Parental uncertainty, and it's impacts on equitable social treatment.

[Tharmas]

Hm... 0.3% is a very low percentage. First generation is 50%. Second generation is 25% and so on. You need to go extremely far back to reach a number like 0.3%. A couple of hundred years isn't enough.

In the first place, you're underestimating exponential decay rates. 0.3% is between eight and nine generations, just like LP said. In the second place, you appear to be extrapolating from modern generation times. Women used to typically start having babies younger than they do now. A hundred and fifty years could easily be nine generations. And in the third place, the colonial period started five hundred years ago. Even if LP's ancestors had all been forty when they gave birth, that would still only take us back to 1660, when the VOC and the British East India Company were in full bloom.

(I should add that LP's original hypothesis is perfectly plausible too. What was someone from southeast Asia doing in Europe ~9 generations ago? Blowing his pay on booze and whores -- there were any number of Southeast Asian able-bodied-seamen on European ships. During the colonial period it was entirely normal for navy and merchant ships to recruit sailors from whatever random ports they stopped in.)

I think there’s some misunderstanding of genetics going on in this discussion. A southeast Asian’s genes are not completely different from a European’s, so you mix them and get half and half. The vast majority of all genes are the same in all humans. It’s only a small percentage that are useful to identify groups and sub groups of populations. Some of these genes are highly conserved, some less so.

So to get 0.3% you can’t simply add generations, 50% for generation one, 25% for generation two, etc.

I’m no expert on genetics, but I happen to be reading a book by someone who is, who analyzes the percentage of genetic similarities and differences between populations ancient and modern.

He claims that the percentage of Neanderthal genes in some living Europeans is as high as 2 to 3%. That’s after a lot more than four or five generations, and tens of thousands of years!

Off topic fun fact: Native Americans are more closely related to Europeans than to any contemporary East Asians.

 

[steve_bank]

We came out of Africa, but humanity is not tribal on a global or national scale. That is obvious.

My grandmother once said that people want heaven on Earth but they are not going to get it.

The current progressives think social engineering is going to make things right, much as the Soviet communist tried.

To me the best possible system is one that serves to minimize disparity recognizing it can not be eliminated.

African cultures were far from social equality. They wre authorterian as are most human cultures t varrying degrees.

I heard it said in a societyy of geniuses there would be an Einstein that stood out.

The idea that there will be a homogeneous perfectly balanced system is fantasy.

At the end of the movie Enemy At The Gates about the Battle Of Stalingrad a poltical officer comments we intended to create an equal society, but there is always something to covet about someone else.

The question is how to manage inevitable stratification.

What America had was churning from immigrantsat the bottom percolating up over generations. It was fuled by primary education for all. Then govy grants and loans for college.

In our system of completion it is on the individual regardless of how you start to go out and earn equality. It is not given, unless we wabt to start calling each oter comrade.

I once heard a great lecture from the London School of Economics on slavery. But turned out to be on inequality in general. He made a fascinating argument where he basically said that we get the social systems and inequalities that our technology and social innovations can support. Due to the warring nature of man any nation that doesn't adopt the most optimal way to organize society will get conquered by any neighbour slightly better organised. This is a natural evolution towards optimising society toward wealth and power.

He then proceeded to defend slavery in every culture where it has existed. He also defended unfair education and blocking women from higher education, in the olden days. He then defended the gender equality and lack of slavery of our own age with the same arguments. Some inequality is good. Lots of inequality is bad. The more advanced the economy the more equality promotes economic strength and power.

I'm aware I didn't go into any details here. But I found it convincing and made me think a lot better of my ancestors.

I personally don't want a homogeneous perfectly balanced system. That's death. That's a system without dynamism and without any ability to develop and grow. If we ever reach that system I'll be the first person to kill myself. Why bother going on living in such a society? It's not life at all.

I suppose that would be a social Darwinism view, survival of the fittest.

From my experience anyone with the same general education are no better or worse than anyone else. That being said, why is Africa with its resourceis in constant economic turmoil? China is attempting to take advantage by making African staes in debt to China with Chin knowing they will eventually default. Economic conquest.

I agree with the statement on organization. Between the resources of the Arabs and Iranians-Persians the Mid East shoud be a garden spot, it is not.

Then look at tiny Israel that fended off several wars of annihilation by vastly superior forces, and grew into a modem technological system with general liberal l rights and freedoms.

They were good at organizing themselves and overcoming internal conflict staring with te first war.

The Arabs are just plain culturaly bizzare, medieval fiefdoms in the 21st century..

 

[DrZoidberg]

I suppose that would be a social Darwinism view, survival of the fittest.

"Social Darwinism" is not "survival of the fittest". Survival of the fittest is what Charles Darwin actually wrote. Social Darwinism is a perversion of his writings in order to help the aristocracy justify their abuse the poor. Social Darwinism is best described as "survival of the strongest".

"Survival of the fittest" is basically a tautology. What is meant by "Survival of the fittest" is whatever system/organism is the best adapted for survival is the system that will survive. It's juxtaposed towards religious ideas. It's also juxtaposed AGAINST survival of the strongest.

But sure, the field of economy have borrowed heavily from Darwinism. Fit companies survive better than strong companies. Which supports the idea that Social Darwinism is incorrect.

From my experience anyone with the same general education are no better or worse than anyone else.

I never said anything about better or worse. You projected that onto what I wrote. Economic systems are either optimized for the available technology or they are not. Education is only one factor in this. If there's a big power differential between a country and it's neighbours the weaker party has to play really nice to avoid getting invaded.

That being said, why is Africa with its resourceis in constant economic turmoil? China is attempting to take advantage by making African staes in debt to China with Chin knowing they will eventually default. Economic conquest.

Africa aren't in constant economic turmoil. They were in economic turmoil following de-colonization because Europeans used existing local ethnic conflicts in a divide and conquer strategy. After they left the ethnic conflicts Europeans had done their best to amplify exploded, causing massive chaos. And then USSR and USA decided to fund various dictatorial warlords further exacerbatting the chaos and pushing them further into chaos.

Once USSR collapsed and everybody else left them the fuck alone, they've actually been doing quite well. Between 1990 and 2010 Africa was the world's most impressive growth market. Sometimes the nicest thing you can do to someone is to leave them the fuck alone. They're currently undergoing the huge demographic shift where the economy is being transformed from an predominantly agrarian to industrial economies. This is why all those African migrants are crossing the Mediterranean in dodgy boats. This isn't an evidence of things going badly. Rather the opposite.

What China is doing in Africa isn't evil. They're giving African nations great value loans that are wisely invested. For the benefit of both China and Africa. They can give Africa these beneficial loans because of monetary manipulation of their own currency. Basically, they're weakening the purchasing power of the Chinese people in order to be able to use this money for long term investments abroad. Which isn't nice to the Chinese people. But very nice to the Africans. That BTW is what Trump was whining about and why he started a trade war with China. He thought it was unfair that Xi Jinping was manipulating Chinese currency preventing them from buying American products and services.

Then look at tiny Israel that fended off several wars of annihilation by vastly superior forces, and grew into a modem technological system with general liberal l rights and freedoms.

They were good at organizing themselves and overcoming internal conflict staring with te first war.

The Arabs are just plain culturaly bizzare, medieval fiefdoms in the 21st century..

Nah. Israel survived because the invading Arab forces weren't really trying. Sure the military technology of USA backing up the Israelis certainly helped make any Arab conquest of Israel very costly. Which is the real secret. Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrian couldn't give less of a shit about Palestinians. Their populations would never accept sacrificing many soldiers in order to help Palestine. So they didn't.

 

[Bomb#20]

0.3% is between eight and nine generations, just like LP said. ...

I think there’s some misunderstanding of genetics going on in this discussion. A southeast Asian’s genes are not completely different from a European’s, so you mix them and get half and half. The vast majority of all genes are the same in all humans. It’s only a small percentage that are useful to identify groups and sub groups of populations. Some of these genes are highly conserved, some less so.

So to get 0.3% you can’t simply add generations, 50% for generation one, 25% for generation two, etc.

I'm assuming when LP said he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes, what that means is he sent a swab to some outfit like 23-and-me and they told him he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes. Those companies certainly understand what you said -- humans are all about 99.9% genetically identical -- and they'll have taken it into account. They're talking about 0.3% of the 0.1% of the genome that varies having come from southeast Asia.

He claims that the percentage of Neanderthal genes in some living Europeans is as high as 2 to 3%. That’s after a lot more than four or five generations, and tens of thousands of years!

Sure -- that means we got our Neanderthal genes via zillions of different routes. Likewise, if LP is really 0.3% southeast Asian*, he might have gotten that from one ancestor 9 generations ago and another 10 generations ago, or he might have gotten it from three different ancestors 10 generations ago, or from one ancestor 10 generations ago and four other ancestors eleven generations ago, or any other combination that adds up to 0.3%. But once you're adding up contributions from lots of ancestors, the likelihood shoots through the roof that there were some kissing cousins in there so the same person is your ancestor more than once through different paths. Go back thirty thousand years and that becomes inevitable. A 2-3% Neanderthal figure would probably mainly reflect that the founding population might have consisted of about forty H. sapiens sapiens and one Neanderthal; everybody in Europe no doubt got occasional infusions of Neanderthal genes independently of one another but that probably accounts for a lot less of the genes.

(* More likely, that 0.3% figure is an estimate with big error bars. Might perfectly well really be 0.4% from one ancestor 8 generations ago.)

Off topic fun fact: Native Americans are more closely related to Europeans than to any contemporary East Asians.

What's your source for that? It doesn't agree with the tables in Cavalli-Sforza's book*. For example, the F_ST genetic distance from North American Indians to Japanese is listed as 0.0721; from North American Indians to English is listed as 0.0947. The distance from North American Indians to the Chukchi people right on the Asian side of the Bering Strait is only 0.0627.

(* The History and Geography of Human Genes)

 

[Emily Lake]

I personally don't want a homogeneous perfectly balanced system. That's death. That's a system without dynamism and without any ability to develop and grow. If we ever reach that system I'll be the first person to kill myself. Why bother going on living in such a society? It's not life at all.

Dynamic equilibrium - Yes! Stasis - No!

 

[Emily Lake]

Hm... 0.3% is a very low percentage. First generation is 50%. Second generation is 25% and so on. You need to go extremely far back to reach a number like 0.3%. A couple of hundred years isn't enough.

In the first place, you're underestimating exponential decay rates. 0.3% is between eight and nine generations, just like LP said. In the second place, you appear to be extrapolating from modern generation times. Women used to typically start having babies younger than they do now. A hundred and fifty years could easily be nine generations. And in the third place, the colonial period started five hundred years ago. Even if LP's ancestors had all been forty when they gave birth, that would still only take us back to 1660, when the VOC and the British East India Company were in full bloom.

(I should add that LP's original hypothesis is perfectly plausible too. What was someone from southeast Asia doing in Europe ~9 generations ago? Blowing his pay on booze and whores -- there were any number of Southeast Asian able-bodied-seamen on European ships. During the colonial period it was entirely normal for navy and merchant ships to recruit sailors from whatever random ports they stopped in.)

The Manila Galleons ran between South America and the Philippines starting in the mid 1500s. The Silk Road pretty much ran from BC to the 1800s. And as already mentioned, Genghis Khan tried to rape everyone back in the 1100s or 1200s or something.

 

[Swammerdami]

Hm... 0.3% is a very low percentage. First generation is 50%. Second generation is 25% and so on. You need to go extremely far back to reach a number like 0.3%. A couple of hundred years isn't enough.

In the first place, you're underestimating exponential decay rates. 0.3% is between eight and nine generations, just like LP said. In the second place, you appear to be extrapolating from modern generation times. Women used to typically start having babies younger than they do now. A hundred and fifty years could easily be nine generations. And in the third place, the colonial period started five hundred years ago. Even if LP's ancestors had all been forty when they gave birth, that would still only take us back to 1660, when the VOC and the British East India Company were in full bloom.

Yes. The 0.3% contribution is probably from a 6-great or 7-great grandparent, who was born about 250 years (plus or minus 50) before Ego.

I know my own pedigree well enough that I'd check it to try to guess such a 0.3% anomaly, if I had one, but not well enough to have much chance of success.

Lady Di mother of Prince Harry and William Windsor Wales, on the other hand, had a 3-great grandmother Katherine Scott Forbes who was born 1812 in Bombay to a representative of the East India Company (and son of a Scottish Laird) and his mistress (and housekeeper) Eliza Kevork, herself the offspring of an Armenian man (Jakob Kevorkian) and Indian woman. Not only 0.8% of Lady Di's autosomal DNA, but her mitochondrial DNA (haplogroup R, SE Asian) descend from this unnamed mother of Eliza Kevork.

(Katherine Forbes moved to Aberdeen and married the manufacturer James Crombie. Their daughter Jane married Dr. David Littlejohn, Sheriff of Aberdeen. Littlejohn's daughter Ruth married Colonel William S. Gill. Gill's daughter, also Ruth, married the Englishman Edmund Roche Baron Fermoy And Baron Fermoy's daughter married the 8th Earl Spencer.)

 

[Bomb#20]

Lady Di mother of Prince Harry and William Windsor Wales, on the other hand, had a 3-great grandmother Katherine Scott Forbes who was born 1812 in Bombay to a representative of the East India Company (and son of a Scottish Laird) and his mistress (and housekeeper) Eliza Kevork, herself the offspring of an Armenian man (Jakob Kevorkian) and Indian woman. Not only 0.8% of Lady Di's autosomal DNA, but her mitochondrial DNA (haplogroup R, SE Asian) descend from this unnamed mother of Eliza Kevork.

(Katherine Forbes moved to Aberdeen and married the manufacturer James Crombie. Their daughter Jane married Dr. David Littlejohn, Sheriff of Aberdeen. Littlejohn's daughter Ruth married Colonel William S. Gill. Gill's daughter, also Ruth, married the Englishman Edmund Roche Baron Fermoy And Baron Fermoy's daughter married the 8th Earl Spencer.)

Wait, are you telling me that the royal families of Europe have allowed their noble bloodline to become infested with the inferior genes of commoners and foreigners? Sacre bleu! If this sort of thing is allowed to continue, next thing you know we won't even be able to count on our national figureheads to be giant-jawed hemophiliacs!

 

[DrZoidberg]

Lady Di mother of Prince Harry and William Windsor Wales, on the other hand, had a 3-great grandmother Katherine Scott Forbes who was born 1812 in Bombay to a representative of the East India Company (and son of a Scottish Laird) and his mistress (and housekeeper) Eliza Kevork, herself the offspring of an Armenian man (Jakob Kevorkian) and Indian woman. Not only 0.8% of Lady Di's autosomal DNA, but her mitochondrial DNA (haplogroup R, SE Asian) descend from this unnamed mother of Eliza Kevork.

(Katherine Forbes moved to Aberdeen and married the manufacturer James Crombie. Their daughter Jane married Dr. David Littlejohn, Sheriff of Aberdeen. Littlejohn's daughter Ruth married Colonel William S. Gill. Gill's daughter, also Ruth, married the Englishman Edmund Roche Baron Fermoy And Baron Fermoy's daughter married the 8th Earl Spencer.)

Wait, are you telling me that the royal families of Europe have allowed their noble bloodline to become infested with the inferior genes of commoners and foreigners? Sacre bleu! If this sort of thing is allowed to continue, next thing you know we won't even be able to count on our national figureheads to be giant-jawed hemophiliacs!

It's not even a joke. Windsor and Habsburg are quite closely related through several bloodlines. The guy who had most of their shared genes is Christian IX of Denmark. The great granddad of the current queen of Denmark. Whoops.

What do you guys think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognathism

 

[Swammerdami]

Inbreeding in the royal and noble houses of Europe is MUCH less than popularly supposed. And don't forget that one marriage neutralizes in-breeding: Even if Prince Charles were severely inbred (he isn't), his sons from Lady Di would have zero inbreeding as long as Charles and Diana are unrelated.

Obviously there are some instances of severe in-breeding, most notably among the Habsburgs and for Spain's King Carlos II specifically. The Bourbons and the Rothschilds are two other European houses with "excessive" inter-marriage. (The Bourbon King Alphonso XII of Spain would be VERY interbred IF we believe his official pedigree, but I think experts are in agreement that Alphonso XII's biological father was one of the lovers of his mother Isabel II, Queen in her own right. This means that the last 4 Kings of Spain did not have the Bourbon Y-chromosome: they may have the Y-chromosome of Queen Isabel's American dentist!)

Was Japan's Imperial family inbred?

Lady Di mother of Prince Harry and William Windsor Wales, on the other hand, had a 3-great grandmother Katherine Scott Forbes who was born 1812 in Bombay to a representative of the East India Company (and son of a Scottish Laird) and his mistress (and housekeeper) Eliza Kevork, herself the offspring of an Armenian man (Jakob Kevorkian) and Indian woman. Not only 0.8% of Lady Di's autosomal DNA, but her mitochondrial DNA (haplogroup R, SE Asian) descend from this unnamed mother of Eliza Kevork.

(Katherine Forbes moved to Aberdeen and married the manufacturer James Crombie. Their daughter Jane married Dr. David Littlejohn, Sheriff of Aberdeen. Littlejohn's daughter Ruth married Colonel William S. Gill. Gill's daughter, also Ruth, married the Englishman Edmund Roche Baron Fermoy And Baron Fermoy's daughter married the 8th Earl Spencer.)

Wait, are you telling me that the royal families of Europe have allowed their noble bloodline to become infested with the inferior genes of commoners and foreigners? Sacre bleu! If this sort of thing is allowed to continue, next thing you know we won't even be able to count on our national figureheads to be giant-jawed hemophiliacs!

It's not even a joke. Windsor and Habsburg are quite closely related through several bloodlines. The guy who had most of their shared genes is Christian IX of Denmark. The great granddad of the current queen of Denmark. Whoops.

What do you guys think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognathism

What do I think? I think I'll need a cite. According to most databases, I think the most recent Habsburg from whom the present heirs to the British throne descend is Joanna (1547-1578), daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I and wife of Francis I de Medici. Grand Duke of Tuscany. (They also descend from Joanna's sister Maria, who married a Duke of Cleve-Julich.)

 

[Emily Lake]

How did we get from "Kids should be taken away from their birth parents, randomized, and redistributed out so that kids get more equal childhoods" to "royal folks are inbred"?

Thread drift is fascinating sometimes.

 

[Tharmas]

I'm assuming when LP said he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes, what that means is he sent a swab to some outfit like 23-and-me and they told him he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes. Those companies certainly understand what you said -- humans are all about 99.9% genetically identical -- and they'll have taken it into account. They're talking about 0.3% of the 0.1% of the genome that varies having come from southeast Asia.

He claims that the percentage of Neanderthal genes in some living Europeans is as high as 2 to 3%. That’s after a lot more than four or five generations, and tens of thousands of years!

Sure -- that means we got our Neanderthal genes via zillions of different routes. Likewise, if LP is really 0.3% southeast Asian*, he might have gotten that from one ancestor 9 generations ago and another 10 generations ago, or he might have gotten it from three different ancestors 10 generations ago, or from one ancestor 10 generations ago and four other ancestors eleven generations ago, or any other combination that adds up to 0.3%. But once you're adding up contributions from lots of ancestors, the likelihood shoots through the roof that there were some kissing cousins in there so the same person is your ancestor more than once through different paths. Go back thirty thousand years and that becomes inevitable. A 2-3% Neanderthal figure would probably mainly reflect that the founding population might have consisted of about forty H. sapiens sapiens and one Neanderthal; everybody in Europe no doubt got occasional infusions of Neanderthal genes independently of one another but that probably accounts for a lot less of the genes.

(* More likely, that 0.3% figure is an estimate with big error bars. Might perfectly well really be 0.4% from one ancestor 8 generations ago.)

Off topic fun fact: Native Americans are more closely related to Europeans than to any contemporary East Asians.

What's your source for that? It doesn't agree with the tables in Cavalli-Sforza's book*. For example, the F_ST genetic distance from North American Indians to Japanese is listed as 0.0721; from North American Indians to English is listed as 0.0947. The distance from North American Indians to the Chukchi people right on the Asian side of the Bering Strait is only 0.0627.

(* The History and Geography of Human Genes)

I take your point; however I am not entirely convinced that an outfit like Twenty Three And Me is necessarily so precise in obtaining their results that .3% really offers that meaningful a measure. A few years ago I read reviews of the top four or five of those outfits (I was thinking of getting an analysis for myself, but never followed through). I was surprised at the differences in the accuracy and narrowness of focus between the various choices. I don’t remember any of the specifics, so take that observation for what it’s worth.

As for my “fun fact”, on referencing it I find I stated it backwards. It’s Europeans who are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to East Asians.

My source is the book Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018):

My laboratory’s first major discovery using the Four Population Test came when we tested the widely held view that Native Americans and East Asians are “sister populations” that descend from a common ancestral branch that separated earlier from the ancestors of Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. To our surprise, we found that at mutations not shared with sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to East Asians.

<snip>

What we had found was evidence that people in northern Europe, such as the French, are descended from a mixture of populations, one of which shared more ancestry with present-day Native Americans than with any other population living today.

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (p. 104). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Professor David Reich, of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a pioneer in analyzing ancient human DNA to learn about the past.

I highly recommend the book, although, as Reich warns in the introduction, the field is moving so fast that it was no doubt already out of date by the time it was printed.

 

[skepticalbip]

... snip ...

As for my “fun fact”, on referencing it I find I stated it backwards. It’s Europeans who are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to East Asians.

Do you think maybe that indicates that there was some interbreeding between Native Americans and people with European origins over the last 500 or so years?

 

[Tharmas]

... snip ...

As for my “fun fact”, on referencing it I find I stated it backwards. It’s Europeans who are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to East Asians.

Do you think maybe that indicates that there was some interbreeding between Native Americans and people with European origins over the last 500 or so years?

It would be tempting to argue that this observation has a trivial explanation, such as Native Americans having some ancestry from European migrants over the last five hundred years. But we found the same pattern in every Native American population we studied, including those we could prove had no European admixture. The scenario of Native Americans and Europeans descending from a common population that split earlier from East Asians was also contradicted by the data. Something was deeply wrong with the standard tree model of population relationships.

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (p. 103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I can't quote all the research summarized in the book, but Reich is nothing if not thorough. Note that it's only one of the several populations that created modern Europeans that contribute this ancestry. He postulates a population of north Eurasians that split, with one part moving east to the Americas, and the other moving west to Europe. Lo, DNA from some archaic human remains, the Mal'ta boy, confirm this hypothesis. Like I said, the book is absolutely fascinating.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm assuming when LP said he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes, what that means is he sent a swab to some outfit like 23-and-me and they told him he had 0.3% southeast Asian genes. Those companies certainly understand what you said -- humans are all about 99.9% genetically identical -- and they'll have taken it into account. They're talking about 0.3% of the 0.1% of the genome that varies having come from southeast Asia.

It was actually part of a research project, not one of the consumer genetics companies.

(* More likely, that 0.3% figure is an estimate with big error bars. Might perfectly well really be 0.4% from one ancestor 8 generations ago.)

I doubt there were error bars in terms of what they measured, but how genes map to locations probably does have some appreciable error bars.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, now that all kinds of posters have bloviated heavily about their various attachments to their genetic rather than intellectual heritage, let me point out the actual purpose of the thread:

To maybe convince people that their obsession with genetics over intellectual heritage is misplaced. You are not gods gift, and treating your genetics as if they ARE can be pointed to as a deleterious social advent.

My suspicion is that the behavior seen in the population of the article of the OP was a very unlikely mutation, that would be difficult to retain without a certain threshold for commonality. However it arose, it gives better outcomes than the opposite is likely to. That is the entirety of the point: that human nature is not the arbiter of what is "best" but merely the arbiter of what is, among humans, at this moment in time

Rather, it informs us how we might reorder our priorities from having "natural kids like ourselves" to seeing the value in adopting disparate children very much unlike ourselves, who will take new and interesting perspectives on our ideas; that the first, rather than the last means of acquiring and raising a child should be adoption, as long as there are children seeking homes.

 

[Emily Lake]

I find it interesting that this gets framed as "human" nature, as opposed to just... well... nature. Humans aren't special - we're just as much of an animal as other animals are. And just like those other animals, we tend to act to protect our progeny and further our gene lines.

By the way, these mongooses aren't voluntarily engaging in "blind" parenting. This is an evolutionary adaptation on the part of the subordinate females in the tribe, so that they can pass on their own gene lines without the matriarch murdering their babies.

 

[skepticalbip]

So, now that all kinds of posters have bloviated heavily about their various attachments to their genetic rather than intellectual heritage, let me point out the actual purpose of the thread:

To maybe convince people that their obsession with genetics over intellectual heritage is misplaced. ..............

Railing against the instincts that evolution has resulted in and proposing we ignore it and accept and replace instincts with your ideas of a "better" system seems to me to be rather arrogant.

 

[J842P]

So, something entirely infeasible to apply but clearly supportive of some things I've felt for some time, namely that reliance on direct genetic provenance rather than intellectual contribution, especially in a species with as little genetic variation as our own, is counter to the wellbeing of social species, and that a stronger community and better parental practices arise from ignorance of genetic heritage.

https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/mong...ms-care-for-all-the-groups-pups-as-their-own/

A new study on mongoose society has found that because mothers in groups of mongooses all give birth on the same night, this creates a “veil of ignorance” about which pups belong to which moms. And this leads to the pups being raised equitably, in a communal fashion.

Well. We are neotenized, feminized, chimpanzees that hide our estrus. The most mammalian of mammals. We all care for our young.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, now that all kinds of posters have bloviated heavily about their various attachments to their genetic rather than intellectual heritage, let me point out the actual purpose of the thread:

To maybe convince people that their obsession with genetics over intellectual heritage is misplaced. ..............

Railing against the instincts that evolution has resulted in and proposing we ignore it and accept and replace instincts with your ideas of a "better" system seems to me to be rather arrogant.

Ah, and so too laws against revenge, and against striking our children, and against striking our spouses, and against solving our problems through the killing of others, and all other manner of "instincts" we hold which we have formulated systems of minimizing or defeating?

Is this the arrogance of which you speak?

If so, label me arrogant beyond measure, and rightfully so.

I label your own arrogance and hubris insufficient.

See also: NATURALISTIC FALLACY.