Biological Problems with Mixed-Race Families, Marriages, Relationships and Adoptions
By A. J. Fisher, Jan. 14, 2011
As anyone familiar with the literature knows, mixed-race marriages and romantic relationships suffer many more problems than single-race marriages and romantic relationships. For those familiar with human biodiversity (HBD) and sociobiology, this should come as no surprise. In evolutionary terms, one could argue that mixed-race marriages are maladaptive in that they reduce a person's overall genetic fitness - i.e. passing on copies of one's own genes. In a multiracial marriage or relationship, one is showing altruism toward a partner who shares fewer genes than a co-ethnic would share. A parent will also share fewer genes with a multiracial child than with a same-race child.
It's natural for someone to prefer a partner of the same race, as this increases a person's Darwinian fitness. J. Philippe Rushton has noted:
"[P]eople maximize their inclusive fitness by marrying others similar to themselves…."
In another article, Rushton notes:
"Studies of human marriages and friendships show that people choose each other on the basis of similarity, assorting on the most genetically influenced of a set of homogenous attributes…. Darwin's theory of evolution tells us that the ultimate reason for behavior, like morphology, is to enhance inclusive fitness."
Yet, while the vast majority of people are endogamous and marry within their own race, what about those who do not? And what about those who have mixed-race children? Rushton has argued that the lower frequency of shared genes in racially mixed families might result in: less intense bonding, greater conflict, and fewer children. (There are also other problems, such as mixed-race children being unable to find organ or bone-marrow transplants. More on that later.)
Part of the answer as to why this is so lies in genetic distances, as put forward by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in Genes, Peoples, and Languages. Steve Sailer writes:
"Cavalli-Sforza's team compiled extraordinary tables depicting the "genetic distances" separating 2,000 different racial groups from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then, Cavalli-Sforza has found, the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danish, and the Japanese 59 times greater. Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus (the main group of sub-Saharan blacks) is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish."
Using the genetic distances outlined above, let's look at two hypothetical multiracial marriages.
An English Man and a Japanese Woman: As genetic distance figures above note, an English man would be around 59 times more closely related to a Dane than to his Japanese wife.
An English Female and a Black (Bantu) Father: Using the genetic distance figures above, the distance even widens with a white-black relationship. The English woman would be around 109 times more closely related to a Dane than to her black husband, and he would overwhelmingly be more closely related to his black co-ethnics than to his wife.
What of the mixed-race children? Parents in mixed-race relationships are not only genetically dissimilar to each other but they also have a much greater genetic distance from potential mixed-race children than from same-race children. Regarding the individual's genetic investment in the second example above, Frank Salter (On Genetic Interests, pg. 261) writes:
"For a person of English ethnicity, choosing an English spouse over a Dane gains less than one percent fitness. But choosing an English spouse over a Bantu, one yields a fitness gain of 92 percent…. The same applies in reverse order, so that a Bantu who chooses another Bantu instead of someone of English ethnicity has 92% more of his or her genes in offspring as a result. It is almost the equivalent to having twice the number of children with an English spouse. Thus assortative mating by ethnicity can have large fitness benefits, the largest derived from choosing mates within geographic races."