A Conversation with Edward Dutton

Edward Dutton is an English evolutionary anthropologist and is adjunct professor of anthropology of religion at Oulu University in Finland. He has a degree in theology from Durham University and a PhD in religious studies from the University of Aberdeen. Dr. Dutton has published broadly on human intelligence and has a YouTube channel on controversial scientific research called “The Jolly Heretic.”

Grégoire Canlorbe: What can be done about low-IQ immigration and interracial marriage in the West?

Edward Dutton: If you are talking about the video I did on race, I’m interested in the consequences of outbreeding. An r strategy for reproduction is common in an unstable ecology that nevertheless does not pose great difficulties for survival. An example would be the subtropical African savannahs, where humans evolved and where food was plentiful. The environment is unstable, however, compared to harsher, more northerly climates where winters are cold but where the seasons change in a predictably stable way. The savannahs were less predictable because of occasional devastating droughts and unpredictable plagues of viral, bacterial, or parasitic diseases.

In these circumstances, humans live fast and die young and have as many children as they can, by as many genetically fit people as they can. There’s some justification for outbreeding because a genetically very different person might have useful genes for parasite resistance or something else that you don’t have, and so you’d expect r-strategists to be interested in outbreeding. At the same time, r-strategists tend to have high levels of mental instability because, in an environment with few challenges for survival, there’s very little selection against it.

A K strategy is more common when the carrying capacity for the species is reached and individuals start competing with each other. They do this as the ecology becomes more stable and more harsh. They invest less energy in copulation and more in nurture. They have a smaller number of children and they invest a great deal in them so they’re highly adapted to the ecology and more likely to survive the competition with members of their own species. Now, once this happens — once you are reducing the number of people who you are having sex with and you’re reducing the number of children you have — you can maximize the extent to which you pass on your genes by selecting an optimal level of genetic similarity in your partner.

In these ecologies, there is selection against outbreeding and in favor of people who are similar, or who are optimally similar. The optimum level of similarity seems to be the equivalent of third cousins or actual third cousins, so there is less benefit in mixed marriages. Now, there are variations, of course, because 88 per cent of the genome affects the brain. Sometimes people will select a mate who’s very, very mentally similar, let’s say, but of a different race. That’s possible.

In fact, it’s interesting to note that when a white man marries a black woman, those marriages are very stable, presumably because they reflect K strategy. I mean, a black woman is not often regarded as particularly feminine or attractive, and so the white man is not selecting her based on physical markers. He’s probably selecting on mental markers, and therefore they’re more likely to get along and not argue with each other.

Much more important than crossbreeding to Europeans is the question of who’s having children. I write about this in my book At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent, What It Means For The Future. That’s the big issue: There is now a negative association between fertility and IQ. Intelligence is declining and we know it’s genetic because we have research from Iceland. We know that over the last three generations, the percentage of the population that carries genes that are associated with a very high IQ has gone down.

We’re definitely getting less intelligent for genetic reasons, and that’s what’s going to cause civilization to collapse. The cause of this, as I’ve said in my book, is the introduction of contraception. More intelligent people — unless they’re religious — want to have a relatively small family so they can enjoy a high standard of living. And it’s the intelligent who are more able to achieve this, using contraception. Less intelligent people are less efficient users of contraception, and often too impulsive to use it consistently.

Feminism, of course, means that more intelligent women delay their fertility in order to pursue a career. Welfare is also a problem. Only those who are on welfare, who have a very low IQ, are breeding at above replacement-level fertility in Western countries. Obviously, immigration from low-IQ countries is a factor as well, because it reduces IQ at the genetic level, but also at the environmental level in that it makes schools less efficient; it also brings in all kinds of conflicts, and that means that IQ becomes suboptimal for everybody, but I’m not sure that miscegenation becomes a problem in that regard.

Grégoire Canlorbe: How do you assess the Lebensborn experiment under the Nazi regime? Could it have reversed the dysgenic trends in the West — at least the “Aryan race”?

Edward Dutton: Do you mean Hitler was trying to raise intelligence and he was basing it on the marker of being Aryan? Well, there is some very weak correlation between having blonde hair and blue eyes and having high IQ — very weak. So, let’s say to some extent that may have elevated IQ. But the Nazis were not particularly interested in intelligence research. The Nazis were a nationalist movement that wanted to unite all different social classes under nationalism. They wanted to stop people who had very low IQs from having children, but apart from that, I’m not sure they were particularly interested in doing anything in terms of eugenics or even understood that IQ was declining.

When you’re speaking of race, you’re dividing up humanity based on gene frequencies, and, generally, gene frequencies that reflect evolution in a particular environment. And so, therefore, those differences in gene frequency, although they are small, tend to push in a particular direction. Consequently, we end up with a series of genetic clusters, which, by the way, tend to parallel the twelve races of Classical Anthropology. I don’t think people would talk about an “Aryan race,” but I suppose you could talk about an Aryan ethnicity or something like that. Certainly, there are areas where these characteristics — blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin — are more pronounced than others, and so I suppose you could talk about a sub-race or something like that.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides race and intelligence, you have a keen interest in religion. How do you explain that Catholicism has fallen into cosmopolitanism since the Second Vatican Council?

Edward Dutton: Catholicism has fallen into cosmopolitanism just as all Western religions have. Religions, like any ideology, tend to be a manifestation of the way the people are thinking. If the big predictor of religiousness is stress, people who are stressed tend to become more religious; and if the levels of stress have substantially gone down, many people cease being religious. Apart from the people who are still traditionally religious, many have lost their religiousness. They don’t believe things firmly.

In the past, within societies, religion could promote ethnocentrism as an expression of the will of God. That may be one reason why religion was selected for, because you have an instinct to preserve your ethnic group. God is telling you that you should preserve your ethnic group, which is the best of all groups. A group that follows that worldview is going to have a better chance of surviving. Stress makes you instinctive and religious. So as the level of stress goes down and people become less instinctive, this need for group survival declines, and that is going to be reflected in religion. And then there is the question of who takes over the religion — who takes control.

My colleague Michael Woodley of Menie talks about what he calls the social epistasis model. At the start of Industrial Revolution, child mortality was 40 percent, but now it’s only 1 percent. It is important to recognize that people who have deficiencies of the mind — depression, autism, etc. — tend also to have physical defects: allergies, physical abnormalities, poor immune system, and so on. Physical defects lead to high infant mortality, so the deficiencies of mind associated with them would have been expunged from the population every generation. These people wouldn’t have survived childhood or wouldn’t have survived to live very long and have children. About 88 percent of the genome concerns the mind, so it’s a massive target for mutation. High rates of infant mortality purged mutations that affect the mind.

Lower rates of infant mortality mean you’re going to get more and more people — what Woodley calls spiteful mutants — who exhibit spiteful mutations of the mind. They advocate things that would be washed out in harsher evolutionary conditions because they’d make you destroy yourself. They make you go against evolutionary imperatives. Examples would be encouraging childlessness in women, homosexuality — which is a reproductive dead end — and welcoming aliens into one’s territory who then become fierce competitors for resources. Elites advocate those things, and then, they cause those with whom they associate — even if the associates are not mutants — to express their own genes sub-optimally because we’re adapted to live in the company of people who are normal, not mutants. And the mutants will want to take over, as this will be adaptive for their group.

You’d expect the elite — and social class is accounted for 70 percent by genetics — to have more of these spiteful mutants, because their ancestors have probably been wealthier and been subject to Darwinian culling conditions for fewer generations than those whose ancestors were poor. And so you can see how these spiteful mutants can take control — over religion and over politics. These people would take over all institutions, and then they make the institutions maladaptive — they would make them go against evolutionary imperatives and so influence even non-mutants to be maladapted, by limiting their fertility, for example. And that, perhaps, is what you’re seeing with the Catholic Church and with other religions. In the past, they were advocating evolutionarily useful things, but now it’s flipped and they’re advocating things that, basically, will cause the destruction of European Man.

Grégoire Canlorbe: If the great leaders of the Pagan world — Leonidas, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Augustus — came back to life, how do you think they would react to the invasion of Europe by Muslims and black Africans?

Edward Dutton: Obviously these people were living under conditions of Darwinian selection. And so, should they come back, they would be, for the most part, strongly adapted, both at the individual level and the group level, to evolutionary survival. Actually there’s an extent to which they’d have already experienced what we’re being faced with.

During the decline of Rome, you had warmer conditions, which would have weakened Darwinian harsh selection. And you had contraception, which would have reduced intelligence and would have had a dysgenic effect. And then, you had the fall of Rome. So, they would have experienced our decline before. But Caesar, of course, was living about 40 or 50 years before the decline of Rome slowly started. So, he would be a lot more horrified, I think. I don’t know what the Pagan leaders of the past would do, should they come back in our epoch. It would depend on how much power they would have, but I imagine they would stop the situation or put it into reverse.

You could argue that Muslims who are coming into Europe now have been under conditions of Natural Selection for longer than Europeans have. We stopped being under conditions of Darwinian selection in about 1800. So, we’ve had generations and generations of this rising tide of mutation. People from Third-World countries have had much less of that. So, what I suspect the Pagans would do is what the Muslims are doing now. Look at Muslim behavior patterns: That’s what Pagans would do. They would outbreed the present population, and they would be highly militarized and highly religious — martial values and all that — and then, basically, take over.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is sometimes suggested that the religion linked to a given people expresses the soul of their race. Do you think that the East-Asian genome influences the religions of East-Asian peoples, such as Buddhism or Shintoism?

Edward Dutton: If we’re talking about East Asians, Northeast Asians, it is interesting that the kind of religion that they have — if we look at, say, the Japanese — has developed in a slightly different way from Europe. With Europe, you have this very strong sort of moral God who judges your morality, and you have only one God. He judges you, and the good thing about that system is that it is open. It’s not a religion based around race — at least, not openly.

Let me put it in another way: I’ve got a book coming out soon called Race Differences In Ethnocentrism. And I’ve got another book that’s already out called The Silent Rape Epidemic: How The Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers. In both books, I argue that some peoples follow what I call a “genius strategy,” and that some peoples follow what I call an “ethnocentric strategy.”

If you’re evolved as East Asians are, with a very cold and very harsh but very stable climate, then you can’t develop a large gene pool because if you deviate too strongly from this particular evolution to the ecology, you’ll die. So, you end up with a small gene pool, and that means that you can’t really create geniuses very easily because geniuses are, in part, people with outlier high IQ.

In the Northeast Asian environment you need to have not only a small gene pool to survive, you need to be able to cooperate and get along and create highly pro-social groups. And geniuses are a problem, because geniuses tend to be higher IQ outliers, and this means that they’re more likely to happen, by genetic chance, if there is a more varied gene pool, and also, they tend to be moderately psychopathic. In an ecology such as that in which the Japanese evolved, you can’t risk that. There’s a good side to geniuses, but there’s also a bad side which is psychopaths and criminals. And you just can’t afford to have many of those people; you need to have tightly structured groups where everyone gets on.

This means that the way that you can defend your society and win the battle of group selection with other groups is to be more ethnocentric. And you see that with the Japanese: When they invaded Singapore, or wherever they fought, they were unbelievably brave and ethnocentric, and prepared to give their lives for their country.

In a country like Britain, it’s a bit different because it was less harsh, historically. You have a more varied gene pool, and this allows you to produce geniuses, and they came up with amazing inventions. And then you can trade and then expand, and then your gene pool can become bigger and bigger, and then you can produce yet more geniuses and you can expand even more. Britain, America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia — they’re all in the British sphere. In terms of winning the battle of group selection, we Brits have done very well, and that strategy worked under Darwinian conditions because the levels of ethnocentrism and the levels of religiousness never dropped too low.

Once they do drop too low — once the environment becomes as wonderful as it is now, and it’s such low stress — then, people stop being religious, and they lose their ethnocentric instinct. They’re less in touch with their instincts, and then it’s a problem because they’re very open, they’re not very ethnocentric, and then, suddenly, this is weaponized against them. Whereas the Japanese are much more ethnocentric than we are.

And so, even though they don’t come up with original things — the Japanese, even though they’re cleverer than us, they haven’t produced much in the way of original inventions or geniuses, or whatever — even now, when their environment is so good, they are still high in ethnocentrism. What we’re seeing in psychological trends is that they’re not interested in having children anymore.

So, you’ve got this difference, and you see this in the nature of the religions — Christianity, and, to a certain extent, even Islam and Judaism, encourage this because they are global religions. So, you’re not in it based on your ancestry; you’re in it based on just believing things. And this, of course, helps the religion to expand, and it helps the gene pool to expand because it makes people more cooperative and open to other people, right? You trust in someone who believes in the same God as you and has the same religion.

Whereas, in East Asian countries like Japan, it doesn’t work like that: You are Shinto by virtue of being Japanese. And, okay, there’s an extent to which they kind of adopted aspects of the genius strategy by accepting Buddhism because Buddhism is a universal religion, but only to a limited degree. So they’ve kept with this form of religion that is, basically, promoting their own genetic cohesion as an ethnocentric group — you can’t just convert to Shintoism.

And you get something similar with Hinduism, and even with Islam. Even though you can convert to Islam, there are all kinds of preservations of genetic proximity within Islam with things like cousin marriage. So there’s an extent to which it’s a little bit more complicated with Islam. But that’s how I see the religion of East Asians reflecting their genes.