* This week’s Torah portion according to Wikipedia: “The parashah reports God’s commands to bring olive oil for the lamp, to make sacred garments for the priests, to conduct an ordination ceremony, and to make an incense altar.”
* The Sanctuary appealed to all five senses. Judaism has nothing like it today in creating a visceral and compelling road to God. Judaism is poorer for not having the Third Temple.
* Casey:
* “Splashing blood” as conferring authority & sacredness. Heart as the oldest metaphor. Russians as goy-resistance.
* We should do a re-write of Exodus where Aaron is a “questioning bisexual character.”
* This parasha is about the rituals and the priests who help people to get closer to God. What do you do to get closer to God? As an addict, you are either getting closer to God or getting closer to your disease. Do we still need priests?
* Every detail is prescribed to reduce the chances of Israel lapsing into paganism. You couldn’t bring in your own incense into the Sanctuary. That was a capital offense.
* There was no role for women to work in the Sanctuary because that would wreak havoc by creating sexual tension.
* The olive oil for the menorah must be pure “without any admixture of a foreign substance.” According to Artscroll: “This requirement of absolute purity is a fitting prelude to the selection of Aaron and his sons as Kohanim, for they, too, must remain pure and separate from the rest of the nation.” What about a goy nation’s population? Is it made stronger with substantial admixtures of foreign substances? Is a goy nation 99.4% pure white more of a threat to Jews than American goyim who are about 60% pure white?
* The Jewish priesthood is hereditary. It is genetic. Jewish priests have a distinctive genetic code. You can’t convert to being a priest nor can you be elected.
* A 2005 news article reported:
"Likeness leads to liking," said the study's author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. "People have a need to identify and be with others like themselves ('their own kind'). It is a powerful force in human affairs."
Rushton anchored the human preference for similarity in the evolutionary psychology of altruism, which suggests that favoritism toward kin and similar others evolved to help replicate shared genes. In-group loyalty is almost always seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty. This explains why ethnic remarks are so easily taken as "fighting words."
The paper described the group-identification processes as innate–part of the evolved machinery of the human mind. Even very young children make in-group/out-group distinctions about race and ethnicity in the absence of social learning.
Sociologist Linda S. Gottfredson wrote: "Humans are not promiscuous altruists, of course, but favor persons genetically similar to themselves."
Brenda Walker wrote: "We all prefer to be around others who speak our language, share our values and understand our jokes. Human community is based upon similarities, not differences. Wouldn’t it be better to develop public policy on the basis of human nature as it really is?"
Psychologist Richard Lynn said in 1989: "Racial and ethnic conflict is occurring throughout the world—between Blacks and Whites in the United States, South Africa, and Britain; Basques and Spaniards in Spain; and Irish and British in Northern Ireland. These conflicts have defied explanations by the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and economics…. genetic similarity theory represents a major advance in the understanding of these conflicts." (pg. 534)
American biologist E. Raymond Hall noted that "two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area." This rule applies to people. "To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other."
Psychologist Raymond Cattell said: "Whenever a nation has been forcibly put together from differing races, we find a social life unnecessarily disjointed, weak, and feverish. There are thousands of misunderstandings, produced by individuals working for different goals in different ways and at different speeds."
Dr. Phil Rushton found:
For Homo sapiens, inclusive fitness theory goes well beyond ‘kin’. As William Hamilton hypothesized, genes can increase the probability of their own survival by bringing about the reproduction of not only family members with whom they share copies, but also of any individuals with whom they share copies. Research with Hamilton’s theory on people is less well known and remains controversial. This review shows: (1) spouses and close friends assort on blood groups and that similarity predicts fertility; (2) twin and adoption studies find genes rather than upbringing cause people to positively assort; (3) phenotype matching is more pronounced on more heritable items within sets of homogeneous traits; (4) bereavement studies find grief is greater following the death of a more similar co-twin or child; (5) studies of face perception find people prefer and trust those who look like them; and (6) DNA variance within and between ethnic groups is equivalent to that within and between families.
Kin-selection theory predicts that animals increase their fitness by allocating more cooperation to kin than to non-kin. Hamilton (1964) showed that altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favored when rb – c > 0, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. However, to benefit kin over non-kin, altruists must be able to detect genetic relatedness. Mechanisms proposed for this to occur include familiarity, imprinting on self or others, and innate feature detectors that work in the absence of learning…
A study of 263 child bereavements found that: (1) spouses agreed 74% of the time on which side of the family a child ‘took after’ the most, their own or that of their spouse, and (2) the grief intensity reported by mothers, fathers, and grandparents was greater for children who resembled their side of the family than for children resembling the other side of the family…
Several studies have found that people rate faces as more attractive when they resemble their own. Platek et al. (2002) morphed people’s faces with those of toddlers and asked questions such as ‘Which one of these children would you like to spend time with?’ and ‘Which child would you adopt?’ People responded more positively toward children’s faces that had been morphed with their own. During debriefing, the participants expressed surprise that any morphing had occurred. DeBruine (2002) found people trusted a stranger’s face more when it had been morphed with their own than when it was left unchanged…
The pull of genetic similarity does not stop at family and friends. Malat & Hamilton (2006) found that people prefer same-race health providers and perceive them as more trustworthy. Putnam (2004) found that the more ethnically diverse a community, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust others, from nextdoor neighbours to local governments.
Inclusive fitness theory has been used to explain why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighbourhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance…
In retrospect, it is not surprising that people are able to detect and prefer those who resemble themselves. Similarity, whether actual or perceived, is one of the most important factors in human relationships. It is more surprising to find just how fine-tuned the recognition process can be. The studies reviewed above show that the preference for similarity occurs within ethnic groups and within families and on the more heritable items from within sets of related traits.
In another paper, Rushton found:
Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the ‘dark side’ of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins.
Most theories of ethno-political conflict and nationalism focus on cultural, cognitive and economic factors, often with the assumption that modernisation will gradually reduce the effect of local antagonisms and promote the growth of more universalistic societies (Smith 1998). However, purely socio-economic explanations seem inadequate to account for the rapid rise of nationalism in the former Soviet Bloc and too weak to explain the lethality of the conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the Indian subcontinent, and Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia, or even the level of animosity between Blacks, Whites and Hispanics in the US…
Patriotism is almost always seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty and is typically preached using kinship terms. Countries are called the ‘motherland’ or the ‘fatherland’. Ethnic identity builds on real as well as putative similarity. At the core of human nature, people are genetically motivated to prefer others genetically similar to themselves…
In 1964, evolutionary biologist William Hamilton finally provided a generally accepted solution to the problem of altruism based on the concept of inclusive fitness, not just individual fitness. It is the genes that survive and are passed on. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in siblings, nephews, cousins and grandchildren as well as in offspring. Siblings share fifty per cent, nephews and nieces twenty-five per cent, and cousins about twelve and a half per cent of their distinctive genes. So when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of these common genes. The vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration.
‘Hamilton’s Rule’ states that across all species, altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favoured when rbc40, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. Evolutionary biologists have used Hamilton’s ‘gene’s eye’ point of view to carry out research on a wide range of social interactions including altruism, aggression, selfishness and spite. The formulation was dubbed ‘kin selection theory’ by John Maynard Smith (1964) and became widely known through influential books such as The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) and Sociobiology: the New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (1975).
* Reading Mark Twain’s 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews,” I wax nostalgic for the free speech of that time. People felt free to engage in stereotypes, even negative ones.
Mark Twain: “By his make and ways he is substantially a foreigner wherever he may be, and even the angels dislike a foreigner.”
