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August 2007 

Carnivores and Herbivores

Does Diet Influence Political Disposition?

How does eating meat impact our political behavior?

The poor helpless zebra in the photo above has been triangulated by a pride of female lions, consisting of sisters and female cousins. Besides organized hunting, which can bring down prey many times the size of an average lion, these females also suckle each other's cubs. The matrifocal social organization of lions extends into the next generation, as lionesses maintain fixed territories that will be handed down to their daughters when they die.

But this does not mean that dominance rests solely in the hands of the females. Shortly after these females downed the zebra, the male lions pushed them aside, eating their fill and then letting the females and cubs finish off the scraps. While male lions are in many ways parasites, their probability of passing on their DNA, just like human males, is lower than females. As they reach maturity, they are banished from their pride. They form into brother and male-cousin centric bands, roaming the territories of other prides, and competing violently for their females.

Much of lion social behavior has evolved due to the benefits of communal hunting, which yields about twice the amount of food per lion as individual hunting. The survival of cubs is also greatly enhanced by communal living.

On the herbivore side of the animal kingdom, the pinnacle of social evolution is found with the elephants. Remarkably, their social behavior has many parallels with lions. The elephants are matrifocal, with an altruistic matriarch leading a band of daughters and granddaughters.

Like the lions, a calve can nurse with any lactating female in the herd. Few species sacrifice themselves as much for their offspring as elephants. And just like the lions, the adolescent male elephants are chased out of the herd, and form into loosely organized herds with a dominance hierarchy determined principally by size.

Among the omnivores, the pinnacle of social evolution is obviously mankind. But among individual humans, there exists a wide disparity in the ratio of animal to vegetable protein that is consumed. Except for tribes like the Inuit, there are few social groups that rely almost completely on meat.

However, there are a remarkably large number of people that do not eat meat. In our survey, 4.7% of our 2,189 respondents indicated they do not meat, which compares quite well with other estimates that place that number at 4.5% of the United States population.

As we noted in a previous article, Beef, It's What's for Conservatism, the preference for eating beef was highly correlated with political conservatism. We could only speculate as to how beef might be related to political affiliation, but it does seem to be enabling the production of dopamine, the neurochemical we have hypothesized to be more active in Conservative cognitive styles.

But one thing we also discovered from the very same survey: the politics of vegetarians stand apart from the meat eaters. Before we discuss the political nuances of the vegetarians and meat eaters, let's take a look at the percentages of vegetarians from our survey of 2,189 people.

Percentage of vegetarians by political-gender cohorts
(VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)

In the above graph, the females are more likely to be vegetarian than males, and the Liberals in both genders were more likely not to eat meat. As would be expected, the more liberal one is, the greater the tendency not to eat meat.

The Social Nuances of Meat-Eaters and Vegetarians

There is a definite trend towards vegetarianism in the 25 and under age cohort. However, we are not sure if this pattern is a secular trend, or simply reflects the fact that people become more carnivorous as they age. We suspect that it is secular, and the younger generations are permanently moving away from meat.

Our survey captured a number of interesting differences between the meat-eaters and vegetarians. For instance, vegetarians have a strong preference for the color black. We are not sure of the significance of this, as it is a peculiar color preference, and perhaps indicative of the dopamine "tone" of their central nervous systems. They also had elevated preferences for orange, grey, and yellow, but only orange was statistically significant. On the other hand, the meat-eaters had a strong preference towards blue, which may also be an indicator of dopamine "tone".

The vegetarians are also the least likely to be Caucasian. Caucasians were more likely to be meat-eaters, and interestingly enough, the Caucasians preferred beef over every other meat. Keep in mind that the respondents to our survey primarily reside in the United States.

Compared to the meat-eaters, the vegetarians live very urban lifestyles. 73% indicated that they currently live in the city, compared to about 50% of the meat-eaters. Vegetarians were also more egalitarian than meat-eaters, as 43% of the vegetarians indicated that equality was more important than freedom. Only 20% of the meat-eaters made that claim, and beef-eaters (those that prefer beef) had the lowest preference of all, with only 10% choosing equality over freedom.

The health profiles of vegetarians are different from meat-eaters, and interestingly, the vegetarians are less likely to spend time outdoors, at least according to our survey. Also, vegetarians were more likely to report pain when pressing their sternums, a possible indicator of a vitamin D deficiency, and also reported the highest rate of fatigue. They were also more likely to be left-handed.

Political Trends of Meat-eaters and Vegetarians

In our survey, the vegetarians were more liberal across all political cohorts than the meat-eaters. That is, the Conservative vegetarians were more liberal than the Conservative meat-eaters, the Liberal vegetarians were more liberal than the Liberal meat-eaters, etc. This certainly leads us to speculate about a causal relationship. Does eating meat make you more conservative? If you shift to a vegetarian diet, will you become more liberal?

While we did not capture enough information to resolve these issues, we did capture some interesting statistics that make us believe meat is having an impact on political disposition. We asked our 2,189 respondents whether they had become more liberal or conservative over the last few years. The results, by favorite meat, are in the graph below.

More Conservative (MC) or More Liberal (ML) in the last few years? Trends by meat preference

There are some very interesting trends in the above graph. First, those preferring chicken, fish, and turkey indicated that they have become more liberal in the last few years. However, these trends were small compared to the strong liberal shift of vegetarians.

Second, those preferring beef, lamb, and pork had shifted more towards conservatism. This trend was especially strong among those preferring beef. However, this by no means proves causality.

As we have proposed (see Conservative Left Brain, Liberal Right Brain), the connection between conservatism and the dopamine system is a strong one. And dopamine is metabolized from tyrosine, an amino acid found in high quantities in dairy products and meat. We must note that more than one dietary model can account for the dopamine advantage of animal products.

Will a sustained vegetarian diet make you more liberal? Will eating beef over a long period of time make you more conservative? We are inclined to believe this to be true, but so far, the evidence is far from unequivocal.

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The Predatory Society

Are humans becoming worse?

While banks engineer every diabolical plot to extract more money from their customers, while doctors, lawyers, dentists, and auto repairmen populate invoices with every charge imaginable, while motorists run you over while chatting on their cell phones, making sure to use all of their monthly minutes--are people getting worse? Or does it just seem that way?

Well, the cell phone part is certainly true. While there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that altruistic behavior is on the decline and predatory behavior is on the offensive, hard evidence isn't quite as clear. But what hard evidence is there?

When discussing levels of altruism and social predation, there are are number of statistics, such as charitable contributions, crime rates, and declines in the levels of company-paid employee benefits that are usually quoted. However, these do not give a very complete picture of the overall altruism and selfishness that the average person engages in on a daily basis.

Altruism, selfishness, indifference, and spite are actually behaviors that vary quite a bit with group size, population density, and genetic distance. Urban areas are plagued with spiteful and indifferent behaviors, but there is a rather well established survival function for this: it lowers birth rates and reduces habitat depletion.

The social indifference of urban life seems to be hard-wired into our brains. Even a small number of other humans simultaneously presented within one's field of vision triggers a sort of "indifference-alarm" effect, whereby we become much less sensitive towards resolving ordinary emotional states in others, and more aware of threatening states and escape routes. As we have discussed before, Conservatives are more likely to make this transition than Liberals.

But is society currently experiencing a decline in altruistic behavior, and a rise in spiteful and selfish behaviors? One indicator of this is "trust", and based on one of our more recent surveys, young people don't seem to "trust" people as much as their parents do. In fact, the younger generation is much more suspicious.

We asked the 3,501 respondents to our Iraqi Warfare Attitudes Survey, how many non-relatives do you trust? The results by age and gender are seen in the graph below:

How many non-relatives do you trust?
(By gender and age cohorts)

As can be seen above, there is a distinct trend in both genders to trust more people in the older age cohorts. There are several possible explanations. First involves the tendency for the sex hormone (testosterone and estrogen) levels to deplete with age, having the secondary effect of reducing competitiveness.

Another explanation might involve the decrease in workforce participation with age, which reduces the overall sense of competition and "threat" one experiences at the job. However, in our data, we found just the opposite. People with jobs are more likely to trust others than those without. This might imply that people in the workforce have the opportunity to make more trustworthy acquaintances.

Another explanation might be religiosity, which tends to increase with age. The Very Religious have higher rates of trust than the less religious. However, we also found that the older nonreligious cohorts trust more people than their younger counterparts.

A fourth explanation is most disturbing: the level of social predation and spite is increasing, and this is more likely to be reflected in the attitudes of the younger generations. However, we cannot discount many other possible explanations. The perceived predatory nature of society has some interesting political and religious correlates, as we will discuss in a future edition.

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9113

 

The Population Biology of California

The Caucasians Versus the Asians

Are the Chinese more altruistic towards close kin?

The decline of communism in China, and throughout the world, is now being felt at the American gas pump. The United States had been the biggest beneficiary of Chinese communism, as it reigned in Chinese economic development, and helped reduce per capita energy consumption to one-eighth that of the average American.

In the current picture of declining world oil reserves, a fully capitalistic and economically developed China is a much greater threat to American lifestyles than a communist China. After World War II, the emergence of the communist and capitalist spheres of influence had the beneficial impact of lowering the world resource competition.

It is hard to think of an international symbiosis of communism and capitalism as lowering world resource competition, but one doesn't need to go back far to see how the rapid industrial development of Japan and Germany became the primary factor in causing World War II. Interestingly, the most desirable resource for both nations was oil.

But the world has changed much since the war, and resource-wars have become less destructive, at least until now. This is primarily due to the integrated world economy, where economic production and consumption are organized around a wider spectrum of genetics than ever before. Today, the average product touches the hands of more ethnicities than ever in history, and this trend is accelerating. International capitalism is steadily eroding the "ethnic homogeneity" of industrial production and consumption.

But nowhere in the world is this more true than in California, the North American anchor of the loosely organized and dynamic "Pacific Rim" sub-economy, consisting of those territories surrounding the perimeter of the Pacific ocean. The natural resources of western Canada, western United States, Australia, and western Mexico are economically integrated with the low-wage labor of China and Indonesia, along with the technological juggernauts of Japan, South Korea, and California.

When it comes to economic output, California has no peer among the other American states, and is more appropriately compared with other nations. It is so big that it is currently ranked tenth in the world in gross national product. The breadth of California's economy extends from America's richest agricultural region to the technological backbone of the microprocessor industry--Silicon Valley.

This economic diversity has a corresponding diversity of biogeography, as California has the largest number of indigenous species of any comparably-sized region in North America. This wide range of habitats, economic diversity, and strategic position in the Pacific Rim, by no accident, just happens to be one of earth's more unique experiments in human population biology.

The Big Ecological Footprints of the Caucasians

At the time of the first substantial incursions of the Caucasians in the 1700s, California supported a population of about 300,000 Native Americans. But supporting 300,000 Caucasians is another matter. The Caucasians have some pretty unique physical properties when compared to the other races. They are taller, require more energy, dissipate heat less effectively, are biochemically more impacted by sunlight, and require more space, both within their homes and within their communities.

Their impact on an environment and on other non-Caucasian populations reflects these basic adaptations, inherited from the legacy of harsh European winters and lower average levels of heat and solar radiation. A given area of land will support less Caucasians than other races. However, this interesting phenomenon varies by political affiliation (one of the key differences between Caucasian Conservatives and Liberals).

The enhanced propensity for Caucasians to disperse into new territories is founded upon their greater need for space to support reproduction. Even though Caucasians are very capable of supporting high population densities, it disturbs reproductive rates more than the other races, a phenomenon that will become very important in the evolving population biology of California.

The White Founder Populations in California

The California "Gold Rush", in 1848, was not only the greatest spectacle of human immigration at the time, it was a window into the not-too-distant future for the Caucasians. Right before the discovery of gold, there were only seven Chinese in all of California.

The first immigrants into new territories consist of four types of founder populations: fortune-seekers; populations that are displaced from their home territories by war or famine; armies; and the very religious. Among the Caucasians, all four types contributed to early Californian immigration, but it was the fortune-seekers that dominated the late 1840s and early 1850s. Within six years after the discovery of gold, California's non-native population increased from 14,000 to 300,000.

Fortune-seekers are predominately male populations, and the objects of fortune-seeking involve products that are very profitable in their native populations, like gold, oil, and sugar. Alaska is a good contemporary example of a population skewed with male fortune-seekers.

But fortune-seekers have high rates of attrition unless the new territory has an acceptable number of reproductive females, even though it might have an adequate number of prostitutes. Prostitution has historically been an important factor in the temporary stability of founder populations of male fortune-seekers and the military.

But a population is not stable over time unless it maintains a minimal ratio of reproductive females, and that minimal ratio varies with age demographics, monogamy rates, average age at both first intercourse and childbirth, educational levels, population density, and a number of other factors.

During the Gold Rush, the most valuable thing in California was not gold. While the discovery of a new claim would hardly raise an eyebrow, females were so scarce that parades were frequently organized when one arrived. In 1850, only 8% of the California population was female, and this plummeted to just 2% in the mining camps, most of those being prostitutes.

Occupational Flexibility of Founder Populations

The low technology of surface gold-mining attracted a particularly interesting mixture of skills, and highlights a common characteristic of new immigrants--they are occupationally "flexible", that is, they tend to be "generalists".

On the opposite end is specialization, which is a common characteristic of high-density animal populations. Specialization increases the energy-yield of a habitat, and reduces intragroup competition. Generalists in urban populations tend to be at an economic disadvantage.

As the surface gold dried up, these generalists were driven into either working for highly-capitalized mining ventures, or into agriculture, ranching, and construction--all industries that directly support large increases in human reproduction. California did not become suitable for the immigration of large numbers of females until the surface gold was depleted.

The Small Ecological Footprints of the Chinese

The history of founder populations occupying the territories of genetically distant humans is replete with conflict. This tendency is also exacerbated by low ratios of females. The Chinese immigration into California, starting with the 1848 Gold Rush, was a prime example, and strikingly similar to the current Hispanic immigration.

The early Chinese immigrants, like the Hispanics, were economic "scavengers". Fleeing the poverty of the port cities of Southeastern China, they filled the empty niches of the Caucasian economy, avoiding direct competition with the Caucasians, and even being careful not to prospect ahead of the white miners, and instead, working vacated gold claims.

The Chinese were remarkably resilient in the face of the hostile and often violent male-dominated Caucasian population. The Chinese immigrants had several advantages over the Caucasians, the most prominent being their lower impact on the environment relative to the amount of labor they produced.

The Chinese consumed less, lived in higher-density households, worked for less wages, saved more, and performed tasks that were socially demeaning to the Caucasians: farmworkers, laundry, gardening, and housework, which are many of the same occupations that provide jobs for the current Hispanic immigrants. They excelled in highly labor-intensive businesses.

Are the Chinese More Altruistic Towards Kin?

Chinese are named with the family name first, which is a clue into how their altruistic behaviors tend to be focused. Adult Chinese, within their own families, are referred to by their relationship, rather than their given name. Older brother, older sister, second brother, second sister, etc, provide some insight into the wider inclusive fitness bandwidth of the Chinese. It is also common that cousins are referred to by their first name appended with "brother" or "sister".

But what is inclusive fitness? Inclusive fitness is the individual's relative genetic presence in the gene pool of the next generation. Thus, brothers, sisters, cousins, second-cousins all have a coefficient of relatedness, which is simply the proportion of genes that are shared in common. One doesn't need to reproduce to improve the fitness of one's own genes, as this can also be accomplished by altruistic behaviors towards close kin. The evolution of altruism is a by-product of inclusive fitness.

The proposal that Chinese exhibit altruism over a larger number of relatives than do Caucasians is certainly controversial. The Chinese extended family, with three generations living under one roof, is certainly evidence of this. Chinese economic behavior has historically been organized around kin-groups and genetic closeness, and as Janet Landa has pointed out, has had a substantial economic advantage when confronting competing non-kin based business organizations.

But this kin-focused Chinese inclusive fitness model also makes sense due to population density. The greater number of people living under one roof requires a larger number of kin that one performs altruistic behaviors for. But all is not milk and honey, as altruistic behavior towards close kin is commonly associated with either indifference or spite towards genetic distance.

The Loner Race: The Caucasians

Over the last 500 years, the space-hungry Caucasians have occupied every continent, mixing up the genetics and economics of the human species like no other race. The expansive and space-hungry model of Caucasian reproduction seems to have evolved with a slightly more limited approach to altruism and inclusive fitness towards close kin.

This is controversial, but there are several indicators that Caucasians, on average, are less likely to organize their altruistic behavior around close kin. First is the elevated Caucasian tendency towards the nuclear family structure. Based on the evidence we've been able to collect, the Caucasians maintain the smallest household family sizes of any race, even when controlling for income. However, we must note that our statistics are highly skewed towards the United States.

Caucasians also have the greatest propensity to accept other races into the lower levels of their socioeconomic hierarchy. This is not altruistic towards non-whites, rather, it simply implies that Caucasians are more likely to sacrifice their own genetics in favor of cheaper non-white labor.

This economic indifference towards other Caucasians is admittedly weak evidence, but there are other racially ambivalent tendencies, as seen in adoption statistics, whereby Caucasians are much more likely to adopt children from other ethnicities. Again, the low reproductive tendencies of Caucasians may account for this phenomenon, but childless white couples are more likely to adopt non-whites than childless non-white couples are to adopt other races.

When Populations Collide

What happens when two populations, living in the same general proximity, maintain different altruistic approaches to close kin? While there are no fixed rules, there are several notable tendencies.

The two populations will maintain different density levels, with the "close" population maintaining the higher level, and utilizing less resources in reproduction. This neutralizes the reproductive advantages of lower-density populations. The Chinese immigrants managed to reproductively compete quite effectively with the space-hungry model of Caucasian reproduction.

Economic organization in the "close" population is more family-centric, that is, dependent on family labor. This has the by-product of replicating the same family business model--for example, families that start restaurants are more likely to start additional restaurants as their extended family grows. This increases competition within the same population, resulting in business formation into the neighboring lower-density population. Chinese businesses locate into Caucasian areas at a much higher rate than Caucasian businesses locate into Chinese areas.

Members of the higher-density population will emigrate into the lower-density population. The highly reproductive members of the lower-density population will tend to emigrate into new territories sooner than the low-reproductive members. Over time, the low-density population is predominately displaced by the higher-density population.

The Success of the Chinese Model of Immigration

In 1850, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Chileans, having engaged the wrath of both the Caucasian miners and the depletion of surface gold, returned to their homelands. But the Chinese model of immigration, based on a wider spectrum of altruistic behaviors towards close kin, lower reproductive space requirements, and a smaller ecological footprint, was too much for the Californian Caucasians, which would maintain anti-Chinese "coolie" laws on the books until 1952.

Today, the California Chinese have shifted towards the K side of the r-K reproductive spectrum, just like the Caucasians (see the Population Biology of Conservatives and Liberals). Interestingly, this decline in both Chinese and Caucasian reproductive rates has also spawned greater gene flow between the populations.

Increased population density results in a greater variety of reproductive strategies. Interracial couplings between Asians and Caucasians are at an all time high, but interestingly, not as reproductively proficient as racially-homogenous Asian or Caucasian couplings.

But this convergence of Californian Asian and Caucasian genes is occurring amid a swelling Hispanic population that will overtake the Caucasians in a few decades. As we will discuss next month, this population shares several characteristics with the Asian immigrants, and a variety of liberalism that is running towards a head-on collision with the Caucasian Conservatives.

As we have proposed in The Sunlight Theory of Political Preference, Caucasians in the lower latitudes run politically "hot", that is, tend towards conservatism due to the enhanced impact of sunlight on the production of the sex hormones. These lower-latitude, sun-baked conservative Caucasians, after vanquishing the Caucasian liberals with their higher birth rates, are now faced with a liberalism far more dangerous to them than they ever dreamed Caucasian liberalism could be.

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Charles Brack and Xi Zhang, August 2007

Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
           Zhang@neuropolitics.org