Beginning in April 1995, Dennis Prager devoted every hour of his radio show for six weeks, much to the dismay of his bosses and many of his listeners, to the Baby Richard controversy. Why this obsession? Because the story exemplified Prager’s belief that blood means nothing and values mean everything.
In his March 25, 2002 column, Dennis wrote:
I took the news of the forced resignation of
Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene — for having had sexual contact with an 18- or 19-year-old woman 11 years earlier — very hard.
You see, in 1995, Greene and I were the two most vocal voices in
America in defense of a 4-year-old boy taken away from his family and given over to a birth father whom the boy had never seen. The boy, Danny Warburton, was known as “Baby Richard,” though at the age of four, he was hardly a baby.
The Illinois Supreme Court, in a vote of 5 to 2, overturned a
lower-court ruling to leave Danny with his parents and his brother, and to hand him over forever to a birth father who soon after abandoned the boy again. The justices did not even provide a way for Danny to communicate with his family, the only family he had ever known.
At Danny’s birth, the birth mother had legally given adoption rights over to the Warburtons, a fireman and homemaker — his parents virtually from birth.
Bob Greene in the Chicago Tribune and I, through my radio talk show and writings, poured our hearts out for this boy. I devoted half a year to writing an analysis of that horrific decision and the
blood-is-more-important-than-love thinking that made it possible.
How could these Illinois Supreme Court justices use their power to
hurt, rather than protect, a child? As the case involved Chicago
residents, Bob’s voice was uniquely powerful. Against the judgment of those in the media who believe that the public easily gets bored with any issue, he devoted column after column to making readers like me weep for Danny Warburton and for his mother, father and brother.
Were it not for Bob Greene, I would have known much less about the
situation and not obtained the information I desperately needed to make my daily case against Illinois Supreme Court. Also, knowing that I had a major ally in the media enabled me to do something I have never done in 20 years on the radio — devote more than a month to the same subject, every day, for three hours.
Said Dennis Sept. 17, 2010: “I spoke at a rally on his [Baby Richard’s] behalf in Chicago. And I cried in the middle of my own talk, it was so painful, that whole issue, in part because my child [Aaron] was the same age and also adopted at birth and the thought of his being taken away was nightmarish.”
According to Wikipedia
Susan Brandenburg reported July 4, 2007:
Moriarty’s dramatic account of the four-year battle by Czechoslovakian immigrant Otto Kirchner to regain custody of his son from the couple who had adopted him at birth is in direct contrast to the condemnation of him that defined the case back in the mid-1990’s. It ultimately changed adoption laws in several states.
Although it appeared to the public that the biological
father of the boy had suddenly appeared on the scene to rip his 4-year-old son from the loving arms of his adoptive parents, the father’s court battle for custody actually began before his child was three months old.One aspect of Moriarty’s “rest of the story” is that
the adoptive parents, Kim and Jay Warburton, and their attorney had actually coerced Daniela Kirchner, a young, vulnerable, then-single immigrant mother, into signing away rights to her baby without the knowledge or permission of the birth father. For years, beginning when the child was a tiny infant, the conflict between the adoptive parents and the biological parents raged through courts and state legislatures, fueled by intense media coverage of a highly toxic nature against the biological parents.
In Think A Second Time, Dennis wrote:
Nothing in the history of the human race has
caused more evil than the belief in the importance of blood.
Many of the greatest evils in history — from the universal practice of slavery to the caste system that has permeated the Hindu world — have emanated from the blood-based belief that I owe allegiance only to my group.
But it is in the twentiest century that blood-based beliefs have caused the most cruelty and destruction:
* The Turkish slaughter of the Armenians.
* The German near-extermination of the Jews of Europe (the Holocaust).
* The Japanese mass slaughter and enslavement of other Asians.
* The Chinese slaughter of the Tibetans.
* The mutual mass slaughter of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.
* Apartheid in South Africa and racist laws against blacks in America.
* The enslavement and mass slaughter of blacks in the Sudan.
* The “ethnic cleansing” by Serbians in Bosnia.
Every one of these evils was a result of blood-based beliefs.
The only great twentieth-century evil that did not result from
blood-based beliefs was communism, which dehumanized people by defining them according to class or Party affiliation rather than race.
As regards children, blood-based thinking has been at the root of the belief in parental ownership of children — “you are my blood, I own you.” A feeling of ownership over children has led to or justified the enormous amount of abuse and humiliation of children and to such practices as male relatives murdering a daughter/sister for losing her virginity before marrying.
Of course, blood-based values aren’t entirely destructive… They have led to one positive development: the fostering of love and
responsibility toward family members. Yet even these two positive
results have often had negative consequences…
Obligations toward blood relations have frequently led to believing
that one has no obligations to non-blood. The more people have based love
for people on blood, the more they have tended to diminish the value of people who are not blood related. Hence, the great amount of inter-tribal, inter-clan, inter-racial, inter-ethnic, and
inter-national hatreds.
Another negative consequence of blood-based values has been
described…as “familism”, not trusting anyone outside of one’s
family… [A] major explanation for the development of North America and the relative non-development of South America has been the prevalence of familism in South America.
…[F]eelings of responsibility and even love toward family members are created; they are not the “natural” result of blood relationships…
When people do care for family members it is because they are family members, not because they are blood (even though most people believe that it is blood that is the source of that caring). We think that blood love is natural, almost instinctive. It isn’t.
The desire to eat or to engage in sexual relations is natural, but
caring for blood relations has been culturally cultivated…
If blood were a factor of any significance in determining family love, biological parents would be considerably more likely than adoptive parents to love their children. However, by any measurement we are capable of making, parents of both adopted and biological children love them identically…
Adoption also provides proof that obligation toward family members
emanates more from cultural values than from blood ties. Members of
adoptive families feel just as obligated toward (and close to) family members as do members of blood families…
Husbands and wives are family — indeed, they are often the individual to whom one feels closest in life — yet they are not blood related…
Throughout the world the family of one’s spouse is considered one’s
family — yet, like our spouse, none of this family is blood related…
Friends provide the most obvious example of non-blood love…
If parents loved their children because they are blood related, why do they continue to love their child even if they come to loathe the child’s other blood parent?
You could just as easily argue that nothing in the history of the human race has caused more good than the belief in the importance of blood as it has been the foundation (we like people who are like us more than we like people who are different from us) of almost all flourishing families, tribes and communities. All the evils Prager lists above are the flip side of genetic altruism — sacrificing for your own.
Prager’s theses are easy to test. Does genetic similarity predict
closer ties or not?
J. Philippe Rushton found:
For Homo sapiens, inclusive fitness theory goes well beyond ‘kin’. As William Hamilton hypothesized, genes can
increase the probability of their own survival by bringing about the reproduction of not only family members with whom they share copies, but also of any individuals with whom they share copies. Research with Hamilton’s theory on people is less well known and remains controversial. This review shows: (1) spouses and close friends assort on blood groups and that similarity predicts fertility; (2) twin and adoption studies find genes rather than upbringing cause people to positively assort; (3) phenotype matching is more pronounced on more heritable items within sets of homogeneous traits; (4) bereavement studies find grief is greater following the death of a more similar co-twin or child; (5) studies of face perception find people prefer and trust those who look like them; and (6) DNA variance within and between ethnic groups is equivalent to that within and between families.Kin-selection theory predicts that animals increase their fitness by allocating more cooperation to kin than to non-kin. Hamilton (1964) showed that altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favored when rb – c > 0, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. However, to benefit kin over non-kin, altruists must be able to detect genetic relatedness. Mechanisms proposed for this to occur include familiarity, imprinting on self or others, and innate feature detectors that work in the absence of learning…
A study of 263 child bereavements found that: (1) spouses agreed 74% of the time on which side of the family a child ‘took after’ the most, their own or that of their spouse, and (2) the grief intensity reported by mothers, fathers, and grandparents was greater for children who resembled their side of the family than for children resembling the other side of the family…
Several studies have found that people rate faces as more attractive when they resemble their own. Platek et al. (2002) morphed people’s faces with those of toddlers and asked questions such as ‘Which one of these children would you like to spend time with?’ and ‘Which child would you adopt?’ People responded more positively toward children’s faces that had been morphed with their own. During debriefing, the participants expressed surprise that any morphing had occurred. DeBruine (2002) found people trusted a stranger’s face more when it had been morphed with their own than when it was left unchanged…
The pull of genetic similarity does not stop at family and friends. Malat & Hamilton (2006) found that people prefer same-race health providers and perceive them as more trustworthy. Putnam (2004) found that the more ethnically diverse a community, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust others, from nextdoor
neighbours to local governments.Inclusive fitness theory has been used to explain why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighbourhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance…
In retrospect, it is not surprising that people are able to detect and prefer those who resemble themselves. Similarity, whether actual or perceived, is one of the most important factors in human relationships. It is more surprising to find just how fine-tuned the recognition process can be. The studies reviewed above show that the preference for similarity occurs within ethnic groups and within families and on the more heritable items from within sets of related traits.
In another paper, Rushton found:
Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the ‘dark side’ of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin
myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins.Most theories of ethno-political conflict and nationalism focus on cultural, cognitive and economic factors, often with the assumption that modernisation will gradually reduce the effect of local antagonisms and promote the growth of more universalistic societies (Smith 1998). However, purely socio-economic explanations seem inadequate to account for the rapid rise of nationalism in the former Soviet Bloc and too weak to explain the lethality of the conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the Indian subcontinent, and Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia, or even the level of animosity between Blacks, Whites and Hispanics in the US…
Patriotism is almost always seen as a virtue and
extension of family loyalty and is typically preached using kinship terms. Countries are called the ‘motherland’ or the ‘fatherland’. Ethnic identity builds on real as well as putative similarity. At the core of human nature, people are genetically motivated to prefer others genetically similar to themselves…In 1964, evolutionary biologist William Hamilton
finally provided a generally accepted solution to the problem of altruism based on the concept of inclusive fitness, not just individual fitness. It is the genes that survive and are passed on. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in
siblings, nephews, cousins and grandchildren as well as in offspring. Siblings share fifty per cent, nephews and nieces twenty-five per cent, and cousins about twelve and a half per cent of their distinctive genes. So when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of these common genes. The
vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration.‘Hamilton’s Rule’ states that across all species,
altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favoured when rbc40, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. Evolutionary biologists have used Hamilton’s ‘gene’s eye’ point of view to carry out research
on a wide range of social interactions including altruism, aggression, selfishness and spite. The formulation was dubbed ‘kin selection theory’ by John Maynard Smith (1964) and became widely known through influential books such as The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) and Sociobiology: the New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (1975).
With Arthur Jensen, Rushton sketched:
…the poverty of predictions from culture-only explanations. The preponderance of evidence demonstrates that in intelligence, brain size, and other life-history variables, East Asians average a higher IQ and larger brain than Europeans who average a higher IQ and larger brain than Africans. Further, these group differences are 50–80% heritable. These are facts, not opinions and science must be governed by data. There is no place for the ‘‘moralistic fallacy’’ that reality must conform to our social, political, or ethical desires.
[James Watson] is but the latest in a long line of academics that have been pilloried and defamed. The others include Nobel-Prize winner William
Shockley, Hans Eysenck, Linda Gottfredson, Richard Lynn, Richard Hernstein, Charles Murray, Christopher Brand, Glayde Whitney, Helmuth Nyborg, and Tatu Vanhanen. The present writers too have endured their share of attacks. The taboo on race will surely become a major topic of investigation by sociologists of knowledge. There is no parallel to it in the history of science. It is uniquely imposed, mainly through self-censorship, by members of the Western intelligentsia in their own academy – which prides itself on a tradition of academic freedom, open inquiry, and the unfettered discovery, systematization, and pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination to the general public.
Based on the book Race, Evolution & Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton
