Path: utzoo!censor!geac!jtsv16!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!vsi1!daver!lynx!neal
From: neal@lynx.uucp (Neal Woodall)
Newsgroups: ca.politics,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Hybrid vigor
Summary: More thoughts on this subject
Message-ID: <5983@lynx.UUCP>
Date: 9 Aug 89 17:22:29 GMT
References: <4869@drivax.UUCP> <3411@internal.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: neal@lynx.UUCP (Neal Woodall)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Lynx Real-Time Systems Inc, Campbell CA
Lines: 75

MacLeod writes:

American Blacks are highly hybridized with Whites, and exhibit the hybrid vigor
so prized by athletic teams.

Casseres writes:
 
If some people posted this bullshit, I would assume they didn't know it 
was racist ignorance.  In your case, I assume that you do know, and that 
either you are a racist or you are just being a self-indulgent wise guy.
 
MacLeod writes:

Back in high school biology, I was taught that a eugenics program should
take a given gene pool and inbreed it for 20 generations, weeding out
the recessive-gene problems dredged up by the increasingly homozygous
population.  At this point, the gene pool is outbred to a very different
one, and the F1 generation produced exhibits heterozygous "hybrid vigor",
often exceeding either parent stock in desired traits.

Casseres writes:

I have only heard of "hybrid vigor" in the context of agricultural crops.  
I have never heard of it being applied to human populations.


Mr. Casseres is clearly ignorant on this: hybrid vigor can indeed be applied
to things other than agricultrual crops.....it is also frequently applied to
agrcultural stock (ie, animals) as well. Perhaps the reason you hardly ever
hear of it being aplied to humans is because it invariably causes a furior
among the "progressives" who fear that it could be used to further racial
discrimination. In fact, Mr. Casseres himself demonstrates this in his quote
above. It is because of the inevitable cries of "racism" and "discrimination"
from the so-called "progressives" that this subject cannot usually be
discussed in a rational fashion.

I have my own views on this, and at the risk of being flamed or worse, I am
going to enter this fray.

It is my understanding that the journey to the North American continent was
very hard for the slaves that were brought from Africa....hundreds of slaves
crowded into the cargo holds of ships, given little food and water. The heat
from the crowded bodies alone was enough to kill about 20% of them. Sometimes
the attrition rates for the entire trip would be almost 50% of an original
group of captured Africans.

Is it any suprise that the ones who eventually made it to America were of
superior physical constitution and genotype?

When the slaves arrived in this country, they were sold to the plantation
owners for the purposes of physical labor....the owners did not want small
and weak slaves, they wanted strong slaves that could toil for hours a day
in the fields. They undertook breeding programs to produce the strongest
slaves with superior stamina....they bred the largest, strongest slaves
to all of the slave women in order to have succeding generations of
strong and hard working slaves. Also, it was not uncommon for the sons of
the plantation owners to take a concubine negro woman to learn sex from. The
children of these women carried the genes of both the African women and the
Anglo men, resulting in the mixing of the gene pools that McLeod wrote about
that could indeed have resulted in "hybrid vigor".

Is it any suprise that Afro-Americans excell at most sports (ie, are
represented in most sports in numbers that are vastly larger than their
representation in the general population would suggest)? They have
superior genes (in general) for physical strength and stamina.

I hope that people can examine these ideas OBJECTIVELY, without putting too
much emotional content into them. These statements are NOT ment to be
racist in nature, and I hope that people will discuss this in a rational
way, rather than flaming me or calling me names.




Neal