Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields
io9.com
io9.com
* A 'financial war' when transparency results in the world population finding out that a lot of crooks have a lot of the world's wealth!
"My favorite along these lines is a classic, Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons." It's the original version of "Idiocracy" — the basic idea is that selection now favors the stupid, and so if we go forward in time, that's what we'll see. The concept is simple and well-drawn; the consequences unexpected."
I would say the current state of American politics is a warning sign for this condition.
edit: quote was taken from John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison:
I understand, though, that the film is an allegory, and as such it succeeds admirably. In terms of the downward trajectory of our political and cultural discourse, it is disturbingly spot-on. Reminds me a little of the prescience of "Network": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29
On the other hand, religious zealots opposed to birth control may get the upper hand. I don't think there's a necessary intrinsic correlation between religious zealotry and intelligence. Religion by itself is largely about ingroup / outgroup dynamics and power structures, which don't seem to have necessary positive or negative relationships with intelligence.
And how will this help?
I suppose you could model this in a simple way. First you could assume that the IQ of a child is the average of the IQs of its parents (don't bother telling me that's a false assumption, of course it is, but we're making a simple model here). Then, you could put in certain assumptions about the likelihood of two people meeting, and the likelihood of them mating if they do (lots of adjustable parameters here including the unwillingness to mate with somebody too much smarter or dumber than yourself). Throw in additional "dumb people breed more" parameters and see what happens to the simulation.
Under certain values of the parameters, you'll just see a slide into idiocracy. But if you make people pickier about their mating partners you might wind up seeing a split into two entirely separate breeding populations -- one smart, one dumb. It would be an interesting set of simulations to do.
Philip K. Dick put it another way: in sci-fi, the main character isn't a person, but an idea. But an idea as a main character is only interesting if it's relevant to us, today, right now.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that George Lucas never meant to tell us that we'd be playing with light sabers. Frequently, the futuristic technology of sci-fi is nothing more than a literary device allowing the author to contrive a situation or theme that wouldn't be possible with more mundane environments.
He wrote this in the 60s and 70s.
Clearly you didn't read the same books I did? "Great"? REALLY?
Kevin J. Anderson's writing is horrific. He's an absolute hack. Brian Herbert should be ashamed at what he's doing to his father's good name, allowing this incompetent fuckwit to befoul his legacy.
I bought the first of the Butlerian Jihad books, even knowing how horrible a writer KJA is, because the topic interested me so. I couldn't make it more than about 15 pages.
It's a minor literary tragedy.
You're right, though; I just went back and re-read the first chapter, there's no mention of the different castes being differentiated until after fertilization. Of course there's much we know now that Huxley didn't know about genetics, so if you were to try to start up a Brave New World society then genetics would be the right place to start.
Other technological problems with BNW include the attempts to teach values by subliminal messages during sleep, which afaik have now been pretty much proven to be a bunch of hooey.
The main problem, I think, is that you'd almost certainly always wind up with an overlap between your castes -- your smartest gammas would be smarter than your dumbest betas. That's not necessarily a big problem, though.