Reading Peter's post my first thought was: 'to what extent is this saying something about West African females rather than African (as a whole)?'
I was pleased to see towards the end that a difference between West and East African genetics was mentioned as perhaps why results for recent African migrants are different to those of African-Americans (predominantly of West African origin?).
I would expect to see more selection for slow life history in North and Northeast African populations, if only because they have gone farther in the evolution of social complexity.
In any case, they are not the same as the populations that are ancestral to African Americans, who are primarily of West African origin and secondarily of Central African origin.
frosttt i made this response to one of ur posts on iq and junk:
We are critically impoverished as human beings if the best we can come up with is money as the mediator of our relationships with the non-human world. Allocating financial value to the environment does not mean that we will embody practices of appreciation, attention, or even of love in our interrelationships with a sentient, moral and agential non-human world. Instead, it lowers ‘the moral tone of social life’ and, through doing so, it furthers damage to both humans and ecosphere because ‘the pricing of everything works powerfully as a device for making morality and love… seem irrelevant.’
Sian Sullivan, Green capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service provider
Never in the past has it been so necessary to retain the utmost clarity, coherence, and purposefulness that is required of our era. In a society that has made survival, adaptation, and co-existence a mode of domination and annihilation, there can be no compromises with contradictions — only their total resolution in a new ecological society or the inevitability of hopeless surrender.
Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society
We are still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ignoble history – the end products of man’s domination of man. We may never end this condition of domination. The future may bring us and our shoddy civilization down in a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung. How idiotic it would all be! But we may also end the domination of man by man. We may finally succeed in breaking the chain to the past and gain a humanistic anarchist society. It would be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time. Free men would not be greedy, one liberated community would not try to dominate another because it had a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” would not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining tubercular virgins would not be written. We can ask only one thing of the free men and women of the future: to forgive us that it took so long to get there and that it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask that they try not to think of us too harshly, that they give us their sympathy and understand that we lived in the depths of a social hell.
Murray Bookchin, Scarcity and Post-Scarcity
Social ecologists argue, based on considerable anthropological evidence, that the modern view of nature as a hostile, stingy “other” grows historically out of a projection of warped, hierarchical social relations onto the rest of the natural world. Clearly, in non-hierarchical, organic, tribal societies, nature is usually viewed as a fecund source of life and well-being. Indeed, it is seen as a community to which humanity belongs. This yields a very different environmental ethic than today’s stratified and hierarchical societies. It explains why social ecologists continually stress the need to reharmonize social relationships as a fundamental part of resolving the ecological crisis in any deep, long-lasting way. It is an essential element in restoring a complementary ethical relationship with the non-human world.
Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman
Politics originally did not mean statecraft. In contrast to the self-governing polis, the state consists of the institutions by which a privileged and exploitative class imposes itself, by force where necessary, on an oppressed and exploited class. Statecraft is the activity of officials within that professional machinery to control the citizenry in the interests of that privileged class. By contrast, politics is the active participation of free citizens in managing the affairs of the city and defending its freedom. Only after centuries of civic debasement, marked by class formation, conflict, and mutual hatred, was the state produced and politics degraded to the practice of statecraft. With the rise of statecraft, people became disengaged from moral responsibility for their cities; the city was transformed, ultimately along with the nation, into a provider of goods and services. Proactive citizens, filled with a deep moral commitment to their cities, gradually gave way to the passive subjects of rulers and to the constituents of parliamentarians, until today they are, in fact, little more than consumers whose free time is spent in shopping malls and retail stores.
Money is valuable as a medium of exchange. Without it, you can't have a market economy, since you need some way of measuring the relative worth of very disparate goods and services.
I agree that money causes us to downplay the importance of goods and services that are not easily monetized. This is one of the flaws of the market economy.
Just to reiterate and expand on a couple of suggestions that I also made on your earlier similar piece for Aporia which you may have missed since i posted them sometime after your original piece:
1) Genomic Imprinting and Offspring Growth
First, is it possible that genomic imprinting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting), the phenomenon whereby genes have different effects depending on whether they derive from the mother or the father, could explain the difference in birthweight reported?
A possible analogy is provided by ligers and tigons, crosses between lions and tigers fathered by lions and tigers respectively.
Ligers, with a lion father and tigress mother, tend to be very large, much larger than either of the parent species, whereas tigons, with a tiger father and a lioness mother, are smaller than either parent species.
This is apparently because paternally-expressed genes in lions promote growth of offspring in utero at the expense of the mother, whereas maternally-expressed genes counteract this effect. However, these genes are lacking in tigers, resulting in outsized growth in ligers, but the opposite effect in tigons.
This is supposedly because several different male lions are typically incumbent in a single pride of lionesses at the same time, and their tenure is often quite fleeting, meaning that the next offspring borne by a lioness is likely to be fathered by a different male. It is therefore in the interests of the male to promote maximum offspring growth even at the expense of the mother's future reproductive capacity, something mothers naturally evolve maternally-expressed genes to counteract.
In contrast, tigers are more solitary, a single male defending the territory of multipe females. Therefore, subsequent offspring are relatively more likely to be sired by the same male, until he is displaced, making it counterproductive for the father to promote offspring growth at the expense of the mother's future reproductive capacity.
There may be analogous differences in the mating systems of blacks and whites.
For example, it seems blacks in the US and UK have a somewhat higher divorce rate then whites. Divorce rates are also reportedly higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in Europe.
If relationships among blacks tended to be more fleeting, then similar paternally and maternally expressed genes may have evolved.
2) Pelvis Size, Head Size and Body-Size
Another suggestion: It seems to be generally accepted that childbirth is especially physically traumatic in humans, and results in high rates of death during childbirth as compared to most other mammalian species (at least prior to modern medical advances), because the large size of the human brain makes birthing large-brained (and hence large-headed) human infants especially traumatic.
Therefore, since race differences in brain size are also well-established, could the differnces in offspring outcomes somehow reflect a mismatch between the size of the biracial infant's head and the reproductive anatomy of the mother.
Vladimir Avdeyev, in his book 'Raciology: The Science of the Hereditary Traits of Peoples', claims:
“The form of the skull of a child is directly connected with the characteristics of the structure of the mother’s pelvis—they should correspond to each other in the goal of eliminating death in childbirth. The mixing of the races unavoidably leads to this, because the structure of the pelvis of a mother of a different race does not correspond to the shape of the head of [the] mixed infant; that leads to complications during childbirth” (Raciology: p157).
Similarly, Philippe Rushton claimed in the Preface to the Third Edition of his book, 'Race Evolution and Behavior', that the reason blacks perform better in track events in athletics is that they have narrower hips, which leads to a “a more efficient stride”, but that “the reason Whites and East Asians have wider hips than Blacks, and so make poorer runners, is because they give birth to larger brained babies” (Race, Evolution and Behavior: p11-12).
Could a mismatch between the reproductive anatomy and pelvises of black mothers and the larger-brained mixed-race offspring explain the lower birthweight of mixed-race offspring fathered by white males?
Alternatively, could it be a mismatch between the reproductive anatomy of the mother and overall offspring body-size (not head-size), that expains the differences observed.
Black neonates tend to have lower birthweight than white neonates, even after controlling for gestational age and shorter gestational period among blacks.
Could it be that there is simply less room for the developing fetus to grow inside black women's wombs? This would explain the higher prevalence of low birthweights among both full-black neonates and biracial neonates birthed by black mothers.
Similarly, I am aware that one study reported a higher rate of caesarean sections being performed among East Asian women birthing offspring sired by white fathers, but a lower rate among white women birthing offspring sired by Asian men, which presumably reflects differences in the body-size of neonates as compared to the reproductive anatomy of the mother (Nystrom et al 2008)
____________
Nystrom et al (2008) Perinatal outcomes among Asian–white interracial couples. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 199(4), p382.e1-382.e6
I have trouble following your argument because you don't anchor reach stage of your argument in the scientific literature. You tend to go from one possibility to the next without any backtracking. In some cases, I agree and in others I neither agree nor disagree.
I don't understand your argument that the length of pregnancy may correlate positively with brain size to prevent complications during birth. Wouldn't larger brains therefore correlate with earlier births? (They don't)
In the case of caesarian sections, there has been too much change over time to identify ethnic differences. C sections used to be rare in the Chinese population, but they are now more common in that population than in most others.
"I don't understand your argument that the length of pregnancy may correlate positively with brain size to prevent complications during birth. Wouldn't larger brains therefore correlate with earlier births? (They don't)"
Sorry. I didn't intend to suggest that brain-size and pregnancy length would positively correlate. Not sure where you got that from. Maybe I explained myself badly.
I agree that, if larger brain-size makes birth more difficult, then one would expect earlier birth to be associated with increased brain-size, so as to birth offspring before the brain becomes too large.
But you're right. While this has been suggested to have occurred in humans, there's no general trend in this direction.
Actually, quite the contrary, since increased encephalization is associated with slower life-history and longer gestation periods.
______________
"In the case of caesarian sections, there has been too much change over time to identify ethnic differences"
Yes, the frequency of caesarian sections has varied over time and place.
But the study I cited involved a sample taken in a single time and place, namely a single hospital in California in the early-2000s.
"In this hospital, white mother/Asian father couples had the lowest rate (23 percent) of caesarean delivery, while Asian mother/white father couples had the highest rate (33.2 percent)."
The researchers suggested that this resulted from a mismatch between the size of the developing biracial infant and the size of the pelvis of the monoracial mother, since white neonates tend to have greater birthweights than Asian neonates, and white women have wider pelvises than Asian women.
Fine. I'm not hostile to that explanation. It also seems to be supported by another study:
Borrell, L. N., Rodriguez-Alvarez, E., Savitz, D. A., & Baquero, M. C. (2016). Parental race/ethnicity and adverse birth outcomes in New York City: 2000–2010. American Journal of Public Health, 106(8), 1491-1497. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303242
I'm confused about why you see this as evidence of mismatch. Mismatch would seem to imply that mixed-race babies would have worse outcomes than single race babies of either race. I haven't read all the papers you cited, but based on the evidence you cited and my skimming some of them, it looks like the babies with black and white parents have better outcomes than babies with two black parents. Based on the evidence you cited, it looks like a case where the ancestry composition of the fetus and the race of the mother (either through genetic or environmental effects) both exert additive effects on the outcomes, but not that there is an interaction between the two. In other words, it looks like the model is (Birth Outcomes) = β_0 + β_1*(race of fetus) + β_2*(race of mother) rather than (Birth Outcomes) = β_0 + β_1*(race of fetus) + β_2*(race of mother) + β_3*(race of fetus)*(race of mother). Am I misunderstanding you or missing something? Or is there no evidence of mismatch here, just of the race of the mother having an effect in addition to the race of the fetus?
"it looks like the babies with black and white parents have better outcomes than babies with two black parents."
Not at all.
According to most of the studies, biracial babies with a Black mother and White father have the same birth outcomes as Black babies with two Black parents. Both groups of babies do worse at birth than White babies with White parents.
According to one study (Collins & David, 1993), biracial babies with a Black mother and White father have worse birth outcomes than Black babies with two Black parents (as well as White babies with White parents). This somewhat different conclusion is probably due to the fact that the researchers looked not only at birthweight and risk of pre-term birth but also at prematurity and intrauterine growth retardation.
An interesting essay could be written on Asian (Mongoloid) father - white mother couples and the reverse. My observation over many years is boys in particular from these couples tend to do better physically and psychologically when the father is Mongoloid and the mother is white. My understanding is one hypothesis is white mothers are better able to handle the increased testosterone of a male birth than Mongoloid mothers. A competing or cooperating hypothesis is boys from these couples feel more secure with their Mongoloid father. That said, in many cases you can see the boys from white mothers are physically larger and stronger.
Isn't the larger size just a result of a higher probability of taking after the (white)mother's side physically? In my observation, males have a slightly higher chance of resembling their maternal side than paternal, though it doesn't seem like a stark difference.
that would be a factor to consider but I do not believe it is the main or only factor. a mother's ability to handle the higher testosterone of a male fetus seems to also explain why gay men tend to be second-, third- or more-younger brothers to the first born who is less likely to be gay
You may be right, but I have no way of evaluating your evidence. This is why researchers publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals.
In the case of your second point, i.e., the likelihood of male homosexuality increasing with birth order, this seems to be a real finding. I lean toward the "gay germ" theory. The oldest son in a family is less exposed to the pathogens that an older sibling might bring into the household.
research starts with observation & speculation. I believe it's birth order of males and does not include older sisters. pretty sure it's more difficult for the mother to carry males due to testosterone, which I believe the mom becomes allergic to or suppresses. I am not aware of the gay thing happening after older sisters, which would defeat the 'gay germ' theory if so. I am just speculating based on observation. I hope that is OK. BTW, I have enjoyed your work for many years
along with the male birth order is widespread extra attention given to first-born son - primogeniture and similar in other cultures. if this is bc the first-born son is generally stronger, that's more evidence for Mongoloid dad-white mom being better for the boys (whites have higher testosterone than Mongoloids generally). also more evidence for why later sons are more likely to be gay
> A biracial fetus in a White womb has fewer risks. It is already mature enough to survive on its own when the womb initiates the birth process.
This can't be the entire explanation, or you'd expect white mother / black father births to have _better_ outcomes than white mother / white father. They're worse.
I see that under the "discussion" heading, you say that after adjustment for socioeconomic status white mother / black father is equal to white / white. But (a) I couldn't find a mention of that in the rest of the piece, and (b) equal is still not better.
It's mentioned in my description of the Collins & David (1993) study. "In contrast, infants born to White mothers and Black fathers had odds of low birthweight equal to those of infants in the general White population when measured risk factors were controlled. "
This was also a finding of the Hessol et al. (1998) study: “In the adjusted models analyzing moderately low birth weight infants, only black maternal race was a statistically significant risk factor.”
I wouldn't expect to see better birth outcomes if the fetus stays longer in the womb than it should. There are risks with post-term births, although they're much less than the risks with pre-term births.
Reading Peter's post my first thought was: 'to what extent is this saying something about West African females rather than African (as a whole)?'
I was pleased to see towards the end that a difference between West and East African genetics was mentioned as perhaps why results for recent African migrants are different to those of African-Americans (predominantly of West African origin?).
I would expect to see more selection for slow life history in North and Northeast African populations, if only because they have gone farther in the evolution of social complexity.
In any case, they are not the same as the populations that are ancestral to African Americans, who are primarily of West African origin and secondarily of Central African origin.
frosttt i made this response to one of ur posts on iq and junk:
We are critically impoverished as human beings if the best we can come up with is money as the mediator of our relationships with the non-human world. Allocating financial value to the environment does not mean that we will embody practices of appreciation, attention, or even of love in our interrelationships with a sentient, moral and agential non-human world. Instead, it lowers ‘the moral tone of social life’ and, through doing so, it furthers damage to both humans and ecosphere because ‘the pricing of everything works powerfully as a device for making morality and love… seem irrelevant.’
Sian Sullivan, Green capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service provider
Never in the past has it been so necessary to retain the utmost clarity, coherence, and purposefulness that is required of our era. In a society that has made survival, adaptation, and co-existence a mode of domination and annihilation, there can be no compromises with contradictions — only their total resolution in a new ecological society or the inevitability of hopeless surrender.
Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society
We are still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ignoble history – the end products of man’s domination of man. We may never end this condition of domination. The future may bring us and our shoddy civilization down in a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung. How idiotic it would all be! But we may also end the domination of man by man. We may finally succeed in breaking the chain to the past and gain a humanistic anarchist society. It would be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time. Free men would not be greedy, one liberated community would not try to dominate another because it had a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” would not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining tubercular virgins would not be written. We can ask only one thing of the free men and women of the future: to forgive us that it took so long to get there and that it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask that they try not to think of us too harshly, that they give us their sympathy and understand that we lived in the depths of a social hell.
Murray Bookchin, Scarcity and Post-Scarcity
Social ecologists argue, based on considerable anthropological evidence, that the modern view of nature as a hostile, stingy “other” grows historically out of a projection of warped, hierarchical social relations onto the rest of the natural world. Clearly, in non-hierarchical, organic, tribal societies, nature is usually viewed as a fecund source of life and well-being. Indeed, it is seen as a community to which humanity belongs. This yields a very different environmental ethic than today’s stratified and hierarchical societies. It explains why social ecologists continually stress the need to reharmonize social relationships as a fundamental part of resolving the ecological crisis in any deep, long-lasting way. It is an essential element in restoring a complementary ethical relationship with the non-human world.
Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman
Politics originally did not mean statecraft. In contrast to the self-governing polis, the state consists of the institutions by which a privileged and exploitative class imposes itself, by force where necessary, on an oppressed and exploited class. Statecraft is the activity of officials within that professional machinery to control the citizenry in the interests of that privileged class. By contrast, politics is the active participation of free citizens in managing the affairs of the city and defending its freedom. Only after centuries of civic debasement, marked by class formation, conflict, and mutual hatred, was the state produced and politics degraded to the practice of statecraft. With the rise of statecraft, people became disengaged from moral responsibility for their cities; the city was transformed, ultimately along with the nation, into a provider of goods and services. Proactive citizens, filled with a deep moral commitment to their cities, gradually gave way to the passive subjects of rulers and to the constituents of parliamentarians, until today they are, in fact, little more than consumers whose free time is spent in shopping malls and retail stores.
Murray Bookchin, Toward a Communalist Approach
Money is valuable as a medium of exchange. Without it, you can't have a market economy, since you need some way of measuring the relative worth of very disparate goods and services.
I agree that money causes us to downplay the importance of goods and services that are not easily monetized. This is one of the flaws of the market economy.
Hi Peter,
Just to reiterate and expand on a couple of suggestions that I also made on your earlier similar piece for Aporia which you may have missed since i posted them sometime after your original piece:
1) Genomic Imprinting and Offspring Growth
First, is it possible that genomic imprinting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting), the phenomenon whereby genes have different effects depending on whether they derive from the mother or the father, could explain the difference in birthweight reported?
A possible analogy is provided by ligers and tigons, crosses between lions and tigers fathered by lions and tigers respectively.
Ligers, with a lion father and tigress mother, tend to be very large, much larger than either of the parent species, whereas tigons, with a tiger father and a lioness mother, are smaller than either parent species.
This is apparently because paternally-expressed genes in lions promote growth of offspring in utero at the expense of the mother, whereas maternally-expressed genes counteract this effect. However, these genes are lacking in tigers, resulting in outsized growth in ligers, but the opposite effect in tigons.
This is supposedly because several different male lions are typically incumbent in a single pride of lionesses at the same time, and their tenure is often quite fleeting, meaning that the next offspring borne by a lioness is likely to be fathered by a different male. It is therefore in the interests of the male to promote maximum offspring growth even at the expense of the mother's future reproductive capacity, something mothers naturally evolve maternally-expressed genes to counteract.
In contrast, tigers are more solitary, a single male defending the territory of multipe females. Therefore, subsequent offspring are relatively more likely to be sired by the same male, until he is displaced, making it counterproductive for the father to promote offspring growth at the expense of the mother's future reproductive capacity.
There may be analogous differences in the mating systems of blacks and whites.
For example, it seems blacks in the US and UK have a somewhat higher divorce rate then whites. Divorce rates are also reportedly higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in Europe.
If relationships among blacks tended to be more fleeting, then similar paternally and maternally expressed genes may have evolved.
2) Pelvis Size, Head Size and Body-Size
Another suggestion: It seems to be generally accepted that childbirth is especially physically traumatic in humans, and results in high rates of death during childbirth as compared to most other mammalian species (at least prior to modern medical advances), because the large size of the human brain makes birthing large-brained (and hence large-headed) human infants especially traumatic.
Therefore, since race differences in brain size are also well-established, could the differnces in offspring outcomes somehow reflect a mismatch between the size of the biracial infant's head and the reproductive anatomy of the mother.
Vladimir Avdeyev, in his book 'Raciology: The Science of the Hereditary Traits of Peoples', claims:
“The form of the skull of a child is directly connected with the characteristics of the structure of the mother’s pelvis—they should correspond to each other in the goal of eliminating death in childbirth. The mixing of the races unavoidably leads to this, because the structure of the pelvis of a mother of a different race does not correspond to the shape of the head of [the] mixed infant; that leads to complications during childbirth” (Raciology: p157).
Similarly, Philippe Rushton claimed in the Preface to the Third Edition of his book, 'Race Evolution and Behavior', that the reason blacks perform better in track events in athletics is that they have narrower hips, which leads to a “a more efficient stride”, but that “the reason Whites and East Asians have wider hips than Blacks, and so make poorer runners, is because they give birth to larger brained babies” (Race, Evolution and Behavior: p11-12).
Could a mismatch between the reproductive anatomy and pelvises of black mothers and the larger-brained mixed-race offspring explain the lower birthweight of mixed-race offspring fathered by white males?
Alternatively, could it be a mismatch between the reproductive anatomy of the mother and overall offspring body-size (not head-size), that expains the differences observed.
Black neonates tend to have lower birthweight than white neonates, even after controlling for gestational age and shorter gestational period among blacks.
Could it be that there is simply less room for the developing fetus to grow inside black women's wombs? This would explain the higher prevalence of low birthweights among both full-black neonates and biracial neonates birthed by black mothers.
Similarly, I am aware that one study reported a higher rate of caesarean sections being performed among East Asian women birthing offspring sired by white fathers, but a lower rate among white women birthing offspring sired by Asian men, which presumably reflects differences in the body-size of neonates as compared to the reproductive anatomy of the mother (Nystrom et al 2008)
____________
Nystrom et al (2008) Perinatal outcomes among Asian–white interracial couples. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 199(4), p382.e1-382.e6
I have trouble following your argument because you don't anchor reach stage of your argument in the scientific literature. You tend to go from one possibility to the next without any backtracking. In some cases, I agree and in others I neither agree nor disagree.
I don't understand your argument that the length of pregnancy may correlate positively with brain size to prevent complications during birth. Wouldn't larger brains therefore correlate with earlier births? (They don't)
In the case of caesarian sections, there has been too much change over time to identify ethnic differences. C sections used to be rare in the Chinese population, but they are now more common in that population than in most others.
"I don't understand your argument that the length of pregnancy may correlate positively with brain size to prevent complications during birth. Wouldn't larger brains therefore correlate with earlier births? (They don't)"
Sorry. I didn't intend to suggest that brain-size and pregnancy length would positively correlate. Not sure where you got that from. Maybe I explained myself badly.
I agree that, if larger brain-size makes birth more difficult, then one would expect earlier birth to be associated with increased brain-size, so as to birth offspring before the brain becomes too large.
But you're right. While this has been suggested to have occurred in humans, there's no general trend in this direction.
Actually, quite the contrary, since increased encephalization is associated with slower life-history and longer gestation periods.
______________
"In the case of caesarian sections, there has been too much change over time to identify ethnic differences"
Yes, the frequency of caesarian sections has varied over time and place.
But the study I cited involved a sample taken in a single time and place, namely a single hospital in California in the early-2000s.
"In this hospital, white mother/Asian father couples had the lowest rate (23 percent) of caesarean delivery, while Asian mother/white father couples had the highest rate (33.2 percent)."
The researchers suggested that this resulted from a mismatch between the size of the developing biracial infant and the size of the pelvis of the monoracial mother, since white neonates tend to have greater birthweights than Asian neonates, and white women have wider pelvises than Asian women.
https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(08)00697-2/abstract
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121110612/https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/sumc-acf092508.php
Fine. I'm not hostile to that explanation. It also seems to be supported by another study:
Borrell, L. N., Rodriguez-Alvarez, E., Savitz, D. A., & Baquero, M. C. (2016). Parental race/ethnicity and adverse birth outcomes in New York City: 2000–2010. American Journal of Public Health, 106(8), 1491-1497. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303242
I'm confused about why you see this as evidence of mismatch. Mismatch would seem to imply that mixed-race babies would have worse outcomes than single race babies of either race. I haven't read all the papers you cited, but based on the evidence you cited and my skimming some of them, it looks like the babies with black and white parents have better outcomes than babies with two black parents. Based on the evidence you cited, it looks like a case where the ancestry composition of the fetus and the race of the mother (either through genetic or environmental effects) both exert additive effects on the outcomes, but not that there is an interaction between the two. In other words, it looks like the model is (Birth Outcomes) = β_0 + β_1*(race of fetus) + β_2*(race of mother) rather than (Birth Outcomes) = β_0 + β_1*(race of fetus) + β_2*(race of mother) + β_3*(race of fetus)*(race of mother). Am I misunderstanding you or missing something? Or is there no evidence of mismatch here, just of the race of the mother having an effect in addition to the race of the fetus?
"it looks like the babies with black and white parents have better outcomes than babies with two black parents."
Not at all.
According to most of the studies, biracial babies with a Black mother and White father have the same birth outcomes as Black babies with two Black parents. Both groups of babies do worse at birth than White babies with White parents.
According to one study (Collins & David, 1993), biracial babies with a Black mother and White father have worse birth outcomes than Black babies with two Black parents (as well as White babies with White parents). This somewhat different conclusion is probably due to the fact that the researchers looked not only at birthweight and risk of pre-term birth but also at prematurity and intrauterine growth retardation.
An interesting essay could be written on Asian (Mongoloid) father - white mother couples and the reverse. My observation over many years is boys in particular from these couples tend to do better physically and psychologically when the father is Mongoloid and the mother is white. My understanding is one hypothesis is white mothers are better able to handle the increased testosterone of a male birth than Mongoloid mothers. A competing or cooperating hypothesis is boys from these couples feel more secure with their Mongoloid father. That said, in many cases you can see the boys from white mothers are physically larger and stronger.
'mongoloid' is some weird, outdated and racist-sounding terminology. do better
Isn't the larger size just a result of a higher probability of taking after the (white)mother's side physically? In my observation, males have a slightly higher chance of resembling their maternal side than paternal, though it doesn't seem like a stark difference.
that would be a factor to consider but I do not believe it is the main or only factor. a mother's ability to handle the higher testosterone of a male fetus seems to also explain why gay men tend to be second-, third- or more-younger brothers to the first born who is less likely to be gay
You may be right, but I have no way of evaluating your evidence. This is why researchers publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals.
In the case of your second point, i.e., the likelihood of male homosexuality increasing with birth order, this seems to be a real finding. I lean toward the "gay germ" theory. The oldest son in a family is less exposed to the pathogens that an older sibling might bring into the household.
research starts with observation & speculation. I believe it's birth order of males and does not include older sisters. pretty sure it's more difficult for the mother to carry males due to testosterone, which I believe the mom becomes allergic to or suppresses. I am not aware of the gay thing happening after older sisters, which would defeat the 'gay germ' theory if so. I am just speculating based on observation. I hope that is OK. BTW, I have enjoyed your work for many years
along with the male birth order is widespread extra attention given to first-born son - primogeniture and similar in other cultures. if this is bc the first-born son is generally stronger, that's more evidence for Mongoloid dad-white mom being better for the boys (whites have higher testosterone than Mongoloids generally). also more evidence for why later sons are more likely to be gay
Sons are more exploratory and more likely to hang out with other boys. They are thus a vector for infection of younger brothers. https://x.com/JayMan471/status/1924014756127478227
why are you like this
> A biracial fetus in a White womb has fewer risks. It is already mature enough to survive on its own when the womb initiates the birth process.
This can't be the entire explanation, or you'd expect white mother / black father births to have _better_ outcomes than white mother / white father. They're worse.
I see that under the "discussion" heading, you say that after adjustment for socioeconomic status white mother / black father is equal to white / white. But (a) I couldn't find a mention of that in the rest of the piece, and (b) equal is still not better.
It's mentioned in my description of the Collins & David (1993) study. "In contrast, infants born to White mothers and Black fathers had odds of low birthweight equal to those of infants in the general White population when measured risk factors were controlled. "
This was also a finding of the Hessol et al. (1998) study: “In the adjusted models analyzing moderately low birth weight infants, only black maternal race was a statistically significant risk factor.”
I wouldn't expect to see better birth outcomes if the fetus stays longer in the womb than it should. There are risks with post-term births, although they're much less than the risks with pre-term births.