Preface: this is not white apologia, I am not white, I am a pure asiatic mongoloid barbarian. With that being said----
There seems to be a sentiment that is largely a holdover from the liberal beliefs about ‘bad apples’ in our gene pool or whatever. Some people seem to think that we could solve all our problems by not allowing these bad apples to have children. It seems pretty straightforward, right? Parents pass traits to their offspring, you get rid of the bad parents, and you won’t have the offspring having bad traits.
Well… aside from that being borderline eugenics, it’s also bullshit. Not completely bullshit, but pretty much bullshit.
AS FAR AS WE KNOW, BELIEFS ARE NOT HERITABLE. This means that if your parents were bloodthirsty fascists, you are not necessarily a bloodthirsty fascist. Heritable traits are generally much simpler (and by simpler I mean comparatively simpler— even things like eye color needs hundreds of genes, each thousands of bases long, to be coordinated) than behavioral traits. Which means, aside from a few very, very basic instincts OUR BELIEFS ARE LEARNED AND NOT INHERITED FROM OUR PARENTS. While parents can influence your beliefs heavily as an environmental factor they don’t just magically give you ideas when you’re born.
So there. It feels good to want to murder bad people but just know that until we fundamentally restructure society, killing them will just be like trying to fill up a river by draining it with a sponge.
Is this a bit? Who in their right mind thinks that beliefs are heritable? Virtually everyone agrees that we learn them from our families in early childhood and from our communities in later childhood.
There is some ongoing research on epigenetic transgenerational trauma theory, which—assuming it even holds water—wouldn’t be a transmission of ideology.
I saw something that might’ve implied this, so I posted this just in case.
remembering this fact reminded me why silicon based lifeforms are unlikely. They’d need to exhale silicon dioxide which is a solid mineral. (quartz)