I recently posted an article explaining Why I Went Public on Evolution . Posting this on social media, the featured image is one of the engagement photos of my wife and I. Victoria was who I made this decision with back in 2012.
Oddly, this was the response that one person had on facebook to the group. What do you make of it? Seems scientifically confused and misanthropic…at best…
EDIT: For the record, here is the full conversation:
Sounds like typical racist manure to me. Strangely he doesn’t seem at all concerned with whatever recessive genes you may carry yourself. Do we really have to waste time guessing why?
Wow.
Well, it’s been a long time since I troubled my head with the specifics of what white supremacists believed, but I do seem to recall that views along these lines were circulated, once upon a time, on white supremacist websites like Stormfront. In particular, they not only thought that the child of a white woman and a black man (speaking here of people of African descent, though I suspect they’d have thought the same for any dark-skinned person) would be “black,” not mixed-race, and some of them thought that carrying such a child permanently altered the character of the mother such that subsequent children, regardless of who the father was, would carry the “race” of that first child’s father.
I think it is fair to say that if you asked for a detailed explanation of how this is supposed to work, you would not get one that made any sense. Nor would you get any sort of nuanced approach to what is meant by the term “race.” It is a weird product of the fear and rage of the white supremacists, a complicated and disturbing topic.
I’m sorry you had to encounter someone like that. How awful.
This person is unwell. I don’t think their ravings are worth discussion.
@sfmatheson his ideas, very unfortunately, are not as uncommon as we might hope. They really do seem racist, and his comments are swimming in pseudoscience. That needs to be exposed for what it is.
On a personal level, it is very difficult to carry interactions like this in secrecy. Even if he was one of a kind (he isn’t), I need to share what happened, for my own mental health, if nothing else.
Racists who swim in pseudoscience constitute a significant proportion of the American population and are highly enriched in conservative Christian populations. I certainly agree that shining light on sickness like this is important, and I would never ask you to face this alone or in secret. The comments themselves do not IMO warrant discussion except to reveal them to the community so we all know the kind of awful shit that gets thrown about by our diseased culture.
I’m sorry you were targeted by a racist.
Not having delved too far into the racist/white supremacist mindset, I cannot be sure, but I suspect they may be talking about more superficial, but more visually obvious recessive traits, that are associated with Europeans, like red or blonde hair, blue or green eyes. I believe these sorts of things may have held a strange fascination for the Nazi eugenicists, and I would not be surprised if that has continued with their ideological heirs.
Speaking from a purely aesthetic (and again largely superficial) viewpoint, I’d be disappointed if such features disappeared entirely from the human spectrum (though I think that is unlikely), but would also be disappointed if we lost the often highly idiosyncratic beauty of many mixed-race people. In this, as in many things, I think more diversity is an excellent thing. 
The vast, vast majority of your fellow Americans see a wonderful and loving couple. That’s it. Our modern culture does carry a lot of baggage from generations past, but you shouldn’t feel threatened by people who want to go digging through it. The more attention we pay to the negative people in society the more power we give them.
This person is disturbed. Sorry you had to deal with that.
But I agree it is important to talk about and expose as unscientific.
A lot of these people really seem to have crawled out from their caves lately, and it seems like the Trump administration and it’s anti-immigration rhetoric and classic racist dog-whistles have given them newfound courage to spew their racist crap.
I’ve encountered and had to deal with this from long before Trump.
Yeah I’m not saying they didn’t previously exist (nor that the numbers of them have changed), but they have certainly been emboldened to appear in the open much more lately.
The last four years have been a shock to those of us who did not have to deal with it before Trump and mistakenly believed that we had made huge progress and racism was on the wane. It turns out that a huge portion of the US population is formerly closeted racists.
Thank you for sharing, because you should not have to carry this AT ALL.
Disturbed? Maybe. Confused? Certainly. Racist? Hard to be sure whether gibberish is racist. I would just like to point out that “Indo-European” is a language family, not an ethnicity. There are no “Indo-European genes”. And I don’t know what your ancestral language was, but I’m guessing it was an Indo-European one, like Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, etc., which would make the statement even stranger.
One of the most interesting things about India that is not apparent to those of us living in the US is the linguistic and genetic differences between north and south India. The languages you listed are much closer to English than they are to the four major southern languages.
Kannada, which I tried to learn but mostly failed to learn, has the same basic grammar as Japanese, at least according to a Japanese friend to whom I complained about its difficulty.
So far, there seems no consensus on relationships of the Dravidian languages. Greenberg put them as related to Afroasiatic, quite far from Indo-European — farther than Amerind, for example. And much farther than Japanese.
I would agree.
I didn’t claim that they were related. I was just pointing out how difficult the grammar is for a native English speaker.
If I wanted to invite you to eat dinner with me in Kannada, the word order is, “You me with eat do?” That’s the point at which I decided to learn only a few phrases by rote that would indicate I was making an effort.
That’s how Hindi is too. Verbs go at the end of the sentence.
But is “to do” (maadi) used as a helper with every verb, even “to eat” and even “to think”?
