Genetics-Obsessed Internet Racists Don't Understand Particulate Inheritance

Never has information been more available to ordinary people than it is today; never has the irrelevance of this availability been more apparent than it is now. We are trapped in a hell of those who can access facts costlessly and immediately and who use these affordances to find new, exciting ways to be stupid, whose ignorance is always one step ahead of their exposure to knowledge. Weep with me, for I have a mixed-race child.

My current source of misery is personal and particularly idiotic. My son - conceived through IVF, for the record, during a three-years long, ruinously expensive “fertility journey” - is half white and half Korean. I have shared pictures of him online, as I am proud of him and people want to see him.1 He happens to present phenotypically, to many, as entirely East Asian. As my wife regularly points out, this belief could be quickly disposed of by seeing him in context with fully Korean children, but nevertheless, the internet’s self-appointed racial purity police have opinions. A legion of people who nurse a profound sense of entitlement to knowledge they have not earned insist that he cannot possibly be my son because he doesn’t look like a perfect, uniform blend. The emails, my friend, the emails…. “That’s not your baby” is kind of rough even by internet standards. Setting aside basic manners, this assertion is not a nuanced critique based on population genetics but an embarrassing, public demonstration that these supposed masters of genetic inquiry operate on a biological model that was scientifically dead before their great-grandparents were born.

The source of their error is foundational and criminally simple. These self-styled geniuses are adherents of the blending hypothesis of inheritance. This model, which was the common ideal before Gregor Mendel revolutionized biology, proposed that heritable material mixed irreversibly, much like combining two colors of paint. Red paint and white paint mix to create pink; once mixed, the original colors cannot be separated. The consequence of this model is that variation is “washed out” over time, and every offspring should be a precise average of the characteristics of their parents. This is the level of genetic reasoning embraced by a cadre of people who believe themselves to be the guarantors of the genetic future of the West.

In fairness, there’s a certain intuitive logic to blended inheritance. If you have