Discrimination permeates all aspects of life

Xenophobia and racism, of course, permeate our contemporary society, as

does discrimination on the basis of class, gender, disability, age and so on.
race, xenophobia, and its concomitant prejudice and ethnic discrimination.
Racism and xenophobia have deep roots in

WHAT IS true is that in different social and historical circumstances, human behavior and
psychology can vary dramatically, just as in different physical circumstances, water can be a
solid, a liquid, or a gas. But that does not mean that human beings are infinitely malleable
or that there are no biological constraints on human behavior.
But the idea that xenophobia is part of human nature also has also been defended by some
biologists and psychologists. For example, in the 1970s, the Harvard entomologist Edward
O. Wilson, one of the world's leading experts on ants, claimed in his book Sociobiology that
characteristics such as competition, aggression, territoriality, xenophobia and warfare are
universal and have a genetic basis.

Similar claims have been made more recently by some so-called evolutionary psychologists,
who argue that underlying features of human psychology were shaped by the evolutionary
pressures faced by early humans, and have changed little since.

Among these pressures was supposedly the need to survive in small groups competing with
other such groups, which favored those who distinguished between insiders and outsiders,
and who prioritized the former over the latter.

These arguments lead to the conclusion that attempting to create a society based on equality
and cooperation, rather than inequality and competition, goes against human nature.
Wilson reportedly quipped about Marxism, "Wonderful theory. Wrong species."

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker criticizes "Marxists, academic feminists and
cafe intellectuals" and claims that inequality and conflict are inevitable features of human
society. According to Pinker, "The standard Marxist theory of human nature has probably
been refuted by many sources of evidence, including the anthropological record and
Darwinian theory."

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THE ARGUMENT that human nature rules out radical social change has probably been
around as long as class society has existed, but it is the theories of the sociobiologists and
the evolutionary psychologists that are mistaken.

To take the case of xenophobia, it is simply false that fear or hatred of strangers is a
universal feature of human psychology. The Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin notes:

[T]he attitudes of people toward foreign cultures and other countries have varied tremendously
from social class to social class and time to time. Could the aristocracy of Russia in the
nineteenth century, which thought all things Slavic to be inferior, which spoke French by
preference, which looked to Germany for its military and technological resources, be described
as xenophobic? Educated and upper classes in particular have often looked to other cultures for
the highest and the best.
Nineteenth-century European aristocrats are not the only ones to show no fear of people
from other cultures. The historian Howard Zinn reports that when Christopher Columbus
and his crew came ashore in the Bahamas in October 1492, Arawak Indians "ran to greet
them, brought them food, water, gifts." According to Zinn:

it is easy to think of countless other examples in which people from different backgrounds
have lived together harmoniously, or have united across national and ethnic lines to fight for
social justice.

Even if a particular trait is universal, this doesn't mean that it has a genetic basis.

Sometimes, sociobiologists claim that non-human animals share the characteristic in

question--aggression, for instance--and that this shows it probably has a genetic basis.

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ATTEMPTS BY evolutionary psychologists to show that various characteristics are "hard

wired" into human psychology also fall flat. Just like sociobiologists before them,
evolutionary psychologists often ignore alternative explanations of human behavior, as well
as evidence that the psychological characteristics that they claim were built into the human
mind hundreds of thousands of years ago are not universal after all.

Of course, we know that human beings are capable of xenophobia, aggression and even
genocide. But we equally know that humans are capable of friendliness toward strangers,
altruism and solidarity. The claim that the first set of traits is more natural than the second
is baseless.

Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists adopt an ultra-adaptationist view that tries

to explain every significant aspect of human behavior or psychology as a biological
adaptation, shaped by natural selection.

But while human intelligence was surely the subject of natural selection, it is highly
implausible to think that specific behaviors or psychological characteristics are hard wired
into our brains. As the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once put it:

The central feature of our biological uniqueness also provides the major reason for doubting that
our behaviors are directly coded by specific genes. That feature is, of course, our large brain...

[M]arkedly increased brain size in human evolution...added enough neural connections to

convert an inflexible and rather rigidly programmed device into a labile organ, endowed with
sufficient logic and memory to substitute non-programmed learning for direct specification as
the ground of social behavior. Flexibility may well be the most important determinant of human
consciousness; the direct programming of behavior has probably become inadaptive.

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BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISTS maintain that our biological inheritance places relatively

tight constraints on possible forms of human behavior. By contrast, the actual history of
human evolution points to a very different picture of human nature.
It is the human ability to learn and to pass on newly acquired knowledge and behavior to
future generations that makes it impossible to understand the complexities of human
society in biological terms, even though we are biological creatures.

These considerations from evolutionary biology are reinforced by what we know about brain
development in the growth of individual humans. While some peripheral structures, such as
sensory cells, are genetically specified, most brain structures develop as the result of brain
cell proliferation followed by a process of "pruning."

While the initial process of proliferation is under genetic control, the process of brain-cell
pruning depends on interaction between cells and the environment. Thus, the cortical
structures we end up with are not genetically specified, but mainly shaped by our
environment.

The claim is not that there are no biological limits to human behavior, but that our biology
has made a much greater range of behaviors possible than in other species.

Human beings are not naturally violent, selfish, competitive, greedy or xenophobic. It is not
natural for human societies to be organized hierarchically or for women to have lower social
status than men, and modern capitalist society does not exist because it uniquely reflects
human nature.

WHAT IS true is that in different social and historical circumstances, human behavior and
psychology can vary dramatically, just as in different physical circumstances, water can be a
solid, a liquid, or a gas. But that does not mean that human beings are infinitely malleable
or that there are no biological constraints on human behavior.

There is a profound ignorance in these people who choose to believe or are

raised with racist and xenophobic beliefs and ideologies. They ignore the
humanity that exists within everybody. Every single human on this Earth is a
person with thoughts and feelings, and when the politicians who run our
governments decide to prevent asylum seekers from finding a safe haven based
on their skin color, they are reducing these asylum seekers to less than human.
Should children in Europe be taught the value of tolerance of diversity
This new crisis adds more flame to the fire.