The phrase “gene-culture” expresses the idea that there is no such thing as a culture independent from genes, or genes independent from culture. It enables a researcher to think of human evolution in accurate, realistic terms. At a population level, it is not individual humans, or specific genetic backgrounds, that are most relevant to natural selection, it is the gene-culture.
Examples of gene-cultures are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), Lebanese Christians, the Amish, Malaysian Muslims, and Ashkenazi Jews.
In order for children to grow up, prosper, and reproduce, in addition to requiring healthy and capable genes, they require healthy and capable cultures. They need a culture where there is rule of law, where there is sufficient social support to overcome the fear of the financial risk posed by having children, and where there is sufficient knowledge and health care to feed, clothe and care for these children.
The reproductive prosperity of a population relies on both genes and cultures. The two are inseparable. And when either of them is unfit, reproductive fitness is diminished.
The Japanese are extremely fit genetically. Intellectually they have the capacity to provide sufficient food and care for their offspring. But their culture is unfit. The reproductive fitness of their genes doesn’t make a difference when the culture part is unfit; the gene-culture as a whole becomes unfit and fails to reproduce effectively.
What is unfit about Japanese culture is the fact that they fully embraced the West’s neo-Liberal Usurer Economics, which, through the Risk-Profit Differential, constantly pushes the nation’s wealth into the hands of the super-rich, increasing poverty among the lower classes, and causing stagnation in the middle class.
Any culture that is not resistant to usury will eventually suffer stagnation, declining birth rates and population shrinkage. This is happening in most, if not all, of the developed world.
Just as a population that is genetically prone to a plague can be wiped out by it, a population that is culturally prone to usury will be wiped out by it.
The idea of the gene-culture enables us to view matters of cultural (economic and religious) practice in Darwinian terms. Just as a harmful genetic mutation reduces a population’s viability, a harmful cultural mutation (in the case of Japanese, embracing Western-style usury) reduces the population’s viability.
The idea of the gene-culture also contains the important implication that culture affects genes and genes affect culture. Among animals, genetic fitness is the most important factor in their survival, most animals have negligible cultures (exceptions being higher primates like orangutans). Humans, however, due to their intellectual complexity, are extremely reliant on culture, so that culture makes up about half of the picture when it comes to examining a population’s reproductive fitness.
In the above chart, I’m counting the material environment in which the genes exist toward the gene side. The contribution of culture toward the reproductive fitness of humans varies a great deal from environment to environment, and the average amount of its contribution might be less than 50%.
Imagine a hundred Japanese middle class families in Tokyo adopting a hundred Haitian children from soon after birth. The children will grow up in a Japanese world, learning Japanese customs and ideals. But they do not have Japanese genes. Victorian romantics and modern proponents of “environment is everything” (junk 20th century social scientists, which is nearly all of them) would imagine that these children would grow up and make perfect Japanese citizens who will only be held back by racism.
What actually happens is that their Haitian genes will mutate Japanese culture, so that no matter how hard they try to be authentically Japanese, there will be clear manifestations of differences in their understanding and application of Japanese culture (which is not a bad thing, it is a simple fact of biology).
But the most interesting thing is the children of these children. These children will create a Creole Japanese culture that will seem quite foreign to the average Japanese. It will have aspects of Japanese culture and Haitian culture, even if the children and their parents know nothing about Haiti and its people. Haitian culture is partly a result of its population’s genetics. And if this population is made to grow up in Japan, these genes will ultimately show through, tearing Japanese cultural conditioning apart and creating something new and interesting out of it.
A Shortcut to (Edible) Mushrooms
When a tribe that has never seem mushrooms before wanders into a shire where mushrooms abound, some brave souls will experiment with this new potentially edible stuff. If someone eats a particular mushroom, gets sick and dies, this will not lead to a genetic adaptation against eating such mushrooms. It leads to a cultural adaptation. The culture will recognize such mushrooms as unsafe to eat, perhaps first beginning by considering all mushrooms unsafe (if the first experiment with mushrooms goes really badly).
Genes are a response to topology. Cultures, too, are responses to topology. When tribe is placed in that particular environment, it responds, modifying its culture to adapt to it, in this particular case by accumulating knowledge regarding which mushrooms are safe and which ones are not.
If this tribe’s descendants move on to a city a few generations later, they may carry with them extensive knowledge of mushrooms that is going to be largely irrelevant, since this knowledge was an adaptation to pressures from another environment. For this reason this knowledge will slowly be lost unless someone writes it down.
This process of a culture adapting to a new environment, then losing the adaptation once it goes into a new environment, is the same as a genome adapting to a new environment then losing the adaptation once it goes into a new one. Except that cultural adaptation is much, much faster, and increases the species’ adaptation power by orders of magnitude. Humans do not need genetic adaptations to poisonous mushrooms when they have the power of overnight cultural adaptation.
An interesting expression of the gene-culture came from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s president, the Wall Street-friendly drunkard Boris Yeltsin, took off all of Russia’s defenses and threw it to Wall Street’s fattest and ugliest usurers, who, in just a few years, managed to plunge the country into the worst demographic disaster in its history. Russia started to resemble a third-world backwater rather than a proud Euro-Asiatic country. Regardless of the genetic fitness of Russia’s population, removal of its cultural defenses against usury destroyed its reproductive fitness.
Once Vladimir Putin took over, he kicked out the usurers and started the process of repairing Russia’s cultural fitness through reviving the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian industry. The usurers, in turn, launched an all-out financial and propaganda war on him from Wall Street that has continued to date. Regardless of Wall Street and Washington’s chest-pumping, Russia has continued its demographic recovery. Christianity is back on the rise, culture is flourishing, life expectancies increase and technological innovation grows.
The above is, of course, a gross simplification of what happened in Russia. But to the gene-culture this is not an issue, since the gene-culture is a high-level construct that enables researchers to examine human history from a Darwinian perspective. No facts are ignored or thrown out to fit reality into the theory (as is done by junk sociologists on the one hand, and certain evolutionary psychologists on the other), as the theory encompasses all facts. Dysfunctions in politics are affected by, and affect, the gene-culture. Russia’s gene-culture leads to Czars, Arab and African gene-cultures lead to dictators, and Western Europe’s present gene-culture leads to usurer-controlled democracies. Cultures select for genes and genes select for cultures.
The gene-culture also sheds light on the effects of feminism. Feminism reduces fertility in many ways, such as encouraging women to spend their most fertile years working to enrich the usurer class. A gene-culture that is not immune to feminism will be infected and mutated by it, so that its reproductive fitness decreases. Meanwhile, gene-cultures that are immune to feminism will not be harmed by it, and will reproduce faster than the infected populations. This process will naturally eliminate feminism from any large population that contains a significant minority gene-culture that is resistant to feminism.
The gene-culture could also be called the gene-meme, or geme for short. But this gets too technical and only social scientists would understand it. I chose “gene-culture” since it is easier to imagine and comprehend. By “culture” I mean everything carried by a human population apart from genes and epigenetics. This includes language, religion, law and political institutions.