Macroevolution, Microevolution, & Race

The microevolution/macroevolution distinction is important in dealing with most practical issues involving race in an evolutionary context. For a random example of how racial issues that concern us are essentially microevolutionary in nature, glance at Book Review, “Migration and Colonization in Human Microevolution,” Heredity 84 (2000): 619–20. (Book’s Table of Contents and sample pages here.) Another book that tentatively crosses the line into the microevolutionary realm, though not focused on race (possible rapid evolution among Ashkenazi Jews is discussed in one chapter, however) is The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (New York: Basic Books, 2009), which was well-reviewed in The Occidental Quarterly.[1]

Macroevolution versus Microevolution

The following definition of macroevolution is from the glossary of a publisher’s website dedicated to a leading undergraduate anthology textbook by University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley, Evolution, 3rd ed. (University of Oxford Press, 2003):

Macroevolution is evolution on the grand scale: the term refers to events above the species level; the origin of a new higher group, such as the mammals, would be an example of a macroevolutionary event.

Macroevolution has mainly been studied morphologically, because we have more taxonomic and fossil evidence than for other kinds of characters, such as physiology or chromosomes.

According to the neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution, major evolutionary transitions such as the origin of mammals from reptiles — well documented in the fossil record — occur in gradual adaptive stages. However, macroevolution may proceed by developmental macromutations as well as by gradual adaptation.

Macroevolution can be contrasted with microevolution: evolutionary changes on the small scale, such as changes in gene frequencies within a population. A major issue relating to many controversies in evolutionary biology is the extent to which macroevolutionary changes can be explained by microevolutionary processes.

The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines microevolution as “Evolutionary change below the level of the species, resulting from relatively small genetic variations. Microevolution produces new strains of microorganisms, for example, or the rise of a new subspecies. The accumulation of many microevolutionary changes results in macroevolution.”

Most evolutionary narratives focus on macroevolutionary change. There is usually a paucity of information in mainstream evolutionary literature about biological change below the species level.

The primary mechanisms of microevolution include mutation, migration, gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection. Artificial selection, too, which human beings have engaged in for thousands of years, and which still holds potentially rich insights into race processes (for example, how, by analogy, culture serves as a powerful selective mechanism in human populations), is a component of microevolution.

These processes constitute the subset of evolutionary mechanisms with which racial science is primarily concerned.

Race Creation and Destruction

Races are dynamic, not static or stationary entities. Therefore, time is an essential dimension in racial studies. Human populations form, thrive, disperse, hybridize, and become extinct. Differential reproduction means that, over time, some races wax while others wane. Even differential reproduction within a race can alter its genetic composition.

Jewish anthropologist Stanley Garn long ago observed:

Races do not remain constant. They change. Natural selection or directed genetic change and nondirected sources of genetic change are continually at work. Some local populations expand tremendously and others die out. Some populations change their genetic makeup rapidly, others at a slower pace. It is unlikely that any geographical race [i.e., large race] today closely resembles the collection of races in the same geographical area 500,000 or 50,000 or in some cases even 5,000 years ago. . . . We know that present frequencies of the sickle-cell gene in Africa are relatively recent. We know that they are changing now. We know that Northwest Europeans were relatively few in number 2,000 years ago, yet today [1971] they comprise the largest subgrouping of the European geographical race.[2]

Dog breeds are an example of race formation occurring with extreme rapidity in evolutionary terms. Similarly, Garn believed that selection has taken place even in hybrid “local races” (smaller populations than large “geographical races”) of recent origin—American Negroes, South African Cape Coloureds, “Ladinos” (Southern European-Amerindian crosses in Latin America), and “Neo-Hawaiians.” Such races (for so he regarded them) were already “moving toward new adaptive modes” and represented “ongoing human evolution on the march.” (p. 177.)

The same considerations apply with even greater force to race destruction. Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote:

So long as populations can exchange genes, the genetic differences between them are subject to swamping and dissolution by hybridization. The races of man furnish some of the clearest illustrations of this—history records many examples of race fusion and of emergence of new hybrid races. It is possible at least to imagine a fusion of all human races into a single, greatly variable population.[3]

Dobzhansky expressed the view that “human races are relics of the precultural stage of evolution” because civilization causes race convergence (through gene exchange) to outrun race divergence—an idea also articulated by Italian-born population geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Sir Julian Huxley, and others.

This, of course, is precisely the point at which human choice comes into play: whether to preserve or destroy the biological and cultural diversity of the Earth’s peoples. Contemporary elites have voted to destroy at least one major race of mankind—an action, ironically, which only a short time before they’d outlawed as “genocide.” They clearly do not intend to hold themselves legally accountable for their crime.

The Jewish proposal to sterilize the entire German population advanced by Theodore Kaufman in Germany Must Perish! (1941),[4] the murder of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans by Communist elites, and current policies of replacement migration, selective racial censorship and media control all signify biological destruction at a speed unparalleled on the macroevolutionary level with the exception of a few extinction events. Under present conditions, substantial hybridism conspicuous in every city and small town in the ex-First World destroys multiple white racial lines in a single generation. This is biological change at the speed of light. It is happening because there are no longer protective demographic, geographical, or cultural moats protecting the white gene pool from destruction.

The Creation—Evolution Debate

A final consequence of the microevolution/macroevolution distinction is that you don’t need to believe in the descent of man from ape-like creatures to study racial change from a microevolutionary perspective. Even intelligent design advocates admit that “There is abundant evidence that changes can occur within existing species, both domestic and wild, so microevolution is uncontroversial.”

Many establishment evolutionists are ideologically disturbed (here also) by the microevolution/macroevolution distinction, primarily, it seems, because such a large contingent of “creationists” concede the validity of microevolution while denying the possibility of macroevolution. Creationists are thoroughly detested by academic evolutionists, who invariably parade their supposed “superiority” over the former in condescending, pseudo-heroic Monkey Trial terms, as if they were a persecuted minority instead of a powerful, intolerant elite with the deck stacked heavily in their favor. Regardless of one’s opinions about evolution, there is no doubt as to the relative distribution of social power between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.

True, most creationists and intelligent design advocates, like most Christians, will continue to exhibit indifference or hostility to the survival of the white race (but only the white race, which is what makes them unprincipled). Contemporary Judeo-Christians, left and right, believe they find warrant for white genocide and anti-white racism in their holy book or in politically correct theology. But for any Christian with a moral conscience, objection to racial science should not be grounded in hostility to evolution alone. Acceptance of macroevolutionary theory is not a precondition for the intelligent study of racial biology. It is perfectly possible to remain an unbeliever, skeptic, or agnostic about cosmology and “ape into man” but still acknowledge the objective existence of human races and oppose white genocide because it is evil.

Notes

[1] F. Roger Devlin, “The Revolution in Human Evolution” 9 (Winter 2009-2010): 113-27.

[2] Stanley M. Garn, Human Races, 3rd ed. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1971), 154-55.

[3] Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 185.

[4] According to Time magazine’s March 24, 1941 review, “The [book’s] grisliness preceded the [arrival of the book itself]. One day [U.S. book] reviewers unwrapped a small, oblong parcel, found inside a miniature black cardboard coffin with a hinged lid. In it was a card reading, ‘Read Germany Must Perish! Tomorrow you will receive your copy.’” In 1939, as chairman of The American Federation of Peace, Kaufman had urged Congress “to sterilize all Americans so that their children might not become homicidal monsters. In step with the times, [by 1941] Sterilizer Kaufman had simply transferred his basic idea to the [German] enemy.”

TOQ Online, January 20, 2010