The Brits lost a generation of young men from 1914-1918 during the Great War as it was called until the second world war started. In WW2 they had further losses. Are these losses reflected today in the gene pool of British subjects?
Honest question. Don't know the answer.
I have a very shallow pool of experience but the lads I worked with at Scotland Yard back 15 years ago were no hothouse flowers.Originally Posted by willie
In fact the supervisor of that squad was the first one to contact me on the morning of 9/11 and tell me that they stood with us, every man jack of them. Brought tears to my eyes to read that email.
There's nothing civil about this war.
Interesting thought. I've in the past speculated that the American survivors of WWII service were statistically more likely to be those who followed directions and followed them well, which wasn't bad for American manufacturing when they came home and went to work.
On the other hand, it's possible that WWI shifted the gene pool for Britain with the staggering loss of life it created, and how those lives were selected.
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Not another dime.
I think we are getting way off into quackery territory with this theory, no offense to you. I'd be very doubtful that any geneticist would very receptive of this theory.
Man is shaped by their environment and experiences in addition to the environment they grow up in and live in.
The world view of somebody who lives in New York City is probably going to be different than somebody who lives in San Antonio, Texas or Rawlings, Wyoming, because their life experiences are significantly different.
People who live in densely populated urban areas in the U.S. have a different life style than somebody who grows up on a farm in Wisconsin, and people in England have a different life style and set of referents than people in the U.S.
Likewise, my limited but deeply serious experience with the various UK Armed Forces tells me there's no shortage of stalwart go-getters in the UK as a whole. Some of their stories of how they were treated at home, though, filled me with sorrow. We get much nicer treatment in the US.
Have you spent any time in the military? I know people who died because they followed orders to the letter, and I know plenty of people that lived because they knew a stupid order when they heard it - particularly in route clearance/IED removal protocols. While SOP's have evolved and improved quite a bit since the surge days, there were a lot of hard lessons learned in early OIF/OEF.
I strongly doubt that there's any statistically significant difference in compliance vs survival in the overwhelming majority of warfighing. War is a nasty, indiscriminate bitch.
Tommy
All of Mr. Kipling's work is outstanding. 'Tommy' resonates the most with me though.
Britain had essentially no gun controls until sometime in the early 1920's and it had a lower murder rate than it does today. But the class stratification that you can still see there did it no good--generations of hard working and patriotic Brits voted for the Labour Party because the Tories weren't very welcoming. Unfortunately the Labour Party believed in controlling everything--including guns--the Libs went along, and the Tories wanted to show that they were modern and progressive also.
There are still a lot of good, tough Brits--their NCO's tend to be excellent--but 100 years of relentless propaganda can change a nation, and it has changed Britain.
And, as Sean notes, we are being changed as well. Most of one party and half of the other are willing to eliminate our freedoms in exchange for airy and unenforceable promises of security, and our media hates few things as much as it hates civilian gun ownership. We need to constantly take non-shooters shooting so they learn that guns can be handled safely and aren't just inherently dangerous objects.
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