Recent decades have been a strange shock to the ordinary way of things, with the left eating up and vomitting back out bad science like undercooked food. From climate studies to epidemiology and beyond, the left — ever the fan of progress — leaned hard into a consensus framework of “the science,” and allowed themselves to make epistemic fools of themselves on epic proportions.

Seriously, the delusions of the left today will be listed among the major “mass hysteria” events in history textbooks of the future.

But in a context of uniquely left-wing delirium, it can be easy to forget that the right isn’t inherently better at science.

With its preference for tradition, the right is often good at coming to the correct (or at least a correct) answer on important social questions, but it’s often really bad at explaining why they are correct because tradition doesn’t usually carry the “why” forward, just the “what.” When that tradition gets challenged, and leftists demand an explanation for why we do things this way — where “things” include marriage, patriotism, education, politics, family, hierarchies, property rights, and so forth — the justifications offered by the right are often abysmal.

And nowhere are they more abysmal than when they try to appropriate science or scientific language to defend their points of view — especially when the view in question is religious.

Several years ago, a few papers were published talking about microchimerism, which is the phenomenon in which cells from one organism become a part of the body of another organism. Examples of microchimerism would include things like organ transplants and blood transfusions, and is particularly studied in cases of mother-child blood exchange. But the object of interest in this particular case is something else.

There has been a claim going around for some time in right-wing circles of the internet that microchimerism implies that women “retain DNA from other sperm.”

Actually, this isn’t “implied” — science proves it.

There are studies.

In point of fact, microchimerism isn’t all that controversial. What is controversial is the insinuation that women are “permanently contaminated with Men’s DNA” in a way that alters their feelings or behavior… or, perhaps, even the genetic expression of future offspring (this theory is called “telegony,” more on this later).

This is a particularly powerful claim because it cuts right to the deepest and darkest male fears and anxieties:

Perhaps some previous lover left his mark on her, on her soul… and now some part of her body will always long for his cock again.

Maybe she ever so slightly became more like him. 

Maybe his sperm are still there, waiting to change her babies too…

These kinds of claims are tricky to bring up, even in a context like this, because they are so powerful that they risk altering men’s brains, even if they consciously don’t accept the argument. The problem isn’t the intentions or character of the individual bringing them up. In fact, the interested parties appear to be some of the most curious and open-minded people on the planet, who are just exploring an interesting biological phenomenon out of sheer love of science — you’ll notice, as evidence, their overwhelming caution and humility when they make their claims. No, the problem isn’t the people bringing this subject up, but the very subject itself.

Fear of infidelity cuts straight to our monkey-brains. You could have the biggest prefrontal cortex in the world, and it isn’t going to make a difference. Hear repeated insinuations that your wife is probably cheating on you, and the power of the thought will grow. That goes right to the amygdala.

This interpretation of microchimerism is essentially a claim of invincible, permanent infidelity from any previous sexual partner.

You can say “that’s not infidelity” all you want, but the male brain is still going to process it that way. It taps into our disgust circuit. A woman that has been permanently altered by another man’s cum is tainted, and irrevocably so. You’re not going to overcome disgust with reason.

So, if this claim is true, then some things in society need to change.

Hell, maybe Muslims have it figured out.

But what if the claims about microchimerism aren’t quite what they’re making them out to be? Although it’s fairly unusual, might it be possible that someone misread a scientific paper and its implications?

If so… is there a more potent brain-poison imaginable for men?

Even porn isn’t as destructive as this, since pornography will give men bad expectations and erectile dysfunction… but at least they’ll still likely wind up with a woman. If the claims made by red-pill guys about microchimerism and telegony aren’t true, but are believed — and they’re exactly the sort of claims that will alter men’s feelings and behaviors, even if they aren’t believed — then men will actually tend to avoid women and relationships altogether.

So, is it true?

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first.

Telegony — the idea that offspring of a woman and a man can inherit traits from previous male sexual partners of the woman — is actually a phenomenon which has been studied and observed in flies. Flies aren’t humans, for a lot of different reasons, but at least we’re not in complete pseudoscience here.

Many scientists have come up with theories as to how the mechanism might work if telegony were ever observed in humans — perhaps through fetal genes in a mother’s blood, or perhaps through a convoluted procedure of information exchange between sperm cells and uterine fluid that changes how future sperm cells get processed or something…

Hey, it’s a hypothesis.

Nothing wrong with a little speculation.

But in matters like this, it’s important to remember that this is not only speculation, but speculation about something which has not been observed in humans:

The potential for such effects exists in any species where females can mate with more than one male and eggs are fertilised internally. But we do not yet know whether similar effects can occur in other species, and (contrary to what you might read in some media) there is no evidence of telegony in humans.

There are claims from Aristotle, and observations in the 19th century that seem to lend some degree of believability to the claim. One particularly famous example was that of Lord Marton’s mare, a horse which was bred with a quagga stallion (a kind of zebra). When Marton’s mare was later bred with a black stallion, and resulting foal had stripes on its legs reminiscent of the quagga. The case was cited by Charles Darwin himself as evidence of telegony.

It is worth noting however, that “primitive markings” like leg bars and zippers are actually common in regular horses without any quagga genetic input, particularly in dun-colored animals. As it turns out, Lord Marton’s mare is entirely explainable through the conventional understanding of dominant and recessive alleles.

In the 1890s, interest in telegony led some scientists to try to find real-world, demonstrable examples of telegony. In 1895, Scottish zoologist James Cossar Ewart attempted to replicate the Marton’s mare phenomenon, but he saw no evidence of telegony. The next year, in 1896, Karl Pearson,

…examined the matter statistically, and showed that in man there was no evidence that the younger children of a family have characters more nearly resembling those of the father than do the eldest, for it is evident that if telegony really occurs the later offspring of the “infected” mother would resemble the father more than the firstborn.

The American Naturalist, Dec 1899

It’s also worth noting that Karl Pearson was one of the foremost and most zealous eugenicists of his age, and wanted nothing more than efficiency in the protection of “good stock” in the human species. He was open to the idea of telegony, as its truth would have implications for how best to go about his desired eugenic program.

Modern papers that discuss the subject still speak of telegony as “disproved,” even when they seek to revive some interest in the ideas, by whatever hypothetical mechanisms they imagine could explain an unobserved phenomenon. And perhaps there is some reason to take an interest in the subject — it is, at the very least, an interesting idea, and there’s something unscientific in spirit, in simply rejecting ideas out of hand, just because they are uncomfortable or because some version of the idea has been falsified.

But it is even more unscientific to assert with placid certainty that ideas like telegony — which have no scientific basis in humans, or even horses — are clearly true:

What about microchimerism, then?

Our friends over at the ULTIMATE MEN’S GUIDE assert that the prevalence of microchimerism in women who have never been pregnant demonstrates that sexual intercourse unquestionably causes microchimerism.

However, if one actually reads the studies cited — particularly the study of Danish girls between 10-15 — we find that sexual intercourse is entertained at length, but appears to be insufficient to explain the prevalence:

In a recent report on young adolescent behavior in Denmark, 16% of girls aged 14 y and 36% of girls aged 15 y report to have had sexual intercourse.¹⁶ Of these approximately 80% stated that they used condom, which prevents the transfer of male cells.¹⁶ Thus, at most 7.2% of the studied girls would expectedly test Y chromosome positive if sexual intercourse was the source of male microchimerism. We report that 13.6 % test positive indicating that even though sexual intercourse may be involved other sources likely exist which causes male microchimerism in young girls. […] This raises questions regarding the origin of the male microchimerism.

So perhaps sexual intercourse could be a source, but if so, it is not even remotely powerful enough to explain the prevalence of male microchimerism in females (at least in Danish teenage females). The main causes seem to be maternal transmission, especially if the mother of the daughter previously had — or was pregnant with — a son. This apparently explains the data better, but still seems insufficient. The reality is: we don’t know.

And there appears to be no distinction in kind between microchimerism that follows from sexual intercourse (assuming such a thing exists) and microchimerism induced by more generally known mechanisms — blood transfusions, maternal fluid exchange, twins, etc.

This sort of begs the question: what effect does microchimerism even have on women?

Apparently, scientists have some concerns about the role of microchimerism in the development of autoimmune diseases. Some speculate on a possible relationship with cancer and other problems. It’s a developing field of study, and there’s a lot we don’t know. But whatever effects might exist from microchimerism in general, they’re apparently fairly hard to see or study.

Since it’s notoriously difficult to prove a negative, I’m not willing to say that the promoters of concern regarding microchimerism and telegony are wrong.

Not for certain.

But I’d bet on it.

I’d bet a lot of money on it, actually.

But the presentation of microchimerism and telegony as facts backed by science turns a bad bet into something closer to an outright lie.

And not just any lie — it’s the sort of lie that speaks to the most receptive and manipulable parts of the male brain, where sex, fear, and disgust intersect. This is the sort of lie that will persuade you, even if you don’t accept the argument, if you hear it repeated enough (don’t read this blog post too many times).

The effect of this lie — based on genetic argumentation — is to persuade men to resent and distrust women, or to avoid them entirely. In other words, they are persuaded by genetic argumentation to withhold their own genes from the next generation, statistically speaking (you are far less likely to have kids if you avoid women and refuse to get married).

You can’t cuckold me if I existentially CUCKOLD MYSELF first.

The right-wing belief in sexual microchimerism and telegony is a small and fairly irrelevant movement — smaller by a fair bit than, say, belief in a flat earth. So if it’s small, and if its beliefs are so psychologically toxic, why bring it up at all?

For myself, I want to be able to block everyone who mentions the subject. Back in my mid-20s, I carried the naïve belief that bad arguments could simply be refuted, and that would be that. But in studying attention and persuasion, you come to learn that brains don’t work that way. No one is as logical as they think they are, and emotionally laden subjects can, over time, induce disgust, fear, hatred, and resentment by repetition, even if you aren’t rationally persuaded by any particular argument.

(How else do you think Trump Derangement Syndrome came to be?)

Talk of microchimerism and telegony is a recipe for distrust and suspicion towards your spouse. As a happily married man, I don’t want that. And I know the effects that arguments like this have.

You have to excise these kinds of sources of disgust and resentment, or they poison you over time, no matter how immune you think you are.

However, something feels off about simply throwing away an argument without taking it seriously. I can’t start blocking people over their beliefs without at least examining them first.

Not if I care about philosophy.

So here we are, taking it seriously one time before we cast away the mental poison, the brain-eating bacteria that has infected these poor souls, and who now wish to infect others with this peculiar strain of resentment. By my judgment, the science doesn’t support the claims — as could have been expected, given the nature of the claims. And so I wash my hands of the matter, and hopefully turn to brighter, better things.

Yea, it hath revenged itself! And alas! now will it make my soul also dizzy with revenge!

That I may not turn dizzy, however, bind me fast, my friends, to this pillar! Rather will I be a pillar-saint than a whirl of vengeance!

Verily, no cyclone or whirlwind is Zarathustra: and if he be a dancer, he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!—

Thus spake Zarathustra.