Benefits of interracial marriage blending genetics

I suppose it is an honour to be criticised in such quarters, but I dont think I deserve it. My post (here) expressed no opinion either for or against interracial marriage. I merely pointed out a fallacy in an argument sometimes used against it. I dont think anyone has answered my criticism, other than by the usual tactic of changing the subject.

It is possible that with more research further drawbacks or advantages to interracial mating will emerge. Just as each pure group has its own distinctive profile of genetic risks, we might expect each mixed group to have its own special features. But on common-sense grounds these are unlikely to be very important. The reason is simply that the existing races are already genetically variable. If there were any co-adapted gene complexes, they would be broken up by mating within races almost as frequently as in mating between races. As for being adapted to the environment, the differences between human races are comparatively recent and superficial in evolutionary terms. This is true whether we adopt a pure Out-of-Africa model or some mixture of Out-of-Africa and multiregionalism. In the latter case it would still be true that races as they exist now are comparatively recent. It is also likely that some of the differences between races are not adaptive at all, but the result of genetic drift at a time when populations were much smaller and more isolated from each other than today. And some of the differences that were adaptive in Paleolithic and Ice Age conditions will no longer be adaptive now.

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What would undeniably be lost would be the clustering of genes and phenotypic traits which at present makes it possible to identify individuals as belonging to a particular race, despite the overlap in traits between races. I cannot see any biological reasons for objecting to this, other than the dubious co-adapted gene complex idea discussed above. From a purely aesthetic point of view, I would regret the disappearance of such fine types as the Nuer or the Icelander. From a scientific point of view, I would be sorry to lose such curiosities as the Andaman Islanders. More generally, I think it would be undesirable to make any large and sudden change in the genetic makeup of the human species, on the prudential ground that we cant predict all the consequences see note 2. Global panmixia would be difficult to reverse note 3. But it would also be unreasonable to resist all change.

I see that one of my posts from earlier this year is being quoted on White Nationalist sites as sophistry aimed at encouraging interracial marriage, or miscegenation, as they charmingly call it.

Turning to the pros and cons at population level, the first key point is that interracial mating in itself makes no difference to gene frequencies in the total population. Any trait that depends on the additive effect of genes will therefore not be affected so far as its mean value in the combined population is concerned. Interracial mating does however affect the amount of diversity within and between populations, as measured by average heterozygosity (though, as I pointed out here, this is not always a very useful measure). If we consider the fanciful case of global panmixia, where the entire human population mates entirely at random, then races within the human population would cease to exist. The resulting level of diversity in the global population would be lower than at present, because between-group variance would be eliminated, but the remaining diversity would be greater than in any of the present races. For quantitative characters such as height or IQ (assuming additive inheritance), the genotypic mean would be that of the present world population, while the standard deviation would be somewhat greater than in existing populations. Effects due to dominance and epistasis are of course more difficult to predict.