Rights of fathers and the biology of fatherhood

The contribution of the mother and father to a baby at birth, seen to scale

Sadly, any woman saying anything bold and controversial on the Internet is like flypaper for misogynists and MRAs, who are usually the same people. If the woman happens to be good-looking, the boys take out the heavy artillery.

I was bored, so I watched Laci Green's sex-positive video about condom use. I'm far out of that demographic, but I like watching Laci Green no matter what she's saying. 

Only an ex-Mormon can have a smile bigger than those glasses.

 From there, the subject was sidetracked to tangent issues. One of those were the issues of fathers' rights. One guy wrote this:

"Women don't create life, they carry it like an incubator.
Men make the life,sperm is the cell that carries all the information."


--A. I. Natsumi

This was either an extreme case of ignorance or a troll. But it gave me an opportunity to write my thoughts on fathers' rights.

Most men aren't this ignorant, but most also presume the child is biologically fifty percent theirs because they provided fifty percent of the genetic material. This is what they were taught in high school biology. This is also simplistic to the point of being incorrect.

While it's true that males provide half the nuclear DNA, the nucleus is not the only DNA in a human cell. All the mitochondrial DNA is the mother's. And that's the great majority of the DNA in the cell. The mother also provides all of the cellular machinery, all of those organelles that make a cell function.

Also, all the bacteria that is vital to the baby surviving comes from the mother. It's been determined that there are many more symbiotic bacterial cells in and on a person then there are human cells. (Bacterial cells, however, are much smaller.)

So, if you look at design and material provided, the male is a minority partner in creating the child.

I'm not saying we should take our cues from nature in this matter, because nature is terribly immoral and unethical.  I'm saying that fathers can't justify their custody rights based on nature either. At birth, the father's contribution compared to the mother's is not half-and-half. 

Of course the father is essential in starting the pregnancy. IMHO, this matters if the parents started the pregnancy deliberately, but wouldn't be a factor in an unplanned birth.  

With MRA's and misogynists, there's never been a truer statement than "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics."



BTW, visit Laci Green's Youtube channel sometime:

Eugenics and the Myth of Racial Superiority

Internet commentary has certainly demolished some myths. One of them is that we're in a post-racial society, or anything like one. You can cite the millions of openly bigoted comments, especially those made after Barrack Obama's election in 2008. Besides the ARWP's, there's a whole host of commentators and trolls that don't even try to hedge or redefine their racism anymore.

This does have the pretense of being scientific, but there's no credibility to it. First of all, six cubic inches is huge. Asians would need a second head for that. Even if the poster used the wrong units, the average brain volume (according to Wikipedia, for a quick answer) is 1260 cubic centimeters. Six cubic  centimeters would be within the margin of error of that figure. In other words, insignificant.

Second, everything one talks about with genetics--with all of science really-- is a matter of probabilities. At best, discrimination judges someone not where their abilities fall, but where they're guessed likely fall.

Third, intelligence is not a well-defined term.

However, eugenics itself is flawed to its very core. It's not actually "Survival of the fittest." Evolution doesn't select for the best traits. It selects for ones that are best for survival and reproduction in the organism's environment. This seldom matches what a human being would consider an improvement. Such as, when human beings learned to cook, we began to get crooked teeth, because the genetics for well-meshed teeth were no longer needed, and the resource expenditure to make teeth straight and keep jaws strong was unnecessary. This is not something that eugenicists would consider superior. 

Therefore, a eugenic dictator is likely to choose "superior" traits that suck in the environment that his subjects actually have to live in--since life is inherently unpredictable. So, eugenics would reduce survival and reproductive success. 

I'm not sure if anybody else has this reaction, but whenever I hear of the eugenicists of the late 19th and and early 20th century (and during that time, almost every well-educated Caucasian who came of age then was a eugenicist) I'm struck by how naive they were. The whole reason the ideology was evil was that it would cause a lot of suffering, and for nothing, because it wouldn't work. Anybody who understands Darwinism now knows that. It's better to let the environment tell our genes what it wants. That's what genes exist for.

So, any claim of racial status based on so-called science is fraudulent. At best, it's a biology dropout who would make the claim.