Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Making a Better Black Person

Be forewarned up front, I'm an arm-chair geneticist and I don't know if enough generations of slavery took place to justify any conclusion of 'natural' selection but I wonder.  In this context, call it unnatural selection.

There's probably no more harsh selection pressure that was ever put on any humans other than slavery.  Every aspect of it was a horror, even the boat trip to the U.S.  You may want to review the movie, "Amistad," regarding those slave ships.  The movie is too 'pretty' but it presents an important story in this context.

Note:  I'm not considering the Holocaust in this context as it's not 'selection pressure' when there is no chance of survival.

My general premise is that only the smartest, strongest, fastest people could survive slavery.  White people like to think they're superior to black people but it seems more likely it's the other way around.

Black people dominate in US sport even though the percentage of black people in the population is much lower than the percentage of white people. Whether black people dominate music is a judgment call but there's sure a profound influence and many musical genres came specifically from the American black community.  There isn't such a dominance in physical arts but I notice there is much more of a tendency to get radical in paintings by black artists than I might find in another community and that goes back to Grandma Moses.

Domination in intellectual pursuits goes by the numbers.   If you get enough smart guys agreeing on something then probably the other smart guys will agree with it too.  Skin color has zero influence on research papers.  It does have influence on television, tho, as Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are a couple of TV smart guys ... but I can't take either one of them seriously.  For me, it's like Graham Kerr was the Galloping Gourmet and these guys are the Amiable Astronomers.  That's just a little too strange for me.

Shockley did some studies years back in the 80s (?) over which he was reviled as being a racist.  His conclusion was generally white people are smarter than black people and oriental people are smarter than everybody.  That's a simplistic summation but that kind of information was in his study and the result was a roar of denial from just about everywhere.

For my own view, I don't believe the tests revealed much as they assume the IQ test used was valid and there are more reasons all the time to be suspicious of the value of such tests.  They're so limited in focus they can't possibly give a true measure of what someone's intellect really may be.  For example, I've known graduate mathematicians who were brilliant in their calculus but they were strongly dyslexic and could barely read.  If you send one of those to English class, they will call him stupid.

Just to make sure this is straight, I'm not better than anyone and that thinking has nothing to do with the thesis.  The context is necessarily racial but it is not racist.  Some say black people have 'natural' rhythm that makes them better dancers, better musicians, etc but where is the science in that.  If there's a gene that makes someone better at blues then let's find it.

Note:  if it is possible to detect a 'blues gene' what do you tell the kid.  Don't do it.  Don't do it!  Your life will be filled with pain!  But if he's got that blues gene he wouldn't be able to stop himself anyway as there's more pain in not doing it than ever comes from trying.

Part of what drives my thinking is in watching international sports as my unverified impression is black people take a larger position in American sports than elsewhere unless the population of the country has a high population of black people anyway.  That leads me to the thinking of whether the impact of slavery has been more complex than I have realized previously.

I hate the disclaimers but I have a genius for making myself misunderstood.  My purpose isn't to rationalize slavery insofar as if it made a healthier black person then it wasn't so bad.  My question is fair and honest as to whether it's possible there was an actual benefit to it despite the horror of how it came.  I'm clear this is Hitlerian eugenics but I'm not proposing it, I'm trying to understand it.

Perhaps some find it offensive to consider breeding humans like horses but the same principles of genetics apply.  We keep our breeding within our tribe and of course we do because that's where the best breeding stock can be found for anyone.  We all know this, that's why we have tribes, and we perform our own implicit eugenics.

A human generation is fifteen to twenty years so slavery went at least ten generations and maybe as many as twenty.  In twenty generations of breeding anything, you're going to see some profound effect so the question is did this really make black people smarter, faster, stronger.

For breeding thoroughbreds, one of the fundamental components of reinforcing favorable traits is mother-son / father-daughter breeding.  That will bring about the fastest change but we doubt that will manifest itself in any humans any time soon.  Nevertheless, there will still be effect as killing off the weak ones necessarily means it's the healthiest ones who survive.  It's the same thing that keeps deer populations healthy as predators eat the weak ones not the fastest ones.

Maybe this can be nitpicked to death as black people have a higher incidence of hypertension (i.e. high blood pressure) so slavery couldn't have done anything too damn good ... but maybe they do anyway.  There are certain maladies more common in a Jewish community, etc.  Oriental people frequently cannot digest lactose.  This sort of thing isn't unusual.

Again, to deliberately hammer this, my point isn't to justify slavery but rather to ask whether anything whatsoever came out of it that was any good.

Note:  comments are moderated.  Any honest response will be published, racist spew will not.

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