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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026
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Yes on talent, but where the text is silent is on the ultimate relationship between "yes magic" and "no magic" beyond being clear that some people can and most people cannot, no matter their education. There is no serious exploration of whether, or how often, non-mages are born into wizarding families, or why. While there are notable "squib" characters, none are from pureblood families, and those relatively pureblood families who are not prejudiced against Muggles (e.g. the Weasleys) have distant Muggle relatives... who they don't fraternize with. The fact that all the Weasleys can do magic strongly suggests that there is a genetic component; a family that large would presumably produce some Squibs if "yes magic" were more-or-less randomly assigned.
I agree that Rowling was more influenced by ideas about class than about race, but the text she wrote seems to draw heavily from a cultural background of genetic inheritance as well, probably unconsciously. It's hard to read her books and not suspect that there is something genetic about magic use, even if the "pureblood" story isn't the correct one, or is only partly correct. Biological reality is insistent; it intrudes even on our overt fantasies!
Class in the UK is genetic, of course, and used to be more so. You get some children who fall out, and some bright talents who climb up.
I think Rowling was drawing on this at least a little bit, though probably not consciously. Notably the Squibs in the books aren’t failsons, they’re lower-class coded (Filch, the cat lady). But smartest-in-the-class, daughter-of-two-dentists, charitable-work Hermione is definitely the kind of person rising through the upper-middle-class.
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I suppose the way it's portrayed is that magic appears to run in families, and therefore must have a strong genetic component, but that this is just magic Y/N. Two wizarding parents will reliably produce wizarding children, and every now and then two muggle parents will throw up a wizard child, but there doesn't seem to be a difference between the overall magical potential of purebloods and muggleborn.
It does make me wonder a bit about mixed pairings. The prevalence of half-blood wizards in the series seems to suggest that wizard/muggle pairings frequently (usually?) produce wizards. I can't off the top of my head think of cases of, for example, a wizard/muggle pairing produce some wizard and some muggle children.
We are told that squibs are relatively rare. They may not actually be any more rare than muggle-borns proportionally (after all, vastly more people are born to muggle parents than to wizarding parents), though. I do wonder about the statistics, and how likely wizards/muggles are to be born to mixed marriages... wiki tells me that a muggle born to one muggle parent and one wizarding parent is considered a squib, which suggests to me that wizard/muggle pairings usually produce wizarding children, but I would love better data than that.
This is getting more into worldbuilding and fanon now, but I could see a case that wizards ought to have a strong bias toward endogamy. If two wizards generally produce wizard children, but wizard/muggle pairings only sometimes produce wizard children, and the muggle population is vastly larger than the wizard population, then arguably there's a risk of wizards breeding themselves out of existence through intermarriage. Wizards might be like some minority ethnic or religious communities in prioritising endogamy, to try to preserve their own existence.
As far as I'm aware pureblood defenders in the setting don't make that argument, though. Salazar Slytherin, for example, seems to have taken the view that only purebloods are worthy of magic. If he were just concerned for maintaining the existence of the wizard population, then adopting muggle-born and convincing them to exclusively marry other wizards would seem like a higher priority than excluding them. The pureblood supremacist view is that purebloods are individually superior, and that, at least, is clearly indicated to be false.
I don't know whether you've read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but this is basically where Yudkowsky arrives on the matter.
Right--which is where we wrap back around to the OP. There is no question that Rowling presents the pureblood supremacist view as both wrong and wicked. But an in-universe steelman of pureblood politics might look something like,
That's the "love" the OP suggests Malfoid (at least potentially) brings to the source material: the love for one's children that is expressed by giving them the best available start, by choosing a high quality reproductive partner. Slytherin need not be bigots to be both proud of what they have (magic is cool!) and anxious to share that inheritance with their own children.
You have suggested that the discourse is tainted by the real-world implications that the OP probably intended for at least some readers to draw vis-a-vis race mixing or the like. Where I think those implications fail is simply that there aren't very many human traits comparable to "magic Y/N," and almost all of them are discrete, identifiable disabilities: Down Syndrome Y/N, Tay-Sachs Y/N/Carrier, Sickle Cell Y/N/Carrier, etc. At present (to the best of my non-expert understanding) the really positive stuff people want to select for in embryo screenings tend to be polygenic and tentative--height, IQ, athleticism, etc. are stochastic spectra rather than binary Y/N traits. But if I were a Wizard in Rowling's world, I think it would be very easy to regard Muggledom as an identifiable disability, at least for the child of a Wizard. In much the way that clinical words for disabilities (imbecile, retard, dumb, lame, etc.) tend to evolve into insults and epithets, I can imagine the perception of Muggledom as Disability forming the psychological foundation of anti-Muggle bigotry.
But a bigotry arising from good science is still bigotry--and good science that gives occasional cover to bigotry is still good science. I think the OP in this case too often fails to fully appreciate the former, but those complaining about the OP here do not seem to fully appreciate the latter. I guess the relevant meme is, "The worst person you know just made a great point." AAQCs are not personality awards, or endorsements, or judgments of moral character. More often than not, "death of the author" applies.
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