Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ?
If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 and marked it off-topic.
And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas?
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :)
If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves.
Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.
IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder.
The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology.
So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean.
There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions.
But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should.
Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.
A implies B
I don't like B
therefore (not A)
Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful?
Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!
Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart.
> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?
Nothing!
I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene. It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available).
Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument.
You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them.
Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0
Again, we are animals. We are subject to the same rules. If we decide to ignore them, our children will pay the price.
And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
This means that the choice is not "eugenic or do nothing", it's "eugenic or dysgenic".
The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed.
So one type of person is on the way to extinction, and another type is growing without bound. Currently this means the the total population (both groups together) is shrinking, but that will change.
I mean, I'm not a proponent of the (semi-serious?) thought that "aspies are the next step in human evolution", but since I was diagnosed myself recently, I've found myself imagining what such a world would be like every once in a while...
Anyways, I'm all in favor of some forms of 'eugenics' as our knowledge about the effects increase. We've been helping our own evolution along for quite a while now, so I don't see why tinkering with our genes should somehow be completely off-limits.
Schizophrenia may (or may not) correlate on the phenotype level, but genetically, they are inverses. Genetic risk for schizophrenia lowers IQ in GCTAs, genetic correlation, and family studies. If you select for intelligence, you will get less schizophrenia, and if you select against schizophrenia, you will get more intelligence.
1) Prevent brain damage: Ensure that all children receive adequate nutrition, and eliminate exposure to toxins such as lead.
2) Make sure every child is educated up to his or her full potential.
3) Provide access to contraceptives, so that children are born only to people who feel themselves ready to be parents.