The Green Banana Gang

 

Marek Kohn

 

President Tudjman of Croatia recently suggested that certain elements might be "genetically programmed" against the Croatian state. What he meant by this remains mysterious, but his remark reveals how readily genes spring to his mind when he thinks of nationhood. He is not alone in making such associations. Many people feel that the tendency to prefer one's own ethnic group, and dislike others, is part of human nature. They are no longer inclined to believe that nature is what we are put in this world to rise above, as Katharine Hepburn told Humphrey Bogart in 'The African Queen'. Nature means genes, and we are stuck with them.

Ethnicity is a particularly sensitive issue for modern Darwinists, because of the associations it triggers: scientific racism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism. Lay people may well wonder what good can come of a Darwinian perspective on ethnicity. The answer is that it can illuminate a phenomenon whose roots seem even more mysterious than President Tudjman's cryptic remarks. Using modern evolutionary analytical tools, ethnicity can be understood as a construct with some biological components, rather than as an ineffable quality supported by obscure primordial instincts. It can be made amenable to reason.

Modern Darwinism is not actually very concerned with ethnicity. Its driving force is not race but sex, turning on the insight that males and females have different reproductive interests. Darwinian theory makes strong predictions of differences between the sexes, but not of differences between ethnic groups. It does emphasise that the more closely two individuals are related, the more genes they will have in common, and the closer their reproductive interests will therefore be. Some evolutionists argue that these shared interests could give rise to innate ethnocentric tendencies in humans. Others consider that the power of shared reproductive interests is negligible beyond close relatives. They might be able to bind families, but not nations.

Evolutionists seem unexcited about arguing the toss between the two positions, and it doesn't look like a potentially productive line of argument. A more useful approach may be to retrace our evolutionary steps, to see if the paths our ancestors chose may have led us towards our ethnicised present. They may well have taken an unusual path, as primates go. Most primate species have social structures based on bonding between female kin, or on monogamy. The least common variant is based on bonding between related males. It is seen in chimpanzees, our closest relatives.

Robert Foley and Phyllis Lee, anthropologists at Cambridge University, have argued that the lineage represented by modern humans was obliged to follow this pattern for ecological reasons. Once again, it all comes down to differences in reproductive interests. The main factor limiting a male's success in replicating his genes is his sexual access to females. A female's reproductive interests, on the other hand, are best served by securing the food resources necessary to raise her offspring to maturity. Males therefore distribute themselves in relation to females, and females distribute themselves in relation to resources.

Deep in forests, food may be plentiful and evenly spread. Females can therefore group themselves together, and these groups may be sexually monopolised by single males. But the hominid lineage, of which we are the sole extant species, branched off from the apes' at a time when African forests were shrinking. The first hominids adapted to open country with patches of woodland, and this would have forced females to disperse away from each other. It would have been in the males' interest to form coalitions among kin, to defend territory containing females from other coalitions. The conditions which inaugurated our lineage also instituted a social pattern of mutually hostile, turf-minded male coalitions. Foley and Lee argue that once such a pattern has been established, the directions in which the species can move are constrained. To move from a male-bonded system like that of chimps to a female-bonded system like that of gorillas would incur a loss of fitness, so it does not happen. Hominids may have conserved their distinctive male-bonded pattern throughout their history.

This is emphatically not the same as saying that ethnocentrism is innate, however. A chimp coalition is not an ethnic group. Seeing another troop approaching, a chimpanzee must be able to think the equivalent of "here come enemies". He must be able to tell ally from foe. But what he cannot do is think something like "here comes the Green Banana Troop", or "I belong to the Tall Tree Gang". Chimpanzees do not use symbols to denote either personal or group identity. They are unable to reify their coalitions as entities with existences independent of themselves. This is a uniquely human capability. It is what induces a man to lay down his life not for the requisite number of close relatives - three brothers or nine cousins, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped - but for his country.

An account such as this is not conclusive. Evolutionary theory evolves fast, and not all anthropologists would accept Foley and Lee's model. It will seem esoteric as well as politically dubious to those who remain unconvinced that biology has anything to say about society. But it is surely a constructive alternative to the view that we inherit our ethnic sense as a package that cannot be unwrapped. It acknowledges the possibility of an evolved component, a male tendency to form mutually hostile coalitions, but emphasises the momentous transformation these coalitions undergo when they are structured by symbols.

That indicates where we should concentrate our efforts if we're trying to consider how to reduce the conflicts caused by ethnicity. Humans have a remarkable capacity to identify affiliations not just with kin, but with a range of other entities at the same time: town, religious denomination, ethnic group, class, football team and so on. Promoting some of these and downplaying others may reduce conflict, as supporters of the "European idea" believe. There is little evolutionary reason to suppose that ethnic groups enjoy an innate privilege over other group identities in their hold over people's imaginations. If people have so far failed to identify as Europeans rather than as Germans, Danes and so on, it is for historical reasons, not evolutionary ones.

It is for historical reasons, too, that Darwinism is recognised as a means of defining limits on human behaviour. It can also be a tool for highlighting human possibilities. But that depends on who is prepared to pick it up and use it.

 

This piece originally appeared in the New Statesman, 5 December 1997.

 

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