Kin relation does not necessarily have to have a biological origin. Co-religionists refer to themselves as brother or sister. Kinship, it is my opinion, can be had by a feeling of shared religion, culture, language or whatever binding elements suits the situational context. What might seem like a common biological similarity might or might not result in a feeling of a shared cosmology or world view. Neil Bissoondath articulated a feeling of detachment culturally from those he shares what should be a biological linkage:

"Samuel Selvon, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Hanif Kureishi, and I are all writers, all the same "ethnicity" to a certain extent, all ethnically "South Asian," all "Indians." Yet I suspect that as a group, we are at least as dissimilar as similar. When any of us meet, there is no gravitation around an ethnic bonfire. I feel a greater affinity for the work of Timothy Mo - a British novelist born of an English mother and a Chinese father - than I do for that of Salman Rushdie, with whom I share an ethnicity." Bissondath, Neil I am Canadian, Saturday Night, October, 1994, p. 18

Kinship forms the basis for Pierre L. van den Berghe's thesis surrounding what he examines as the ethnic phenomenon. In his book "The Ethnic Phenomenon" he outlines that kin selection has its roots in a shared commonality that stems from common genes and that nepotism is the basis for ethnic division:

"To maximize their reproduction, genes in program organisms to do two things: successfully compete against, and thereby contribute to the reproduction of organisms that carry alternative alleles of the genes in question, and successfully cooperate with (and thereby contribute to the reproduction of) organisms that share the same allele of the genes. In simpler terms, the degree of cooperation between organisms can be expected to be a direct function of the proportion of the genes they share: conversely, the degree of conflict between them is an inverse function of the proportion of shared genes." van den Berghe, Pierre The Ethnic Phenomenon, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1981, p. 7

The selections noted above are clearly anathema. While Bissondath above does not feel a kinship with those of a shared pigmentation allele and geographical roots, van den Berghe rests his whole thesis the same: that we peg our feelings of kinship in biological terms and ethnicity is a result thereof. I can summarize my reaction to van den Berghe: I was having a problem with van den Berghe's kinship theory because it is reductionism and it does not include other socially constructed distinctions.

"The sociobiological paradigm provides a much simpler explanation. In nearly all species, the female is the scarce reproductive resource for the male rather than vice versa. There are fewer females available doe insemination than males ready to inseminate. Eggs are big, few and therefore costly; sperms are small abundant and cheap. Since females invest much more in the reproductive process than males, they maximize their fitness by being choosy about their mating partners. They seek to pick the best by being possible mates in terms of genetic qualities and resources they have to offer. The males, on the other hand, maximizes his fitness by being promiscuous and by outcompeting his rivals in access to reproductive females" van den Berghe, p. 26

My problem with the sociobiological context is that it has become too simplistic and tends to peg too much determinism on a biological construct that has gone obsolete in a Postmodern arena. If what is said about the social construction of culture is true, then there are greater issues to consider outside the realm of the biological. Social forces of shared commonality have already overtaken a biological base as the foundation of such commonality. If an argument is put forward that there is protection in numbers and that comfort can be had by looking in a groups scenario of shared common features, then I have no choice but to agree. To make nepotism a foundation of a thesis of shared kinship then I have to argue that it is simplistic and has to undergo some form of revision. Since the absolute truth is elusive and some truths of yesterday are no longer relevant today and todays will no longer be relevant tomorrow, a revisiting of the sociobiological paradigm is worth considering.

Van Den Berghe is a white sociologist born in the old Belgian colony of the Congo. Disgusted by white oppression of Africans, he became a fairly conventional liberal on race relations. But, as he overcame his Eurocentric focus on white crimes, he realized that race-based exploitation and violence are universal human curses. This lead him to sociobiology, and its bedrock finding: the theory of kin selection: The more genes we share with another individual, the more altruistic we are toward him. And the less kind we are toward our more distant kin.

Since there is no fundamental boundary between family, ethnic group, and race, Van Den Berghe coined the brilliant term "ethnic nepotism" to describe the human tendency to favor "our people" at the expense of others.

This is the most significant advance ever in the Marxist analysis of economic exploitation. By substituting kinship for class as the great engine of history, Van Den Berghe has invented a neo-Darwinian Marxism with enormous explanatory power and predictive power. This 1981 book's accuracy was confirmed by the subsequent breakup of the communist world into clashing ethnic groups.

Steve Sailer