Multiple Sciences Disprove Racial Supremacy.

Why eugenics rhetoric is a myth, and how biology shatters that myth.

If you’ve ever been told that any section of the human race is superior or inferior, based on genetics, I can liberate you from that ignorance/deception, by pointing you toward a variety of well researched terms.

If you aren’t familiar, the study of epigenetics is the focus on the relationship between an organism and the environment it lives within. Epigenetics refers to the internal adaptations of the body, the gene expression, and how external factors influence it. Our environment and our psychological experiences within it change how our bodies function for periods of time ranging from a few seconds to many years. When these adaptations to our environment take place, especially when sustained, they can linger in the genetic code passed down to children. This means that any physiological change in the genetic code is subject to be altered and informed by soundings throughout generations.

The shortest way to say this, is that racial supremacy is not possible because any trait we can claim is favorable, is more a result of environment than something rigidly destined by static genes. Genes are not static, they evolve. We’ll introduce several sciences that explore this, and in addition to opening the door to fascinating research, we can disprove the basis of violent ideologies associated with racial supremacy.

Neurogenesis is the establishment of new neural connections within the brain. Your brain continues to change and adapt throughout your entire life. This happens most rapidly in the early stages of development but nonetheless continues. Whenever you learn a new skill, your brain is connecting cells to best repeat and naturalize the behavior. This is why the adage “practice makes perfect” is prevalent. Because your brain experiments with routs of linking repetition, understanding, relevant emotions and more to that new skill. It does this to create efficient means to send those biochemical signals associated with the task. In the early stages of learning, these neural routs fan out, in all directions, to find the best pathway, when your brain begins to favor some paths over others, it focuses on strengthening those pathways. When this happens you slowly feel the effects of the task feeling more and more natural, requiring less focus and you can practice with fewer mistakes than when you started.

Many factors play into how well your brain creates new pathways. Stress hormones for instance, reduce neurogenesis, because stress hormones are part of the body’s threat assessment designed to mobilize the body for fight or flight, (now understood to be fight, flight, freeze, fawn) Thus if your body believes it is in danger, it does not prioritize making new connections and allocates resources according to the sense of threat. (To understand ho stress can impact the body, I suggest the work of Robert Sapolsky) Nutrition and lack of nutrition play a role in how well the brain creates new connection, as does the quality of relationships in someone’s life and a myriad of other factors.

Why this is relevant to the myth of supremacy, is this. If our brains are in a perpetual state of genesis, based on our surroundings and experience, then the blueprints past down to us by our parents are not a dictation of our personality, behavior, skillset etc. Rather, our parents past down some combination of the neural frameworks as a baseline to how we operate, and our brains become increasingly different from the brains of our parents as we go through life.

Neuroplacticity is the process of a brain changing throughout life. I touched on this when I mentioned ‘strengthening pathways’. What this means is the brains capacity to understand what unneeded or underutilized connections can be changed and ‘rewoven’, so to speak, into existing networks that are used commonly. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ongoing attempt to perpetually improve its function and to be increasingly fit to navigate the environment it’s within. What the fact of neuroplasticity proves is that any human being has the potential to change dramatically throughout life. So even if someone started from a more stressful environment, born into a smaller community, and came from parents who never played guitar, that person could still become a low stress, guitar-playing socialite.

Though neuroplasticity reveals the myth of racial supremacy to be a silly one, it does beg the question, “If everyone adapts to their environment and improves throughout life, and those improvements are passed down into the baseline framework their kids inherit, why isn’t everyone a genius?” The truth comes down to what neural pathways are allowed to be nurtured. what genes expression is required to survive the environment will determine the focus of the brain’s development. This brings us to trauma, on an individual and inter-generational level.

Traumatology is the study of how extreme or prolonged stress can impact the function of the human body. It studies that which requires the nervous system to make physiological changes throughout the body in order to navigate threats within the environment. Threats can be anything from a physical attacker, to lack of food, to prolonged isolation, to the understanding that if you miss a payment to keep a roof over your head, you may not have a bed to sleep in anymore.

So the fewer threats present in the developing body and brain, the fewer restrictions on things like neurogenesis or even immune function. And since inter-generational trauma is the body’s attempt to pass down relevant stress responses to the current environment, it could create trends where segregation exists that would seem to the untrained eye to be a result of skin color. Any trend someone can point to, which might seem like evidence of superiority or inferiority, is actually evidence of a lack of nurture and opportunity. That is to say, if you live in a segregated system, it may seem that members of the underclass are less inclined to be academic, or whatever, when really their nervous system had to prioritize survival differently than the privileged class. And if those environmental factors were different, so would be the nervous systems of the people within the environment.

Any negative aspect of inter-generational trauma, can be reversed in a few generations of living within a relatively safe environment. Our genes which exists to express when under threat, as well as genes which exists to express for growth, relaxation, social connection, neurogenesis etc. are all triggered by input from the world around us. So if there’s a need to respond to threat more often, those threat-response neural connections will be what the brain strengthens. The same is true with nurturing. If loving events happen more often, the brain strengthens affectionate neural pathways. If musical events happen more often the brain will strengthen its musical pathways, and so on and so forth with all kinds of experiences.

References I suggest for more fully understanding these kinds of sciences are the following researchers and authors.
Bessel Van Der Kolk – how the body processes and changes regarding trauma.
Robert Sapolsky – how stress effects the human body.

Alice Miller – how early development plays a role in physical and psychological makeup.

Stephen Porges – how the body operates from either the stress or rest response.

Benjamin Fry – how the body can have mixed signals regarding fight or flight.

Gabor Mate – how early development and trauma plays a role health and addiction.

Mark Wolynn – how trauma is passed down through generations.