Quote Originally Posted by Viking View Post
I would say necessarily. The larger the population, the stronger the evolutionary pressure needs to be to enforce homogeneity for a given trait. As far as human faces go, that sounds most relevant for sexual selection, and I am not sure it would be up to the task.

Size in numbers also correlates with size in area, so you can have founder effects and other phenomena that push for the branching off of new, distinct ethnic groups.
Pretty much all ethnic groups grow by outright absorbing/assimilating disparate ethnic groups as well as by intragroup sexual reproduction. But there's two ways to interpret what I said about facial variation, first in terms of variability in particular measurements within a group (e.g. interocular distance, ear height), second in terms of how the population can be divided into something like facial archetypes. These are obviously not unrelated but I would guess the former has prompted more research.

Adoptees that are adequately young tend to adopt the culture they are adopted into. He would have a much easier time passing as a Mexican than a European where he grew up, so it's not the most surprising cultural identity he adopted.
He mentioned that kids at school or in the gang identified him as Asian, so there's more to it than a scale of appearance (particularly as perceived from without).

I get the impression that he has a bit of a conservative personality (cf. the Action facet of the Openness to experience dimension in the NEO PI-R model); he does not seem very interested in trying out new things in general. He was set in his ways before he got to Korea.

If he had ended up in Mexico instead, I don't think he would be very interested in exploring aspects of Mexican culture that he does not already have some familiarity with, because that's how his personality works.


I don't know how to evaluate your impression of his personality. I would say he comes across as insecure or defensive (stemming from trauma), but that's not the same as what you're describing.