ABSTRACT
The sociobiology of ethnicity is by now an estahlished part of sociobiological thinking. Ethnic attachments seem to be universal, primordial human sentiments. Ethnocentrism the view that one's own group is superior to all others and the focal point li'om which other groups should be judged - seems to have been implanted in the human hiogram long ago, and may even have heen inherited, to some extent, from our primate ancestors. I In the ancestral human environment, fierce loyalty to a community or tribe would have been highly adaptive. Those who were most loyal to their group would have def('nded it more vigorously and haw lived longer, on average, and thus would likely have passed along more copies of their genes to future generations.:! Rudimentary forms to which we now rei(')' as ethnic attachments would have been favoured by natural selectioll. Even Darwin himself saw that this should have been the case. As he said, 'A tribe including many members who, Irom possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious o\'er most other tribes. ,:l
Pierre van den Berghe has arh'ued that ethnicity is, in actuality, an extension of kinship. I Just as people behave more altruistically towards kin than non-kin, they IX'haw more altruistically towards the memhers of their own trihe, natioll, or ethnic group. People I~l\"our their own ethnic gTOUp and tend to look with disdain on the IlH'mhers of other groups. One way of testing this argument is to examine the relationship between a society's degree of ethnic homogeneity or heterogeneity and its Iewl of public spending. In the broadest sense, the expectation would be that public spending should be greatest in the most ethnically homogeneous societies. Ethnically heterogeneous societies should have less public spending because people are more reluctant to incur costs to provide for others when those others are much less likely to belong to their own ethnic group.
