posted on May, 16 2006 @ 08:05 AM
I must disagree with this being a Nuture-only problem. I mean, humans are NATURALLY xenophobic. It's how we became the dominant life form on the
planet.
What we did was, if ever an animal attacked us, we would take revenge - not just on the animal that hurt us, but on their entire pack! We exterminated
races with extreme prejudice. Look at how few different kinds of humans there are compared to all the "failed human" evolutionary paths that we
find. Did these humans die of natural causes? No. It's much more likely that we killed them - every last one of them - and their differences made
them all the more easy to spot.
I think prejudice and racism is an inbuilt, and disgusting, quality of the human species. However, it was there for a reason. Now that we've achieved
that reason (to become dominant) we have to unevolve it - which we are doing. Women tend to like men that are not quite as agressive as they were
before, and racism everywhere is looked down upon. Thus, we are slowly weeding out that evolutionary "used to be an advantage" through the OTHER
evolutionary advantage of Culture.