“Tribal behavior is more deeply ingrained than are mere cultural prescriptions. Its longevity and stability point strongly to a genetic basis. This is hardly surprising, given that tribes are the default human social institution. The inbuilt nature of tribalism explains why it took so many thousands of years for East Asians and later Europeans to break free of its deadening embrace.”

— Nicholas Wade

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

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Nicholas Wade 14

British writer 1942

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“There are two important factors to consider in the emergence of social change. One is that a society develops through changes in its institutions, which are blends of culture and genetically shaped social behavior. The other is that the genes and culture interact. This may seem paradoxical to anyone who considers genes and culture to be entirely separate realms. But it is scarcely surprising from an evolutionary perspective, given that the genome is designed to respond to the environment, and a major component of the human environment is society and its cultural practices.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

“Each of the major civilizations has developed the institutions appropriate for its circumstances and survival. But these institutions, though heavily imbued with cultural traditions, rest of a bedrock of genetically shaped human behavior.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

“The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 3 “Infra Dawn” (p. 66)

“In the last half-century, Americans have increasingly tended to emphasize race and tribe in promoting “diversity,” rather than seeking to strengthen the more tenuous notion of unity with their fellow citizens. We have forgotten that human nature is fond of division and must work at setting aside superficial tribal affinities to unite on the basis of core values and ideas.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

“Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion—accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption—plot perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Rebelling Within Nature http://lesswrong.com/lw/s5/rebelling_within_nature/ (July 2008)

“Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“… Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

ibid.
Other

“The physiology of orgasm and penile erection no more explain a culture's sexual schema than the auditory range of the human ear explains its music.”

Carole Vance anthropologist

"Social Construction Theory and Sexuality", quoted in Maus, Fred Everett (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music, p.158. ISBN 1580461433

“I am not a person of color; I am not a citizen of a tribe; and I have apologized for confusion I’ve caused on tribal citizenship, tribal sovereignty, and for any harm that I’ve caused.”

Elizabeth Warren (1949) 28th United States Senator from Massachusetts

Quoted in Warren Faces Ancestry Question At Town Hall: ‘I Shouldn’t Have Done It. I Am Not A Person Of Color’ https://www.dailywire.com/news/warren-faces-ancestry-question-at-town-hall-i-shouldnt-have-done-it-i-am-not-a-person-of-color (December 8, 2019)
2019

“Institutions are human behavior, and they are, therefore, to be explained by the characteristics of that behavior.”

George C. Homans (1910–1989) American sociologist

George C. Homans (1962), "Autobiographical introduction", in: Sentiments & activities; essays in social science https://archive.org/stream/sentimentsactivi00homa#page/34/mode/2up, p. 35

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