Eugenics

[Nikitn]

In China they are encouraging families to have only one kid per person - and this program has bore success. Why not restrict lower-educated people into having 1 kid per person while letting the more educated have as many as they please? If we assume that somebody with higher education has a higher chance of being more intelligent, this would effectively make Chinese society smarter. If this is taken to a global scale, then a world-wide eugenics program, by an autocratic and relatively noncorrupt world government, would improve the quality of the human gene-pool substantially.

More problems that can be solved, are that of overpopulation & the problem of lesser educated people being much more fertile than higher-educated people. The last one is quite unnatural - throughout human history the smarter and more adaptive individuals would have a higher chance of passing on the genes than an average individual who lacked these traits. In the long run, why wouldn't this could lead to a dumbification of humanity?

EDIT: nice to see that people aren't going amok over this.

[Manco]

Social class =/= intelligence is one of the first problems I can think of.

In fact, anecdotal experience from my own life would point to the opposite. My richer friends are dumb as nails, while some of my working class friends are near-geniuses.

[Veliky Kaiser Theos]

Good luck implementing that successfully. Eugenics is good for humanity as a whole, but a lot of noise would be made by the intellectually inferior or average (the majority). That's a bad way to attract votes in democratic nations. It may just work in (Psuedo-)Communist China though, as you had in your example, due to them lacking the privelege of voting.

Something like this would definitely reduce population growth, and might humanely improve the gene pool if carried out successfuly.

[Logios]

I would say it would not work since what is gained in increased selectivity might be lost on decreased diversity. In other terms, the intellectual elite could become inbred in the extreme case or lack the access to a broader range of "building block types" needed for being more adaptive and diverse in the less extreme. Also human generation frequencies are about 30 years, but our society is evolving much faster than us. It takes many generations to produce a better suited individual, but who knows what qualities a human being needs in just 30 years time.
I do believe however that the better educated families would have greather material and intellectual resources to pass on to their children, so it might work but not due to genetics.

[Sphere]

Linking genetics to intelligence in humans is rather silly in my opinion. Societal education is far more important than the underlying genetics (sans a genetically induced learning diability). We really do stand on the shoulders of giants as it were, so if you want to improve the overall intelligence of your population, focus on an educational program, not an eugenics program.

(And this is ignoring all the horribly negative effects on personal freedom inherent in eugenics)

[Phier]

Linking genetics to intelligence in humans is rather silly in my opinion. Societal education is far more important than the underlying genetics (sans a genetically induced learning diability). We really do stand on the shoulders of giants as it were, so if you want to improve the overall intelligence of your population, focus on an educational program, not an eugenics program.

I'm going to have to disagree with the dismissal of genetics in intelligence. While education is required to achieve your genetic potential in intelligence, that ceiling is in part determined by your genetics. Its not simply raw intelligence but memory and drive play a role too.

I'm well above average in intelligence, at least according to testing. If this was due to education, I'd expect the same from those who went to the same schools I did, but I'm still above most of them as well.

I have to add I was also a LOUSY student. I was the typical bored, doing the minimum, really until I graduated college.

So how did education make me as intelligent as I am (and you will have to take my word on it) but not the other guys who actually worked harder in my classes? I'd have to argue that difference is genetic, my parents are both very intelligent. My mother skipped 2 grades in school back when that was in vogue, my father has three advanced degrees. They were also rather lousy at educating me at home. They did the usual parents making sure your kid did his work (important in my case) but they were not teaching me advanced concepts. I DID learn them but 100% on my own time.

I could give other examples, like setting the curve on a evolutionary biology class my first year of college out of 800 students never even going to class.

Being singled out at 11 for taking the SAT, despite being a god awful student, simply because of my PSAT score.

Was it my education?

I think we have a different issue right now in that many people are being educated beyond what their personal cognitive abilities are. They learn material without really grasping or understanding it. They can reproduce it but they offer nothing new, and fail when presented with a challenge to what they were taught.

[removeduser_4536284751384]

I'm going to have to disagree with the dismissal of genetics in intelligence. While education is required to achieve your genetic potential in intelligence, that ceiling is in part determined by your genetics. Its not simply raw intelligence but memory and drive play a role too.

I think we have a different issue right now in that many people are being educated beyond what their personal cognitive abilities are. They learn material without really grasping or understanding it. They can reproduce it but they offer nothing new, and fail when presented with a challenge to what they were taught.

But people are smarter now than they ever were in history. Someone with an IQ of 200 in antiquity would only be 100 now. What is our actual genetic potential? Because I don't think anyone has achieved it.

"Intelligence" as commonly understood is a mix of skills like memory, mental arithmetic, logic, spelling etc. All of these skills are learned through practice, you're not born with your maximum potential. I assume genetics affects the amount of practice required to develop and master skills. But I severely doubt any human has developed a "maximum" number of skills to such a level that they could not learn more.

And education can affect one's intelligence. If you're a doctor in one field you'll find it a lot easier to learn a completely unrelated field than a first year university student.

If you want to make Somalis over all more intelligent as a population, eugenics.
If you want to make them more educated, well then education.

Education makes you more intelligent. Mental arithmetic is a good example. The more you do calculations, the more results you have remembered to compare new calculations to. To multiply 24 times 3 I don't just multiply it out, I remember that 20 times 3 is 60, and 4 times 3 is 12, and add them together. The adding is the only real calculation I do. Had I not encountered the simpler multiplication previously (i.e. been educated), I would have found that a lot harder.

I'm not claiming nature has no effect, because I'm sure it does. But you seem to be claiming nurture has little effect. Which is obviously false. If you had never been educated but been raised by your two parents at home all your life, do you think you'd be a) as intelligent and b) find learning as easy as you do today?

[General_Thral]

so how are you going to quantify peoples intelligence ? by their qualifications? because you will find people will be smart in different ways .

was watching a video on youtube about the education system and how it was floored because it neglected certain people like me and few of my other friends.

i don't like using the educational system as some sort of intelligence measuring device because the people who got the highest grades were just copying and pasting from memory - they never actually understood it. i remember when i was in secondary school about 5 years ago this guy came in and gave us some IQ tests which everyone in our year was given . then about 3 months after when they guy came back the teachers were stunned to find that some of the 'clever' people in our year got some of the lowest IQ ratings apparently even a handful of these IQ scores , scored under the national average - yet they were supposed to be the 'smart' people while me and a few of my other friends who were in special needs classes who were called 'dumb' got some of the highest scores in fact my class got the highest average IQ scores in the year even though 90% of us were considered special needs.

Anyway i think its wrong to assume smarter people have superior genetics but from an economic standpoint usually people with higher qualifications would mean a higher salary which would also mean less government aid for the families.

[Phier]

But people are smarter now than they ever were in history. Someone with an IQ of 200 in antiquity would only be 100 now. What is our actual genetic potential? Because I don't think anyone has achieved it.

Citation needed. We KNOW more now than any other time as a group, but thats simply due to knowledge being far more freely distributed. I don't think I'm smarter than Plato, Archimedes, or Michelangelo, even though I KNOW a lot more than they do about the world and the universe. I'd say more people now can reach their potential, not that we are any smarter.

"Intelligence" as commonly understood is a mix of skills like memory, mental arithmetic, logic, spelling etc. All of these skills are learned through practice, you're not born with your maximum potential. I assume genetics affects the amount of practice required to develop and master skills. But I severely doubt any human has developed a "maximum" number of skills to such a level that they could not learn more.

Skills and intelligence would be two different things. Skills are taught, they come with experience or experimentation. But just like we hunted with pointed sticks for a LONG time before some proto human figured out how to add a sharp rock to the point, it takes more than time or practice to make leaps.

And education can affect one's intelligence. If you're a doctor in one field you'll find it a lot easier to learn a completely unrelated field than a first year university student.

I'm not sure why this matters and I don't disagree with the idea, but I think thats more to do with understanding how to study and divide your time than anything else. I will say that when I am in 'study' mode I AM smarter but only because my brain seems sharper. Again though so what.

Education makes you more intelligent. Mental arithmetic is a good example. The more you do calculations, the more results you have remembered to compare new calculations to. To multiply 24 times 3 I don't just multiply it out, I remember that 20 times 3 is 60, and 4 times 3 is 12, and add them together. The adding is the only real calculation I do. Had I not encountered the simpler multiplication previously (i.e. been educated), I would have found that a lot harder.

Skills again, not intelligence.

I'm not claiming nature has no effect, because I'm sure it does. But you seem to be claiming nurture has little effect.

I'm saying that to dismiss nature in intelligence is to fly in the face of observation.

Which is obviously false. If you had never been educated but been raised by your two parents at home all your life, do you think you'd be a) as intelligent and b) find learning as easy as you do today?

I think my potential would be the same, or at least would have been the same at the more plastic stage of development. I'm not saying education isn't important I'm saying nature does in fact play a big part of it and geniuses are born as much as made.

[Ardruire Iacób]

But people are smarter now than they ever were in history. Someone with an IQ of 200 in antiquity would only be 100 now. What is our actual genetic potential? Because I don't think anyone has achieved it.

So people are more middle class, male, and white than ever before? Eugenics - where the future is bourgeois.

[Nikitn]

Well, inbreeding is exaggerating, but I see your point. I'm not saying that only the elite should breed, I'm merely saying that the higher up you go on the intelligence ladder the more kids you should be allowed to have.

As for the society: Intelligence is distributed pretty evenly among populations classified by their genes (for example: big body build, small body build, this immune system, that immune system etc.) - isn't it? So why would encouraging general intelligence in humanity restrict the other traits?

Manco: Yeah, but on average an educated person is more intelligent than a highschool drop-out.

Linking genetics to intelligence in humans is rather silly in my opinion. Societal education is far more important than the underlying genetics (sans a genetically induced learning diability). We really do stand on the shoulders of giants as it were, so if you want to improve the overall intelligence of your population, focus on an educational program, not an eugenics program.

(And this is ignoring all the horribly negative effects on personal freedom inherent in eugenics)

There are limits to how effective an educational program can be. Look at the US - massive amounts of money are pumped into the education system but the results are marginal.

There is also the problem of the inverse correlation between economic status and fertility.

[Manco]

Manco: Yeah, but on average an educated person is more intelligent than a highschool drop-out.

No, he's more educated.
He's smarter because he's trained to be smarter. Eugenetics doesn't care about who's "trained", it's all about natural ability. Classic nature vs nurture.

It's very likely that the average college student is indeed smarter than the average drop-out, but that's too general to be of any use. Drop-outs might be less intelligent in general, but certain subsets could hypothetically be much smarter than your average college student.

So then we come back to the same questions: How do you decide who's the "best"? Who decides this? What criteria have been used? What's the validity of these criteria?

[Nikitn]

Obviously many factors decide if a guy is able to complete school, but all else equal an intelligent person would get much better grades than somebody who isn't intelligent.

[Manco]

But all else isn't equal in real life, and that's what eugenetics never stand up to.

[Ardruire Iacób]

But all else isn't equal in real life, and that's what eugenetics never stand up to.

This.

Eugenics, as has been stated, assumes that traits like "intelligence" are hereditary and not acquired by education. I'd like you to provide a study which proves this to be the case. One with a control group and solid methodology, too. There may be certain limits to a person's natural ability towards intelligence, but can you prove they're hereditary?

[Nikitn]

Argh, many studies have been done about this. Just do a quick google and you'll find quotes like:

Intelligence at age 5 predicts better than any other variable a child's future educational progress and attainment (Kline, 1991).

Why wouldn't intelligence be dependant on natural selection? Magic?

But all else isn't equal in real life, and that's what eugenetics never stand up to.

That wasn't my point, my point was that intelligence has a large effect on level of education. I laid forward a sound logical argument which you have dismissed.

Sphere: Well, what will happen once a nation has reached the apex of living standards and education efficiency? Take a socialist country like Finland - first class social welfare system and of course educational system. Not much more can be done to improve it.

[Sphere]

There are limits to how effective an educational program can be. Look at the US - massive amounts of money are pumped into the education system but the results are marginal.

On the contrary, the US has perhaps the best higher education system in the world and a world class private education system. Our public system is terribly hit or miss based largely on the wealth of the community around it as most school funding comes directly from property taxes. But if you can get poor students into private schools they tend to do amazingly well. Hence the vast expansion of charter school systems by states and muncipalities.

[Manco]

But it isn't sound. It would be sound if we could completely decouple nature from nurture, be able to perfectly distinguish between what's learned behaviour or traits, and what's inherent and natural.

As long as we can't do that, eugenetics isn't eugenetics. It's whatever criteria a bunch of people arbitrarily happen to decide, regardless of objective truth.


That intelligence has a large effect on level of education sounds right and probably is right. But going from that to level of education is a sufficiently good indicator to gauge intelligence as to use in an eugenetic program, is something entirely different.
Just to go a bit ad absurdum here, that logic would mean we could just as well not have any male children any more, as they have on average a lower education level.
It's just too broad a criterium, before we even delve into its validity.

[Phier]

The problem with eugenics isn't if it would work. It would work without a doubt. The problem with eugenics isn't even the morality issue as human morality does not seem to apply to large groups looking at the mass murders of the 20th century.

No the problem is we don't know WHAT to select for.

For example. You want to select for intelligence. Ok fine, what criteria do you use? Grades? IQ tests? 3d puzzles?

I ask this because you can get different types of intelligence to a degree, and just because you are good at some aspects doesn't mean you are good at others.

Added we don't even know what traits are linked to others. There is supposition that some negative reproductive traits, such as homosexuality, and even perhaps crons disease, could be linked to other benefits.

So you could very quickly increase the overall intelligence of the next generation by only letting intelligent people breed but that could create new issues unforeseen.

And lets go further. Intelligence might not be a good selection criteria in the first place. What about drive? What about imagination? Most people, including myself use their intelligence to make life easier for themselves but not really creating anything new or wonderful.

Some day true eugenics will be a reality whether we like it or not. Once we fully understand the genome and what the effects are people will actively select for the traits they want in their children (instead of just killing the girls via abortion like they do today). Those who opt to not use this technology will feel pressured to, no one wants their kids to be the class dunce/weakling. This will leave only religious groups who will be more like the Amish are viewed today. Backwards, odd, and kinda sad.

People look at eugenics from a Nazi standpoint, or a dog breeder, where the runts are put down. The future of eugenics is going to be far more benign on the individual. We WILL create our supermen and women. Even if a country has laws to opt out, SOME country out there will do it, and like an arms race it will push the rest along.

[Copperknickers II]

The problem with eugenics isn't if it would work. It would work without a doubt. The problem with eugenics isn't even the morality issue as human morality does not seem to apply to large groups looking at the mass murders of the 20th century.

No the problem is we don't know WHAT to select for.

For example. You want to select for intelligence. Ok fine, what criteria do you use? Grades? IQ tests? 3d puzzles?

I ask this because you can get different types of intelligence to a degree, and just because you are good at some aspects doesn't mean you are good at others.

Added we don't even know what traits are linked to others. There is supposition that some negative reproductive traits, such as homosexuality, and even perhaps crons disease, could be linked to other benefits.

So you could very quickly increase the overall intelligence of the next generation by only letting intelligent people breed but that could create new issues unforeseen.

And lets go further. Intelligence might not be a good selection criteria in the first place. What about drive? What about imagination? Most people, including myself use their intelligence to make life easier for themselves but not really creating anything new or wonderful.

Some day true eugenics will be a reality whether we like it or not. Once we fully understand the genome and what the effects are people will actively select for the traits they want in their children (instead of just killing the girls via abortion like they do today). Those who opt to not use this technology will feel pressured to, no one wants their kids to be the class dunce/weakling. This will leave only religious groups who will be more like the Amish are viewed today. Backwards, odd, and kinda sad.

People look at eugenics from a Nazi standpoint, or a dog breeder, where the runts are put down. The future of eugenics is going to be far more benign on the individual. We WILL create our supermen and women. Even if a country has laws to opt out, SOME country out there will do it, and like an arms race it will push the rest along.

QFT

Like Phier says, we do not know nearly enough about genetics for us to be able to effectively carry out a eugenics program.

And I don't know about you, but if someone told me that I was of inferior genetics and therefore was a second class citizen who was to have no children, I would be rather unhappy about it. No democratic government is going to be eugenicist, because you alienate the vast majority of your voters when you allow there to become a concept of a 'superman'. Nazi Germany only lasted so long because it targeted tiny minorities and created a majority national identity. People are not interested in improving the genetic stock of their nation, and they can only withstand so much chipping away at the edges before they realise.