Racism/xenophobia/paedophilia/adultery - 'natural'?

Great Debates
1

Since reading ‘The Selfish Gene’ a few years ago, I’ve pondered on controversial ideas about what is ‘natural’ behaviour in society (at least I think they’re pretty controversial, hordes will possibly come in here and tell me that my viewpoint is accepted fact…also note that I read it when I was 15 and can’t remember if Dawkins goes into the following in detail. If he does, I’ll do it with less arrogance.)

Those who’ve read the book, or have any basic understanding of similar theories of evolution will be aware that the basic idea is that our genes make us ‘want’ to look out for those with the same genes, or at least with similar copies.

Thus it makes more sense for me to look out for my close family more than distant relations and in turn, distant relations more than complete strangers.

It’s not particularly easy for me to see which Europeans share more of my genetic make up, but it seems intuitive to me that if someone is blonde they probably share less, and if they’re black then probably even fewer genes. So my instinct should be to protect/help out/not harm those that look more like me. Surely this is the basis of racism/xenophobia? If someone doesn’t look like me, it doesn’t further my genes to help them out, and if we’re competing for anything then it would make sense for me to harm their chances. Previously this would have been food and water, but I think it’s manifested these days by people saying “These foreigners coming over here and taking all our jobs”. When people say that, it’s best to correct them and remind them that ‘these people’ are doing their jobs. And better.

Note that no-where in the above do I correlate natural with right, I’ll leave that with WildfireMM**. What I suggest is more the reverse, that our progression into society and living together in groups has taken away any need for the above, and we’ve learned (mostly) to repress any such instincts, because they are archaic in today’s world. I don’t have to consciously think “right, I’ll not punch that dirty foreigner whilst slinging a racial epithet”, I’ve just learned that judging people based on whether they share an ethnic background with me is meaningless.

I’ve been thinking about this again recently because of an excellent article in the last edition of New Scientist (you will have to subscribe to read the whole thing, but I think there may be a couple of subscribers on this board - maybe), which describes pretty much what I’m saying, but with excellent examples and far more articulately. What it also gives is an excellent parallel, which I’d not thought about before:

The article says that it’s entirely natural for a forty year old man to be attracted to a fourteen year old sexually mature girl, but when it’s voiced or acted on it’s taboo and illegal. Once again, this is another case where natural is clearly not the same as being ‘right’ because of the irrelevance of its basis and the more complex issues in today’s society.

Same can be said of adultery. It’s in people’s interest to procreate with as many as possible, certainly for men to spread their genes around and not have to expend any effort in raising their offspring. Society makes this much more complicated again, but humans have also learned that we mean much more to each other than X and Y chromosomes to trade off and we take pride when we don’t indulge in this behaviour.

I guess there’s not much of a debate here, yet, I just wanted to commit what I’ve said to paper (or screen) and in doing so have partly drawn together my own thoughts on what I’m trying to say…

The things I’ve put in my title are natural, and happen in ‘the wild’, in society and in unaware human trials (read the NS article) all the time. They are not, however, acceptable in any civilized society and I wouldn’t want to be part of one where they are. What this leaves me to conclude is that a civilized society is not ‘natural’, at least not in this sense of the word, and humans weren’t ‘designed’ (another debate, there) to co-exist like this. Doesn’t mean that the concept of a welfare state is a bad thing, though!

My debate, if any, then is…is it society and our interdependence that’s made us turn these acts/attitudes taboo, despite making a fair bit of sense in the biological sense? Or am I wrong thinking that any of the above would be considered ‘natural’ by any stretch of the term?

At the very least I hope the OP of the “homosexuality is unnatural” thread might pop in and realise that by using a little more coherent logic than repeating the same phrase I can seem to conclude that our entire modern world is unnatural, and unnatural doesn’t mean wrong.

2

“Natural” in discussions of ethics does (or rather should, by origin) not mean “as it would exist in a state of nature,” for which I will leave someone else to quote Hobbes. Rather, it means “in accordance with its natural propensities” – the hidden catch being “as they are understood by the philosopher/writer and/or his readers.” For example, Marriage is “natural” because the majority of human beings desire a partner exclusively pair-bonded to him/her, and also to live in an ordered society. (Getting specific about marriage, what constitutes a valid one and what expectations are legitimate of and in one, will raise a whole lot of argument, but not the generic concept.) There are and always have been people who don’t desire life in an ordered society, and there are and always have been people with no interest in marrying. But the point is that that is a valid generalization about people, recognizing that there are exceptions.

Historically, people tended to distrust strangers, people from outside their own cultural setting and who looked and acted different from them. This could be overcome by longtime proximity without dominance either way, but again as a generalization it was valid. I’m not altogether convinced that this is a Dawkinsian response (of “the selfish genome”) rather than a sociocultural trait – “The way we do things is, by definition, the right way to do 'em. Them furriners who do wierd and different things – they’re not natural.”

But I think it’s important to recognize that for most of the history of thought “natural” did not reference “as opposed to anthropogenic” but rather “in accordance with the innate nature of” – to the point that some dogs which slew a lion were (in tradition, and I believe this is documented in a chronicle) tried and executed for regicide, in that they had “unnaturally” slain their king.

3

I’ve never been quite comfortable referring to human behaviors or inventions as unnatural. Why should anything we do be considered unnatural? Maybe it’s just semantics but it seems to me it’d be impossible for us to do something unnatural. How is a space shuttle, a gun, or the FDA different than a spider web, a bee’s hive, a bird’s nest, or a beaver’s dam? We’re just altering our environment to suit our needs. If we choose to change our outlook as a society – say, the evolution of women’s rights – then I see every step as very natural, from treating women as walking wombs to having one leading a country.

So what is unnatural, exactly? Something we wouldn’t be doing several thousand years ago? Is agriculture natural? I’ve seen it argued that women had it way better before agriculture came around. So how do we decide if sexism is ‘natural’ or not?

One somewhat depressing idea about the concept of ingrained human nature is thinking of how improbable it is to make a truly liberal and pluralistic society. Still, we shouldn’t stop from trying.

There’s also a biological basis for a woman to cheat. Two fundamental qualities she should be looking for in a man are the ability and resources to support her and the child and his quality genes. These two qualities aren’t often in the same person, though. It’s better to maximize each column –- for example, being supported by a rich man while secretly finding men with good genes. Then she can get the best of both worlds, so to speak.

I find our current sexual mores with regards to having sex with more than one partner in a given time period unhealthy and causing a lot of unneeded stress. We’re not completely monogamous…but we’re not in the habit of keeping harems, either, unless you’re a king. Having sex with only one person for decades at a time works for many couples of course, but for many others not so much. We really need to be more honest with ourselves IMO –- maybe a couple of harmless, superficial flings here and there could bring the divorce rate down.

4

Well, I can’t make up a reasoned argument, as I’m not sure quite what the OP is after.

However I can add a few points.

I find that I am, and others that I know are, attracted to people who don’t look like me. I’ve always put this down to genes hedging their bets.

The ability to learn languages fluently (pass as a native) seems to tail off in most people in their teens. I suspect that this is a ‘tribal’ or herd thing, designed to keep smaller units from breaking up.

I’ve also noticed that strangers are welcomed when they are in small numbers, but viewed with suspicion when in large numbers. Drop a Martian in an unfriendly London pub and he would be hard pressed to buy a beer for a week, drop 1,000 Martians in a small town and the locals would be muttering about vurriners (Devon polite term for grockles).

Obviously we are ‘programmed’ as well as ‘conditioned’, we can see instincts in animals even if they are reared out of the pack.

Dawkins is interesting, mainly to me because the concept is straightforward - if we were not programmed for survival then we would not be here.

5

The first problem I’m having is the idea that these things are particularly taboo in our society. The second is the gross simplification in the idea that they are genetically selected for. You need to appreciate that for >90% of our species history we lived in family groups of 5-20 people that met 1-4 times a year to make up tribes of 500-2000. In her entire lifetime no woman would travel more than 2000 kilometres from the place of her birth, and men would travel half that. That is about the only system that we could consider “natural”.

Now under this natural system xenophobia and racism of the type you describe make no sense at all. Nowhere on the world do people differ so markedly within 1000km that appearance xenophobia could function. As such we have to declare this sort of xenophobia as unnatural as well as unethical. The idea that fear and hatred of non-clam people could be selected for makes perfect sense given that HGs were in a state of near constant warfare with their neighbours, however that doesn’t justify judging people based on appearance.

The idea that a man will desire a young sexually mature partner makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective.

However it’s not particularly taboo either. In many western societies the age of consent is 15 or 16, which was the age at which physical maturity was reached for the majority of women when the laws were written. It’s probably as low as 14 for some women today, but even now 14 year olds have far more frequent birth problems. So in essence there is no taboo against men having sex with younger physically mature women in most modern cultures, and the law making it illegal to have sex with a mature 14 year old is nothing more than an example of a law netting a few statistical outliers with a broad net. Some US states have the age of consent as high as 18, but IIRC even they are in the minority. The degree of social stigma attached to such relationships is hard to truly evaluate. While many would decry such a relationship it’s hard to imagine any serious social repercussions. The general tone of criticism would be one of wondering why they don’t select partners their own age. As such the taboo is very weak and focussed mainly on possible power imbalances, mental health issues or simply the fact that they are taking partners from their own age group. I could make a very strong argument that in natural societies it would be beneficial for older men not to marry the very youngest women if older women were unattached, and similarly beneficial not to get bogged down in partnerships with unusual power balances. As such I dispute the idea that the modern system is unnatural or very different from that seen in any human society, ever.

The same goes for adultery. There are lots of good reasons why having sex with lots of partners is evolutionary suicide for humans. The risk of disease, producing children with low survival probabilities who nonetheless consume resources, the extremely high risk of inbreeding in small groups with illicit relationships. The list goes on and on. Saying that it’s in people’s interests to be promiscuous is grossly oversimplifying a complex situation. It is true that it is sometimes in people’s interests to sometimes be promiscuous, but in a natural society it was never in anyone’s interest for everyone to be promiscuous all the time. That would be suicide for any natural society. And what we find in modern society is that it is acceptable for young people to be promiscuous and “sow their wild oats” but that this is far less acceptable in small communities, and that people are expected to settle down later in life. I could make a very strong argument that this arrangement is perfectly natural.

In short, I don’t think the examples you gave are good examples of behavior that would be accepted in natural societies, nor do I think they are good examples of behavior that is taboo in modern societies.

I have no idea who could have argued this, pr what they could have based it on. Certainly not on any sociology of any studied HG groups. Women in HG societies have/had lousy lives, with husbands having the right to kill, torture or trade their wives for any reason or no reason. Not even the worst agricultural society ever approached that level of degradation of women.

I’d certainly be interested in seeing some evidence of a HG group in which women had a better life than the typical agriculturist.

6

More likely it simply relates to the standard changes in the brain with puberty. Children learn thing fast because they question very little. They make new connections fast and can accommodate entirely new areas of knowledge very fast. As we become adults we switch to a more critical way of learning. New information has to make links to old pathways or we can’t learn it. That makes us far better critical thinkers but much slower learners.

Language is no different in this respect than mathematics or the ability to operate machinery. As such there is no reason to suspect this is deigned to keep herds in place. Rather it is a progression that has evolved to maximize learning appropriate to environment. In natural settings a person will have seen pretty much everything they will ever see, used pretty much any tool they will ever use and heard every language they will ever hear by the time they are 18. Once an age is reached at which we have picked up the broad knowledge needed to survive the brain then switches to a mode that enables us to consolidate and analyse that information. In a natural environment the odds of anyone over the age of 14 ever encountering a new language was less than their odds of being struck by lightning.

Interesting point. Not sure what, if anything, it tells us but it’s an interesting observation.

7

The fallacy here is the ‘positive and benefical’ nuance that has come (falsely) to be associated with the word ‘natural’. The meme is that ‘natural’ is good and right and proper in contrast with things ‘artificial’ - the new snobbery is to have, for instance, ‘natural’ fibre clothes (never mind that in our ‘natural’ state we’re supposed to be covered in hair and naked :D). We are now conditioned to think of ‘natural’ as lovely fields of flowers and butterflies when in fact ‘nature’ stripped of nuance is violent, raw, and vicious. Creatures eat their offspring. Murder as a way to win your mate - or dispose of the mate once it’s served its purpose.

Once you peel the warm fuzzy references away from ‘natural’, you apprehend it as the neutral term it is and refuse to think of it as something that is desirable. At that point, any argument which appeals to the false beneficial interpretation of ‘natural’ should fail. So it matters not a whit if it’s ‘natural’ that your first instinct is to smack the gob of someone who annoys you except as an interesting explanation of the origin of the urge.

That’s what I’m talking about. It doesn’t make ‘a fair bit of sense’ biologically. It just is what it is. Dying horribly of disease makes a fair bit of sense biologically - it’s what animals in nature do. The fact is that what is ‘natural’ for humans is that they developed superior brains and the ability to create complex social structures which have created strictures against behaving like animals. Therefore it is precisely the social interaction that is ‘natural’ for humans and not the biological urges that social structures have been constructed to govern.

8

As you may have guessed from my wishy-washy OP, I didn’t really have too much of an actual debate in mind, I just wanted to hear some discussion on the subject from a clever bunch of people.

I’ll vehemently state again that I dont agree with any form of bigotry, but to me, it makes sense for animals to group together to outcompete another group and an easily recognisable group would be skin colour/background.

So is our trend away from these traits a sign that human ‘nature’ itself is changing with the lack of selection pressures and our instincts themselves are changing? Or is it that living in a civilized society is a large step away from anything that would occur in the animal kingdom, and it can be said that humans are moving away from nature entirely and forgetting our instincts?

Vague, I know, but the question I’m asking now is whether the way we live these days is a direct result of our evolutionary progression into societies, or whether we’ve taken ourselves as a whole away from a large part of our instincts and evolution, as a result of evolution giving us larger brains.

9

But as I pointed out, this isn’t reasonable at all. Can you name any natural sitaution where any animal species would be faced with intraspecies competition from a group that has a different skin colour or different background? It just doesn’t happen because animal groups that are in competition will also be interbreeding and as such skin colour forms fullly overlapping grades between competing groups, never sharp distinctions. Similarly animal groups that compete must be sharing a common environment and hence background.

As I pointed out, you have presented no evidence that our trend is away from any trait. In point of fact we are probably more liberal than any hunter gatherer group. And no, our instincts aren’t changing. We’ve only been sedentary agricuyturalists fro about 6, 000 years and only been technological for about 50 years. Far too short for any significant change in instinct to manifect itself.

Hominoids have been living in societies for as long as we have existed. This isn’t some novel progression for Homo sapiens.

10

I can see what you’re getting at here, but I think it’s the lack of early inter-ethnic socializing that’s led to humans being, to quote the NS article because I can’t put phrase it better, biologically primed for racism.

I was wrong to put it down to competition between overlapping groups because, as you say, they would be interbreeding. Early humans would have existed in groups with their own identity separate from neighbouring groups and different in many characteristics. People would have judged other humans belonged to their group by traits like clothing, behaviour or physical features (which later on skin colour would have become part of). To quote a chunk of the article rather than paraphrasing;

To me, this suggests that racism and xenopobia have at their roots a genetic basis from the early social groups, where a fear/mistrust of those who are different in some way would have been genetically favourable. It is a fairly modern thing for people to travel the globe and end up interacting with people from largely different backgrounds, and it’s where this redundant, archaic way of judging others has become something more sinister in cases where people dont have the brainpower to realise what they are doing doesn’t make any sense.

11

This makes no sense at all. You are claiming that a total lack of exposure to discernibly different ethnicities during our evolutionary development led to humans evolving an ability to discern different ethnicities. That simply can’t be true. It’s as nonsensical as saying that because our earliest ancestors were never exposed to macropods they therefore must have evolved the ability to distinguish kangaroos from wallabies.

Evolution does not and can not work that way. A population can’t become biologically primed for a condition that they have never been exposed to. With no exposure to the phenomenon there can be no potential for selection WRT to that phenomenon.

Clothing, yes, Behaviour, yes. Language, yes. Physical features, no.

I put it to you again: can you name any species of any animals that existed at any time that would have been exposed to intra-species interaction with populations with discernibly different physical features? It just doesn’t happen because animal groups that are in competition will also be interbreeding and as such physical features form fullly overlapping grades between competing groups, never sharp distinctions.

This is the point where your position here falls over entirely. Until the development of agriculture and a decicated trading class humans would simply never have been exposed to people with different skin colours or any other differences in physical appearance. HGs only interact with groups with whom they are interbreeding, and interbreeding prevents the development of distinctions of physical appearance.

IOW appearance racism can not be a natural evolutionary trait as you propose simply because it is not something our ancestors were ever exposed to. With no exposure there could not be any evolutionary repsonse. The only way you can wangle an evolutionary explanation for this one is if you are somehow proposing a pre-adaptation mechanism.

But the article isn’t saying that racism itself is in any way an evolutionary trait. It is saying that we use physcial appearance, ie race, to rationalise our dislike of outsiders post facto. In other words the article isn’t saying that we dislike outsiders because they are physically divergent. It is saying that because we dislike outsiders we then seek to find find a way to rationalise that dislike. In some cases we use phsyical divergences to justify what is a purely visceral dislike. If you look at Nazi anti-Jewish propganda or the old “one drop” policies you will see that when people can’t reliably distinguish based on physical diffreneces they will then go on to rationalise the dislike in other ways.

In summary you have misinterpreted the article on this point. It isn’t saying that disliking people who look different is genetic. It is saying that disliking outsiders is genetic, and when people want to rationalise that dislike they sometimes turn to physical differences. A such the dislike of people with physical differences isn’t the natural state, it is entirely a product of our society. In the natural state we should accpet anyone regardless of their appearance so long as they are a member of our group and behave accordingly.

Xenophobia, undeniably. Racism, impossible. Unless of course you can name a HG population that could ever have interacted with a discernibly different racial group.

And of course xenophobia is neither taboo nor illegal in the US or anywhere else. Even in this age of tolerance and multicuturalism it is still expected that we all agree that democracy is the best government, capitalism the best economic system and so on and so forth. IOW we are still expected to say that our government is best, our society is best, our people are best. The idea that a taboo exists on such concepts is sorely lacking in evidence.

I don’t get this. You have been constantly arguing that we have evolved to be prejudiced against people from largely different backgrounds, yet here you say that even being exposed to such people is a modern thing. How can we have evolved a response to something we were never exposed to until modern times?

12

Does Helen Fisher ring a bell? According to her Wiki she’s considered the foremost anthropologist on love (aka “Interpersonal chemistry”). Here’s where she talks about women having it better before agriculture, starting at ~9:00. She basically says that women were considered equal or nearly so with men because they did so many jobs and that after agriculture came along women’s power fell while men’s shot up.

As for husbands killing or mistreating their wives…did that ever go away with the simple introduction of agriculture? I thought that required something a little more substantial and recent, like the idea that women aren’t walking wombs with simple minds.

I really don’t know anything in this field compared to you Blake so please, I’d love my (or Helen Fisher’s) ignorance fought.

13

If you had a transcript of what Fisher said we could discuss something. I’m not wasting my money downloading some video.

Suffice it to say that women in HG societies were never considered equal in any sense a modern person would consider the term. Veyr much akin to property. Like I say, if Fisher could name the HG society that had this supposed sexual equality it might be worth something. I’ve never seen such a society described anywhere.

As for women doibng so many jobs, women in agricutltral societies did even more jobs since they were doing all the old HG jobs in additon to harvesting, thrshing etc. So Fisher’s idea that labour somehow plays a role seems pretty spurious.

Did it go away with agriculture? Yes. I can’t think of any agricultural societies that give a husband the right to kill his wife. Perhaps you could name one?

14

I’m not arguing Blake, at least not intentionally. I’m aware I dont know as much about this subject as you and others (engineering student here), I was hoping by discussing it with those that do I’d gain some knowledge. Slowly it’s getting through.

I dont see how we have to be exposed to every eventuality to have evolved a response to it, when a deeper more general response may have already been formed. We’ve learned to distinguish between members of different social groups by shared traits or characteristics. When someone who doesn’t fit all the criteria for my social group comes along for whatever reason, then there’s a biological basis for mistrusting them.

Our society is multiculural and multiethnic to a certain extent, but I was raised in a very predominantly white neighbourhood, and it’s not been until University that I’ve be taught alongside any large numbers of students from different ethnic backgrounds than me. Although some members of my social group are asian, most are white. There are similar large groups of asian/chinese students with relatively little interaction between ethnicities. I’ve seen a lot of racist remarks from people who I socialise with, and they’re often from people who I thought were better.

A massive part of any racist attitudes I’ve seen is ignorance, but are you saying that encountering people with an inherent difference (skin colour, accent, clothing) to the people they regularly interact with doesn’t on some level trigger a “different to me, be wary” instinct?

15

mstay you wil forgive me if I treat any claim by Fisher with gross skepticism untuil I see the research the claim is based on. I just tried a Google search of her name with agriculture, and the results are les than impressive.

Lots of sites touting that it’s a good thing that she is flogging an online computer dating service as science. BS alarm starts buzzing.

This site which presents her as syaing “Women have been held back historically despite their many biological advantages due to the division of labor which began in hunter-gatherer societies and intensified during the agricultural revolution.” BS alarm starts blaring. The division of labour intsenified under agricuture? I’d dearly love to see how she came to that conclusion given that it was a capital offence for a woman to even pick up a bow or a spear in all the HG societies I am familiar with, much less actually go hunting. Equality of labour in HG societies my ass. Labour divisons in HG societies were very clearly marked, far more so than in any agricultural society.

An finally this site. I’ll levae you to rea dit for yourself, but suffice it to say of those are faithful quotes of Fisher’s on that site the woman is a quack. No self-respecting anthropolgist woudl make claims such as that women have existed for millions of years.

Now I am not familiar with Fisher or her work, but at this stage she isn’t coming across particularly well. Peddling computer dating as anthroplogical science, lots of nouvo-feminist ideology dressed up as anthropology, lots of claims that seem on the face of it to be plainly erroneous and factual errors regarding human evolution. Now of course these may be all misrepresentations, or maybe she has really strong data to back up those claims. But until someone presents them to me I will stick with what I know based on actual data rather than Fisher’s extraordinary claims about HG societies having an equal didvision of labour and sexual equality.

16

Here you are referring to pre-adaptation, eg the human hand evolved to grip branches, providing a pre-adaptation to tool use. The thing is that in order to declare pre-adaptation you need to actually demonstrate that it existed in the ancestral population. Without that Ockham’s razor demands that we reject its very existence. With no evidence of race-based racism in HG groups we really have no reason to assume such an evolutionary response actually exists.

There is no evidence for this. What we have ‘learned’ is to distinguish between everything in the world based on shared traits or characteristics. So have all tetra pods. That doesn’t allow us to conclude that frogs or duck billed platypuses are inherently racist.

This is perfectly true, but it is also not in any way evidence of genetic racism. If someone doesn’t fit your social group because of the type of car they drive, or the food they eat there is also a biological basis for mistrusting them, eg many people tend to dislike cyclists or vegetarians. That doesn’t provide evidence that we evolved to spot differences in mode of transport or diet. It simply means that we evolved to mistrust outsiders, and we have the capacity to define outsiders in a multitude of ways.

I think this is the point you are missing. Humans have an inbuilt distrust of outsiders. No argument there. Where you go wrong is assuming that every single character that has ever been used to define an outsider must itself be genetically hardwired in. That is not a logical extension. Humans can differentiate between infinite numbers of factors and choose to discriminate or not based on any one of those factors. IOW this is not an instinct to distrust those that don’t look like you. No such instinct can have evolved. The instinct is to distrust people who are different. It’s a choice what constitutes different.

Bringing this back to the original argument, do you have any evidence that a society ever existed that discriminated against all outsiders on the basis of every distinguishable feature? If not then you really have a tough time arguing that we are genetically hardwired to discriminate on the basis of skin colour just because it is distinguishable.

Yes, and although most are middle class some are poor and some are wealthy. And most are Christian but some are Jews. And most are Omnivores but some are herbivores. And most are Capitalists but come are Communists. And so ad infinitum. And people have and do discriminate just as vigorously based on those differences, and other times and places such differences have been totally ignored. Are you seriously suggesting that we have evolved to differentiate Jew and Gentile, or differentiate Capitalist and Communist? Of course we haven’t. We have evolved to distinguish like and non-like and history shows us that we can discriminate on the basis of these differences as we wish according to the society of the day. So if the society of today decides that we shouldn’t discriminate against other members of our society on the basis of being Jewish, or Hispanic or poor why is that unnatural?

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that we have a choice about how we respond to that warning and all human groups have always had that ability. Do you really feel wary around Jews because they are different? Do you feel wary around working class people? Or how about Catholics? Italians? Many people did once feel wary around those groups because they chose to focus on the inherent differences. But at other times those differences were entirely ignored, proving that while the difference is inherent the response is voluntary.

Since the response is voluntary there is nothing unnatural about society imposing laws saying that you should exercise that voluntary control. Unless you also wish to argue that society shouldn’t expect you to exercise control and not rape your neighbour’s wife. The natural state for humans is living in a society where we don’t just act on the first instinctive response to seeing another person. No society has ever tolerated rape because the first instinctive response was lust, or murder because the first instinctive response was violence, or theft because the first instinctive response was envy.

Your suggestion that it is somehow unnatural of society to demand people not to respond instinctively to other society member require some evidence. That evidence would ideally come in the form of a society that did accept people always acting in first instinctive response.
What this comes down to I guess is the reason why you think someone is an outsider. If you think they are an outsider because they don’t share your values, your customs, they don’t respect what you hold dear, they have no ties to the land and no incentive to care for it and so forth then that is fully justified, and I agree that any law opposing that is unnatural. If the sole reason you think they are an outsider is because they have different coloured eyes, that’s lunacy. A person can be a perfectly integrated and valuable member of your society despite such a trivial distinction.

And that is the world of difference between my position and yours.

I claim that people have an instinctive distrust of people who are outsiders and have defined outsider in diverse ways in diverse times and places.

You claim that people have an instinctive distrust of people who look different regardless of whether they are outsiders or not, and that this distrust of people who look different is the very cause of the distrust of outsiders.

Those are not similar or even compatible positions. You say that people have no choice but to distrust those who look different, and that in fact they only distrust outsiders as an extension of disliking people who look different. I say we have no choice but to distrust outsiders, but that distrusting people based on appearance is entirely a choice, and for most of our evolutionary history appearance played no role whatsoever because it could play no role whatsoever.