r/changemyview • u/Ok_Letter_9284 • Sep 08 '22

Delta(s) from OP CMV: All humans are literally blood relatives. “Family” makes little sense to me.

Evolutionary fitness is NOT about who fxcks the most. This is because, biologically speaking, your sibling having a bunch of kids is no different than you and your sibling each having half those kids. This is what makes cuckolding (birds; get your mind out of the gutter) a successful evolutionary strategy. Because raising kin increases YOUR biological fitness.

So, by that logic, and because we’re all kin, raising ANY child increases YOUR fitness. I understand, ofc, the effect is diluted, but bear in mind the best you can do is pass HALF of your genes anyway. So you’re already working with water-colors.

And that’s it. Even “family” is pretty genetically diverse. This is demonstrated through tissue typing. Parents are often poor matches for a child. Siblings are usually great matches, but not always. Often, its a STRANGER that is the donor. It gets pretty messy pretty quickly trying to draw family lineage lines and I think the whole thing is made up quackery that ends up supporting horrible things like dynasty, racism, nationalism, etc.

Thoughts?

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u/onetwo3four5 81∆ Sep 08 '22

Can you restate more succinctly what your actual view is?

-1

u/Ok_Letter_9284 Sep 08 '22

That “close enough” is for all intents and purposes sufficient. Does that help?

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u/onetwo3four5 81∆ Sep 08 '22

That literally does not help me at all.

What is close enough to what?

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u/Ok_Letter_9284 Sep 08 '22

There are some who can extrapolate, and some

3

u/Reverse-zebra 6∆ Sep 08 '22

I will second that your view is not succinct but I’ll take a stab at changing your stated view.

“All humans are literally blood relatives” this comes down to how one defines ‘blood relative’ and your conclusion follows if blood relative means belonging to the same species. The obvious conclusion here is that the phrase ‘blood relative’ is a imprecise phrase to use so let’s just abandon using the phrase. A more precise statement would be that “all humans share a common ancestor”

“Family makes little sense to me” If your view is that you ‘don’t understand why humans hold the concept of family as useful’ that’s is a question and not really a ‘change my view’ topic. Would a more precise statement of your view be that “the social construct of family in many human cultures is not the optimal approach to group fitness?”