Potterverse: Social Psychology - Wizarding Genetics

[Alexander]

No: HPFGUIDX 34520

  Greetings!

  Two little works of mine. Note please that I'm neither a
social psychologist, nor a genetic engineer. I'm just a
programmer who has or had both these subjects as his hobby.
So please be kind with me. And of course, if there are real
social psychologists, genetic engineers etc etc on the List,
feedback is most welcome.

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      WIZARDING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

  So far, Muggle World has created only two social theories
that got publicly accepted. These are Marxism (or, in
Asimov's spelling, psychohistory) and Hero/Crowd Theory.

  The problem with social analysis is the complexity of the
subject. Marxist approach considers society as a whole and
tries to define certain laws concerning it's development and
existence. It is declared that ruler has little to none
power to influence his country. Hero/Crowd Theory, on the
other hand, considers that some individuals due to certain
reasons have major impact on society development.

  Both system have proven to work correctly and make correct
predictions, Marxism being more accurate in long-term
predictions. So we can accept that both systems are true,
and assume that:

  1) In stabile times, individual has little to no power to
influence his country, or rather the society will always
have a leader that will follow present course voluntarily.
Those leaders incapable of that will be removed.
  2) In crisis times, influence of a single individual on
the history becomes tremendous.

  In both cases, we can reasonably assume that psychology of
the ruler has a tight connection to the social psychology.

  From this point of view persona of Cornelius Fudge is of
great interest.

  We have little information about him, of course. But what
we know for sure is that he is conservative. In fact, this
seems to be his primary personality trait. Was it induced by
Wizarding society, or was it induced on Wizarding society by
Fudge himself is beyond our analysis and is not really
interesting.

  So we have come to conclusion that modern trend of the
Wizarding World is conservatism.

  This fits very well with what we know about recent history
of the Wizarding World. At present moment, security perhaps
is the greatest value from the point of view of most wizards
who have power.

  But this doesn't fit very well with other theories.

  Especially with Theory of Wizard Toughness.

  So far we have all rights to assume that wizards are much
tougher, surviving and just plain lucky than muggles. We
have pretty much evidence on that.

  What this essentially means is that wizards will consider
physical danger much more lightheartedly than muggles. From
what we know, wizard children have no reliable access to
magic during their first 10 years of life. So we can
reasonably assume that their upbringing will be much like
that of muggle children.

  Only that facing less physical risk wizard children will
be much more reckless.

  What adults will grow of such children? We can assume that
they will become more adventurous and more prone to taking
risks. And we have ample evidence of this conclusion as well
what leads us to the next statement:

  Wizarding World in general is much more adventurous and
prone to risk-taking than Muggle World.

  Here we come to contradiction. We have a conservative
community of risk takers. Surely something that cannot exist
for long.

  Or can it?

  Of course, social strain will be great in the Wizarding
World. We can suppose that many conflicts which would become
a subject of hot debate in Muggle World will turn into real
wars in the Wizarding World.

  So we come to the final conclusion. Wizarding World exists
in a state of permanent war. Something similar to Orwell's
"1984". Of course we don't mean that Wizarding World social
system mirrors that of "1984". But certain similarity exists
and must be kept in mind.

  Now we can consider the eternal struggle of good and evil
in the Wizarding World from an entirely different point of
view. Instead of a mystical ancient conflict it becomes a
social regulator of sorts. A war becomes an integral part
of the society.

  Conservatism of the ruling circles is easily explained by
this theory. Indeed, it is only logical that conservatives
rule the community. Society that has chaos at it's roots
will always try to get as much order as possible.

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      WIZARDING GENETICS

  In this research we will try to cover the subject of
magical power aquisition and inheritance. We will also try
to make a reasonable guess about what magical powers are.

  First of all, we reject immediately all ideas about magic
being unexplainable. Of course we understand that this is
quite possible, but this theory is non-positive and will not
provide us any help. On the other hand, even a wrong theory
may help us better than complete absence of such. At the
very least it may give us an impulse for further research.

  So far only two theories have been proposed that try to
explain the existance and inheritance of magical power.
These two are Genetic Theory and Chaos Theory.

    Genetic Theory

  We make an initial assumption that magical talent is
controlled by some gene or set of genes. In other words, we
assume that wizards do have no differences from muggles but
in their genetic code.

  So far, so good. What genes, then?

  First of all, we can reasonably assume that Wizarding Gene
(called WG in the text) is the dominant. This conclusion
springs immediately from the statistics of wizard-muggle
marriages: so far no wizard born from a muggle and a wizard
has reported to have non-magical brothers and sisters.

  Second, magical talent is controlled not by a single pair
of chromosomes (like gender), but by a set of them. This
conclusion we draw from the facts that: a) wizards sometimes
appear in completely non-magical families, and b) single
dominant gene would manifest itself in one of the parents at
least.

  Also we must remember about Creavey Case. In a non-magical
family both children were born with magical talent. We can
reasonably assume that both Creavey parents have parts of
the magical genes set heterotyped (doubled). From this we
can also expect most of Creavey children to posess magical
talent. If this conclusion will be supported by long-term
research, this will become a significant proof of the
theory.

  Another conclusion is that if some muggle family has a
wizarding child, we can expect them to have partial magical
parentage themselves, if often lost in the ages.

  About rarity of squibs.

  So far we know that Wizarding World experiences a large
amount of muggle-blood injections. This probably has some
connection with the fact that magican genetic patterns have
certain influence on either reproduction abilities or
behavioral patterns (more probably former). Hence we can
assume a relatively large percent of muggle genes in the
Wizarding World genetic pool. Even with dominant magical
genes we should expect a relatively large percent of squibs.
But this doesn't seem to be the case.

  This can only happen if whole genetic pattern is not
required for a child to be magically talented. That is, even
a part of magical genes is enough. Whether this means that
the child is less talented or powerful or it's not the case
should be researched further.

    Chaos Theory

  This theory assumes that magical talent has little to none
connection with the genetics. Instead, human brain patterns
are considered to be the source of magic.

  Initial assumption is that human brain is the accumulator
of Chaos/Order energy. Concentration of extremely large
amount of information disrupts the information structure of
the Universe, and this fact can result in non-mundane
effects - the so-called "spells". Modern science does not
reject such opportunity entirely, and this has already been
covered in lots of science-fiction books.

  Here we assume that for the magical talent to be present,
human must have a certain brain pattern. Given the fact that
most spells we know about require verbal and somatic actions
to be cast, we can suppose with a reasonable degree of
certainty that this patterns have close connection with
verbal speech brain centers and motion-control brain
centers. This also fits very well with the fact that only a
few of wizards are able to cast spells without spelling the
incantation. This probably comes from the fact that for the
spell to be cast, appropriate information structure must be
created in the caster's brain. It's easy to see that a
person not trained to "turn-off" his/her brain centers will
speak the spell aloud (even if sub-consciously). Russian
experiments in the late 60'ies proved that a person can be
trained to control it's blood pressure and heart beat rate,
though trainee can not explain how he does it. We assume
that similar process of second level biological feedback
link exists in this case, too.

  Inheritance of magical powers is tied to genetics, of
course. Similarity of brain centers becomes however
something more like a phenotype similarity (a child often
looks similar to one or both of parents), and this can
happen even to non-magical parents, in this case appropriate
brain pattern is created randomly.

  This means that: a) muggle parents that have a magical
talented child may have no magical blood in their veins, and
b) that squibs are muggles by definition.

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  So? Any more ideas? :)

Sincerely yours,
Alexander Lomski,
(Gryffindor/Slytherin crossbreed),
who thinks boa-constrictor will return in later books, to be
a husband for Nagini and draw her to the Good side... :)

    One must be a complete paranoic to search for the
    hedgehog at the top of a fir tree.
        Pavel Shumilov.