are minuscule, biologically ‘cheap’ to manufacture, and are produced by the testes in astronomical numbers. Eggs, on the other hand, are comparatively large—small humming-birds, for instance, make eggs equivalent to 25 per cent of their body weight and packed with nutrients. Being ‘expensive’ to make, they are produced in much smaller numbers that sperm.

The consequences for the two sexes are profound. With a more or less fixed output of eggs, females cannot usually generate more offspring by taking on extra mating partners. The best option is to be careful in their choice of who fathers the young. Males have quite a different agenda. With almost unlimited supply of sperm at their disposal, the best reproductive strategy is to mate with as many females as possible, each of which will provide them with offspring.

From a male’s perspective, there are never enough females to go around and so, motivated by lust and sheer greed, each of them comes into serious competition with other philanderers. To be successful in the mating stakes, a male needs to win and win well. This rivalry manifests itself as raw aggression among the sturdy males of those species for which ‘biggest is best’. To be triumphant in battle, a male has to look like a warrior, act like a warrior—and mean it!

Competition for sex is the overriding evolutionary pressure responsible for fashioning the appearance of mature males, whether they be chest-thumping gorillas or heavily veiled fighting fish. This is because, in the struggle for supremacy, weapons and large body size have been overwhelmingly advantageous, enabling hefty, well-armed males to win more mates than feeble and less bold ones.

Over countless generations, macho males driven by their gonads have been willing to risk life and limb in order to rank among the most bountiful breeders of their kind. Such a valuable prize is always worth fighting for, and only the most pugilistic individuals stand a chance of winning—which is why the males of many species are larger and more irascible than their mates. To help them in their battle against rivals, warrior males throughout the animal kingdom have often become heavyweights, equipped with weapons enabling them to stab, ram, kick or wrestle. For those who compete for harems, the reward for being a successful male is proportionately high, and so the conflicts become that much more serious.

When a pair of bull elephant seals clash on the breeding beaches, no quarter is given. Each is a warrior fighting for the survival of his line. By far the largest of the seals, each bellowing bull is a quivering mound of flesh and blubber 6 metres (20 ft) long and weighting 3000 kilograms (6600 pounds)—five times the weight of a mature female… The combatants often tear their noses and gouge out chunks of their opponents’ skin. There is a lot at stake, and well-matched rivals do not give up easily. But inevitably, one of them backs off and awaits a further opportunity to challenge the beachmaster…

The odds are heavily stacked against the males. Fewer than one in ten become successful warriors commandeering their own stretches of the beach favoured by the females; the rest will die without issue or resort to sneaking a furtive mating here and there. Competition between the lusty males is therefore intense, and success will favour only the heaviest and most belligerent of them…

Horns and antlers

The most spectacular horns and antlers adorn the heads of the hoofed mammals. They come in an amazing array of shapes and sizes, resembling corkscrews, rapiers, daggers and meat hooks; some are tightly spiralled, others extravagantly branched. In many cases, the females are hornless…

Ibex, big-horn sheep, goats and musk oxen perform serious battering contests in which the opponents gallop towards each other and meet head on; it is a wonder that any participant survives such head-shattering impacts. The secret of their survival lies in the construction of their skulls…

Males of all kind have become embroiled in an arms race favouring those which can grow and deploy bigger weapons. The extinct Irish elk was one such species: the older stags sported a might spread of antlers that would dwarf those of modern deer. Like those of today’s warriors, such weapons are costly to grow—especially those of deer, which have to be regrown every year—and the individual has to be a very competent forager to find enough food to be able to ‘afford’ and replace them annually.

Stags sometimes sustain smashed antlers or broken legs, or are blinded in one eye. In one population, battles over rutting supremacy accounted for 20 per cent of all adult male mortality and in Germany 5 per cent of stags are killed every year through fighting. Some 10 per cent of bull musk oxen die from fractured skulls, despite the reinforced nature of their foreheads, and no less that 60 per cent of narwhals sport broken tusks or have pieces or twisted ivory buried into their flesh—doubtless all wounds uncured through fighting.

Sneaky males

The problem for most males is that they must often wait on the side-lines, sometimes for years, until they are in a position to challenge the dominant breeders—and then most will fail. In the interim, they resort to sneaky tactics. In southern fur seals, the beachmaster are typical warriors and each stakes out a territory which it defends violently from other males, creating the most vicious fights in the animal world.

The bulls aim for the vulnerable soft skin around the fore flippers, ripping huge gashes in them with their teeth. The combatants sometimes end up with horrific injuries, such as torn muzzles, dislocated jaws, missing eyes and great chunks bitten out of their pelts. At this time, the bulls appear to be immune from pain; those which have commandeered prime positions on the beach rarely stand down and they valiantly stave off challenges from neighbouring males. Many pups are crushed in the resulting mayhem on the crowded rookeries…

Several major lakes nestle in Africa’s Great Rift Valley. There are algal scrapers, leaf choppers, scale eaters, shell crushers, diggers, hunters and plankton filterers; there is even one species that survives by biting out the eyes of other fish. Many are colourful and have remarkable breeding arrangements; in Lake Tanganyika, fifteen kinds employ empty water-snail shells as receptacles for their eggs, although one, called Lamprolugus callipterus, is especially interesting. This shell-brooding cichlid holds the record of proportionately the largest males in the animal kingdom. The fully grown ones are giants, up to thirty times the size of their mates; in human terms, this is equivalent to the difference between a 80 kilogram (180-pound) man and the average newborn baby. There is a good reason for this disparity between the sexes…

Gender jumpers

So the warriors and dandies of the natural world may gain mates through brute force or low cunning. But so relentless is the drive to carry on their genetic line that the males of some species have evolved other quite astonishing ploys to maximize their breeding potential. One surpassing technique is gender jumping…

Aggression plays a key role in the life of a gender-jumping wrasse. Each territory contains a tyrannical male which firmly dominates his harem of six or more mates. Only by continually demonstrating his command over them can he prevent one of them from changing sex and usurping his position of power. When young, the small wrasse join the harems as spawning females at the bottom of the packing order and, bearing the brunt of everyone’s hostility, their masculine tendencies are suppressed. But as they grow, each has the potential to be a male. The chance to switch sex and status comes with the death of the despotic male. Within and hour or two of his disappearance, the largest and most dominant female becomes aggressive and starts to behave like the departed ‘master’, chivvying the rest of the females and defending the area against neighbouring males. Should one of them beat her into submission, her transformation will be halted. If not, within about ten days or so, ‘she’ will be irrevocably changed to a fully functioning ‘he’ and produce active sperm.

Big and brawny, that’s the female anemone fish (left). The wimpish male just supplies sperm. When she dies, he grows, jumps gender, and lays eggs.

Small is sexy

In the vertebrates and the insects, extreme sexual dimorphism—huge differences between the two sexes—has come about because the males have evolved into weapon-bearing warriors designed for acquiring harems. However, in species in which males have opted for dedicated monogamy, the females are usually the larger sex; in some cases, the males are miniaturized. ‘Dwarf’ males are found in a variety of flatworms, nematodes, crustaceans and molluscs. In the oyster Ostrea pulchrana, the large females host the small males on their shells and may even retard their growth through some chemical influence.

Charles Darwin was aware of degenerate males when he studied barnacles… Some barnacles are parasites, bearing little resemblance to crustaceans, and with separate sexes. The vanishingly small males enter their mates as free-swimming larvae and settle inside their partners’ tissues, resembling alien parasites themselves!

In some species, once the tiny male has made contact with his mate, he bonds with her for life. His body merges with hers, even sharing her blood supply, because once the male is in situ he depends utterly upon his ogreish mate for nourishment. In the end, the male is reduced to a fleshy appendage, a blob of testis under the complete control of the gravid female.

Adapted and abridged from Kevin MacDonald’s foreword to the 2011 book Raciology by Vladimir Avdeyev (read MacDonald’s entire review here or here).

Philippe Rushton once commented that science moves forward, continuing to gather data and refine its theories—with one important exception. A century ago, there was a robust Darwinian science of race differences, from differences in head shape and cranial capacity, to differences in intelligence and behavioral restraint. However, this young science was nipped in the bud.

But not because it was displaced by a new, powerful, empirically-based theory. Rather, the demise of racial science came about because of intellectual movements dominated by ethnic Jews and tightly linked to the political Left—the topic of my book, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in 20th-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Kindle edition now available).

This was a case of science being replaced by ideology—an ideology designed to oppose the idea that Europeans were in any way unique or superior. Ultimately, it was an ideology that rationalized the decline of Europeans and their culture that we see all around us today.

The new ideology decreed that humans were infinitely malleable creatures of their culture. It eventually became defined by the view that “race does not exist.” Franz Boas, the high priest of the new cult, was a strongly-identified Jew and committed Leftist. His famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a result of immigration from Europe to America was very effective propaganda weapon in the cause of eradicating racial science.

Indeed, it was intended as propaganda. Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (pdf), physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz, while not quite accusing Boas of scientific fraud, find that his data do not show any significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of immigration. (See summaries here and here). They also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a desire to end race-realist views in anthropology:

While Boas never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States. In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his point.

As a result of the massive success of this Leftist onslaught, the science of race differences languished. Whatever truths it had uncovered were forgotten.

In Raciology, the Russian journalist Vladimir Avdeyev resurrects the vast tradition of research on the physical anthropology and psychology of race differences. His book is an exhaustive summary of research in the field from the 18th century to the present. It includes a great many summaries of the research of individual scientists, many of whom have been virtually forgotten.

But Raciology is far more than a compendium of research. It also vigorously defends the idea that, as Avdeyev puts it, “the problem of race is the nerve center of world history.” It is intended to influence how people think about race in the context of history and current events.

Several themes recur throughout Raciology.

Race is overwhelmingly the result of biological inheritance, not cultural programming.

Beginning with Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, this body of theory and research proposed that the biologically-based racial characteristics of Whites have led them to be originators of superior cultures. The White race evolved in the north of Europe and spread south and east to be the main force behind the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, Egypt, India, Persia, and the Hittites.

The ancestral type of the White race—called the “Nordic” race originally by Joseph Egorovich Deniker—is characterized by blond hair, blue eyes, light skin, tall stature, and dolichocephalic (long-headed) skull with a well-developed prefrontal area (the area of the brain associated with intelligence, impulse control, and decision making).

Houston Stewart Chamberlain may be considered paradigmatic of a theorist who proposed that northern Europeans are a superior people.

All outstanding peoples that appeared starting in the 6th century in the role of true deciders of the fate of humanity as founders of nations and creators of new thinking and original art, were mainly of German origin. The creations of the Arabs stand out for their short duration; the Mongols only destroyed but they created nothing; the ingenious Italians of the Middle Ages were all émigrés, or of the north which was saturated with Lombard, Gothic, or Frankish blood, or they were Germano-Hellenes of the south; in Spain, the creative element was the Visigoths. The awakening of the Germans forms the foundation of European history, for their worldwide historical significance as founders of a completely new civilization and a completely new culture. [Introduction to The Foundations of the 19th Century]

Nevertheless, Avdeyev notes that, despite Chamberlain’s views on the centrality of the Germanic peoples, he advocated a union of Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples in defense of the White race. Indeed, a theme of Raciology is that “the scientists of Germany well understood that the differences between the Germans and the Russians were extremely insignificant.” In fact, Avdeyev notes that Russians have a higher percentage of light hair and eyes than the European population generally.

Naturally, the idea that Whites had superior traits went along with eugenic ideas of racial betterment. In the words of German racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther, quoted by Avdeyev, the question is “whether we have enough courage to prepare a world for future generations, [by creating a race] that has purged itself in racial and eugenic terms.”

Geneticist Fritz Lenz, writing in 1934, viewed creating and maintaining a superior race as the ultimate struggle:

Undoubtedly, one may lead our race to such an ascent and flowering like it has never achieved before. But if we lose heart, our Nordic race will utterly die… Before us stands the greatest task of history.

That is, active efforts must be made to preserve the best elements and to rid the race of detrimental elements by discouraging reproduction of those who are prone to criminality, low intelligence, or psychiatric disorders. Avdeyev expresses the fundamental goal of eugenics as follows:

Our main goal is crystal-clear: the creation of a new, super-perfected White Race, the moral and physical degradation of which has reached its limit.

Compare American writer Lothrop Stoddard, writing in 1920:

The eugenic ideal is… an ever-perfecting super race. Not the “superman” of Nietzsche—that brilliant yet baleful vision of a master caste, blooming like a gorgeous but parasitic orchid on a rotting trunk of servile degradation, but a super race, cleansing itself throughout by the elimination of its defects, and raising itself throughout by the cultivation of its qualities.” [Lothrop Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man; emphasis in original]

However, despite the great flowering of culture emanating from Europe, and despite the knowledge that Europeans and their culture dominated the planet, there is also a pessimism that pervades this literature—the idea that White racial elites tend to become eroded over historical time because of admixture with lesser types.

It was common among these thinkers to assert that the depletion of the Nordic racial stratum accounts for the decline of Greece, Rome, the Hindus, the Persians, and other Nordic civilizations. For example, Ludwig Woltmann:

The blonde element of the people defines its cultural worthiness, and the fall of great cultures is explained by the dying out of this element.

Eugen Fischer:

[In Greece] the death of the families of fully-vested citizens and the admission of the descendants of slaves and the aboriginal population as citizens, led… to collapse. Rome died of race mixing and the products of degeneracy.

And finally, Otto Reche, writing in 1936:

That which we call “world history” is in essence nothing more than the history of the Indo-Germans and their achievements; the powerfully rousing and simultaneously tragic song about the Nordic race and its idealism; a song which tells about how the strength of the race did what seemed impossible and reached for the stars, and how the strength quickly dried up when the “law of race” was forgotten, when the Nordic man ceased to preserve the purity of his blood and strongly mixes with races [that are] less gifted in cultural terms.

The psychological traits attributed to Nordics are principled moral behavior and idealism, high intellect, inventiveness, and, in the words of Gustav Friedrich Klemm, a proclivity to “constant progress” and science:

Members of that race most often strive for the unknown, for the sake of a pure idea, driven by the thirst of knowledge, and not self-seeking interest.

[Here MacDonald extensively summarizes his views on the handicaps of Nordic individualism before Semitic collectivism and ends his review thus:]

Raciology is a most welcome development. The anti-racial theorizing of Boas and his followers continues to overshadow the current era. Such views are in their essence political movements against European peoples masquerading as science, designed to disarm Europeans—to make them defenseless against the onslaught of other peoples and cultures.

The reality is that the racial science that thrived in America until the 1920s and in Germany until the end of WWII coincided with an era of racial and cultural confidence among Europeans. It occurred at a time when Europe dominated the planet and was spreading its people and culture to all corners of the world.

On the other hand, the assault on this body of research has coincided with an unprecedented retreat of Europeans, not only from outposts like South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but even in Europe itself, which is now being overrun by non-Whites. Countries like the United States and Australia that that were at least 90% European in 1950 are undergoing demographic transitions which predict that Europeans will be a minority with a generation or two.

During this ongoing disaster of European retreat, racial science has remained undeveloped and largely forgotten. It is to be hoped that a resurgence of racial science as outlined in Raciology will be part of a general resurgence of the European peoples. It is certainly a step in the right direction.