Random Racial Reflections: Similarity and Stochastics in Sub-Saharans, Felines and Lepidoptera

Butterflies? Emphatically yes! Blacks? Emphatically no! Cats? Emphatically maybe. Those are my varying answers to the question of “Do you want more of this group in your your life?” Butterflies are beautiful and benign, so I’d be delighted to have more of them. Blacks are uncouth and criminal, so I want fewer of them, not more. As for cats: they’re beautiful too, but they’re very bad for wildlife, so I’m ambivalent.[1] The three groups are obviously different in their effects, ecology and esthetics. That’s why I separate them in my answers: yes; no; maybe.

As above, so below? A butterfly, a cat and a Black rapper (top images from Wikipedia)

In another way, however, I think there’s something that unites the three groups. I think they’re all designed by evolution for randomness. In other words, I think there’s something about the evolved neurology of butterflies, Blacks and cats that makes their behavior unpredictable in a way that isn’t true of related groups like bees, Whites and dogs. Watch a bee or a butterfly; a White or a Black; a dog or a cat. Watching bees, Whites and dogs, you see rationality and regularity. Watching butterflies, Blacks and cats, you don’t. That is, you can understand and predict behavior and reactions with the former set in a way you can’t with the latter set. That’s why I think there’s some kind of randomizer in the neurology of butterflies, Blacks and cats.

The yoke of smoke

And what advantage would that randomizer confer? Well, take butterflies and cats. Butterflies are prey and cats are predators, but both groups would benefit from being unpredictable. The jigs and jags of a butterfly’s flight make it harder for a bird to catch the butterfly; the shifts and swirls of a cat’s movements make it harder for a mouse to escape the cat. Imagine being a mouse hiding from a hunting cat. Could you predict what the cat will do next and make your escape? Not easily. Cats shift and swirl like smoke. And I compared Blacks to smoke in a previous article at the Occidental Observer, when I discussed the cover of the first album by the Chicago rapper Chief Keef (born 1995). He looks menacing as he releases marijuana smoke from his mouth:

It’s a good cover in a bad way, entirely appropriate for the cretinous and corrupting genre of rap. Keef looks both dirty and dangerous, both menacing and malevolent. But I think there’s something in the photo that’s working at a subconscious level to maximize the menace and the malevolence. What is it? It’s the smoke spilling from Keef’s mouth. And why is the smoke important? Because it’s chaotic. I mean that mathematically, not just metaphorically. Smoke is an example of the mathematical phenomenon of chaos. The movements of smoke are notoriously difficult for scientists to model and predict. Smoke is a kind of miniature meteorological phenomenon and, like the weather as a whole, it’s very sensitive to tiny changes in the variables that govern its behavior. … Like smoke, Black behavior is chaotic. And I think that’s why the smoke on the cover of Chief Keef’s Finally Rich is so powerful, subconsciously reinforcing the message of menace and malevolence. And of mindlessness. The smoke is an active, exterior symbol of the evolved Black psychology inside Keef’s dreadlock-draped head. Keef is captured in a moment of stillness, but you can ask the same question of him as you can of the smoke spilling from his mouth. What is going to happen next? You can’t predict what the smoke is going to do and you can’t predict what Keef is going to do. In an instant, he could be active and on his feet, dishing out violence, dealing death or committing rape. Like smoke, Blacks are volatile and chaotic, shifting suddenly and sharply from one pattern of behavior to another. (“Mo with the Flow,” The Occidental Observer, 11th October 2024)

The randomness and unpredictability of Black behavior would again confer advantages in their ancestral environment.[2] Survival in tropical Africa doesn’t require foresight and planning in the way that survival in temperate Europe or America does. If you don’t plan for winter in Europe, you freeze or starve. Or you did, before the welfare states and minority-worshipping bureaucracies that now feed, clothe and house millions of improvident, impulsive Blacks in Europe and America. Those Blacks commit a vastly disproportionate amount of violent and acquisitive crime. And I think they’re impelled to that, and aided in it, by an evolved randomizer in their neurology.

The ferality of felinity

It wouldn’t be a true randomizer, of course. Is true randomness even possible? And how do you define and test for randomness anyway? Those are fascinating questions that have occupied some of the greatest brains in PhyPhiM (Physics, Philosophy and Mathematics). But those brains haven’t been Black, because Blacks have never mattered in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). And it’s Black stochastics that accounts for Black STEM-lessness. Or so I suggest. I also suggest that stochastics is part of why we find cats so fascinating. Cats have the chaos of smoke or flames: you can never predict exactly what comes next. And that explains, I suggest, why cat videos are a popular on-line genre in a way that dog videos aren’t. Someone called Gwern has a different explanation for the popularity of cat-videos:

Cats As Horror Movie Villains

Speculation on cat-human fascination being ancestral vigilance triggered by their behavioral similarity to major primate predators, evolutionarily, creating a compelling ‘safe danger’ like watching a captivating villain. […]

Do people like watching cats because of their neotenous appearance? I doubt it, but then why do we have this odd fascination with every ordinary action of a cat and treating them as instances of the Platonic Cat?

I speculate that there may be an evolutionary psychology reason: cats in Africa prey on primates to a degree I suspect few people appreciate, and this seems to have been true for millions of years.

So perhaps we are still slightly hardwired to closely observe cats, in a way we aren’t for most other potential pets. This accounts for the indefinable appeal of cats: they are paradoxically both pleasant and unpleasant, like horror movies. (“Cats As Horror Movie Villains,” Gwern.net, 11th May 2025)

It’s an interesting theory, but I think it fails to account satisfactorily for the “indefinable appeal of cats.” Like a lot of people, I don’t find cats unpleasant in any conscious way. I find them both beautiful and uncanny. Cats are like bats or butterflies: they don’t seem wholly of this Earth, of this plane of reality.[3] And that uncanniness may be explained partly by the unpredictability of cat behavior and movements, by that hypothetical randomizer in feline neurology. And try examining your own reactions to watching cats or butterflies, on the one hand, and watching tigers or snakes, on the other. There’s a fascination in watching all four groups, but with tigers or snakes we can detect fear and a sense of danger powering our fascination. I for one can’t detect those things in myself with cats or butterflies.

The flame of the game: both jazz musicians and flames constantly improvise (images from Wikipedia)

Instead, the fascination of watching cats or butterflies feels to me more like the fascination of watching smoke or flames. The shifting and the swirling, the unpredictability and chaos, compel my eye and fix my attention. But it’s physics that, in the mathematical sense, explains the chaotic behavior of smoke and flames. It would be biology that explains the chaotic behavior of cats and butterflies. And of Blacks too. Randomness would reign through the brain. And that random reign would help explain why “Blacks Blight Britain.” And perhaps it also helps explain why Blacks are so popular as entertainers and sportsmen. Blacks are interesting to watch in a way that more predictable — and more intelligent — races aren’t. Aesthetically and intellectually, cats and butterflies appeal to me in a way that Blacks definitely don’t. Evolutionarily, the three groups may be much more similar than I’d prefer to think.

[1]  Much as I like cats, I would prefer that zoologically rich islands like Australia, New Zealand and Hawai’i were cat-free zones. That sort of suggestion can earn you death-threats from some cat-lovers, who may in fact be cat-crazed in more ways than one. See my discussion of a cat-conveyed brain-parasite called Toxoplasma.

[2]  I read somewhere that police surveillance of Black gangs doesn’t work as well as for non-Black gangs like the Mafia, because Black gangs act on impulse, with little or no planning. With Blacks, deciding and doing aren’t necessarily distinct.

[3]  I find bats fascinating too, but bats are not beautiful like cats or butterflies. Quite the reverse, for some chiropteran species. Even so, I would rather have more bats and fewer cats in Britain, at least until we can find a way of stopping cats preying on bats. And on butterflies (I know someone who had to cut down a buddleia because it was used as a snack-bar by a neighbor’s cat).