As someone with extensive training in evolutionary theory, I am appalled by Kevin MacDonald's entirely wrong-headed "evolutionary psychology." It's nothing but muddle-headed group selection, and it runs entirely counter to the emphasis on differential reproduction among individuals and individual genetic lines that is the essence of selection theory. I am also a Jewish anthropologist who studied ethnicity among immigrant Jewish groups in Israel. The whole notion of a generalized Jewish ethnic strategy is laughable to anyone who has looked closely at how Jews behave among themselves. Do they all live in joyous harmony, plotting evil things to do to the Gentiles around them? Or are they as quarrelsome internally as any other human group? Guess.

Of course there is such a thing as Jewish identity, but like all identities, it's nested and situational for many if not most of us. Some of us do identify with each other, and as part of a Jewish community - but assuredly not all. I do think our religious laws and traditions have evolved as a way of keeping us together (and keeping us in line) but how many of us shuck those laws as fast as we can? Is everything I do a matter of Jewish strategizing, whether I know it or not? Are we all, wittingly or unwittingly, a part of some enormous Jewish cabal, intent on destroying Gentile society? Or do many, perhaps most of us, rush out to embrace that society as much as it will let us? The answers should be obvious to anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence or analytical ability.

Kevin MacDonald isn't much of a thinker. He does not understand evolutionary theory, and his using it as a tool to further his anti-semitic agenda should be an embarrassment to evolutionary psychologists (a field for which I have little to no respect, anyway) everywhere. I was a witness to Gould and Lewontin's attempts to combat "sociobiology" back in the seventies, and as a Jew (not a Jewess - it's not a racist term but a sexist one ) and a student of evolutionary biology I often wondered why many of the most passionate opponents of evolutionary biology were Jewish. I think now it was because they feared, at some subliminal level, the old idea that acknowledging the biological basis of much of human behavior might segue too easily into the notion that different races had different emotional and intellectual capabilities, and then quickly from that point into racism and antisemitism. I thought their objections were ridiculous then; I thought they did not understand the real implications of evolutionary biology - that all individuals were strategizing all the time, sometimes cooperatively with their kin or even with strangers (reciprocal altruism), and that this constant struggle to maximize reproductive fitness was common to all humanity, indeed to all of life. But now, thanks to MacDonald and Hartung, whose writings I also despise, I see they were right to fear this sort of slide. Lewontin and Gould, in retrospect, I salute you.

But where are the real evolutionary biologists coming to hit this turkey MacDonald on the head - not just for his antisemitism, but for his bad science?