Oxford Experts say parents should be allowed to have their Newborn Babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant”

[Enros]

There are actually a lot of public policies which are inadvertently eugenic, whether you want to define them as "natural" or not is a matter of perspective. For example, Planned Parenthood had its roots in the eugenics movement and still is functionally is eugenic. There is a certain irony to Republicans wanting to defund an organization which reduces the number of people in the next generation in demographics which tend to vote Democrat. I'd say conjugal visits are inadvertently eugenic, or rather dysgenic. The thing about empathy though, is that natural selection limits the frequency of alleles responsible for it because too much empathy is easily taken advantage of. Eugenics might be the only way to really increase their frequency beyond a certain point, but too many of those alleles leads to pathological altruism anyway.

There is some evidence for the hypothesis that humans have been getting more altruistic since the invention of farming. War deaths per capita have been declining throughout recorded history. Crime is also about 2-3% of what it was in the middle ages. Perhaps the evolutionary stable strategy is one with more empathy?

Even if no selection for a more empathetic genome is taking place, no human trait is solely genetic, and it's certain that environmental factors that increase empathy are more at play in today's developed world than in history. I know childhood malnutrition decreases empathy in adulthood and that's simply because our body is so good at coping with limiting resources and shutting down activities that it can't afford (in this case growing certain parts of the brain).

Conjugal visits are dysgenic when compared to no conjugal visits, but being in prison definitely makes you less likely to reproduce than being free.

If there is a dysgenic problem, I think it will be solved in the next few centuries by biotechnology and designer babies. We've endured 12,000 years of genetic drift since we invented farming, another few centuries won't make much of a difference.

[Copperknickers II]

Foetus as a person doesn't actually work, personhood is a complex topic but being a potential person doesn't satisfy any of the necessary criteria for many authors in philosophy both in the western philosophical tradition and in the modern day.

I know that, and I disagree with many authors in historical and modern philosophy. But modern ethical philosophy is not so much at issue here, as modern law and societal morals. Pro-abortionism is deeply hypocritical for anyone who does not believe in killing of marginal cases. Either you believe taking any other human's life, including foetuses, is wrong, or you concede life has no real value compared with utilitarian considerations, or you are deeply and profoundly ignorant. Those are the only three options. No amount of philosophising will ever be enough to finally settle the matter of who is a person and who isn't, there are only the three options above and none is right or wrong. But if you choose option 1, we have to go with the widest possible definition, i.e. any discreet viable organism with human DNA, which means an embryo from the moment of conception onward. There's nothing clear cut about it, if we could make clear distinctions between embryos and humans then I'd be in favour of abortion, but that's my whole point: the consequences of getting it wrong are too dire to think about, so you have to be safe. You can never wrongly kill someone who cannot in any way be described as a viable organism. If that means avoiding killing embryos with no cognitive or sensation-feeling abilities to speak of, so be it. It's better than killing foetuses who do have such abilities.

[Enros]

But I do "concede life has no real value compared with utilitarian considerations". And so do you. There are limits on the right to life. If you are threatening someone else and are killed, by armed police or whoever, that is self-defense and I am fine with it. I bet you are too. Military campaigns like the one against ISIS are also justified.

There are also certain times I think killing civilians is acceptable and I think you agree. If the planes that crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 had been shot down, it would be a good thing (well, it would have been the least bad of a bunch of terrifying options). We would have sacrificed the lives of a few hundred who were going to die anyway, for the lives of thousands. It's a horrible and cold calculation to make and I would feel extremely bad for the victims. However, we live in a cruel and uncaring universe where we are often forced to make these choices.

[Denny Crane!]

I know that, and I disagree with many authors in historical and modern philosophy. But modern ethical philosophy is not so much at issue here, as modern law and societal morals. Pro-abortionism is deeply hypocritical for anyone who does not believe in killing of marginal cases.

A vague comment at best.

Either you believe taking any other human's life, including foetuses, is wrong, or you concede life has no real value compared with utilitarian considerations, or you are deeply and profoundly ignorant.

The deeply ignorant drawing together of classes of personhood is deeply and profoundly ignorant. What is more disturbing is your constant retreat to labeling and inability to debate. Really why can't we talk about the subject without the labelling? Is it that you do not wish to debate personhood because it is a complex topic.

I kinda understand, once you get into the messy details of philosophical distinction it really gets in the way of black and white judgements.

Those are the only three options. No amount of philosophising will ever be enough to finally settle the matter of who is a person and who isn't, there are only the three options above and none is right or wrong. But if you choose option 1, we have to go with the widest possible definition, i.e. any discreet viable organism with human DNA, which means an embryo from the moment of conception onward. There's nothing clear cut about it, if we could make clear distinctions between embryos and humans then I'd be in favour of abortion, but that's my whole point

So without a clear cut distinction you veer from A to B, B being any arbitrary point in the cycle despite no good reason. Totally irrational then and also a completely false dilemma to boot.

As usual I find nothing coherent in your arguments on this topic and for whatever reason really super cloaked in all kinds of hysteria and adhominem and it really baffles me as there is no need for it.

[sumskilz]

Nothing wrong with planned parenthood, it's a result of society trying to find a natural balance in its birthrates and family unit. On that sense, it isn't the type of "artificial" eugeny I was refering to. It's simply nature trying to balance itself inside society, producing such types of things as planned parenthood.

The natural/artificial dichotomy is a little weird with gene/culture evolution. The development of birth control methods is sort of a natural outcome of cultural evolution, no one is consciously thinking about allele frequencies.

Point is, where to best draw the line between slippery slope that might lead to "big state picked eugenics" (already happening in communistic China), or simple natural eugenics, where we reward the individuals with best natural genes and best effort?

Not to mention the huge debates to surge over "what's the most virtuous gene"? That might depend on the opinion of each person. You might up with boosted up humans who only know competition and survival. On such case, can turn into a pandora box.

One can imagine programs that are non-coercive, rather incentive based, but I also think it's a slippery slope whenever you have to trust the state to know best, something I don't have any faith in. That said, a society in which someone can have high net-reproductive success by being a jackass and/or a criminal and pawning off responsibility for their numerous children on the state is certainly not a good thing, but I don't know what an ethical solution for it is.

There is some evidence for the hypothesis that humans have been getting more altruistic since the invention of farming. War deaths per capita have been declining throughout recorded history. Crime is also about 2-3% of what it was in the middle ages.

A recent paper on that topic focused on Western Europe: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification

I don't think it's a coincidence that the 2 repeat MAOA "warrior gene" is extremely rare in places where developed states have existed for longest, but exists at frequencies up to 5% in places where "justice" was until recently handled by revenge killings and feuds. Being randomly and irrationally violent knocks you out of the gene pool much faster in certain social environments.

Perhaps the evolutionary stable strategy is one with more empathy?

There is a particular allele associated with highly pronounced affective empathy, which essentially leads to other people's perceived mental states triggering the same emotion in oneself. Affective empathy is what's lacking in sociopaths, though everyone else has it to some degree. However people with two copies of G at a particular loci in the GLCCI1 gene have considerably more affective empathy than those who are heterozygous or have two copies of A. The term affective empathy is used to distinguish it from cognitive empathy, which is consciously understanding what someone else is feeling or thinking, but not necessarily experiencing it yourself. Sociopaths have cognitive empathy but not affective empathy, while those with autism have less cognitive empathy independent of the affective empathy. So the reason I bring this up is to point out that there is more than one evolutionary path to building a successful prosocial society. In Europeans, the G allele is predominate. Something like 58% of Europeans have two copies of the G allele, and over 95% of Europeans have at least one copy. With East Asians it's almost the opposite, but East Asians are certainly as proscocial. So the interesting anthropological question to ask is, did these differing allele frequencies between the two populations effect how the cultures developed, how each culture (broadly speaking) approaches social responsibility and philosophical/ideological approaches to compassion. The G allele is derived, so it seems to have been selected for in Europe.

[fkizz]

The natural/artificial dichotomy is a little weird with gene/culture evolution. The development of birth control methods is sort of a natural outcome of cultural evolution, no one is consciously thinking about allele frequencies.

One can imagine programs that are non-coercive, rather incentive based, but I also think it's a slippery slope whenever you have to trust the state to know best, something I don't have any faith in. That said, a society in which someone can have high net-reproductive success by being a jackass and/or a criminal and pawning off responsibility for their numerous children on the state is certainly not a good thing, but I don't know what an ethical solution for it is.

I pretty much agree. Also depends on what one defines as best genetics, or what type of genetic enhacement each group or state would lobby for. Even if there is desire of enhancement and evolution, there is also a potential pandora box. Lets see how communistic china deals with it.

Fkizz loving pain and suffering as virtue. What a hero.

You're the one who openly complained that life sucks, not me. Please don't project.

He's a regular Father Teresa.

I apreciate the flattery, but I'm not at the level of "Father Teresa"

Damn you two sound like very unhappy people going by the posts. I might be wrong. But still, for "liberated enlightened atheists" you don't sound free or happy at all. What went wrong?

EDIT- Gaiden already screening the thread a few seconds after I post yet again. Did I catch you on time now?

[Gaidin]

I apreciate the flattery, but I'm not at the level of "Father Teresa"

Damn you two sound like very unhappy people going by the posts. I might be wrong. But still, for "liberated enlightened atheists" you don't sound free or happy at all. What went wrong?

I think you missed the actual reference. It wasn't really a compliment, much less something for you to be flattered about.

[fkizz]

I think you missed the actual reference. It wasn't really a compliment, much less something for you to be flattered about.

Yet again, posting a few seconds after I do, like a programed algorithm. Since you do as you want, I find your unnatural desire and dedication to me a bit creepy. Still I apreciate some fanboyism.

On the character of "Father Theresa", I think the issue is clear and an easily edited wiki source ain't gonna do it.

[Gaidin]

Yet again, posting a few seconds after I do, like a programed algorithm. Since you do as you want, I find your unnatural desire and dedication to me a bit creepy. Still I apreciate some fanboyism.

On the character of "Father Theresa", I think the issue is clear and an easily edited wiki source ain't gonna do it.

I reply to threads I'm interested in. If you don't want me to reply to you, leave. As for wiki...well...yawn...

For the study? Hope you like foreign language.

That crap's been well known for well over fifteen years. I ain't sourcing sarcasm like that again for someone who didn't bother to hear rumors when he was in Elementary School again.

[fkizz]

I reply to threads I'm interested in. If you don't want me to reply to you, leave. As for wiki...well...yawn...

For the study? Hope you like foreign language.

That crap's been well known for well over fifteen years. I ain't sourcing sarcasm like that again for someone who didn't bother to hear rumors when he was in Elementary School again.

Yet again, posting a few seconds after I do, like a programed algorithm.

I apreciate your efforts, but this starts feeling like there is a girl with an internet crush on me or something. At least let another user reply before you do, will ya?

PS- I do not intend to discuss the complex character of "Father Teresa" on this thread, for that is not its purpose. If you want to, create a thread yourself. Worldwide, she is seen as a person of Good. Though obviously no person is perfect.

[Copperknickers II]

But I do "concede life has no real value compared with utilitarian considerations". And so do you. There are limits on the right to life. If you are threatening someone else and are killed, by armed police or whoever, that is self-defense and I am fine with it. I bet you are too. Military campaigns like the one against ISIS are also justified.

There are also certain times I think killing civilians is acceptable and I think you agree. If the planes that crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 had been shot down, it would be a good thing (well, it would have been the least bad of a bunch of terrifying options). We would have sacrificed the lives of a few hundred who were going to die anyway, for the lives of thousands. It's a horrible and cold calculation to make and I would feel extremely bad for the victims. However, we live in a cruel and uncaring universe where we are often forced to make these choices.

That's a valid argument: sometimes you have to choose the least worst option, but that doesn't stop life being the primary consideration: we kill ISIS fighters because they'll kill more people if we don't. It's not so much a case of two wrongs make a right, as 1 wrong > than 50 wrongs. You can't totally neutralise the fact that killing is wrong, but ISIS forced your hand as a utilitarian actor by killing in the first place. The crux of the matter, I should have said, is do you value life as the foremost utilitarian Good? And do you value all lives equally? Obviously in the case of someone threatening you, if the only way of stopping them killing you is killing them, only one person is going to come out of the situation alive, so it's impossible to value your and his lives equally, you have to make a decision, and obviously you choose yourself over him (to put it another way: if taking life is wrong, you should judge situations objectively before you judge them from your own perspective: a wrongful act has been committed whether you kill your assailant or your assailant kills you, and so by killing him (a wrongful act) you are also stopping him from killing you (also a wrongful act).)

The deeply ignorant drawing together of classes of personhood is deeply and profoundly ignorant.

Classes of personhood are created in relation to a given proposal/assertion. I deny the existence of classes of personhood when it comes to the right to life. It's the most basic right there is, so it should apply to all persons regardless of class.

What is more disturbing is your constant retreat to labeling and inability to debate. Really why can't we talk about the subject without the labelling? Is it that you do not wish to debate personhood because it is a complex topic.

I kinda understand, once you get into the messy details of philosophical distinction it really gets in the way of black and white judgements.

You haven't tried to debate personhood with me yet, you just gave me a wikipedia article to read. What specific part of my argument do you find at odds with your perception of personhood? Tell me and I'll gladly debate personhood. I've already said that when we are talking about the right to life, I define a person as a discrete living organism with human DNA, which as I said is deliberately the widest possible definition. Because it is the widest possible definition, it is totally immune from any arguments based on personhood, because its purpose is not to define a person in the moral sphere, its purpose is in reality to define a human being in the biological sphere. I don't in all honesty see what philosophy has to do with that part of it. Why is there a right to life? I don't know. I don't pretend that I can produce any philosophical argument as to why there exists a right to life. But what I can do is argue why there should be a right to life in practical terms, and argue that if there is a right to life, it should apply to foetuses.

So without a clear cut distinction you veer from A to B, B being any arbitrary point in the cycle despite no good reason. Totally irrational then and also a completely false dilemma to boot.

There's a pretty clear cut distinction between a discrete organism with human DNA and anything else.

As usual I find nothing coherent in your arguments on this topic and for whatever reason really super cloaked in all kinds of hysteria and adhominem and it really baffles me as there is no need for it.

Ad hominem? Where can you see an ad hominem in my posts?

[Enros]

That's a valid argument: sometimes you have to choose the least worst option, but that doesn't stop life being the primary consideration: we kill ISIS fighters because they'll kill more people if we don't. It's not so much a case of two wrongs make a right, as 1 wrong > than 50 wrongs. You can't totally neutralise the fact that killing is wrong, but ISIS forced your hand as a utilitarian actor by killing in the first place. The crux of the matter, I should have said, is do you value life as the foremost utilitarian Good? And do you value all lives equally? Obviously in the case of someone threatening you, if the only way of stopping them killing you is killing them, only one person is going to come out of the situation alive, so it's impossible to value your and his lives equally, you have to make a decision, and obviously you choose yourself over him (to put it another way: if taking life is wrong, you should judge situations objectively before you judge them from your own perspective: a wrongful act has been committed whether you kill your assailant or your assailant kills you, and so by killing him (a wrongful act) you are also stopping him from killing you (also a wrongful act).)

I don't value life over everything else. My preferences change depending on the circumstances. Sometime it's probably fine to kill someone even if they are not threat to anyone's life, if they are infringing other human rights and can't be stopped in other ways. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

Here's a graph of crime in the USA:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Do you think it's a coincidence that the huge dip in crime from 1990 onwards came 17 years after abortion was legalized in Roe v. Wade in 1973? Don't take my word for it, have a scan of the Wikipedia article Legalized abortion and crime effect. Abortion prevents people growing up in poverty. People who grow up in poverty are more likely to become criminals and less likely to do creative and productive things with their life than average. Mothers who got abortions usually simply had children at a more convenient time later in their life. I think delaying childbirth counts as saving lives and making all of society richer and better off.

[Copperknickers II]

I don't value life over everything else. My preferences change depending on the circumstances. Sometime it's probably fine to kill someone even if they are not threat to anyone's life, if they are infringing other human rights and can't be stopped in other ways. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

Here's a graph of crime in the USA:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Do you think it's a coincidence that the huge dip in crime from 1990 onwards came 17 years after abortion was legalized in Roe v. Wade in 1973? Don't take my word for it, have a scan of the Wikipedia article Legalized abortion and crime effect. Abortion prevents people growing up in poverty. People who grow up in poverty are more likely to become criminals and less likely to do creative and productive things with their life than average. Mothers who got abortions usually simply had children at a more convenient time later in their life. I think delaying childbirth counts as saving lives and making all of society richer and better off.

None of that stops the fact that in the eyes of a pro-lifer, abortion should be regarded as murder. What if it would be quite productive to kill criminals and disabled people, and it would make society richer and better off. The end does not justify the means, when the means is killing millions of people. Not outside of a nuclear war at any rate. Yes, a lot of people who would have been murdered by the missing foetuses probably had their lives saved by Roe vs Wade. But nowhere NEAR as many as the missing millions themselves (and they are missing, not delayed: aborted foetuses and their living younger siblings are not the same thing).

Besides I imagine similar results could have been achieved by people using contraception. With proper contraception you can reduce the chances of conception to 1 in hundreds of thousands.

[Mangalore]

None of that stops the fact that in the eyes of a pro-lifer, abortion should be regarded as murder. ...

In the eyes of creationists nuclear theory should be wrong so what? The argument is about the definition of a living human person and when that occurs which leads back to the above study which adds the monkey wrench in moral anti abortion arguments that our definition of a person is even more narrow than just that of a human being.

A pro-lifer is conflating the term life into a broaders sense than it actually is meant in because his definition leads to the cancer cell arguments and similar. It's not about something having human DNA and being alive, that category is met by every single body cell of a human organism. It's about the definition of a human being as an individual and when that happens. While I wouldn't subscribe to the conclusions of the study aka tha we probably should define our parameters a bit stricters it is entirely coherent to argue that there is a difference between our definition of personhood and life.

[Enros]

None of that stops the fact that in the eyes of a pro-lifer, abortion should be regarded as murder. What if it would be quite productive to kill criminals and disabled people, and it would make society richer and better off. The end does not justify the means, when the means is killing millions of people. Not outside of a nuclear war at any rate. Yes, a lot of people who would have been murdered by the missing foetuses probably had their lives saved by Roe vs Wade. But nowhere NEAR as many as the missing millions themselves (and they are missing, not delayed: aborted foetuses and their living younger siblings are not the same thing).

Killing criminals doesn't make society richer and better off today, as criminals can be productive in jail and we have already made it harder for their criminal genes to be passed on. If that changed, say after some catastrophe, I might be more in favor of the death penalty.

Killing disabled people certainly wouldn't make society richer and better off, they might use more resources than the average person but consumption isn't a bad thing in the capitalist system, for every producer there must be a consumer. However, in some horrible situation where we had to either leave some disabled people behind, or everyone would die, my opinion might change. But you can think up a situation like this about literally anything.

All of the people in these hypothetical scenarios, like the people on our hypothetical hijacked plane we were going to shoot down, have a strong desire to continue living, and yet we have agreed it is sometimes justified to kill people who want to go on living. A fetus has no desire to continue to living, it has no desires or feelings at all, because it's unconscious. So there should definitely be at least as many scenarios where it's ok to kill fetuses as it is to kill living people. You might argue that an unconscious person has no desires either, but they certainly had when they were conscious.

Besides I imagine similar results could have been achieved by people using contraception. With proper contraception you can reduce the chances of conception to 1 in hundreds of thousands.

Contraception was freely available long before abortion in the USA. Unfortunately its success correlates with education, and poorly educated people are very bad at using it. On average 18% of couples using condoms as their sole method of contraception get pregnant every year. Just considering well educated users, that rate can get as low as 2%. Conversely, among people in poverty, they are laughably ineffective. The same is true of most methods of contraception.

Even in countries where abortion is banned, like Ireland, anyone who can afford to spend a few days in Britain can get an abortion. Those who can't afford it are the only ones affected by the ban. Lack of abortion simply makes the poor poorer and all of society poorer and more dangerous as a result.

[Cyclops]

I am going to fix this article for them:

Original:Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The new and improved GED version:Society should be allowed to kill their criminals because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

I disagree that your version is consistent, as they define self knowledge (and potential loss) as part of their parameters personhood.

If we all adopted this policy, then we could also tweak it to fit whatever other parameters we want.

Society should be allowed to kill their gays....
Society should be allowed to kill their conservatives....
Society should be allowed to kill their liberals....
Society should be allowed to kill their lawyers....
Society should be allowed to kill their retards....
Society should be allowed to kill their pick your undesirables....

I think only certain "retards" (if you mean severely intellectually handicapped by this term) fits this bill. I understand you're revolted, so am I, but don't go over the top, you strengthen their case if you make the opposition to it look unreasonable.

This isn't abortion, its murder. I bet these same two Oxford idiots would cringe at the thought of strangling an unwanted puppy (as would I btw). I find this sentence particularly offensive: “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

I think they have stumbled into a political minefield here, by distinguishing a philosophical approach to abortion, defining personhood as a critical factor that then leaks over past the birth event.

By this standard there are millions of people with mental deficiencies that probably do not truly understand what death is that this could be applied to. Do we then start killing them when they are 5 or 10 or 50 years old?

You're absolutely right here, they look like they've become "accidentally Hitler", as the argument they make definitely supports this sort of euthanasia/eugenics.

This argument also has the potential to support nutty "pro-life" activists, as it identifies post birth and pre-birth humans. The argument of self awareness is a bit idiotic, what if someone is temporarily not self aware, e.g. in a coma or asleep. A sleeping person has the potential to become self aware, as does a baby or even a profoundly intellectually handicapped person.

Reminds me of a Lenny Bruce act, "throw her off the plane so we don't crash!" 'You monster!" "what? She was only half awake." Can't find it on YouTube, but if you can find it. I'd love to see what Lenny woulda made of these guys.

[fkizz]

The natural/artificial dichotomy is a little weird with gene/culture evolution. The development of birth control methods is sort of a natural outcome of cultural evolution, no one is consciously thinking about allele frequencies.

Actually this made me consider the following: in the past, maybe before civilization, high sexual drive increased chances of tribal survival, on a "species" sense.

Now with birth control developed by scientists, and with religious/moral driven people having at least statistically more children than promiscuous people who use birth control in their hedonisitic activities;

It can be said that evolutionary pressure is right now favouring morality on sexual reproductive grounds, which from a political/cultural dispute point of view, can be ironic on many different angles.

What do you think of this possibility, sumskillz? Curious on your answer, since your research seems interesting.

[Theo]

LOL at the hyperbole present in this thread. That paper was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The point of it was the explore the ethical implications of abortion and euthanasia in an academic setting. "Given X, Y should be considered ethical". No one is proposing making infanticide legal. The paper does not advocate any legislation. This is part of an academic debate/discussion. Extreme positions like this are discussed in academic journals all the time. They are NOT advocating making infanticide legal. The point is to explore and scrutinize the ethical and philosophical implications of a given position. Not to make those extreme positions the law.

[sumskilz]

It can be said that evolutionary pressure is right now favouring morality on sexual reproductive grounds, which from a political/cultural dispute point of view, can be ironic on many different angles.

What do you think of this possibility, sumskillz? Curious on your answer, since your research seems interesting.

It is definitely favoring the highly religious:

Abstract: Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain ‘religiosity’ gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of ‘cultural hitch-hiking’, whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.

Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model

There isn't a single religiosity gene, but for the sake of what the model is trying to understand, the simplification works fine.

[Enros]

That counts the children of people who have already attained a particular age. This ignores the fact that religious people are more likely to die at every age. A better study would follow people from birth to find the fertility of people who turn out to be religious and non-religious. High IQ people have a lower death rate at all ages and are less likely to be religious.

Also, it might be true that high IQ people are selected against today, or it might not, the studies are based on bad assumptions. But in the past that was not the case, and in the future it will not be the case either. In the future we will integrate lots of technology with our body, and dysgenics will be irrelevant. Evolution will still occur but not relating to intelligence, diseases, strength etc. We can already control robots with our thoughts.

There are studies assuming national average IQs are mostly due to genetics when that is not the case. It's too much to be a coincidence that the countries with all of the poverty and malnutrition have lower average IQs. The relationship between poverty, malnutrition, fertility and intelligence is already well understood and explained by anthropologists.

There are studies claiming the Flynn effect has reversed in the most developed countries, despite the fact these countries are particularly friendly to immigrants from the developing world who grew up with all of that poverty and malnutrition I just mentioned. Estimates of the negative impact of immigrants on the IQ of developed countries are also flawed because they don't take into account the superior environment of developed countries or that immigrants undergo a demographic transition sometimes in the first generation and usually in the second, which significantly reduces their fertlity.

In general, research about IQ and natural selection is full of cranks and woo-peddlers who base their work on bad assumptions and don't understand the complexity of the systems they are talking about. IQ in general is quite a useless measurement, there are people who simply don't think rationally, value evidence or understand logic who have very high IQs. There's a British UKIP (the crazy far right party) councillor who said she is "not a racist" but hates "negroes" because of "something about their faces" and she is in MENSA. Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Richard Feynman boasted about his surprisingly low 125 IQ (Ok, that's almost 2 standard deviations above average, but 1 in 20-25 people have an IQ that high). It's impossible to predict the IQs of members of national academies of Science, some are very close to average.