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I'm going to come at this from the counter factual.
I know several couples with either extremely mixed genes or his/hers/ours children. The problems of raising a child significantly different from you genetically is subtle and profound.
Basically, if you find yourself in that situation, all your intuitions about how to treat that child tactically in any given parenting situation are constantly wrong. In my own family, and other families I know without this problem, parenting isn't necessarily easy, it never is. But the key to solving any problem lies in either your own, or your partner's memories of childhood. How one of you or the other reacted to things, and the sorts of parenting that worked, or didn't, on you. And if you are lucky, the venn diagram of you and your spouses experiences has a good amount of overlap. Because otherwise, you find yourself not just butting heads with your child, but with each other about what is "normal" or not, and what to do about it. In a heavily mixed marriage, or step/adopted situation, you don't have this.
It's a god damned nightmare for those parents. They begin developing these ironclad notions that something is "wrong" with their child because they have so much trouble relating to their nature. It's nonstop conflict and friction between parent and parent and child.
There is so much ancient, primordial wetware tied up in how we pass on our genes. I'm not remotely shocked the majority of people, regardless of social programming, have an innate desire to avoid the situations I described above. Maybe, just maybe, their genes notice.
I'm a bit puzzled by your comment. I'm in an international and interracial marriage (my wife is Filipino) and have two mixed-race children, and I genuinely have no clue what you mean about "relating to their nature". Maybe an example would help?
There are obviously some cultural differences between my wife and these sometimes create interesting points of disagreement, but they're utterly dwarfed by the massive similarities in our values and life goals; I have far more of substance in common with her than any other woman I've met (e.g., we are both highly educated, nerdy, extremely open to new experiences, liberal with some a smattering of conservative/reactionary attitudes, education-focused, extremely practical in matters of love and romance, etc....).
A part of me is nervous about the off chance someone reads the examples I'm about to give and goes "Heeeeeeey, what a minute!" So I'm going to scramble and anonymize them to some degree. Hope you don't mind. Take them as illustrations instead of data points if that helps.
There is a guy who as a kid, had a stepdad constantly bitter towards him, because he was overachieving anything his step dad ever did in school. The step dad was utterly incapable of helping with homework after grade 9. The step dad vastly preferred his own children, and treated his stepson suspiciously because he was paranoid the stepson was trying to "trick" him.
I know a couple that is half black. Their kid has, to one parent, profound behavior issues that are totally "normal" to the other parent. Issues that are bad enough that he can't be in regular, achieving, upper middle class suburban school. Would fit right in at a DC school though. It's.... not a good situation. For anyone.
I know another couple where both parents are ostensibly very extroverted. However there is another kid from another relationship that is very introverted, because that partner was very introverted. Once again, it causes constant problems in the family, because not a one of them understands the needs of introverts, and the one that did is out of the picture. Every time we see them, that poor kid is so fucking depressed.
Sounds like things are working out great for you. Congrats. I don't really have a "Greater Theory of Why Racing Mixing Always Results in Broken Families". I've just seen enough to have a confident guess as to why not a lot of people jump at the chance.
To be fair this sounds like a culture thing more than a race thing per se. My wife is black, but if we were to have children neither of us would accept it if our kids started acting stereotypically black (which is what it sounds like you mean?). But that's because we both have similar cultural values about how to behave properly.
Well that is the $64,000 question, isn't it? Is it more of a culture thing than a race thing? We know intelligence is heritable, along with alcoholism, propensity for various mental illnesses or personality disorders, religiosity, and many, many more dimensions of temperament. You take it for granted that either these things are uncorrelated from race, or "culture" which is mutable. I'm unconvinced.
My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment. So I don't think that your argument need be opposed to my observation.
More generally I think the HBD hypothesis is nonsense, so yeah of course I believe that this sort of thing isn't genetic. But even if we take it as a given the the HBD argument is true, surely you would not try to argue that there are literally zero behaviors which are learned rather than innate. So really we are talking about the degree to which race is a factor versus culture, not whether culture is a factor at all.
In biology, "heritable" specifically refers to differences due to genetic variation. Confusing name choice, right?
Nah that actually makes sense. The confusing part is that (again, to my understanding) there are many people using "heritable" to mean something other than that.
Can you blame them? It means something other than that, if you're using it in a legal sense rather than a biological sense. And the lawyers called dibs first, several hundred years ago; the biologists should have come up with a different word ... but they didn't, so here we are. When a scientist says something is heritable they generally mean "we found these genes" or "we did these twin studies" or something much stronger than just "we measured this correlation".
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