Doug1943
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- Jan 3, 2016
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- #261
Does "Darwin say that I'm a fool"? Well, yes, so he does. And he says that you are one as well, and that the whole human species are fools ... from a Darwinian point of view, and for more than one reason.Darwin says you're a fool.
Across the whole of life on this planet diversity is why life continued despite multiple life ending events. Well, life ending for those not diverse enough to adapt.
No one says you have to live with, marry, have children with, like any of those "inferior" people. You are free to move to the wild of Alaska where your genetic line will, thankfully, come to an end. BUT...BEWARE...they have Black Bears there and the White bears vwill kill you for fun.
What Dadoalex is probably trying to say is this: from a species-survival standpoint, it is advantageous for sub-populations of a species to inter-breed. If sub-species A has developed a mutation that natural selection favors -- say, longer and sharper claws -- and sub-species B has devleoped a different advantageous mutation -- say, a paler coat that allows it to blend into the natural background, which itself has changed to become 'paler' -- then interbreeding between populations A & B, producing offpring with both longer & sharper claws, and a paler coat, will be evolutionarily advantageous for the species.
We see the inverse of this with too much in-breeding. For example, cousin marriages -- common in certain parts of the world, like Pakistan -- increase the risk of producing offspring that carry both recessive alleles of a gene, giving rise to a defective phenotype [assuming the recessive variant is unfavorable from a survival viewpoint and the dominant one is favorable]. (Which wouldn't happen if the recessive allele were paired with a dominant one.)
So, yes, mix those genes up, to increase the chances of producing high-survival variants of the species.
However, when two different tribes are inter-mingled, they don't take the goal of producing higher-quality offspring into account. Even if they were theoretically aware of the advantages of inter-breeding, they don't tend to do it.
Yes, Serbs should marry Croats, Ukrainians should marry Poles, Tamils should marry Sinhalese, Sunni should marry Shia -- I'm using 'marry' here to mean 'produce offspring with' -- but .... they don't. Rather, they periodically kill each other in large numbers. (There is some inter-breeding of course, since they tend to rape each other's women. But presumably this is not something Dadoalex is urging. And they often kill the women when everyone has had a turn.)
I suppose it would be nice if we were all so high-minded that our actions were taken solely from the point of view of making our species flourish, but that's not how the human race works.
Actually, come to think of it, it might not be so nice. If producing genetically-healthy, sound, offspring were our driving ambition -- we would kill off the genetically-defective at, or before, birth. (Well, okay, we're on the way there.) Sounds like the practice of a certain group a few decades ago. I think they called it "Life not worthy of life" ( or Lebensunwertes Leben in the original German).
And ... we wouldn't have invented nuclear weapons.
The reality is, with tribal diversity -- where different tribal groups (races, religions) are intermingled, you have the standing possibility of bloody civil war.
Most Americans know little beyond the fantasies shown them on their TVs. so they're not really aware of this ugly reality, although the last fifty years have given us numerous examples of this truth: Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland.
DadoAlex's motive is a noble one: we should all just get along. No decent person can disagree. And, given American realities, we have to try. But we shouldn't be muddled by confusing what we would like reality to be, with what it actually is.
In this, we should indeed emulate old Darwin, who brought into the public awareness the unsettling reality that we are made in the image of, descended from, apes, not angels.
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