I still for some curious reason have followed The Unz Review, probably because the interesting information content in the Internet is approaching zero. Many commenters in that website have some crazy obsessions, like about Jews, or IQ, or race, all such no-no topic. I would prefer not to mix with such topics, but what can I do as conspiracy theories are full of these topics. On the other hand, I could write just one short post of race.
There are some people who insist that there are no races, but there most certainly are races. Humans have developed dozens of dog races. Nobody denies that they are races, and all points one wants to make of races in any species can just as well be made with a dog as the species. Or, actually the species is a wolf, but never mind.
Wolf was tamed very long ago, something like 30,000 BC. Some maintain that a dog was tamed 12,000 years ago, but this means something else than taming a wolf. A dog, looking clearly like a dog, was bred about 12,000 years ago, which is 10,000 BC, just a bit before sheep, goat and cattle were bred, 9,000-7,000 BC. But long before that time hunter-gatherers had a tame wolf that we can also call a dog, a big bad dog.
We can be pretty certain that humans did not intentionally tame wolfs. Had they done it intentionally to a wolf, they would have started taming other animals around 30,000 years ago, but they did not. It must be so that natural selection created a subspecies of wolf that lived with humans. That is why dogs actually like humans. They were not tamed like other domestic animals. Breeding is artificial. One should not interfere in nature that way. Later humans naturally bred dogs and created lots of races. Most of the present races are very young, but some are old.
Now, consider a hypothetical situation that we allow dog races to mix freely and at the same time place the resulting population to the wild nature. I think the result is obvious: in the beginning there are all kinds of strange looking dogs, but the best hunting races will do best in the environment and quite soon the population will rather much resemble these hunting races. It will be like with dingos in Australia. Once they were tame dogs brought there, but they evolved into wild dogs and all look pretty much the same. The resulting wild dog population will not have dogs looking like most of our races.
The gene pool of the mixed dogs would contain genes from all races, but the racial characteristics are mainly polygenic and in the admixture of the new wild dog population there will seldom be gene combinations that make these dogs similar to most of our dog races. While the genes stay, the phenotype will appear very seldom if at all after some time. The prevalent genotype will be some kind of a hunting dog. This also means that many lineages (father or mother) of the original hunting dogs in the admixture will be preserved, while the lineages of most other races will be lost. The result will be the same as if the dog races had originally mixed only slightly: the population of hunting dogs would grow and this population would absorb small amounts of genes from the other races, while the populations of the less competitive races would decrease and finally disappear.
Let’s take another example, this time from two species that are sill able to produce fertile offspring: lion and tiger. Their offspring are barely fertile, so let us assume we made this test much earlier, when lions and tigers still could have normally fertile offspring and were not different species, they were subspecies. But we assume in this hypothetical test that lions already had the mane and the males fought for harems, while tigers hunted alone and only mated with the other sex, and consequently did not develop a mane to protect the neck in a fight for females.
We let these two subspecies mix and see what happens to the mane. The population has a reduced ability both for hunting as lions and for hunting as tigers. This population must develop to some direction, or external populations of large carnivores will replace it. The population could in principle develop to some direction which is neither the lion style, nor the tiger style, but as it has the genes for these both excellent hunting styles, it will not develop any new style. The population will either turn to the lion-style or to the tiger-style and the partially developed mane in the recently admixed population will either grow to a full lion mane or disappear as in a tiger. If the chosen style is the lion-style, the parental lineages of pure lions will multiply and the result will be similar to a lion population, which has absorbed a small amount of tiger genes.
Or is my intuition wrong? Would you say that this is the way these animal races must develop? I think it is logical. Mixing these races did nothing good: in the beginning it reduced the competitiveness of the population, later the result was the same as if the populations had mixed only slightly.
Then take humans. I can even admit that there are no human races, if that is the issue for you. Why not, we agree, no races. Anyway, there were ancient human populations that had different genes. These populations developed because natural barriers had separated the populations and each developed to its own direction. Then we merge these populations and let them mix. But this mixing does not happen in a laboratory Petri dish. An artificial admixture could be kept as a race in an artificial environment, like humans do with dogs, but this happens in the real world, so there is “natural” selection of some kind, maybe working through sexual selection of partners, or whatever way there is. The best fitted to the environment will survive in the long run.
What should be the outcome comparing with the animal examples? It should be the same. The outcome should be that the best fitted original population will survive and its gene pool will be enriched by small amounts of genes from the other populations.
So, I ask, what was the point of mixing these populations? The mixed population lacks the adaptations to the environment. It will not stay as it is. It will select one direction from the original set of alternatives, not a new one, as there are already developed alternatives, and the population will develop to that direction. Nothing new can be created by this experiment, as there are the excellent genes of the original populations: the mixed population will select one of these models and develop to that direction. Of course if the environment is changed, as the modern life is different from past life styles, the population adopts to the new environment, but so would each of the original populations do without any mixing.
Did I write anything that irritates somebody? Or did I at least express myself in a so abstract way that nobody can decide if they should be irritated or not? I hope I did and nobody should be irritated by this my idea. Just think of the dog races whenever there is a conflict with the concept of races and political correctness.