Chapter 27
What encourages outbreeding?
There is a gag comparing some impossible task or other with herding cats. Cats are not gregarious, and I’ve never heard of anybody actually trying to herd them. The closest thing I can think of is the traditional riddle, “As I Was Going to Saint Ives.” The traveler meets a man who has organized his many cats into many sacks, each with seven cats, the sacks distributed among his many wives. The cats were thus marginally organized. At least one would have the reasonable expectation that the cats were not swallowing each other.
Well now, the first part of this book is simply a book of hard scientific facts. This was rather like shipping cinder blocks. Each block could be prepared individually and then all could be placed in order in the reasonable expectation that they would not eat each other, there would be no difficulty knowing where one cinder block ended and the next began and none would wander off when you were not looking. The only serious task was to set them out in order where the reader could have a sense of continuity.
Ideas are different. Thus, dogs have puppies SO dogs can do miraculous things SO dogs are rather ordinary animals SO dogs have self- and-situational awareness SO dogs can do what no computer can do SO dogs are not limited to the laws of science computers model so well SO dogs can do miraculous things SO … ad infinitum. This section is a book of ideas in preference to facts. The definition of “idea” has been extended to cover rioting, arson, theft and the occasional murder. Times are mad, but I’m sticking to the old definition of ideas. I am trying to present them in an orderly fashion, but I consider the order to be imposed rather than inherent.
If you wish to order them in your own mind, consider the Sibly curve again. At the far left, at a very low population size, inbreeding is strong, each generation fails to replace itself, and extinction is expected. Less far to the left, there is strong population growth, and the population, assuming a constant environment, is expected to recover. A bit to the right, and the population is just fertile enough to replace itself, what I call the size of repose. The population can sustain itself indefinitely; this is the one good size. A bit farther to the right, the population’s fertility drops below replacement and it may move back toward repose. Far to the right, the population growth rate continues to be negative. The number of near kin an individual has is small, and effectively the population moves to the right even though the actual numbers are declining. Extinction is again expected as has been shown in laboratory work by Calhoun.
The whole thing of course is a continuum. Conceivably any effect we are discussing could be manifest at about any population size. This chapter will pursue what is likely to happen well to the right of the point of repose.
Historically, prosperity tends to occur where people are free, nay encouraged, to make whatever effort they can to improve their own wealth. This is called capitalism. I pass over the special case of Red China, which has become wealthy mostly because of the cooperation of more nearly free and rich countries.
So now the name of the game is thinking about things that can take a population with insufficient kinship and make it worse. The effect of prosperity on population growth is generally to meet and mate outside the limits of what is adequately biologically productive and like every process of its ilk entails the risk of extinction.
Many years ago, a blacksmith in Scotland put together a contraption with two wheels, a seat and handlebars. Or maybe it was an Italian or in France or Germany. Stories vary. What seems clear is that a bicycle offers, in return for a small investment, a way to travel with more speed for similar effort compared with walking. The machine offers a broader social horizon. If you concede that the very existence of bicycles (in contrast with jet travel, which benefits few or foreign patent costs, which put international patent protection beyond the reach of the little guy) makes everybody a little richer, then the bulk of us have social opportunities we could not have in the absence of such a modest device.
When I was in high school, there were a few lucky boys with cars. Our envy did not run deep. In fact, mostly they were, generous offering the rest of us rides, which I joined for the camaraderie; the bicycle got me to school and back with no fuss or bother. I do not remember that the more mobile boys were more likely to have girlfriends. This changed in college, Wesleyan University, which when I attended (They called it the Tom Sawyer Program, admitting boys from the impecunious South, not expecting them to graduate but expecting them to contribute to the diversity of the student body, so dash them I graduated early with high honors.) was morphing from at least a partly religious oriented school to a purely secular and liberal one, which made me feel as uncomfortable as any other iron straight jacket would.
It was a men’s college. There were descendants of old families who had fought on Bunker Hill and helped draft our foundational documents. But we cared little for that; some of us had cars, mostly the jocks, and others did not. And the car was a real boon to getting a date. Walking back from a town where there was a girls’ school took time. But, if the car did not, then, broaden the social horizon but made access easier, in the big picture, of course it did. In a nice little neighborhood, a boy might not just court and be courted by girls with family connections. The whole town was a pigpen.
Well laid out bus lines could substitute for a car, but of course bus lines, like patent law, get nudged by the rich. But the railroad … ah now you could get places. And now there is the airplane. Travel that way is dirt cheap. A lot of people have cars, and making gasoline leaves a lot of kerosine, which – like any other natural, large carbon source can be burnt in a turbine. Jet fuel is almost free. After you have burned a bit in a lantern, the rest has to go to the airplanes. That means among the rich the social horizon is global.
Not so fast. As I have shown, voles and fruit flies mate for individual attraction, while mice and humans mate for status. So, a wealthy man can, or could before we were locked down, scour the planet for another high-status person. This is nonne patruelis aut sobrina ad stultiti. Bad use of good resource.
My impression is that great wealth has meant killing lots of folks. Back in the Dark and middle ages, you got richer by stealing land with your army, which died of disease to a horrible degree. Some soldiers even died in battle. Later in the days of rail, you made your political allies and then got rights to long strips of land. The people who worked the railroad probably died at about the rate of an ancient army and for the same reasons, to wit: stupidity from the higher ups. Henry David Thoreau tells us that the train rolls over more corpses than there are passengers. The call the cross-ties “sleepers,” go figger. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that when a rail line is closed, they don’t just give away the roadbed but create a long skinny park called a “jogging trail.” You can’t build a high-speed rail along the old routes. Wouldn’t do to dig up the old roadbeds and verify the honesty of the genius of Walden Pond.
Nowadays if you want to get rich, grow up in New England, where there are good schools. Go to the West Coast and invent something Red China can use, and then sell your company. I don’t know how many folks China is killing these days, and I don’t want to. It can’t go on much longer with Red China and New England both in the throes of demographic collapse.
War is another Bowie knife. Remembering we are to the right of repose on the Sibly curve, war is a highly effective way to stir up animosity between groups. I recently watched a movie in which the bad guys were Germans. One could without altering plot or character have made them out to be Russian, which would have happened at a later date. I know. I was there.
War can be waged at a number of levels of technology. You might have a hunter-gatherer culture where somebody wandering in from outside is seized and killed. Yes, I hear you shouting foul. We are talking about communities far to the right along the Sibly curve. You might object that such a tiny tribe would be close to repose at the very least. And it might be. But the question is the distance the intruder is from the gene pool. Such tribes are very stable such that, as I have said, the difference between closest tribes my be greater than the distance between foreign countries at a different time. The natives of the western hemisphere had an engaging term, “stamping ground.” If you wandered out of your recognized tribal region, you might be killed or worse, caught and turned over to the squaws, who would do a better, or at least more disagreeable job of it. You would tiptoe. But in your own tribal space you didn’t need to sneak. You could stamp.
I once read that during historical times, the Bantu – having conquered the challenge of agriculture in Africa – were expanding south and encountering land where pygmies lived. They managed to live in peace; in the north there were pygmy villages and Bantu villages, while in the south – where contact had been briefer – there were those two along with mixed villages. Considering the geography to be a slice through time, mixed villages died out even without war.
At the other extreme of belligerent technology, there is modern warfare, including nukes, guns, attack craft and they say air-fuel explosions and metal rods dropped from the sky. For most of my life it has been reckoned that if things went badly enough, it could kill us all. At all events the negative press against the enemy might reduce intermarriage.
The other edge of the Bowie is that short of leveling cities, troops might be sent into an area for more localized combat. Now you have young men falling in love with the local young women. That might encourage outbreeding. Unwilling to accept this as sufficient social outlet for all the boys, the higher ups might recruit “comfort women,” or send the lads to a completely different country for, “rest and rehabilitation,” think getting drunk and groping women. My own observation is that if we get hostile with a country, we soon after have a bunch from that country coming here.
Conflict is always with us. When I was born, there were wars in the Atlantic and the Pacific. It seems to me the number of conflicts has increased and like ideas they now overlap, interlock and crawl inside each other. The noisiest one is the Globalism/Populism divide. I propose that the amount of racket produced by a conflict does not do much to indicate how important the conflict is. Sporting events, by and large are utterly inconsequential no matter that people notice. If you fight nicotine addiction, few may know although it can be life and death.
Starting with globalism, that is directed toward a single world government, currency, language, legal system and social pool. OK, then if there are 8 billion of us and we mate at random, and a generation time is 30 years, it’s going to take 4 billion X 30 or 120 billion years for a guy to marry his nearest kin. If that would work, then you should be able to have fertile offspring with entities that existed scores of billions of years before the universe. Yet I have friends who say, “I am a citizen of the world.” These guys can actually find their socks in the morning. Miraculous.
Tring to reverse out of the insanity, maybe we could try racism. Making Sense of Race, Edward Dutton, Washington Summit Publishers, Whitefish, Montana, 2020, says that classically there are 12 races. I have seen estimates as high as 100, but that is still not getting us very far. The UN reckons there are 195 countries, call it 200 or 40 million people per country. Now finding your nearest kin of the opposite sex will take 20 million generations of 30 years or 600 million years. A snowball earth was melting and oxygen levels were a fifth of what they are now. Fertile offspring? You and any living organism of that time could not survive in the same atmosphere for long enough to share a root beer. In other words, globalism and populism, which I regard as nationalism, both lead to extinction. THERE IS NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE.
A population in demographic repose might be, oh let’s say 20 families or 100 souls. Starting with hard nationalism, you would have to cut each country into (40 million / 100 =) 400,000 parts; we have hardly started.
A friend tells me that in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the movie, there is a line, “Rum turns good men into scoundrels. Saw movie. Don’t recall line. Buying into it anyway.
As I have said, I have met many Muslim men and liked them all. I am quite sure that in their own communities they would never break a law. After all, they would know everybody and would do anything in their power to protect any and all from being victimized in any way. Yet we read of horrors perpetrated by immigrants operating solo or in mobs. Go ahead. Call it the rum effect. In fact, when they boil down molasses, there is always a residue that refuses to crystalize into cane sugar. These dregs are fermented into dark rum. Put in some key lime juice and water, and you get a sort of frightening reddish liquid, just as promised in the movie, “The Shining.” Red rum, migration … it does not matter. They make scoundrels.
Or remember the time North Korea, during that war, captured an American bazooka. So, they had a soldier to fire it and an observer to stand behind. The back blast of course killed the observer, so they turned the (already exceedingly dangerous) contraption around and tried again. … No, I don’t believe that story either. What I’m driving at is that you bring a good man into the … wait for it … WRONG environment, and he kills and assaults people, harming them and getting himself into jail. But that’s only the beginning. The Swedish government, they say and I doubt everything anybody says, had a program for teaching immigrants how to have sex with Swedish women without having to rape them. OK. Isn’t that better than busting a nose? Nope. You have read, that for a couple so distant as that, the result will be to lower his fertility as well as hers, and either can ill afford it. Busted nose? Tell me either I have my nose busted or you kill a baby, I’ll ask you to spare the infant without much caring which baby it is.
I really wish I didn’t have to address the next point, but the logical structure of my prose demands it before the chapter ends. This involves entering a field in which definitions are poorly agreed upon and statistics, from my experience, nonexistent. One term, well established in medicine, is “self-esteem.” That should be pretty self-explanatory. People who are interested in snuffing out Christianity never use the term; they’d rather see religion as an at-best unenforceable contract between a supernatural entity and an individual, sparing the individual from eternal torment. Even if you could call this entity to account, the deal was made under duress and cannot be considered a valid covenant. So that just won’t wash. In fact, people espouse a religion because it aids their self-esteem; and this esteem is the most precious thing we have. Take it away, and we become depressed. We may become suicidal.
Racism is, for our purposes here, the impulse to treat another person less than generously or at least as a distant call upon our generosity. Birds show it. It has a selective advantage. It is probably instinctive. Feel free to bellow, “But I am not a racist. I have never in my life treated anybody differently because of race.” And I believe you. After all, that is a perfect description of me. But beyond the other reasons to suspect that it is universal, look how widespread it is. I think you’ll find it throughout Asia, Africa, the Mideast, Indonesia, South and Central America. If something is so nearly universal but not quite universal, I think it reasonable to look into the merits, causes and effects. Sure. But be ashamed of it? Well, the Latin word for shame is pudens. The word finds its way into anatomy for things located down there. It makes no sense at all to be ashamed of the fact that we have a certain kind of anatomy near the crotch. I see a social advantage to keeping the area covered; not everybody has the sexual development of a Greek god or goddess, and it’s nobody else’s business. But shame? Makes no sense. Neither does being ashamed of what is to all intents and purposes an instinct.
But racism has historically been the occasion for a lot of antisocial behavior. Granted. Nevertheless, it is the antisocial behavior that is odious, not the racism.
Yet there are people who look at the nasty manifestations of racism and feel they need to preserve their self esteem by putting on a show of not being racist. No published proof here, but give me a moment. That show, of course, is done for the sake of the only audience they care about: themselves.
Placing one’s future in another’s hands, marrying somebody, is a monument to trust. So, look at a couple, a real couple not actors, where the man is black and the woman white … I don’t see it the other way around so much … and she has ventured into a strange (to her) society and placed her hopes for a happy and enduring family on beating the odds. Divorces, yes there are statistics on that.
So, looking at the couple, ask yourself whether she is actually innocent of any racist instinct or is she just trying to boost her own self-esteem.
If memory holds, the Prophet says Allah sent his believers into the world to bring them to the truth of Islam. Some died of hunger. Some were stoned or flogged. Some were followed by enormous crowds. Some had great universities built and named after them. Allah called them back and asked, “Any converts?” They said they had no clue. Only Allah can look into the human heart. If I ran the zoo, I’d say, “OK, obviously there will be no death penalty nor cruel punishments so far as Islam reaches.” Guess I was wrong on that one. But I don’t think you are going to be able to prove to me you can read the heart of the man or woman in question.
What does a woman need from a marriage? Protection is high on the list. Men are a lot harder to break physically than women. Self-esteem has to be high on the list. So, status would be attractive. Ha! My family is older than the imperial house of Japan. They go all the way back to legend and gods. Yeah, we got lots of legends and supernatural stuff too. Sometimes the emperor has had power and not others; yeah, we’ve been kings and that kind of stuff. We’ve also been inveterate rebels. New Hampshire motto: Live free or die. Herbert motto: live free or kill. (Actually, it’s in French and means, “I shall serve only God,” which is a much nicer way to say the same thing.) Graduated from Harvard Med, been on the Johns Hopkins faculty, certifiable genius, blah, blah, but when I get too fond of a woman, she either turns into a Tasmanian devil or leaves the state. For two months I worked in Jamaica. Everybody but me was scared all the time. The girls really warmed up to me in those days. Sure, the safest place is always under my wing. But don’t they know how dangerous life is everywhere?
So, I cannot tell you that the population is pushed far to the right by reverse racism. I neither know nor understand.
Worst of all is the government. In a free country, the land belongs to the citizens. If the government were to come to my home with weapons and say it was confiscated and given to people who needed it more, I’d manage. A house trailer does not cost more in a month than my electricity. But throw me out of the country, and I am ruined. No friends. Can’t do my research. Depressed. Well, that is happening by slow degrees. It’s called immigration. If I start a business, the law, what passes for law, is that when I get up to ten employees, I have to start hiring members of a different ethnic group. When the government has a bunch of people to settle, they look around to find the most homogeneous community they can find in order to violate it. There was a time when the government of some Mideastern country would pay a couple to marry if one was Sunni Muslim and the other Shiite Muslim. Of course, those two great religions slaughter each other with wild abandon, but worse, that tosses them way out to the right on the Sibly curve.
It seems that the primary business of government is to kill off the citizens. And all that was way back in the 20th century.