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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Addendum: The Sociobiology of The New World Order (and the Conspiracy of Sociobiology)

The Sociobiology of The New World Order (and the Conspiracy of Sociobiology)

Human sociobiology is the most naturalistic explanation of human social organization, but it remains a taboo, because it implies that society is genetically stratified. Conspiracy theories fill the void, by reporting that the ruling class indeed is an inbreeding elite while allowing anyone uncomfortable with the notion to dismiss the source. Nonetheless, genetic stratification, by class, geography, or otherwise sets the stage for speciation.

The pleasure peddlers, shamed and shunned, defend the legitimacy of their enterprise. And, like pornographers, conspiracy buffs find new audiences through the Internet. With a few keystrokes, anyone can retrieve and ogle whatever account of history fulfills his or her fantasy life.

The attacks of 911 continue to provide fodder for conspiracy buffs. The peculiarities surrounding 911 act as paranoid steroids for the conspiratorial mindset. Whatever the merits of the evidence and arguments of Scholars for 911 Truth and similar groups, the 911 material is only a recent fruit of one branch of the grand conspiratorial family tree.

At root is the notion that behind or above the overt maneuverings of the political class there operates a covert ruling elite that exercises a higher level of control. That is, beyond the control hierarchy’s middle-management level of elected officials and their bureaucrats an invisible executive class pulls the strings. Conspiracy theorists identify the pinnacle of power typically with two interlocked groups: (1) "old money" with roots in the royal families of Europe and (2) the banking industry, which supports, in the United States, the Federal Reserve System and, internationally, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Vatican, CIA, Freemasons and other "societies" are cast in various supporting roles. Conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and Jordan Maxwell present mainstream conspiracy theories built on this model of the controlling infrastructure. (These theorists qualify as mainstream in that they stop short of bringing in extraterrestrial reptiles, entities from the Hollow Earth, and that sort of thing.)

At the most fundamental level, conspiracy theories notice that rich and influential people tend to help out other rich and influential people. While exchanging golf stories at meetings of boards of directors, wealthy people find opportunities to work toward common goals, that is, to conspire. But such socializing applies to the sheet metal worker and the school teacher as much as it does to the secretary of commerce and the chief executive officer. People naturally find ways to cooperate with others with whom they rub elbows while living day to day.

The next level of conspiratorial thinking asserts, more perniciously, that the upper circles of the controlling elite constitute a tight coterie of families, of inter-related bloodlines. The power elite constitutes not only an invisible executive class, but an inbreeding one. A genetic elite, a de facto dynasty, maintains control over America and Europe according to the hardline conspiracy theorists. In this view of the control hierarchy, the American political class extends the system of British peerage.

The idea is not entirely unfounded. A quick search on the Internet reveals family ties among the Bush and Kerry and the Cheney and Obama families, with links to Winston Churchill and European royalty. Nonetheless, this level of conspiracy theorizing typically gets dismissed as a paranoid fantasy built on coincidences.

But isn’t a blueblood ruling elite the most naturalistic model of human social organization? In a large, complex society genes naturally will tend to stratify, with those predisposing individuals toward certain physical and mental capacities clustering at various strata along the social pecking order. In a technological society, genes that predispose individuals toward proficiency in managerial strategy and toward charisma, confidence and persuasiveness, and Machiavellian self promotion will tend to percolate to the top of the pyramid, eventually supplanting genes that predispose individuals toward proficiency in, say, hunting or swordsmanship. Such genetic stratification is to be expected if natural selection shapes the evolution of social species. If we take evolution theory seriously, then one implication for our own species is that of a more or less genetically coherent ruling class.

This line of thinking is not new. Naturalistic explanations of human social organization generally have overthrown supernatural ones, such as that of the divine right of kings. The current form of sociological naturalism is called sociobiology, a science of social behavior formulated in the light of evolutionary biology and genetics. Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term sociobiology while developing his Darwinian model of the evolution of complex animal societies. Wilson focused inititally on the social insects and then extrapolated certain principles to other social species. In his book Sociobiology, he argues that social behaviors evolve in those situations in which sociality confers a survival advantage. Genes that predispose individuals toward sociality will tend to proliferate in those populations. This is straight Darwinian natural selection.

Sociobiology is not particularly controversial when applied to social insects or wolf packs, but applied to human beings the science aggravates sensitive nerves. Any model of human social behavior with a strong genetic component is potentially a means to racist ends. Social class inequities cannot be solved by social programming, the racist argues, because they are grounded—presumably unalterably—in biology. Any sociological theory that leans heavily on biology potentially hands a tool to this kind of racist thinking.

Wilson encountered this sensitivity firsthand when he first published his ideas. He incurred the heat of some of his colleagues on the Harvard campus who in effect accused him of racism. Wilson describes the fallout of this episode in his book Promethean Fire, which is a summary of an earlier work, Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. In these books, Wilson and co-author Charles Lumsden expand the sociobiological model to account for cultural influences on natural selection.

Sociobiology does have a notorious precursor that emboldened racists: eugenics. During the early twentieth century, various foundations and think tanks became preoccupied with the idea of applying Darwinian logic to improving the genetic profile of human beings. The Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Institution and other moneyed interests funded programs to promote selective breeding and the sterilization of people thought to carry inferior genes. Eugenic thinking took root and blossomed into an organized eugenics movement in the United States and Britain, becoming an overt part of civic life. Offshoots of the Rockefeller- and Carnegie-funded programs encouraged eugenics projects even in Hitler’s Germany. Eugenics reached its tragic culmination in the genocidal savagery of the Nazis. The Holocaust embarrassed the elite and discredited the eugenics movement. But eugenic thinking colors various programs still today, as when World Bank loans to third-world countries come with population-control strings attached. Wikipedia provides a basic introduction to the history of, and fallout from, the eugenics movement.

"Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution": Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference, 1921, depicting eugenics as a tree that unites a variety of fields.

Nonetheless, no matter how unsavory the prospects of social darwinism, a scientific account of human social organization will have to take into account evolution theory. Precisely how a beehive or an ant hill stays organized is not completely understood. But these societies lack schools, elections, courts and the other institutions that lead human beings to believe that they are organized rationally and justly rather than biologically. If Darwinian processes shape all animal societies, then those processes should underlie human societies as well.

"Conspiracy theory" is an apt theme to attach to sociobiology, because seen through a lens of paranoid suspicion, sociobiology looks like the ultimate conspiracy theory. Sociobiology is a plot hatched by evolutionary biology and population genetics to control human social organization. The secret cabal that pulls the strings from behind the scenes is composed of chromosomes. Hard to detect, communicating in code, selfish genes act on their own behalf, with no regard for the disposable bodies they manipulate. Clannish, they mingle with their own kind and carefully screen outsiders who petition for admission to the inner circles. And by way of their machinations, the human sociopolitical hierarchies are established and maintained. Heh-heh.

Maybe it is fitting that, conjuring in the social arena, the star larvae hypothesis would invoke the twin taboos of human sociobiology and conspiracy theory. They are biological and folkloric models, respectively, of the same processes of organization and control—the ontogenetic processes of the stellar life cycle—that shape human society on the macro scale. It might be that conspiracy theories are an inevitable cultural product of post-monarchical societies. A society that has an explicit inbreeding dynasty in place, acknowledged as such and visible to all, has no need for conspiracy theories. Only when the genetic elite becomes covert does the mythic imagination fill the void with stories of hidden puppet masters. Conspiracy theories might be as tenacious as they are because they sprout from a disturbance in the unconscious: the absence of an overt dynastic ruling elite that, as a social creature, a human being expects to encounter as part of its sociocultural milieu.

Being purely naturalistic, the sociobiological account of human social organization fits neatly into the star larvae hypothesis. It fits because the hypothesis regards evolution as a programmed process, programmed in whatever way the life cycle of an organism is programmed, ontogeny and phylogeny both being managed by DNA. By extension, the developmental narrative of human history should fall under the same rubric as that of phylogenetic evolution. To exile sociobiology from accounts of human social history, because of its potentially racist applications, is to turn from the most naturalistic to other kinds of accounts. Alternative accounts include those that invoke abstract, mystical concepts, such as providence, manifest destiny, zeitgeist, spontaneous self-organization, democracy, the market, and the like, or institutional constructs, such as the electoral process or the American system of checks and balances.

The more fealty given to democracy, and the less discernable the genetic aristocracy, the more fertile the ground for conspiracy theorists, which might be why they tend to focus on the Western world. But there is no reason to suspect that control hierarchies elsewhere in the world are organized significantly differently from those in the West, they too having evolved by natural selection. Notwithstanding evolution theory, human societies differ from those of the ant or bee or wolf in a critical way: They are caught in a feedback loop with their own evolving technologies.

This dynamic produces various effects, one of which is that it helps protect the genetic elite from excessive inbreeding. Perpetuating an inbreeding elite at the top of the control hierarchy requires maintenance. Excessive inbreeding has undermined more than one well-established dynasty. The West doesn't have quite a Hindu caste system (notwithstanding the proverbial Boston Brahmin), yet genetic mixing between, say, the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of the socioeconomic pyramid would seem to be minimal. The vast majority of people who find mates choose partners from their own social class. Human social organization in the context of evolution and sociobiology must include a tension between class inbreeding and the need to admit new genes to avoid excessive inbreeding.

Karl Marx was astute in his observation that technologies upset class relations. But he lived too early to formulate the idea in specifically genetic terms. Technology dampens the threat of excessive inbreeding in the elite lines by creating novel profitable enterprises and thereby economically elevating the genes of successful entrepreneurs and their investors. Some genetic drift at the interface of the elite gene pool and that of high-ranking commoners is bound to occur spontaneously. But technologies expand the opportunities for this mixing by creating a class of nouveau riche from which the elite circles can draw recruits. This economic elevation creates an opportunity for lower class genes to climb socially, because it buys access to the Ivy League schools and other institutions where old bloodlines review applicants to the upper ranks. The country clubs, philanthropic societies, and private schools serve as a conduit up through which genes of the newly rich can percolate. The Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University, for example, apparently serves this vetting function. By placing new means of production into the hands of lower classes, technology facilitates marrying up.

Whether genetic stratification associated with class stratification might ever produce a post-human species on Earth, given technologically mediated mixing, seems doubtful. Nonetheless, the possibility has not escaped the literary imagination. H. G. Wells described one prospective outcome in his science-fiction classic, The Time Machine. In the story, an inventor, designated only as The Time Traveler, journeys to the year 802,701; where he finds a world in which humanity has split into two species. The Morlocks, descendants of the working class, inhabit a subterranean world and have degenerated into apish brutes. The descendants of the managerial class, the Eloi, have evolved neotenously—becoming androgynous, small of stature, and sporting big eyes—and enjoy an idyllic life of playful innocence, not in space but at least on the Earth's surface. Having failed to move off-planet, they become easy prey for the Morlocks and in fact constitute the Morlock’s diet, in a kind of Marxist fantasy of poetic justice.

Stratification of genes by geography will tend to coincide with stratification by class ("birds of a feather," rich neighborhoods and poor), and the synergy might tend to enhance the prospects for speciation, particularly if the geographical separation is extreme, such as that between Earth and space.

Experts have claimed that human evolution has ceased and that cultural evolution has superceded biological evolution. Philosopher Richard Rorty favored this interpretation in Philosophy and Social Hope:

"The story of how we got from Neanderthal grunts and nudges to German philosophical treatises is no more discontinuous that the story of how we got from the amoebae to the anthropoids. The two stories are parts of one larger story. Cultural evolution takes over from biological evolution without a break."

Add to this view the argument that ease of travel stirs the gene pool geographically and that medical technologies, by keeping "less fit" people alive, keep genes in circulation that otherwise would be filtered out, and the case is made that modernity undermines the genetic stratification that encourages further evolution. Ergo, the torch of human advancement has been passed to the cultural innovators.

This is the point of view is underscored in a New York Times article, "Evolution of Humans May at Last Be Faltering," (Mar. 14, 1995, p. B10):

"A number of experts say that Homo sapiens is becoming increasingly disengaged from the forces of natural selection and speciation, the key processes that brought humankind into existence. [. . . .] Humans, some evolutionists say, have wrapped themselves in such a snug cocoon, from clothing to central heating to hurricane warning systems, that populations are largely insulated from the environmental stresses that drive evolution. Technology and medicine also tend to cancel out inherited genetic defects. [. . . .] Humans are intermixing more than ever before, marrying people born in locations farther away and generally eliminating the isolation of populations that leads to speciation."

The article quotes Ian Tattersall, a paleoantropologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, from his book, The Fossil Trail: "Homo sapiens today is in a mode of intermixing rather than of differentiation, and the conditions for significant evolutionary change simply don’t exist—and won’t, short of some all-too-imaginable calamity."

Stephen Jay Gould apparently shared the view that evolutionary pressures no longer apply to the human species. Commenting on genetic mixing among geographically separated populations, he says, "We are not likely to speciate unless we send up some space colonies." Gould seems never to have followed up on the implications of his insight.

But this evolution-is-over line of thinking forgets that evolution is always adaptation to environment. So long as living conditions change, evolution will have to proceed. Otherwise the theory makes no sense. Technology not only changes living conditions, but does so radically and at an accelerating pace. As a result, human evolution actually should be accelerating. And in fact this is what more recent research shows. An AP article from January 2008 summarizes the new thinking: "Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening. People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say." An audio interview with one of the researchers is available HERE.

NEWSWEEK (Jan 28, 2008, p.49) summarized the findings this way, "A study published in the December Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that not only are humans still evolving, but we are doing so at a faster rate than ever before, with genes that affect our diets and brains leading the race. [. . . .] The findings have turned some traditional assumptions on their heads."

This is an odd course of events. How many sciences, in making predictions, and thus establishing their merit as sciences, are given so much leeway to get things so wrong? How can evolution theory get away with predictions that oscillate so wildly—from the cessation of human evolution to its acceleration—within the span of one generation of researchers? Can a theory so imprecise rest on a solid theoretical footing? Some foundation of the theory must need to be reformulated to accommodate the sudden about face.

But let's give the wobbly theory a break and work within its given parameters.

Geographic illustration of SPATIAL ASPECTS OF SPECIATION: 1. allopatric speciation - physical barrier divides population 2. peripatric speciation - small founding population enters isolated niche 3. parapatric speciation - new niche found adjacent to original one 4. sympatric speciation - speciation occurs without physical separation

Speciation in normal evolutionary theory is thought to occur by various modes, which have in common a small inbreeding population that develops within or geographically separated from its parent population. The geographical separation of the space colony from Earth would seem to create the perfect situation for speciation to occur. The prospects for speciation must surely be amplified if a geographically isolated group, such as in a space colony, is taken primarily from a given class of the parent population, rather than from a cross section of all genetic strata ("the founder effect.") The diagram above illustrates various modes of genetic separation that can lead to speciation.  

The prospective New World Order that haunts the imaginations of conspiracy theorists might not be of this world at all. The prospect of elite genes conspiring to escape Earth to form extraterrestrial societies has occurred to at least one conspiracy theorist (and probably countless science fiction writers). In the video below, Alex Jones concludes his assessment of the twentieth century's eugenics campaigns by raising the specter of an elite flight from Terra, involving immortal transhumanists. (For all his ingenuity in connecting seemingly unrelated dots, Jones fails to note that transhuman [or post-human] immortality in Heaven is also the central theme and promise of the Christian faith to which he subscribes.)

The proposed naturalness of the human social order implied by the science of sociobiology does not mean that cruelty and brutality from the ruling elite should be tolerated or rationalized in terms of "the natural order." The human capacity to step outside of the purely deterministic aspects of the physical world enables and entitles us to make demands of "the natural order," even if nature’s elasticity has its limits. An ethic of noblesse oblige seems a reasonable expectation to impose on privileged classes. Munificence needs to stand in opposition to social Darwinism and eugenics. Why shouldn’t the natural order's natural ethic be one of largesse, to keep the peace if nothing else? Popular revolutions might be the natural corrective for abuses of power.

Caste systems are nothing new. Astrology, for example, is an attempt to classify natural types of human sensibilities and capacities. Genes will tend to cluster in segments of a society where they bestow a survival advantage, and there they can become discernable as conspicuous cliques. It's not that people who make up the cliques necessarily have arrived at their posts by merit of achievement, but just that certain genes will tend to aggregate at the top, and certain individuals will inherit their parents' priveliges. Individuals, from the perspective of the genes, are automaton servants. From a humanistic point of view, this is a perverse perspective. And, similarly, conspiracy theories are dismissed as politically and sociologically perverse. But conspiracy theories might have value as a social safety valve, because they vent intrigues and frustrations that otherwise would fester. The taboo against conspiracy theories protects the status quo from inspection and so also contributes to social stability.

Then again, maybe it's time the naughty bits at the top of the pyramid were exposed, in their full anatomical correctness. Maybe it's time the body politic treated the citizenry to a socioeconomic Full Monty and leave nothing to the imagination. Then we might see where democracy ultimately can lead.

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