Friday, February 27, 2009

Hereditarianism and racialism


More than 1,000 white GSS-ers were asked if they felt that having better genes is important for how your life turns out. Look at the graph: those who believe there should be a law prohibiting marriage between blacks and whites are much more likely to think that genes are important.

I wonder if more whites will adopt hardcore racial attitudes as science makes it increasingly obvious that genes matter. Of course, this type of analysis cannot tell us what is causing what. It could easily be: law against marriage <-- racialism --> genes matter. There is no logical necessity that hereditarianism lead to racialism, but I think one could make the case for a historical connection. Many academics believe the two go hand-in-hand and fear the research for this reason.

9 comments:

  1. Of course, the obvious thing to do is to marry someone who has the traits you want your children to have. Race is a very rough approximation of this at best. Better just to get to know people on an individual level...

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  2. Anonymous8:15 AM

    Well, an individual's decision about who to marry is only a small part of the effects on their life. All-white towns with low crime rates and good academic achievement get altered by interracial "marriage" (i.e. half-white babies abandoned by their black fathers). The worst behaved high school students in my almost all-white town are part-black ... they are all male and are quite popular with the white girls.

    Just something to think about.

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  3. Logically then, before Mendel discovered genetics nobody was racist.

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  4. Anonymous4:56 PM

    Obviously, interracial marriage laws are not coming back. Laws as a whole now are biased strongly against straight white males... the only thing for white guys to do is to start fighting back, legally and "extra"legally. The violence veto needs to come back. White men need to start protecting their turf again. But I don't see any chance of it. All the manhood has been beaten out of white men.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Logically then, before Mendel discovered genetics nobody was racist.

    Or, before Mendel discovered genetics most people understood the concept behind breeding.

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  7. Don't White women have White fathers. Don't most girls want to marry someone like their father. If women are not behaving as desired, where are the fathers? Shouldn't they have a good relationship with their daughter so that she will want to marry someone her father likes.

    (Those are very important thoughts and I probably won't do them justice.) If a girl has a nice relationship to her father, she probably will indeed want to marry someone like him. In fact, if you want your grandchildren to grow up happy and successful, having a nice relationship to your daughters is of incalculable importance. (Ditto for sons, for different reasons.) Girls who were belittled by their fathers often think it is normal, as women, to be belittled by their menfolk. Sad but true.

    A lot of fathers have abandoned their daughters. They are reproducing in a different mode, as it were - trying to produce as many children as possible without caring to lavish attention on them. People don't generally think about how best to spread their genes, which means we are not conscious of the behaviors that best lead to different reproductive strategies.

    Old-world European practices like monogamy, lavishing attention (including discipline, rich food, education, coming-out parties, the whole 9 yds.), were not supported because of a conscious attempt to emulate K-selected gene propagation. It was just tradition. (It is similar in Japan and other places, but I don't know much about that.) There were cultural reasons K-selection could beat r-selection, namely, that European-style K-selection increased a man's odds of knowing who his children were. So he could spend less time trying to get women pregnant and more time designing Venetian canals and whatnot.

    With the monogamous tradition gone (and, importantly, the tradition of men lavishing babydolls, discipline, and spelling books on his progeny), people tend to sink into r-selected reproduction, which sometimes means promiscuity. Boys stop learning how to be gentlemen from their fathers, and girls stop learning to expect anything other than sexual attention from males.

    So, in a tradition where families lack fathers, expect the girls to become attracted to a very different kind of male as they grow up. They'll no longer admire men for being committed, hardworking, or faithful. They will start admiring the men who intimidate other men, who have lots of other girlfriends, who "ramble on" and don't stay around the house competing with the kids for food (since women no longer consider it realistic to hope for a man to be a good provider).

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  8. 0322's comment blodes ill for the future of society. If parent's neglect to raise their children, then a vast world of strangers will be happy to lend a hand.

    70% illegitimacy in the black community is apparently the target for which all other communities presently aim. Illegitimate children -- fatherless children -- of whatever race or ethnicity are in for a very hard road, with little guidance in making good choices.

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  9. 'Tis true, Al Fin. K-selection and r-selection are both workable strategies for spreading your genes. They are not both workable strategies for building a civilization.

    Addressing people for whom that is too abstract, I would rephrase the message to say - if having twenty children by five women, and having four children by one woman, both result in having sixty healthy great-grandchildren, are they really equally advisable strategies? If so, does this imply that children don't benefit from having fathers ... that children aren't devastated when they get abandoned?

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