UNZ: 23-12-2025,
Second Reply to Alexis
Alexis: I am not disregarding “the powerful role of culture” in any sense. Indeed, the framework within which I am working—although not yet fully elaborated—treats the cultural dimension with considerable gravity. Under the Darwinian paradigm, however, culture is relegated to a secondary rather than a primary causal factor.
Reply: This is false. The title of my book is The Culture of Critique and it proposes that certain Jewish intellectual and political movements have had a major role in the decline of European-ancestry populations because of the culture they were instrumental in creating as a result of their rise to elite status in the West. Moreover, cultural practices like eugenics programs or specifying who can marry whom clearly have effects on gene pools, as elaborated in A People That Shall Dwell Alone. My view is that human evolution has moved into a scenario dominated by culture, as described in the papers cited in the following.
But the real problem here is that Alexis acknowledges that he doesn’t have a theory of how culture and evolution interact. I do, as elaborated in several papers published in peer-reviewed journals:
- MacDonald, K. Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy. Politics and Culture #1 (April, 2010).
- MacDonald, K. (2009). Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture. Evolutionary Psychology,