Verified by 
A common complaint against sociobiology/evolutionary psychology is that it is inherently “racist” because of the emphasis it puts on genetics, epitomized in the so-called Selfish Gene paradigm, according to which organisms evolved to copy and transmit their DNA to future generations, not DNA to copy organisms.
This—the Copernican revolution in biology because of the way it made all previous thinking seem medieval by comparison—was itself epitomized in Hamilton’s rule. Darwin, and no one after him before Hamilton, had been unable to explain altruism defined rigorously as behaviour which promotes the survival and/or reproductive success of the recipient at a cost to the survival and/or reproductive success of the altruist.
Hamilton proved that such altruism could evolve if Br>C, where B was the benefit to the recipient, C the cost to the altruist, and r the degree of relatedness between them. The latter was defined as the likelihood of having inherited an identical copy of a rare gene by common descent. This meant that an altruistic act which might cost me 100% of my genes—suicide, in other words—would be paid for in terms of evolution if the benefit saved three of my offspring, each with 50% of my genes (and, being offspring probably having better survival/reproductive prospects, saving just two might be worth it).
The principle applies to all acts of altruism, no matter how trivial. It certainly explains the astonishing self-sacrifice of workers in insect societies, who are all sterile females. But looked at from the selfish gene point of view, they are labouring not for the good of the colony so much as farming the queen for the up to 75% of their genes that they might share with her offspring—their sisters—by comparison with the 50% of their genes they would share with their own offspring.
As the diagram left shows, relatedness in bees is in fact very complex, thanks to their haplo-diploid genetics (males inherit only their mother's genes, females also have fathers). But the basic principle explains all kin-based co-operation, human included, such as that epitomized in the modern world by Zionism.
Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli Jewish jazz artist and writer who had a grandfather who was in his words “a charismatic, poetic, veteran Zionist terrorist. A former prominent commander in the right-wing Irgun terrorist organization…” Atzmon goes on to describe how “my emerging devotion to jazz’’—whose major practitioners he quickly realized were Black American musicians— “had overwhelmed my Jewish nationalist tendencies;” adding that “it was probably then and there that I left the Chosen-ness behind to become an ordinary human being.” He concludes that “Years later, I would come to see that jazz had been my escape route,” adding that
Within months, though, I began to feel less and less connected to my surrounding reality. I saw myself as part of a far broader and greater family, a family of music lovers, admirable people concerned with beauty and spirit rather than land, mammon, and occupation.
In a couple of previous posts, I reported that recent research has revealed evidence of imprinted genes on chromosome 15 being implicated in appreciation and performance of music, both classical and karaoke, citing the Bach family as an example, but perhaps Atzmon is another.
All this suggests to me that what I would call epigenetic relatedness may be as—or perhaps even more—important than classical genetic relatedness in certain respects. One of these is family resemblances, where as the diagram above reveals, relatedness varies vastly according to which particular genes you are looking at. In a previous post, I suggested that X chromosome inheritance might explain the special relationship which often seems to exist between fathers and daughters, and which also means that not all grand-parents are equally related to all their grand-children.
In my own case the most notable example is the way in which I resemble a first cousin (related to me by only one eighth of my genes) in my rather autistic cognitive configuration much more than I do my brother (with whom I share half my genes). But unlike my mentalistically-gifted brother, the autistic cousin in question may have inherited inactivated X chromosome genes critical to cognition from a common maternal grandmother (possibly also with mitochondrial genetic involvement).
Indeed, epigenetic relatedness may be more important in the long run than classical relatedness, particularly in a world where emigration is possible and people can migrate to places where their pattern of gene expression, even if not their whole genome, makes them feel more at home. (Interestingly enough, Atzmon now lives here in London, an immigrant city whose native English population is in a minority.)
Another factor which might make epigenetic relatedness important in evolution is that, unlike classical relatedness, it does not necessarily compromize the whole point of sex. According to another insight of Hamilton's, sex evolved to create outbreeding and the disease resistance that it normally confers. But inbreeding does the opposite, as the long list of genetic diseases which afflict Ashkenazi Jews reveals (and which genomic evidence suggests is the result of the population having passed through a narrow bottleneck in the Middle Ages).
Epigenetic gene expression is often peculiar to the individual; not necessarily heritable by classical Mendelian means; and in any event limited to certain genes, such as imprinted or X-chromosome ones. As a result, the evolutionary conflict between inbreeding and outbreeding set up by selection for co-operation-promoting relatedness and relatedness-negating sexual reproduction is not an issue, so that epigenetic altruism—or at least, avoidance of harm, which comes to the same thing—can flourish unopposed in this respect.
Can that be such a bad thing in psychology today?
References
Atzmon, G. (2011). The Wondering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. Washington USA, zero books.
