Is this for real? What do you think?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

In Defense of Eugenics

The high-stakes race for a better future.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Eugenics: A Reassessment

Richard Lynn

Praeger Publishers, 2001,
$85.00, 384 pp.

ichard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, is one of those rare social scientists who not only understand genetics but are willing to draw conclusions about how biology affects society. This volume builds upon his 1996 Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (reviewed in AR, April, 1997), and lays out the clear choice science now sets before all developed nations: whether to let the genetic quality of their populations continue to deteriorate, or use a combination of old and new techniques to improve it. In Prof. Lynn’s view, this is a high-stakes game, in which those who refuse to play will be certain losers. This careful analysis unquestionably establishes the author as the foremost eugenicist of our time.

Eugenics is an exhaustive treatment that includes a history of the movement, its objectives, its successes and failures, moral arguments for and against it, and a bold prediction of how eugenics will dictate the balance of world power in the 21st century. This book will offend many people, but they will find its relentless logic difficult to refute. The age of widespread population engineering is upon us, and to begin with Prof. Lynn’s concluding quotation from Francis Galton, “the nation which first subjects itself to rational eugenical disciplines is bound to inherit the earth.”

Francis Galton

Richard Lynn.

Galton (1822 - 1911) was, of course, the British genius who coined the term “eugenics.” He first introduced it in his 1883 Inquiries Into Human Fertility, in which he argued that human abilities are greatly influenced by genetic inheritance, and that when the less able outbreed the more able, the quality of a population declines. Galton recognized that the winnowing effects of natural selection had been artificially reversed in the West, so that “the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilization.”

Galton proposed that the British population be divided into three categories: desirables, undesirables, and passables. Desirables should have incentives to have more children, undesirables should have no children, and passables should be left alone. Galton proposed that the desirables and undesirables each include only about five to ten percent of the population, leaving the great majority passable and therefore untouched. He hoped a program that affected only 20 percent of the population would win broad support. He recognized undesirables would have to be coerced into childlessness, but was not specific about how this should be done.

From Galton’s time until the Second World War, eugenic movements attracted strong support. Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, H.G. Wells, Linus Pauling, Teddy Roosevelt, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were all ardent eugenicists. Margaret Sanger, the early American champion of birth control, clearly saw contraception as a means to keep the lower orders from multiplying. As her British counterpart Mary Stopes put it: “more children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.”

Prof. Lynn notes that at the height of the eugenics movement, people knew little about the science of genetics, but they understood the importance of breeding. In an early round of the “nature/nurture” debate, Edward Thorndike pointed out in 1913, “There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man’s environment as to improve his nature.”

Previous generations were not squeamish about distinguishing between desirables and undesirables. In his 1916 multi-generation study of the degenerate Jukes family, American scholar A. H. Eastabrook called it “the scum of society . . . inefficient and indolent, unwilling or unable to take advantage of any opportunity which offers itself or is offered to them.” As Prof. Lynn explains, “The Victorians understood with a clarity that became lost in the second half of the twentieth century that rigorous social control was necessary to contain the growth of a subclass of undeserving poor.”

The eugenics movement gave rise to one important form of rigorous social control: forcible sterilization. In 1907, Indiana was the first jurisdiction to pass a law “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld laws of this kind in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell, and by 1931, 30 states had eugenic sterilization laws.
“The nation which first subjects itself to rational eugenical disciplines is bound to inherit the earth.”

Most European countries adopted similar measures, and Nazi Germany was relatively late with its 1933 Eugenic Sterilization Law. Prof. Lynn points out that despite claims to the contrary, the Nazis did not target Jews for eugenic reasons, and sterilized relatively few people. As a percentage of the population, Sweden sterilized twice as many of its citizens as Germany. The Soviet Union, which was going through a Lysenkoist rejection of genetics, was one of the few developed countries that did not require eugenic sterilization, and Japan did not repeal its sterilization law until 1996.

After the war, eugenics was mistakenly associated with Nazism, and lost almost all support. In 1953, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, proposed a tax on child-bearing to deter the shiftless, and argued for making prospective parents apply for licenses, but eugenics as an explicit movement was essentially dead in the West.

Eugenics joined “racism” as one of the era’s blackest crimes. The European Parliament passed a resolution saying, “cloning of human beings . . . cannot under any circumstances be justified or tolerated by any society . . . as it permits a eugenic and racist selection of the human race . . . .” The French eugenicist Alexis Carrell won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912, but frenzied anti-eugenicists removed his name from street signs and from the medical school of the University of Lyon.

Opposition to eugenics drove some people to absurd positions. Theodosius Dobzhansky of Columbia University took the view that there is no such thing as a bad gene. J.D. Smith of the University of South Carolina wrote that genes for mental retardation should be kept in the population because “mental retardation is a human condition worthy of being valued.”

A few people managed to overcome their initial irrationality. Biologist Arthur Kaplan’s first reaction to the news of a sperm bank that sought contributions only from geniuses was that it was “morally pernicious.” He later changed his mind, saying: “We mold and shape our children according to environmental factors. We give them piano lessons and every other type of lesson imaginable. I’m not sure there is anything wrong with using genetics as long as it is not hurting anyone.”

It was Asians, however, who were least diverted from eugenic thinking. China continues to strengthen laws that curtail reproduction by criminals and defectives. In Singapore, Premiere Lee Kuan Yew gave generous tax incentives to better-educated women to have more children, and succeeded in increasing the percentage of births that were to women with secondary education from 36.7 percent to 47.7 percent. The women who get the most education are the more intelligent, and they marry smart men; Prof. Lynn considers the Singapore program a rare and notable success for modern eugenics.
$90,000 an egg?

Westerners perhaps overvalue the individual, whereas Asians think certain individual rights must be sacrificed to broader interests, “one of which,” Prof. Lynn writes, “is the right of society to protect itself against the social costs incurred when these [less able] groups have children.” At the same time, Western societies have changed considerably in this respect. It used to be common, for example, to quarantine carriers of infectious diseases, but we now give AIDS carriers complete freedom to infect others.

Prof. Lynn points out there is great irony in frantic opposition to eugenics, per se, when many accepted practices in the West are plainly eugenic. In Britain, for example, parents of a retarded woman can have her sterilized, which implicitly recognizes that some people should not have children. Infertile women seeking donor eggs advertise for them at elite universities, and are prepared to pay huge premiums for them, once again recognizing that some genes are better than others. Prof. Lynn has found offers of eggs from fashion models at $90,000 each, and reports there are exclusive sperm banks stocked by Harvard and MIT students.

The most common eugenic practice today is “therapeutic abortion.” Amniocentesis is a widely-used procedure that can detect certain chromosomal abnormalities of the fetus. According to a Canadian study, 80 percent of women who learn their fetuses have serious defects abort them.

From 1970 to 1986, German judges gave sex offenders the option of castration rather than jail. During this period only three percent of the castrated men committed more sex crimes while 46 percent of a matched control group became repeat offenders. As an added eugenic bonus, the castrated group had no children.

American welfare reform in the 1990s also had a faint whiff of eugenics. Some states stopped increasing benefits along with the number of children, and the federal government introduced new rules to make it much harder to stay on the dole. As Prof. Lynn points out, taxing the competent to support procreation by the incompetent is flagrantly dysgenic. Some state legislatures floated bills that would have made welfare conditional on using subcutaneous contraceptives like Norplant, but none of these bills succeeded.

Although Prof. Lynn believes that classic, Galton-style eugenics is out of the question in Western democracies, some eugenic policies might be slipped into place under more acceptable colors. He points out that to the extent there are any difficulties at all in getting contraception or abortions, this is dysgenic. More competent people will take the trouble to use contraceptives or get abortions, while the incompetent will not. He therefore favors universal free abortion, and suggests governments should subsidize contraceptive pills and sell them over-the-counter. He would favor offering criminals a choice between castration and prison, and suggests it could be possible to foster a moral climate in which the most talented people could be made to feel it was their duty to have more children.

Anything more explicit probably has no chance. The late Nobel Prize winner William Shockley argued we should pay people with low IQs to be sterilized. According to his “Bonus 1000” plan, a good incentive would be $1,000 for every IQ point under 100. Psychologist Raymond Cattell suggested the government should seek out intelligent children and pay their parents to have more. David Lykken of the University of Minnesota has once again floated the idea of licenses for parents. Sociologist Hugh LaFollette points out that couples must meet standards if they want to adopt a child; why not set standards for people who want to make a child?

Prof. Lynn states his own preference: “The ideal for humans would be a contraceptive virus acting for about 10 years that could be given to 12-year-old boys. When they were aged 22, they could apply for licenses for parenthood. If they failed to obtain these, they could be vasectomized.” Needless to say, ideas like this are going nowhere for now; as Prof. Lynn points out, according to the UN Declaration on Human Rights everyone has an absolute right to as many babies as he can make.

Buyer Beware

f this book has a serious defect, it is that it is published by Praeger. Praeger brings out excellent volumes no one else will publish, but prints them in tiny quantities and sells them at staggering prices. It is a good bet most readers of this review have never paid $85 for a book, and certainly will not buy this one at that price—though they might spend $22. Judging from its past record, Praeger will never publish this book as a paperback, and after the initial joke of a print run is exhausted in a year or two, there will be no reprints. Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to buy the most authoritative treatment of eugenics available today (and for not much longer), it is likely to be now or never.

From the outset, Galton recognized that immigration policy can be eugenic or dysgenic, and argued that nations should admit only good prospects. Today, in Europe, almost all immigration takes place according to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Prof. Lynn points out that at the time of the convention, almost all refugees were Europeans; now that they are almost all non-white the signatories have every right to reconsider their obligations.

Even if no Western nation is likely to start eugenic programs any time soon, Prof. Lynn explains what they could achieve. The least controversial goal of eugenics is to reduce the frequency of genetic diseases, and Prof. Lynn finds that about a quarter of all hospital beds are occupied by people with these diseases. If they were eliminated, it would save about a quarter of every developed country’s medical budget—a saving of about two percent of GNP. Institutions for people with genetic diseases consume perhaps another 1.5 percent of GNP, and the costs of schizophrenia, depression, and manic-depression taken together add up to another estimated one percent. Eliminating these disorders would be a huge saving and would also spare family members much worry and sorrow.

Prof. Lynn warns, however, that it might be a mistake to eliminate all genes for mental illness, because a certain level of mental instability is associated with creative genius. He notes that writers and artists have two to three times the rate of psychosis and suicide attempts as the rest of us.

Psychopathic personality, on the other hand, should be eliminated completely. About 60 percent of male prison inmates are psychopaths, and they almost always commit the most horrifying crimes. About six percent of men and one percent of women are psychopaths, but in America only about 13 percent of them are in jail, which means 87 percent are on the loose, causing all sorts of damage.

Psychopaths often have a high opinion of themselves. One study of 125 incarcerated teen-age psychopaths found that 78 percent claimed they would be good role-models for children. Psychopaths are well represented in the underclass, but intelligent ones often make good politicians. There is clearly a genetic predisposition to psychopathy, and eliminating the genes would be a great service to society.

The most obvious trait of interest to eugenicists is intelligence. As Prof. Lynn explains, the general level of intelligence is an excellent indicator of quality of life, and there is no reason to believe a country needs low-IQ citizens. In a high-IQ society, many repetitive, unsatisfying jobs can be automated, and those that cannot will be filled, provided the wage is right. Low intelligence is strongly correlated with everything every society is trying to reduce: crime, illegitimacy, and unemployment.

People of the lowest intelligence—the mentally retarded—are a particular cost to society that could be virtually eliminated by eugenics. About 2.2 percent of the babies of normal people are retarded. The figure rises to 17 percent if one parent is retarded, and to 48 percent if both are retarded. Because of the association of low intelligence and crime, prisoners are about four times more likely to be retarded than the rest of the population. Many retarded men in institutions make crude sexual advances to women, so must be cared for by male staff.

The mildly retarded are usually the naturally-occurring low end of the intelligence bell curve, and for this reason are more likely to be born of low-intelligence parents. People in the lowest 25 percent in income have about half the mildly retarded children. The severely retarded usually suffer from less predictable genetic abnormalities, and can come from all levels of society.

In America, retarded women have slightly higher fertility than normal women. This is because they are ignorant, and because men can easily exploit them. A study of female retardates living in sheltered housing found that only four percent knew semen is necessary for pregnancy. Sixty-one percent had been pregnant, but only 48 percent said they had ever had sexual intercourse.

At the other end of bell curve, Prof. Lynn explains that eugenics can raise the average IQ, but it cannot easily increase the theoretical maximum. This is because the optimum combination of IQ genes—which yields a score of about 200—has already occurred in humans through millions of more or less random combinations. Nevertheless, raising the average would have a dramatic effect on the number of geniuses. An increase in the average to 115 would mean the frequency of IQs over 158 would jump 30 fold, from one in 30,000 to one in 1,000. Such a society would have a huge advantage over any other in terms of productivity and creativity.

Prof. Lynn predicts Western democracies will eventually adopt a new kind of eugenics based on advances in genetic screening. The most promising technique is embryo selection (ES). This involves harvesting a woman’s eggs and fertilizing them in vitro with her husband’s sperm. As many as 100 fertilized eggs could be screened for genetic qualities, and the most promising one chosen for implantation. Prof. Lynn suggests it will not be long before an embryo check will yield accurate readings for everything from good looks to musical ability. One hundred potential children would have a 30-point range in IQ, split above and below the average of the two parents, so the best choice from this many eggs would guarantee a 15-point improvement over the parents IQs. Even a woman in her 40s has tens of thousands of viable eggs, so harvesting and fertilizing 100 at a time is only a matter of developing the techniques.

Prof. Lynn recognizes that ES will probably be banned in Western countries. The Catholic Church, which teaches that ordinary intercourse is the only proper way to create new life, would lead the opposition, but it would have many allies. Egalitarians would take the confused position that genes don’t count for anything, but ES is bad because only the rich could afford it. Prof. Lynn points out that the principle of ES is the same as therapeutic abortion—the undesirables are destroyed—but it should be considered more humane because it would not require a woman who wants a baby to have an abortion.

Banning the procedure will do no good, because at least a few countries are sure to permit it, and wealthy, far-sighted couples will pay large sums for it. Europe and America could easily forbid their citizens to patronize foreign ES services, but once the embryos were implanted it would be impossible to know how they got there. “When this procedure becomes widespread,” writes Prof. Lynn, “it will become evident that embryo-selected children are virtually always superior to naturally conceived children with respect to their health, intelligence, and personality.” “Couples will realize,” he adds, “that it is more cost-effective to pay for an embryo-selected child than to pay for a quality education for a normally conceived child,” and predicts that eventually 80 to 90 percent of the babies born in rich countries will be products of ES.

Those that are not selected will be the children of the underclass, and within just a few generations the IQ gap between the two groups could reach 50 points. “Eventually,” he writes, “despite strong ideological opposition it would come to be understood that the underclass of the unplanned [conceptions] was primarily a genetic problem and would require genetic interventions.”

Prof. Lynn is convinced, however, that an Asian country—most likely China—will soon institute a mandatory ES program for its population, and that the resulting improvement in its gene pool will tip the international balance of power decisively in its favor. Attitudes in China radically differ from those in the West. Chinese law already requires sterilization of mental retardates and those with genetic illnesses. Prenatal testing of fetuses is mandatory, and defectives must be aborted. No one with mental illness, venereal disease, or hepatitis may marry.

In the mid-1990s, a poll-taker asked Chinese and Western doctors the following question: Should there be mandatory sterilization for a single, blind woman on public welfare who has already had three children by three different men, all of whom are absent from the household? Only five percent of Western doctors but 82 percent of Chinese doctors said “yes.”

Now that socialism is discredited, Prof. Lynn thinks the Chinese will fill the ideological void with eugenics. He predicts it will become the first, full-fledged eugenic state: all 12-year-old girls will be fitted with contraceptives, only approved couples will be permitted to have children, and ES will be used for all births. Psychopathy and genetic diseases will be eliminated, and IQ will stabilize at the theoretical maximum of about 200 in six or seven generations. Licensing parents will seem just as reasonable as licensing drivers.

Prof. Lynn predicts that in the short run, China’s rulers will clone themselves. In most cases this will mean talent and ability are passed on to the next generation, and it will make it easier for the oligarchs to pass on power to people they can trust—their own twins.

Prof. Lynn’s best guess at a timetable is that ES will be perfected and in obligatory use in China within ten years. Twenty years later there will be the first generation of ES adults, and 20 years after that, half the working population will have come from selected embryos. In 50 years, therefore, China will be the world’s most formidable power.

In the meantime, Prof. Lynn predicts that the United States will have continued to decline because of dysgenic fertility and dysgenic immigration. He says the country may break up into warring ethnic enclaves, but “however the details of the decline of the United States work out, it will forfeit its position as the leading world economic, scientific, and military power, and eventually cease to be a major force in global politics.”

He expects Europe to maintain its influence a little longer, because is has fewer non-white immigrants, but it will be no match for a racially homogeneous, eugenically bred China. China will eventually dominate the globe and run it like a colonial empire. In certain provinces, it might impose ES on the natives, but in places like Africa, which do not have the infrastructure for ES, it would be more likely to impose “robust classical eugenics.”

What are we to make of these predictions? Geneticists appear to agree that it is only a matter of time before ES is perfected. It is also true that Chinese have a deep racial patriotism that drives their desire for hegemony (see book review, Feb. 2001). This, together with their penchant for ruthless social engineering and appreciation of population genetics, makes Prof. Lynn’s predictions entirely believable. Eugenics makes a strong case for the view that unless the West has the will to act upon the advice of one of its own 19th century geniuses, whites can well look forward to serfdom under Oriental masters.


Neo-Eugenics related to article below this

Related Website for the professors

Black-White-East Asian IQ differences at least 50% genetic, scientists conclude in major law journal
A 60-page review of the scientific evidence, some based on state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain size, has concluded that race differences in average IQ are largely genetic. The lead article in the June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy and Law, a journal of the American Psychological Association, examined 10 categories of research evidence from around the world to contrast "a hereditarian model (50% genetic-50% cultural) and a culture-only model (0% genetic-100% cultural)."

The paper, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," by J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario and Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley, appeared with a positive commentary by Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, three critical ones (by Robert Sternberg of Yale University, Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan, and Lisa Suzuki & Joshua Aronson of New York University), and the authors' reply.

"Neither the existence nor the size of race differences in IQ are a matter of dispute, only their cause," write the authors. The Black-White difference has been found consistently from the time of the massive World War I Army testing of 90 years ago to a massive study of over 6 million corporate, military, and higher-education test-takers in 2001.

"Race differences show up by 3 years of age, even after matching on maternal education and other variables," said Rushton. "Therefore they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun to exert an effect. That's why Jensen and I looked at the genetic hypothesis in detail. We examined 10 categories of evidence."

1. The Worldwide Pattern of IQ Scores. East Asians average higher on IQ tests than Whites, both in the U. S. and in Asia, even though IQ tests were developed for use in the Euro-American culture. Around the world, the average IQ for East Asians centers around 106; for Whites, about 100; and for Blacks about 85 in the U.S. and 70 in sub-Saharan Africa.

2. Race Differences are Most Pronounced on Tests that Best Measure the General Intelligence Factor (g). Black-White differences, for example, are larger on the Backward Digit Span test than on the less g loaded Forward Digit Span test.

3. The Gene-Environment Architecture of IQ is the Same in all Races, and Race Differences are Most Pronounced on More Heritable Abilities. Studies of Black, White, and East Asian twins, for example, show the heritability of IQ is 50% or higher in all races.

4. Brain Size Differences. Studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) find a correlation of brain size with IQ of about 0.40. Larger brains contain more neurons and synapses and process information faster. Race differences in brain size are present at birth. By adulthood, East Asians average 1 cubic inch more cranial capacity than Whites who average 5 cubic inches more than Blacks.

5. Trans-Racial Adoption Studies. Race differences in IQ remain following adoption by White middle class parents. East Asians grow to average higher IQs than Whites while Blacks score lower. The Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption Study followed children to age 17 and found race differences were even greater than at age 7: White children, 106; Mixed-Race children, 99; and Black children, 89.

6. Racial Admixture Studies. Black children with lighter skin, for example, average higher IQ scores. In South Africa, the IQ of the mixed-race "Colored" population averages 85, intermediate to the African 70 and White 100.

7. IQ Scores of Blacks and Whites Regress toward the Averages of Their Race. Parents pass on only some exceptional genes to offspring so parents with very high IQs tend to have more average children. Black and White children with parents of IQ 115 move to different averages--Blacks toward 85 and Whites to 100.

8. Race Differences in Other "Life-History" Traits. East Asians and Blacks consistently fall at two ends of a continuum with Whites intermediate on 60 measures of maturation, personality, reproduction, and social organization. For example, Black children sit, crawl, walk, and put on their clothes earlier than Whites or East Asians.

9. Race Differences and the Out-of-Africa theory of Human Origins. East Asian-White-Black differences fit the theory that modern humans arose in Africa about 100,000 years ago and expanded northward. During prolonged winters there was evolutionary selection for higher IQ created by problems of raising children, gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, and making clothes.

10. Do Culture-Only Theories Explain the Data? Culture-only theories do not explain the highly consistent pattern of race differences in IQ, especially the East Asian data. No interventions such as ending segregation, introducing school busing, or "Head Start" programs have reduced the gaps as culture-only theory would predict.

In their article, Rushton and Jensen also address some of the policy issues that stem from their conclusions. Their main recommendation is that people be treated as individuals, not as members of groups. They emphasized that their paper pertains only to average differences. They also called for the need to accurately inform the public about the true nature of individual and group differences, genetics and evolutionary biology.

Rushton and Jensen are well-known for research on racial differences in intelligence. Jensen hypothesized a genetic basis for Black-White IQ differences in his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article. His later books Bias in Mental Tests (1980) and The g Factor (1998), as well as Rushton's (1995) Race, Evolution, and Behavior, show that tests are not biased against English speaking minorities and that Black-White-East Asian differences in brain size and IQ belong in an evolutionary framework.

###

J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada. Tel: 519-661-3685; Email: rushton@uwo.ca

Arthur R. Jensen, School of Education, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94305. Email: nesnejanda@aol.com


Professors of Psychology on genetics, evolutionary psychology, and IQ/race

[wolveraptor]

This is bullshit. We already had a thread about that race difference thing; 99% of it can be attributed to cultural and pecuniary differences. Note, for example, how they use blacks not from oppulent middle class families, but from sub-saharan Africa, one of the most uneducated, nutrient-poor places on the planet habitable by humans, to justify their claims that blacks are stupider.

Furthermore, stopping inheritable diseases is all but impossible. Many of them can occur due to flaws in birth. The human reproductive system is notoriously inefficient.

I particularly resent their little tirade on how "Western man becomes less fit for high civilization". What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What is fit for high civilization? If anything, people have grown more complex over the years. Remember those idiotic old Westerns with barely a plot to speak of back in the forties? Just think of Lost, and tell me it isn't more complex. Humans have been progressing just fine on their own, and we don't need any of this bullshit.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, apparently these guys are saying it's not cultural, based on "evidence" or something.

[wolveraptor]

Think about this: they choose subjects from totally different parts of the world, and totally different social classes. How can they NOT have different cultures? A more accurate test would've been with 3rd or 4rth generation immigrants to the US, or some country, who were all middle class, and all Americanized, but still 100% pure of race (I hate using that term). Then we'd have concrete results. Only problem for these guys is, it would show that there is no differences between the races. Asian culture emphasizes discipline and hard-work, and I am convinced that this is the reason for their supposedly higher IQ.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

Whether there is good evidence or not, may I ask why does everyone seem so repulsed by even the concept that average potential (that is, assuming we can ever actually get "same culture, same nutrition, all that" samples for the test) intelligence might vary a little between various subsectors of the human species?

On average, an African has darker skin. On average (AFAIK), Caucasians are bigger than Asians. So why's intelligence so ... controversial?

[wolveraptor]

Because to the human species, intelligence, not brawn, matters. It was the extreme draught in Africa that began to separate humans from their ancestors. They had to become ingenious to survive. Plus, think about how we decide that infanticide is bad but abortion isn't: because of the level of sentience, or intelligence of the neonate. Intelligence is what defines a human. Saying blacks are stupider almost justifies the slavery era.

Of course, minor variations could occur overtime due to culture. For example, suppose Spartan civilization lasted for a hundred thousand years, with no variation. Surely those Spartans would be brawnier, but possibly less intelligent than us (Spartans were never educated, and brain use makes for brains size).

[The Grim Squeaker]

Personally i think that if you only let people with an I.Q of 110+ breed then in a few generation's breed then the world would be a better place,
The Problem is the length's that some "things" will go to to keep the "human gene pool pure":evil:

The part about Racial differences is pure bullshit though.

[Surlethe]

Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, is one of those rare social scientists who not only understand genetics but are willing to draw conclusions about how biology affects society.

My bullshit detector went off at the first sentence. What business does a social scientist have drawing conclusions about genetics? In fact, since IIRC most geneticists don't fully understand the complexities of human genetics, how the hell can a social scientists draw conclusions about how biology -- the realm of biologists -- and genetics affect society?

[The Grim Squeaker]

y bullshit detector went off at the first sentence. What business does a social scientist have drawing conclusions about genetics? In fact, since IIRC most geneticists don't fully understand the complexities of human genetics, how the hell can a social scientists draw conclusions about how biology -- the realm of biologists -- and genetics affect society?

I'm not a physics professor but I could probably discuss the changes nuclear weopons have wrought on society.
(not exactly the same thing but I hope you see my point)

However he is going out on a limb in the social effect's, that's for sure.

[Surlethe]

I'm not a physics professor but I could probably discuss the changes nuclear weopons have wrought on society.
(not exactly the same thing but I hope you see my point)

However he is going out on a limb in the social effect's, that's for sure.

It's one thing to observe the obvious effects of nuclear weapons on society because nuclear weapons are pretty much cut-and-dried. It's another entirely to base your conclusions on an intricate science which is still evolving and constantly gaining new understanding, and then authoritatively claiming (by writing a book) you understand that science well enough to make sweeping and far-reaching conclusions based on that science, and not even be a scientist in that field.

[The Grim Squeaker]

not exactly the same thing but I hope you see my point)

However he is going out on a limb in the social effect's, that's for sure.


It's one thing to observe the obvious effects of nuclear weapons on society because nuclear weapons are pretty much cut-and-dried. It's another entirely to base your conclusions on an intricate science which is still evolving and constantly gaining new understanding, and then authoritatively claiming (by writing a book) you understand that science well enough to make sweeping and far-reaching conclusions based on that science, and not even be a scientist in that field.

.
True, what i mean is that it is possible to gain a small measure of effect, just not on the level that this guy thinks he has.

[SPOOFE]

There certainly are some people that get shitty genes, or better genes. There's certainly nothing wrong with saying that two people with the "better" genes would create offspring with those better genes.

The whole thing falls apart when you try to apply this concept to superficial traits such as skin color or culture.

[The Third Man]

Prof. Lynn points out that at the time of the convention, almost all refugees were Europeans; now that they are almost all non-white the signatories have every right to reconsider their obligations.

He expects Europe to maintain its influence a little longer, because is has fewer non-white immigrants,

Disgusting. There was a thread recently about atheists converting to Christianity. If it so happened that the church was all that stood against these bullshit ideas being implemented, I'd become a believer tomorrow.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I think his personal webpage for the university mentions he's an evolutionary psychologist. What bothers me is that these people get into magazines and articles, and people use this information to say "see, scientific proof that blacks are dumber!"

How the hell do you argue against that and not be a hypocrite by using psychology to attack one of their own false points?

[Surlethe]

True, what i mean is that it is possible to gain a small measure of effect, just not on the level that this guy thinks he has.

Possibly tiny, but not on a cultural or racial level, which is what he purports to have. Thus, the reason I call bullshit.

I think his personal webpage for the university mentions he's an evolutionary psychologist. What bothers me is that these people get into magazines and articles, and people use this information to say "see, scientific proof that blacks are dumber!"

What bothers me is he has a post at a university.

How the hell do you argue against that and not be a hypocrite by using psychology to attack one of their own false points?

Don't use psychology to attack the points. Call attention to the fact that they're implicitly (or explicitly, as the case may be) claiming to be experts in fields they can't possibly be experts in, and using conclusions from irrelevant fields to support their claims. Basically appeals to authority.

That's what I'd use, at least.

[Keevan_Colton]

Whether there is good evidence or not, may I ask why does everyone seem so repulsed by even the concept that average potential (that is, assuming we can ever actually get "same culture, same nutrition, all that" samples for the test) intelligence might vary a little between various subsectors of the human species?

On average, an African has darker skin. On average (AFAIK), Caucasians are bigger than Asians. So why's intelligence so ... controversial?

Because actually, at a genetic level we dont really have any subdivisions.Race in humans is a misused term, it literally is skin deep. There is more variation within "races" than between them...they are purely cosmetic.

[wolveraptor]

There's no reason why one group of people would ever evolve more or less intelligence than another. Humans everywhere are always struggling, and our species always survived through brains, not brawn. Furthermore, people's skin color only changed as we migrated across the world, adapting to various climates. The struggle for survival was always the same.

[Junghalli]

I'll try to refute some of the more blatantly bullshit points.

The age of widespread population engineering is upon us, and to begin with Prof. Lynn’s concluding quotation from Francis Galton, “the nation which first subjects itself to rational eugenical disciplines is bound to inherit the earth.”

So, what is this anyway? Is this guy one of those transhumanists? Well, I suppose that if some sections of the population were to subject themselves to massive genetic enhancement they would get a leg up over the rest of us. Don't really see it happening though personally. The general trend in humans is to create tools to compensate for the weaknesses of our bodies.

that human abilities are greatly influenced by genetic inheritance, and that when the less able outbreed the more able, the quality of a population declines. Galton recognized that the winnowing effects of natural selection had been artificially reversed in the West, so that “the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilization.”

I'm pulling the bullshit alarm for several reasons. First, how the fuck are the less able outbreeding the more able? Biologically speaking that's a fucking oxymoron. Evolution is survival of the fittest. The fittest are the ones that survive and have the most offspring. If a particular group of people are having more offspring then by definition they are better adapted to their environment, i.e. more fit.
Second, how are people living in a civilized country being selected for being "less fit for a true civilization." By definition, evolution adapts organism to their environment. If our environment is civilization then the most successful adaptations will be the ones that make people more fit for that environment. What he's saying would be like having cheetahs get fat and lazy as their prey get faster to outrun them. It makes no sense whatsoever. Man the bullshit just drips of this.

Galton proposed that the British population be divided into three categories: desirables, undesirables, and passables. Desirables should have incentives to have more children, undesirables should have no children, and passables should be left alone.

Well, selective breeding does work. Just look at what man did to the wolf. But there are a couple of problems with this approach. First, how does one define desirability? Scoring well on IQ tests? Are you really sure those are neccessarily the most fit? Also, this would almost certainly require an unacceptable intrusion into people's lives.

Margaret Sanger, the early American champion of birth control, clearly saw contraception as a means to keep the lower orders from multiplying. As her British counterpart Mary Stopes put it: “more children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.”

Way to go providing ammunition to the idiot fundies who think birth control is teh Ev1l!111.

“There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man’s environment as to improve his nature.”

Kind of forgetting that the human personality is more a function of upbringing than genetics.

In his 1916 multi-generation study of the degenerate Jukes family, American scholar A. H. Eastabrook called it “the scum of society . . . inefficient and indolent, unwilling or unable to take advantage of any opportunity which offers itself or is offered to them.”

See above. This is probably more a factor of upbringing than genetics.

rigorous social control was necessary to contain the growth of a subclass of undeserving poor.

We have a guy who has been deprived of opportunity and treated like shit for his whole life. He's into shoplifting and smack. We think it may be because his eyebrows are heavier.

Indiana was the first jurisdiction to pass a law “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

If imbeciles means retarded they probably don't have very many children anyway I imagine, could just leave this to nature. Other than that all these are conditions brought on by upbringing or maybe upbringing combined with a natural agressive streak. Sterilizing rapists is not going to make it disappear.

Opposition to eugenics drove some people to absurd positions. Theodosius Dobzhansky of Columbia University took the view that there is no such thing as a bad gene.

That is stupid. Tell that to people with hemophilia.

In Singapore, Premiere Lee Kuan Yew gave generous tax incentives to better-educated women to have more children, and succeeded in increasing the percentage of births that were to women with secondary education from 36.7 percent to 47.7 percent.

This has to do with eugenics, how? Surely they're not arguing that education is genetic! Good God, that's almost Lamarckian (and I can guarentee you pure unadulaterated bullshit)!

The women who get the most education are the more intelligent, and they marry smart men

Or perhaps they're more intelligent because they've been educated. Yazuz Kristus the imbecility on display here is mindboggling. Forget science, this shit violates common fucking sense!

As Prof. Lynn points out, taxing the competent to support procreation by the incompetent is flagrantly dysgenic.

The fact that these people may be on welfare due to lack of opportunity and education rather than some kind of built-in mental weakness doesn't occur to these fuckwads, does it?
From a purely scientific point of view, ignoring the issue of individual rights, I can see the benefits of a selective breeding program. But here he wants to organize it along largely arbitrary lines. Forget about the massive compromise of individual freedom, this doesn't make scientific sense either. The only thing this really amounts to is wank material by rich playboys who like to imagine that their good lifestyles and high status are the products of some inherent strength rather than the accident of being born to a rich dad.

More competent people will take the trouble to use contraceptives or get abortions, while the incompetent will not.

Since they're breeding and passing their genes on from a biological sense he's got competant and incompetant backward.

Prof. Lynn states his own preference: “The ideal for humans would be a contraceptive virus acting for about 10 years that could be given to 12-year-old boys. When they were aged 22, they could apply for licenses for parenthood. If they failed to obtain these, they could be vasectomized.

Massive and utterly unacceptable intrusion into people's private lives. Again, how is the selection of who gets to breed and who doesn't going to be made. Eugenics usually amounts to wanking by the rich and privilidged about how they're on top because that's the way of nature. A selective breeding system based on this would be meaningless. At the very best it would favor people who are good social climbers.
Say, there's an idea. What if a society institutes just such a program, and the end result is that after hundreds of generations it ends up turning itself into a whole civilization of little Palpatines, a la B5s Shadows.

Psychopathic personality, on the other hand, should be eliminated completely. About 60 percent of male prison inmates are psychopaths, and they almost always commit the most horrifying crimes. About six percent of men and one percent of women are psychopaths, but in America only about 13 percent of them are in jail, which means 87 percent are on the loose, causing all sorts of damage.

Many psychopaths are people who have been abused as children, suggesting that it's more often a fact of upbringing than genetics. Of course, some humans are more naturally agressive than others and this probably factors into it, but it's hardly inborn.

Low intelligence is strongly correlated with everything every society is trying to reduce: crime, illegitimacy, and unemployment.

Actually, if we were to go the whole hog into a fully eugenic society, low intelligence would be useful in creating specialist worker or grunt castes. Pick those with the strongest backs, weakest minds, and most compliant personalities, and encourage those traits. Keep it up a couple of hundred generations and voila; a biogenetic caste system.

People of the lowest intelligence—the mentally retarded—are a particular cost to society that could be virtually eliminated by eugenics.

Who tend not to breed very much in the first place, I would think.

Prof. Lynn predicts that in the short run, China’s rulers will clone themselves. In most cases this will mean talent and ability are passed on to the next generation, and it will make it easier for the oligarchs to pass on power to people they can trust—their own twins.

The problem here being that the clone of a person will not share that person's personality, his knowledge, or his wisdom. He will merely have the same general temperament, if even that. Why do you think monarchy doesn't work as well as it should in theory? Because the traits that make a good leader are for the most part not hereditary-they derive from a combination of general temperament and a certain upbringing unlikely to be replicated ever.

He expects Europe to maintain its influence a little longer, because is has fewer non-white immigrants

Ah, I see he now shows his true colors. A eugenecist who's also a racist, who'd have thunk it!

[General Zod]

Personally i think that if you only let people with an I.Q of 110+ breed then in a few generation's breed then the world would be a better place,
The Problem is the length's that some "things" will go to to keep the "human gene pool pure":evil:

The part about Racial differences is pure bullshit though.

IQ is barely sufficient for measuring the average person's intelligence. you can have a fairly high IQ and still fall for bullshit like creationism, scientology and christian science if you don't know how to apply your high iq. so without a proper education high iq is relatively meaningless.

[LadyTevar]

Quote:
that human abilities are greatly influenced by genetic inheritance, and that when the less able outbreed the more able, the quality of a population declines. Galton recognized that the winnowing effects of natural selection had been artificially reversed in the West, so that “the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilization.”

I'm pulling the bullshit alarm for several reasons. First, how the fuck are the less able outbreeding the more able? Biologically speaking that's a fucking oxymoron. Evolution is survival of the fittest. The fittest are the ones that survive and have the most offspring. If a particular group of people are having more offspring then by definition they are better adapted to their environment, i.e. more fit.
Second, how are people living in a civilized country being selected for being "less fit for a true civilization." By definition, evolution adapts organism to their environment. If our environment is civilization then the most successful adaptations will be the ones that make people more fit for that environment. What he's saying would be like having cheetahs get fat and lazy as their prey get faster to outrun them. It makes no sense whatsoever. Man the bullshit just drips of this.

Actually, look around you at any ghetto/slum area and you can see what he's talking about. Even in WV, for every married couple living on under $20k/yr/person, you can find 5 unmarried women trying to raise 2-4 children. Now, half of these women are trying to do their best on low-income jobs, but it seems like the rest are just welfare mommies going from man to man popping out babies. Many welfare mothers had addictive habits that cause the children to be neglected or abused.
The children of these low-income mothers are often eating poorly, with less red meat, less fresh fruits and veggies, and far more sodium and fat in their diets. This leads to poor mental development. Often they are left to entertain themselves, or have the TV as a babysitter. This leads to poor reading skills, especially if the mother can't afford headstart or babycare.
Since these are low-income areas, once the children do go to school, the schools themselves are often sub-par, with less access to many of the classes and learning tools better-funded schools enjoy. The students fall behind their comtemporaries in those other schools, scoring worse on math and reading skills. Many students drop out by age 16, believing school isn't helping them, and starting the cycle of unwed low-income parenthood all over again.

[wolveraptor]

Of course, that only emphasizes that different intelligence levels are brought on far more by pecuniary differences than racial ones, so "Prof" Lynn's point is still moot.

[Junghalli]

I knew a girl in high school who was dyslexic... I wonder if she'd fall under the category of people this hatfucker would like to have discouraged from breeding.

[wolveraptor]

Hell, isn't Nitram dyslexic? Doens't he also have a wife? Doesn't that mean he should go e-mail this guy and say, "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! No one will ever love you, because you're a hateful bitch! Nyah nyah nyah!"

[sketerpot]

Intelligence is what defines a human. Saying blacks are stupider almost justifies the slavery era.

What idiocy is this? It does not almost justify slavery! Assume for the sake of argument that it is moral to enslave anybody with an IQ of 70 or less, and that blacks have an average IQ of 90. Would that justify enslaving all blacks? Why the hell should it? In such a system, you would have plenty of people of all races who are eligible for slavery, and blacks would just be disproportionately represented among them. There would still be black geniuses, and blacks with intelligence all over the spectrum.

It's a big jump from saying "blacks have a lower average IQ" to saying that "blacks are stupider". Why does every fucking person seem to make this jump?

IQ is barely sufficient for measuring the average person's intelligence. you can have a fairly high IQ and still fall for bullshit like creationism, scientology and christian science if you don't know how to apply your high iq. so without a proper education high iq is relatively meaningless.

Exceptions (high IQ people falling for bullshit, in this case) don't disprove a correlation. If you want to refute the utility of high IQ, you're going about it the wrong way.

[The Grim Squeaker]

IQ measures against average intelligence,
it cant tell if youre exceptional,
Also it measures general knowledge, a genius who doesnt care about the world could have a low I.Q by some tests.