Who cooks for you?

Today was a busy day amongst our neighborhood Barred Owls.  Maybe an election or something.  I just love to hear them call Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?  They were quite active this afternoon (it was warm and sunny) and again later at night.  If it wasn't for taking the dogs for a walk we would probably never hear these call.

Meanwhile, spring is well under way, Fulham are into the final of the Europa League Cup, Pixie seems to be doing better and life is good.

And, speaking of elections, across the pond, Gordon Brown has put his foot in it, politically speaking, in the run up to the General Election.  He called a woman he had just spoken to "bigoted" when he thought he was not being overheard.  This got me to wondering to what extent xenophobia is genetic (hard-wired) and therefore a product of evolution, and how much it is learned from our peers.  Nature versus nurture.

I think it's probably both.  There are good genetic reasons to be good to people that we know or who look/behave like ourselves.  That's because that person we are helping is likely to be genetically similar to ourselves, and by helping them we propagate some, at least, of our own genes.  But a "foreigner" is less likely to be carrying our genes and therefore is seen simply as competition.  Not too long ago, in our hunter-gather days (roughly 99.8% of our history as a species), anyone we saw and didn't recognize would be assumed to be up to no good and likely to be killed.  We were not tolerant of outsiders.  I think some of this is still with us, which makes it a tough political issue.  The woman was probably not especially xenophobic, amongst her peers, that is, but she was willing to speak her mind when the P.M. came by.  Brown himself can't appear to be xenophobic because there are already so many non Anglo-Saxon/Norman/Celtic people in Britain.  But he also has to look like he's tough on the (illegal) immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.  A very tricky political tightrope.

In fact, it's quite likely that the woman was suffering to some extent from economic xenophobia.  I and all of the other US-based software developers are feeling a bit of that too.  And we don't even get to see the foreigners that we're competing with.

Speaking of immigration, we just saw a British drama on PBS "Small Island" about a Jamaican couple who come to England in 1948, effectively the beginning of the wave of West Indian immigration.  Reaction to them was often extreme and, to our modern ethos, quite appalling.  I can attest to much of that attitude still being there ten years later.  It's a wonderful story which helps reminds us that, underneath our skins, we're all the same species.  In fact, studies have shown that the average genetic distance between someone of African descent and a Caucasian is surprisingly close – and significantly less than the typical amount of genetic variation within a supposedly homogeneous population.