My understanding was that it heightens both genetic strengths and weaknesses. Seems to be what happens with pure breed animals, for example. I'm not a biologist though, so my understanding is probably flawed.
I'm not saying that every village is inbred, but merely that it happens. I think the cultural inbreeding that Daniel Davies was talking about is more typical, and I've seen plenty of examples of that. It applies just as much to village bourgeoise - I don't think there's a class distinction.
It also depends on which ruralities you're talking about. There isn't much similarity between North Wales, and Kent, say. One is a very industrialised, agricultural land - the other consists of marginal, isolated, hill farmers. Plenty of the countryside in Britain has been colonised by the upper middle classes - and in turn this is driving the remains rural working classes into the cities, as they can't afford to live there any more.
> Similarly, it only appears that there are more
> idiots since they are more
> public, often relying on the entire community to
> take care of them, rather
> than their nuclear family or a private institution
> where they all get
> thrown together, often away from where they were
> born.
In this particular instance it was just a statistically improbable number of the mentally handicapped. I think there is some genetic disorder which can cause the mother to be more likely to have mentally handicapped children, but I'm a programmer, not a biologist.
I hasten to add that I didn't think this was due to incest, just people intermarrying over a long period of time (many hundreds, possibly even a thousand, years) within a tiny geographic area. The Fens are insane anyway, so I'm not drawing any larger conclusions about it, merely pointing out that it can happen (just as it happened within the royal families of Europe in the C19th).
> All of its rather astonishing to me since I do not
> experience more backward
> views in a city or a village. The backwardness I've
> encountered in people
> who are supposedly more urbane comes in many forms.
> They engage in new
> forms of hidden sexism and racism that are clothed
> in the mantle of
> academic respectability, for instance. The Bell
> Curve wasn't written by
> hicks. Nor are sociobiologists hicks.
"Urbane" and "urban" are rather different things. There are academic "hicks", just like their are bourgeoise "hicks". I don't know that they are any better than their urban equivalents - worse if my experience is anything to go by. Nobody can be quite as bigoted as the bourgeoise in their comfortable cottages. I'll take overpaid liberals any day of the week.
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