Francisco Gil-White
Encyclopedia
Francisco Gil-White is an anthropologist
who was Assistant Professor of Psychology
at the University of Pennsylvania
from 2001 to 2006 and lecturer at the Solomon Asch
Centre for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He was born in Chicago
and raised in Mexico City
. His father is Francisco Gil Díaz
, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the cabinet of Vicente Fox
. He holds a Masters Degree in Social Sciences
from the University of Chicago
and a PhD in Biological and Cultural Anthropology from UCLA.
Francisco Gil-White’s social scientific approach is broadly interdisciplinary and merges cultural and biological perspectives on human behavior
. At the University of Chicago he obtained a master’s degree in social sciences
that was flexible enough for him to also get training in population genetics
and evolutionary theory. His master’s thesis, which defended that social science should be integrated with biology but not swallowed by it, won the 1996 Earl S. and Esther Johnson Prize, awarded for "combin[ing] high scholarly achievement with concern for humanistic aspirations and the practical applications of the Social Sciences."
From there he went to UCLA where he obtained his PhD in biological and cultural anthropology under Robert Boyd. His training includes evolutionary game theory
, evolutionary psychology
, and behavioral ecology
, on the one hand, and the application of game theory to cultural transmission processes, traditional cultural ethnography
, cultural psychology
, categorization theory, field experimental psychology
, and experimental economics
, on the other.
His UCLA PhD thesis is based on 14 months of ethnographic work studying two neighboring ethnies: the Torgut Mongols and the Kazakhs
of the Bulgan
Sum (district) in the Khovd Province of Mongolia
. His work is broadly concerned with explaining the mechanisms responsible for the social transmission of ideas and behaviors, referred to in this literature as ‘memes’ (by analogy to ‘genes
’), the biases inherent in such mechanisms, and the selective forces, grounded in human social-learning psychology, responsible for the stability or instability of particular memes.
, or even races, but that the human brain is evolved to process human ethnic categories as if they were.
According to Gil-White, various social processes are responsible for the clustering of cultural traits. In the resulting clumps, people are quite similar to each other in their adherence to a particular set of cultural norms, and markedly different from people in other such clumps. Since human interaction is more costly when those who attempt interaction are mismatched in their normative expectations, a psychological mechanism is needed to improve the probability of well-matched interactions.
Initially, trial-and-error learning led people to discriminate in their choice of social partners, favoring those who were most similar to them, but over time, this led to the creation of "endogamy
boundaries" or "marriage frontiers" beyond which people tended not to outmarry, and within which people's norms tended to be very highly correlated. Once this began happening, the resulting endogamy
boundaries began to look to people like species—that is to say, they became good input triggers for the pre-evolved psychological system that humans had evolved to reason about biological kinds: members of an ethnie:
So the brain looks at this and thinks "biological species." Natural selection
did not get rid of this inadvertent outcome because processing ethnic categories this way in fact improves the probability of well-matched interactions. However, one consequence of this has also been racism, for the illusion that ethnic categories have biological reality is very difficult for humans to shake, and helps give apparent support to a number of racist ideologies.
Gil-White's first presentation of his theory, in his doctoral thesis, won him the New Investigator Prize from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in 1999. His main empirical results, from studying the reasoning biases of two neighboring ethnic communities in Western Mongolia results, and his theory, were published in the journal Current Anthropology
in 2001.
The piece has been widely discussed and is cited in many different fields. More recently he was invited to make a presentation of the theory for a lay audience in The Monist
.
For the past few years Francisco Gil-White has been investigating the official and media representation of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia
, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other ethnic wars.
developed and later published a theory to explain the evolutionary origins of prestige in human societies. Unlike chimpanzees, which form linear dominance hierarchies
based on agonism
, human groups naturally assemble into moreegalitarian
social arrangements where status is determined by relative prestige. Henrich and Gil-White's theory explains how prestige based social arrangements operate in hunter gatherer communities, and how natural selection
created cognitive biases that enable high-fidelity social transmission between prestigious mentors and their clients. The theory has garnered considerable attention in evolutionary psychology
and cultural anthropology
literatures.
and his claim that the Palestine Liberation Organisation traces its roots to Adolf Hitler's
World War II Final Solution
. Gil-White has made public documents relevant to his dispute with the University of Pennsylvania,. As a consequence of the protest registered by UPenn students in the context of his dismissal, on February 17, 2005, Gil-White appeared on Hannity and Colmes (Fox News Channel
) in a segment on "how far academic freedom should go."
Gil-White was assistant editor at the online magazine Emperor's Clothes from 2002 to 2005, and now runs his Foundation for the Analysis of Conflict, Ethnic and Social (FACES), which supports his website, Historical and Investigative Research, which publishes his political writings.
Francisco Gil-White teamed up with Israeli citizen Chaim Wolfowicz to create StrongIsrael.org in order to protest what they consider a repetition of the WWII appeasement of the German Nazis in the Oslo Process. The website gathers signatures from Israel and from all over the world in opposition to any more territorial concessions by the Israeli government to PLO/Fatah. Francisco Gil-White was interviewed by Israel National Radio on Sunday, October 27, 2007, about the StrongIsrael effort.
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
who was Assistant Professor of Psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
from 2001 to 2006 and lecturer at the Solomon Asch
Solomon Asch
Solomon Eliot Asch , also known as Shlaym, was an American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.-Early life and education:...
Centre for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He was born in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
and raised in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
. His father is Francisco Gil Díaz
Francisco Gil Díaz
Francisco Gil Díaz is a Mexican economist who served as Secretary of Finance in the cabinet of President Vicente Fox and currently serves as regional chairman of Telefónica for Mexico and Central America....
, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the cabinet of Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox Quesada is a Mexican former politician who served as President of Mexico from 1 December 2000 to 30 November 2006 and currently serves as co-President of the Centrist Democrat International, an international organization of Christian democratic political parties.Fox was elected...
. He holds a Masters Degree in Social Sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and a PhD in Biological and Cultural Anthropology from UCLA.
Francisco Gil-White’s social scientific approach is broadly interdisciplinary and merges cultural and biological perspectives on human behavior
Human behavior
Human behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....
. At the University of Chicago he obtained a master’s degree in social sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
that was flexible enough for him to also get training in population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
and evolutionary theory. His master’s thesis, which defended that social science should be integrated with biology but not swallowed by it, won the 1996 Earl S. and Esther Johnson Prize, awarded for "combin[ing] high scholarly achievement with concern for humanistic aspirations and the practical applications of the Social Sciences."
From there he went to UCLA where he obtained his PhD in biological and cultural anthropology under Robert Boyd. His training includes evolutionary game theory
Evolutionary game theory
Evolutionary game theory is the application of Game Theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. EGT is useful in this context by defining a framework of contests, strategies and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modelled. It originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith...
, evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
, and behavioral ecology
Behavioral ecology
Behavioral ecology, or ethoecology, is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior, and the roles of behavior in enabling an animal to adapt to its environment...
, on the one hand, and the application of game theory to cultural transmission processes, traditional cultural ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
, cultural psychology
Cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is a field of psychology which assumes the idea that culture and mind are inseparable, and that psychological theories grounded in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to a different culture...
, categorization theory, field experimental psychology
Experimental psychology
Experimental psychology is a methodological approach, rather than a subject, and encompasses varied fields within psychology. Experimental psychologists have traditionally conducted research, published articles, and taught classes on neuroscience, developmental psychology, sensation, perception,...
, and experimental economics
Experimental economics
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in...
, on the other.
His UCLA PhD thesis is based on 14 months of ethnographic work studying two neighboring ethnies: the Torgut Mongols and the Kazakhs
Kazakhs
The Kazakhs are a Turkic people of the northern parts of Central Asia ....
of the Bulgan
Bulgan, Khovd
Bulgan is a sum of Khovd Province in western Mongolia....
Sum (district) in the Khovd Province of Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
. His work is broadly concerned with explaining the mechanisms responsible for the social transmission of ideas and behaviors, referred to in this literature as ‘memes’ (by analogy to ‘genes
Gênes
Gênes is the name of a département of the First French Empire in present Italy, named after the city of Genoa. It was formed in 1805, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the Republic of Genoa. Its capital was Genoa, and it was divided in the arrondissements of Genoa, Bobbio, Novi Ligure, Tortona and...
’), the biases inherent in such mechanisms, and the selective forces, grounded in human social-learning psychology, responsible for the stability or instability of particular memes.
Ethnicity
Gil-White's work on ethnicity began with a focus on the psychological biases that are responsible for biasing human reasoning processes when thinking about people in terms of their membership in ethnic or "racial" categories. His argument is that humans process ethnic categories with the same mechanisms that evolved to process biological species. His claim is not that human ethnicities are speciesSpecies
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
, or even races, but that the human brain is evolved to process human ethnic categories as if they were.
According to Gil-White, various social processes are responsible for the clustering of cultural traits. In the resulting clumps, people are quite similar to each other in their adherence to a particular set of cultural norms, and markedly different from people in other such clumps. Since human interaction is more costly when those who attempt interaction are mismatched in their normative expectations, a psychological mechanism is needed to improve the probability of well-matched interactions.
Initially, trial-and-error learning led people to discriminate in their choice of social partners, favoring those who were most similar to them, but over time, this led to the creation of "endogamy
Endogamy
Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such basis as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Greek Orthodox Christian endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another...
boundaries" or "marriage frontiers" beyond which people tended not to outmarry, and within which people's norms tended to be very highly correlated. Once this began happening, the resulting endogamy
Endogamy
Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such basis as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Greek Orthodox Christian endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another...
boundaries began to look to people like species—that is to say, they became good input triggers for the pre-evolved psychological system that humans had evolved to reason about biological kinds: members of an ethnie:
- tend to have similar behaviors (norms) and "phenotypePhenotypeA phenotype is an organism's observable characteristics or traits: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, behavior, and products of behavior...
" (because they have distinctive hats, dress, body paint, scarification, etc.); - they tend to mate with each other; and
- fully fluent members of their cultural set are almost always biological descendants of other members.
So the brain looks at this and thinks "biological species." Natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
did not get rid of this inadvertent outcome because processing ethnic categories this way in fact improves the probability of well-matched interactions. However, one consequence of this has also been racism, for the illusion that ethnic categories have biological reality is very difficult for humans to shake, and helps give apparent support to a number of racist ideologies.
Gil-White's first presentation of his theory, in his doctoral thesis, won him the New Investigator Prize from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in 1999. His main empirical results, from studying the reasoning biases of two neighboring ethnic communities in Western Mongolia results, and his theory, were published in the journal Current Anthropology
Current Anthropology
Current Anthropology is a peer-reviewed anthropology academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Founded in 1959 by the anthropologist Sol Tax...
in 2001.
The piece has been widely discussed and is cited in many different fields. More recently he was invited to make a presentation of the theory for a lay audience in The Monist
The Monist
The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry is an American academic journal in the field of philosophy. It was founded in October 1890 by Edward C. Hegeler, making it one of the longest-established journals in philosophy...
.
For the past few years Francisco Gil-White has been investigating the official and media representation of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other ethnic wars.
Modern scientific racism
Gil-White has written a book-length refutation of the arguments of modern so-called scientific racists entitled "Resurrecting Racism: The modern attack on black people using phony science." In it, Gil-White explains why the genetic evidence refute the idea that human variation parses into subspecies (races). He also explains why the same psychological biases alluded to above make it so difficult for ordinary people to accept this, particularly when they are being bombarded with racist propaganda. Finally, he deals with the question of supposed IQ differences between the alleged "races," tracing the history of the IQ literature to defend his argument that this literature is a series of frauds produced by outright racists.The Last Survivor
Francisco Gil-White has teamed up with Shie Gilbert, Mexico's most famous witness to the Holocaust, and his son Aron Gilbert, in the book El Último Sobreviviente ("The Last Survivor"). Still in good health, 87-year-old Shie Gilbert is internationally recognized as a witness to the Holocaust and is an experienced and energetic lecturer both in Mexico and abroad, educating an entire generation about the horrors of the Jewish experience in World War II. He is among the last survivors of the Holocaust, and perhaps the last one to give his testimony in book form. His son Aron Gilbert who actually wrote the book by interviewing his father over a period of years and conducting his own research, yet the book is written in the voice of his father. The Last Survivor contains a prologue by Francisco Gil-White, and a 70-page chapter at the end explaining why there have been mass killings of Jews century after century in over 2000 years of Western history, and why another one, in his view, is about to take place.Prestige
While doing doctoral work at UCLA, Gil-White and colleague Joseph HenrichJoseph Henrich
Joseph Henrich holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution at the University of British Columbia where he is an associate professor in the departments of psychology and economics. He was previously on the faculty of Emory University...
developed and later published a theory to explain the evolutionary origins of prestige in human societies. Unlike chimpanzees, which form linear dominance hierarchies
Dominance hierarchy
A dominance hierarchy is the organization of individuals in a group that occurs when competition for resources leads to aggression...
based on agonism
Agonism
Agonism is a political theory that emphasises the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how we might accept and channel this positively. For this reason, agonists are especially concerned to intervene...
, human groups naturally assemble into moreegalitarian
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
social arrangements where status is determined by relative prestige. Henrich and Gil-White's theory explains how prestige based social arrangements operate in hunter gatherer communities, and how natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
created cognitive biases that enable high-fidelity social transmission between prestigious mentors and their clients. The theory has garnered considerable attention in evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
and cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
literatures.
Political activism
Gil-White was fired from the University of Pennsylvania. Gil-White claims that this was a politically motivated dismissal, a consequence of his investigative journalism, such as his refutation of the conventional version of the 1990s civil wars in YugoslaviaYugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
and his claim that the Palestine Liberation Organisation traces its roots to Adolf Hitler's
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
World War II Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
. Gil-White has made public documents relevant to his dispute with the University of Pennsylvania,. As a consequence of the protest registered by UPenn students in the context of his dismissal, on February 17, 2005, Gil-White appeared on Hannity and Colmes (Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...
) in a segment on "how far academic freedom should go."
Gil-White was assistant editor at the online magazine Emperor's Clothes from 2002 to 2005, and now runs his Foundation for the Analysis of Conflict, Ethnic and Social (FACES), which supports his website, Historical and Investigative Research, which publishes his political writings.
Francisco Gil-White teamed up with Israeli citizen Chaim Wolfowicz to create StrongIsrael.org in order to protest what they consider a repetition of the WWII appeasement of the German Nazis in the Oslo Process. The website gathers signatures from Israel and from all over the world in opposition to any more territorial concessions by the Israeli government to PLO/Fatah. Francisco Gil-White was interviewed by Israel National Radio on Sunday, October 27, 2007, about the StrongIsrael effort.
Partial list of works
- Gil-White, F. J. (1999) How thick is blood? The plot thickens...: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy? Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(5): 789–820.
- Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001) The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and human behavior 22:165–196.
- Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Are ethnic groups biological 'species' to the human brain?: Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current Anthropology 42(4): 515–554
- Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Sorting is not categorization: A critique of the claim that Brazilians have fuzzy racial categories. Cognition and culture, 1(3):219–249
- Gil-White, F. J. (2003) Gil-White, F. J. "Ultimatum game with an ethnicity manipulation: Results from Khovdiin Bulgan Sum, Mongolia," in Foundations of Human Sociality: Ethnography and Experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Edited by J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, H. Gintis, E. Fehr, and C. Camerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Gil-White, F. J., and P. J. Richerson (2003) "Large scale human cooperation and conflict," in Encyclopedia of cognitive science. Edited by L. Nadel. London: Nature Publishing/MacMillan.
- Gil-White, F.J. (2005) How conformism creates ethnicity creates conformism (and why this matters to lots of things) The Monist, vol. 88, no.2 (pp. 189–237)
- Gil-White, F.J. (2005) Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes): The promise and the limits of the genetic analogy to cultural transmission processes. in S. Hurley and N. Chater, Perspectives on Imitation: From Mirror Neurons to Memes, MIT Press.
- J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis, R. McElreath, M. Alvard, A. Barr, J. Ensminger, K. Hill, F. Gil-White, M. Gurven, F. Marlowe, J.Patton, N. Smith, and D. Tracer. (2005) 'Economic Man' in Cross-cultural Perspective: Economic Experiments in 15 Small Scale Societes, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 795–815. Cambridge University Press.
External links
- Gil-White's Web site
- 1 2 3 Series of Interviews with Tovia Singer on Arutz ShevaArutz ShevaArutz Sheva is an Israeli media network identifying with Religious Zionism. It offers online news in English, Hebrew, French, Spanish and Russian. Arutz Sheva offers free podcasts, live streaming radio, a daily email news update, streaming video and 24 hour updated text news...
- http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124073Interview with Tamar Yonah on INRArutz ShevaArutz Sheva is an Israeli media network identifying with Religious Zionism. It offers online news in English, Hebrew, French, Spanish and Russian. Arutz Sheva offers free podcasts, live streaming radio, a daily email news update, streaming video and 24 hour updated text news...
] - Interview with Argument