Mixed Kids are not “Prettier”: Blowing Up Hybrid Vigour

By Guest Contributor CVT, originally published at Choptensils

Okay, I’m done.  Just done with this sh–.  I am so sick of hearing people talk about mixed folks like we are some sort of science experiment.  “Positive” stereotyping out of ignorance and lack of exposure to make us just a new kind of “other.”  And I know people mean well, but . . . it gets tiring, to say the least.

A few days ago, my cousin (“E”), his girlfriend (“J”), and I (“me”) met up with a married couple that they are friends with.  In this couple, the man is a white Australian man, and the woman is a Chinese woman.  (*1)  The guy’s a nice one, but he’s not killing it in the looks department.  The woman (also quite wonderful) is average-looking. (*2)  She’s pregnant.

So after we part ways, “J” (also Chinese) is excited about the baby, and she says, “I can’t wait for their baby to be born – she is going to be so beautiful.  Because she is Chinese and he is a foreigner, the baby must be so pretty.”

Record-scratch.  I look at her, “What?!”  I don’t say it, but I’m thinking – ‘Has she looked at the father?  What the Hell is wrong with people?’

Because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of thing.  I hear it all the time – “mixed kids are just so pretty.”  And – although I’d love to bathe in the ego-stroking that entails (an interesting counterpoint to “Asian men aren’t hot”) – I’m not having it.  And before I break it down further, let me just say my family is now chock-full of mixed kids, and there’s not a whole lot of “beautiful” running around (I’m so sorry family, but I just got to be honest here).  (*3) The few kids that are actually above-average?  Well, the ones with the above-average parents, of course.  Just like with the majority of pretty “mono-racial” children.

It doesn’t end there, though.   I’ve also heard that mixed kids are “so intelligent” (mostly here in China).  I’ve even been told (back in high school) that “all mixed kids are just so nice.”  (*4)

When this topic gets brought up on a larger level – how beautiful and wonderful and healthy mixed kids are – we inevitably get a reference to “hybrid vigor.”  In these cases, the person making the argument (wrongly) describes “hybrid vigor” as the genetic superiority of “cross-bred” animals and plants in the world.  “It’s science,” they say – and people usually buy it.

Well, sorry, people – but this particular gorgeous, super-intelligent and wondrously kind mixed-race “cross-breed” has a science background.  And y’all – apparently, from your mis-use of scientific understanding – don’t.

So step into my class for a second.

First-off, don’t wrongly cite Gregor Mendel and his pea-experiments as any sort of evidence – either way – of “hybrid vigor.”  Yes, his cross-breeds did better than those plants he did not cross-breed, on an overall level.

But . . . uh . . . you’re missing a vital fact here: those plants that he didn’t cross-breed?  He self-pollinated them.  As in, they were inbred.  Even closer relatives than brother and sister – because the sex cells  came from the same plant.  It was practically cloning.  And even though lots of people like to say members of a particular “mono-racial” group “all look the same,” you’re really not all clones.

Okay, so then our faulty scientists will say, “well fine, what about with dogs and pigs and horses and sheep, etc.?  Cross-breeding them increases fitness.”

Well, yes and no.  First off, “hybrid vigor” actually just references the times when cross-breeding happens to increase fitness – not a fact that it always occurs.  There’s another term,  “outbreeding depression,” for when cross-breeding causes more problems.  So, again, y’all are skipping some important details.

“But cross-breeding more often increases fitness, then.”  Sure, sure.  In dogs and pigs and other domestic animals, that’s true.  But again – look at the comparison – those animals that do not get cross-bred:  these are either “pure-bred” animals (like pugs, for instance) or “inbred” animals.  We’ve talked about inbreeding (and no, I don’t think mono-racial folks are all the products of thousands of years of inbreeding), so . . .

Page 1 of 3 | Next page