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Eugenics has a bad name. Over the past 70 years, its opponents have linked it to racism and even genocide, and some Christians call it a blasphemous attempt to improve on God’s creation. In its heyday in the 1920s, however, eugenics was developed by leading biologists, including the founders of modern genetics. Their work was promoted and often put into policy by eminent statesmen and intellectuals. Eugenics was supported by a broad coalition,including progressives and socialists. On the Right, the Nazis supported it as well, but it is an absurd caricature to call it “Nazi science.”
The basic principles of heredity on which eugenics was based have not changed. It is our approach to science–and our rejection of it–that have supposedly discredited eugenics. In fact, dramatic advances in genetic engineering are constantly opening up new possibilities for modern eugenics.
People are eugenicists by instinct: They want to mate with healthy partners who show signs of intelligence and other desirable traits. Legal prohibitions against incest, meant to reduce the chance of inbreeding, go back at least as far as the Code of Hammurabi–c. 1750 BC–and the Old Testament. Plato and Aristotle promoted eugenic measures, and every society that domesticated livestock discovered the importance of selective breeding.
Even in today’s harshly anti-scientific atmosphere, parents frequently practice eugenics even though they never use the word. People with certain conditions seek genetic counseling in the hope of avoiding passing on genetic diseases to their children. Amniocentesis, or genetic sampling of the fetus, is a common procedure that has the same goal. When infertile couples go to sperm banks or seek eggs, they look for positive qualities in donors.
Not even the most militant political correctness has been able to root out popular understanding of certain basic truths: Parents pass on their traits to their children, and it is foolish to pretend they don’t.
The science of eugenics
It was Francis Galton who coined the Greek-derived term “eugenics,” meaning well born or good breeding. In Hereditary Genius (1869), he argued that mental abilities, just like physical features, are heritable. Through an analysis of the pedigrees of eminent families in England, he concluded that talent does not occur randomly, but instead runs in the families. Therefore, it would be possible, through arranged marriages, to breed people with desirable traits such as good health, intelligence, and noble character. A society of such individuals would far surpass the average abilities of the original population.
Until the Industrial Revolution, healthy and eugenic fertility was the rule in Europe, with the most capable people having the most children. In England in the 1620s, for example, the middle classes had 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class. There were no antibiotics or advanced lifesaving medicine, so less healthy people often died before they could reproduce.
Mass production of rubber condoms by Goodyear in 1860 started the era of affordable and efficient birth control. Middle and upper classes quickly adopted this novelty, while lower classes did not, thus ending the age-old correlation between high social class and larger families.
The First World War was a horrific slaughter of some of Europe’s best men. Indeed, IQ testing was introduced in the army in part to decrease the chances of using men of ability as cannon fodder. After the Second World War, eugenics became widely associated with Nazi atrocities, and by the 1960s and ’70s it was almost universally rejected.
However, it is dangerous to reject eugenics. Without it we have dysgenics, or the spread of less desirable traits, and the ability to maintain civilization declines. Here are some of the most sobering trends.
It is generally accepted that for a population to maintain its numbers, every woman must have an average of 2.2 children. The industrialized nations of Asia and Europe, which have the highest-IQ populations, have the lowest birth rates and are not reproducing themselves: 1.4 births per woman in Japan, 1.25 in South Korea, 1.6 in Russia and Canada, 1.44 in Germany and Italy, etc. The highest birth rates are in the most impoverished countries of Africa: Niger–6.76, Mali, Burundi, and Somalia–6, Burkina Faso–5.86, Angola–5.37, Ethiopia–5.15, Zambia–5.72, Uganda–5.98, etc.
At the same time, in industrialized countries modern medicine have greatly relaxed the environmental pressure that winnows out defects, which increases the frequency of heritable diseases. Also, parents are having children at increasingly later ages, which raises the number of spontaneous mutations–especially in sperm but also in eggs–which are then introduced into a child’s genome. Chemicals used in consumer products, radiation, and radio-wave-emitting devices could also contribute to higher mutation rates.
Contraception continues its dysgenic effect, not only because high-IQ groups have fewer children but because they have children at later ages, thus further decreasing their relative contribution to the gene pool. Because IQ is estimated to be 80 percent heritable, this skew lowers the average IQ in each successive generation. Welfare also encourages lower-IQ groups to have more children.
Finally, emigration from poor to rich countries probably lowers the average intelligence of both the sending and receiving countries. African emigrants, for example, are often of above-average ability in their home countries, but still bring down the average in Europe or America.
The combination of all these factors is highly damaging.
Genetic load
One of the key concepts in evolution is genetic load. This is the number of damaging and even potentially lethal alleles (gene variants) in the gene pool. Spontaneous–or de novo–mutations contribute to genetic load. In order to keep the load stable, the rate of such mutations must not exceed the rate at which they are eliminated–which happens when the person carrying them fails to reproduce. De novo mutations are not alleles passed on in the usual manner from parent to child; they are simply genetic copying errors.
Every child usually gets 60 to 80 de novo mutations. The majority are neutral; only two or three can potentially disrupt gene functions. Most of the deleterious variants are recessive, which means that they cause damage only in unusual cases, in which a child inherits the same mutation from both parents. Still, a de novo mutation at the wrong spot can be devastating.
Favorable mutations are exceedingly rare. The human genome has evolved through chance mutation for millions of years; at this point, a copying error is much more likely to upset a carefully evolved structure rather than improve it. These errors come in various types with specialized names–copy number variations, chromosomal deletions, microsatellite expansion or contraction, aberrant methylation, etc.–and their cumulative effect compromises fitness.
The number of de novo mutations a child gets depends largely on the father’s age; each additional year of father’s age contributes an average of two to three more such mutations. Although older mothers are known to contribute chromosomal abnormalities, such as trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), 80 percent of de novo mutations come from the father. These mutations are passed down to succeeding generations. There will be a significant accumulation of genetic load as more and more generations live under conditions of relaxed genetic pressure in which a high percentage of the population succeeds in reproducing.
Medicine is one of the greatest contributors to genetic load, because it blocks purifying selection. The left-hand graph shows how much modern medicine and public health has reduced death rates (in Australia), especially in the first few years of life. Although it may seem harsh to say so, early deaths kept genetic load in balance by removing deleterious alleles from the gene pool. According to one study, if approximately 16 percent of each generation fails to reproduce, that removes enough de novo mutations to maintain balance.
However, now that so many more people are surviving to child-bearing age, many unfavorable conditions are increasing. Gene pool deterioration is most obvious in heritable conditions that were once fatal but now are not. For example, before the development of insulin treatment, babies born with Type I diabetes died before reaching maturity, whereas now they can survive and have children. In many countries, Type I diabetes is increasing at roughly 5 percent a year, and in Finland, it increased 338 percent over a 32-year period in children ages one to four. These rates are clearly far more rapid than genetic change in the population, so such increases appear to be the result of a combination of increased genetic load and little-understood environmental factors.
In the distant past, deafness could have been a lethal condition if it meant an inability to hear an approaching predator. More recently, it made it difficult to find a spouse. Now, advanced countries have special schools for deaf people where they meet and marry other deaf people. This further propagates undesirable alleles.
Asthma and allergies do not usually kill people, but before the development of modern treatments, they undoubtedly reduced reproductive success. Now, they need not interfere with reproduction, and their incidence is rising. Asthma has at least tripled over the past 25 years, and now affects more than 22 million Americans. Allergies are also increasing, with such things as peanut allergies–virtually unheard of 50 years ago–appearing in day care centers and schools. Both asthma and allergies are heritable.
A rigorous investigation by the Mayo Clinic found that the incidence of celiac disease (CD) has increased 450 percent in the United States since 1950. CD is highly heritable, and now affects one in 133 Americans (0.75 percent). Its incidence continues to grow, and people with the condition must avoid food with gluten. The Mayo Clinic found that if they were unaware of their condition they were four times more likely than those without it to die over a 45-year period.
Twin studies have shown that autism is highly heritable, and its frequency in the United States has increased 600 percent since mid-’70s. Half of this growth is attributed to better diagnosis and awareness of the condition; the other half remains a mystery. People have proposed various environmental causes but there is strong evidence that accumulated genetic load is partly responsible: One study suggests that 10 percent of cases are due to de novo variants.
Similarly, recent research has found that the number of genes expressed in the brain is compromised by de novo mutations in people with autism, and that older parents are more likely to have autistic children. It may be that autism is increasing more rapidly than the accumulation of genetic load because of the highly interconnected nature of the genes that affect the brain. It may be that the number of mutations above a certain threshold can cause the entire neuronal network to function abnormally, thus leading to autism and possibly other neurological conditions.
The average IQ of autistic individuals is around 70, which means that, in varying degree, half suffer from what is considered intellectual disability (ID). More than 3.5 million Americans have some form of autism spectrum disorder. The average cost of lifelong support for an autistic person with ID is reported to be $2.4 million, and $1.4 million for those with IQs over 70. The annual cost of autism in the US is reported to be $236-262 billion.
Genetic load could build up to the point that medicine cannot cope with the associated health compromises. This is especially likely for neurological conditions, such as autism, for which there is no known treatment. Likewise, the appearance of “superbugs” that have evolved immunity to all common antibiotics is a serious potential threat. If drug-resistant bacteria become common, our immune systems will have to combat these pathogens unaided, which was the rule before the discovery of antibiotics.
Accumulation of genetic load could have similar results. If medicine is unable to keep up with the rising genetic load, the number of people who die before reproductive age will start rising again. This would happen even with the medicine functioning at a very high level. In other words, purifying selection will resume so as to prevent further load accumulation.
If, in the future, there is a failure of the medical system or in the welfare policies that make medicine available to people who cannot afford it, there could be a devastating jump in the number of people of all ages who die.
In China and Russia in the 19th century, as many as half of all babies died before adolescence. Imagine genetic load accumulating to the point that death rates returned to that level (16 to 20 percent would be a theoretical minimum) despite modern medicine. Then imagine a societal collapse that eliminates modern medicine or sharply limits its availability.
This nightmare vision is not new. Nobel Prize winner Hermann J. Muller is his famous 1950 paper “Our Load of Mutations” argued that a steady accumulation of genetic load will lead to immense suffering for future generations. In his view, the only way to eliminate mutations was through “rationally directed guidance of reproduction.” He thought “abstention from reproduction” was far more desirable than the eventual alternative: “failure in a struggle for existence.”
Muller wrote that ignoring the future consequences of our actions makes us “debtor generations:”
The term ‘debtor’ is appropriate for such generations because, by instituting for their own immediate benefit ameliorative procedures which delay the attainment of equilibrium and raise the equilibrium level of mutant gene frequency, they transfer to their descendants a price of detriment which the latter must eventually pay in full.
Muller feared that if the mutation rate rose above a “critical value” it could even lead to extinction.
In 2009, Michael Lynch of the University of Indiana and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote the following in his inaugural paper for the academy:
Without a reduction in the germline transmission [passing on to succeeding generations] of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.
Even people who think in eugenic terms are often unaware of the threat to our species posed by the accumulation of genetic load.
Declines in intelligence
Ever since the widespread use of the condom, there has unquestionably been dysgenic fertility for intelligence in advanced countries. In one recent study, Michael Woodley argued that Victorians were, on average, 13 IQ points smarter than we are. Such studies appear to conflict with what is known as the Flynn Effect, or the well-documented fact that actual performance on IQ tests has been rising in recent decades. However, Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen have argued that the IQ sub-tests that improved most were measuring mental processes not highly correlated with general intelligence. It is widely assumed that tested IQ has not risen due to wider distribution of alleles associated with high intelligence, but because of better nutrition, greater familiarity with testing procedures, and perhaps the effect of early use of computers and smart devices.
This rise in IQ scores seems to have come to an end and gone into reverse in Finland,Denmark and Sweden. The IQ-boosting effect of improved nutrition and more stimulating environments may have reached the limit of their effectiveness, and deterioration in the genetic makeup of Europeans may have begun to drag down actual IQ test scores. In other words, a rise in phenotypic IQ (actual performance on IQ tests) caused by environmental factors was masking an ongoing decline in genotypic IQ (the distribution of high-IQ-related alleles).
Fertility by race within the United States is certainly dysgenic for intelligence. Hispanic women have the highest lifetime fertility at 2.82, with black women next at 2.02. Whites are clearly at sub-replacement fertility at 1.85. As the percentages of blacks and Hispanics increases, the average IQ will fall (the decline will be slowed by Asians who, though only 5 percent of the population, have a higher average IQ than whites). Eventually, the United States could have the IQ profile of a Third-World nation.
An average decline of just a few points can have a dramatic effect at the tails of the bell curve.
Assuming an initial average IQ of 100 points and a standard deviation of 15, this graph shows the effects of shifting the average to the left by five and then 15 points. With an initial average of 100 points (shown in red), the number of mentally retarded (IQ less than 70) and highly gifted (IQ over 130) is each about 2.2 percent of the total, as indicated by the shaded areas. Each shift to the left greatly changes the area under the curve at both extremes.
A 15-point decline in the average, to the black American average IQ of 85, reduces the over-130 population to almost zero, while greatly expanding the under-70 population. At that point, only 16 percent of the population is at or above an IQ of 100. Professor Linda Gottfredson of University of Delaware has vividly described the outcomes in daily life of different levels of IQ. Everything about life in the United States will change as the average IQ falls.
There have, in fact, been examples of extremely rapid declines in population IQ. The city of Detroit was founded in 1701 by a party of French colonists led by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. By 1900 it was known as Paris of the West for its grand boulevards–and it had a 98.55 percent-white population of 285,704.
These astonishingly detailed photographs capture something of the nature of the city at that time.
“City Hall and Campus Martius.”
“Band concert on Grand Canal, Belle Isle Park.”
“Excursionists on steamer Tashmoo.”
“Gratiot Avenue from Woodward.”
With the growth of the automobile industry, blacks moved to the city from the South, and by the end of the 1960s they accounted for about half the population. After one of America’s worst race riots in 1967, whites and skilled blacks left for the suburbs and the productive capacity of the city was critically compromised.
The result of this dramatic shift in population–and IQ–is the blasted shell of a city we see today. The destruction was speeded by systematic arson, especially the pre-Halloween orgy of fire and destruction known as Devil’s Night. At its worst, 810 fires were set in a three-day span. The destruction of Detroit is comparable to the results of a nuclear strike. Entire blocks of former residential communities have been obliterated, as can be clearly seen here. Detroit is now a popular destination for photographers who record the astonishing ruins of a once-great city that finally went bankrupt in 2013 with $20 billion in debt.
Few commentators see the pillage of Detroit through a prism of diminishing IQ. They would nevertheless be forced to acknowledge that half of all city residents are functionally illiterate, and that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are at shocking lows. As Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council on Great City Schools, said of Detroit:
The truth here is that no jurisdiction of any kind in the history of NAEP has ever registered such low numbers. They are just above what one would expect by chance alone–as if the kids simply guessed at the answers. These numbers–to our minds–are shocking, appalling, and outrageous . . . .
Mr. Casserly blamed the public schools, and it is true that half of Detroit schools have closed since 1950. However, the remaining schools have been sufficiently funded, with annual expenditures of $13,825 per child for the 2012-2013 school year. Ninety-five percent of the students in Detroit public schools are black, so the problem is more likely to be the students, not the schools.
Standardized tests such as NAEP and the SAT are highly correlated with IQ. The correlation between SAT and IQ is so close–in the 0.72 to 0.88 range–that SAT scores are often used to estimate IQ. The following graphs show national SAT scores by race from 1987 to 2013.
It should be clear that what destroyed Detroit was a rapid decline in average IQ–one almost exactly equivalent to the theoretical 15-point decline plotted on the bell-curves above. The consequences of this decline would have been even more devastating if Detroit had not been part of the richest country in the world and surrounded by an infrastructure that greatly cushioned the collapse.
There is a 0.757 correlation between national IQ and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, and with many other desirable outcomes such as low crime rates, rule of law, freedom of the press, etc. We can anticipate a similar–but slower–collapse at the national level if average IQ continues to fall.
Modern eugenics
To return to Hermann Muller’s paper, “Our Load of Mutations,” he argued that if people were properly educated about the importance of heredity and were guided by medical committees, eugenic goals could be achieved by “freely exercised volition of the individuals concerned.” If those least likely to contribute positively voluntarily remained childless it would mimic natural, purifying selection and would keep genetic load in check.
Of all the possible eugenic methods, this would be the least controversial, but its success would require a fundamental change in thinking. Today, it is virtually impossible to base public policy or even public information on the obvious fact that mating choices can damage the gene pool. And even in a radically changed climate, in which it were generally accepted that it was not desirable for poorly endowed people to reproduce, they are not likely to care very much about the common good.
William Shockley, who invented the transistor and who later took a great interest in eugenics, rarely took positions on public policy, but he did propose “thought experiments” about ways to encourage the less fit to refrain from reproduction. The best known was the $1,000 Bonus Proposal. Anyone of childbearing age would be offered $1,000 for every IQ point under 100 if he agreed to be sterilized. Shockley even suggested that “bounty hunters” could be rewarded for finding such people if they were too stupid to learn about the program on their own. Opponents have argued that anyone who would qualify for a substantial payment would not have the capacity to give informed consent to be sterilized. If that is true, it seems hard to argue that they would have the capacity to be competent parents.
At a 1963 Ciba Foundation conference in London called “Man and His Future,” three distinguished biologists and Nobel laureates–Hermann Muller, Joshua Lederberg, and Francis Crick–took a different approach. They discussed many ideas about the future of mankind, specifically Muller’s proposal of establishing a sperm bank to which only the best men would contribute.
Inventor and industrialist Robert Graham later worked with Muller to establish what became the Repository for Germinal Choice–a name chosen by Muller. Graham discusses the project here, here, and here.
The repository operated according to two eugenic principles. The most obvious was raising the average IQ by increasing the number of children fathered by gifted men. However, it also decreased genetic load by storing sperm from earlier decades–and thought to have a lower load–to make it available for later use. The result was the births of 229 children from gifted donors with IQs of at least 140. Unfortunately, shortly after Robert Graham’s death in 1997 the repository was closed and all specimens were destroyed.
The repository’s approach was similar to one suggested by Michael Lynch of Indiana University. He has proposed transgenerational cryogenic storage for future use of gametes and/or embryos. The goal would be to decrease the number of de novo mutations by using germinal material that was harvested generations ago and stored in liquid nitrogen. Using material from the 1950s, for example, would skip decades’ worth of load and probably greatly reduce the chances of transmitting celiac disease, asthma, diabetes, etc.
Another potential approach involves editing out the genetic load from the genome using a technique called CRISPR/Cas9. CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” and Cas9 is the name of a specialized enzyme used to cut DNA. When it is perfected it could be used to snip out deleterious alleles that add to the load, with the objective of returning genes to their ancestral state. This technology has been tried in China and is still too inaccurate to use in humans but it shows considerable promise.
Richard Lynn–who has unquestionably done more than anyone recently to rehabilitate serious thinking about eugenics–has proposed embryo selection as a eugenic technique. This would involve in vitro fertilization of a large number of a woman’s eggs, letting the embryos develop slightly, and then scanning their genomes and implanting only the most promising ones.
This would not solve the problem of genetic load, and it is likely to remain impractical for a long time. The problem is that it is notoriously difficult to screen for traits that are influenced by more than just a few genes. We can easily screen for known “Mendelian” disorders, such as Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, Marfan syndrome, Rett syndrome, etc., because a defect in a single gene causes a single disease. We know where to look for the defective genes.
However, consider a seemingly simple trait: physical height. We know that variations in height are approximately 95 percent heritable, so screening embryos for the right genes should make it possible to predict an embryo’s height as an adult. In fact, the best available mathematical model for predicting height uses 1,900 different alleles but achieves a correlation of only 0.41 with actual height.
Intelligence is even harder to predict. A study of more than 100,000 people uncovered three genetic variants for IQ, but their impact was minimal: Each accounted for an average of only 0.3 points on an IQ test. That means that a person with two copies of each of the variants (for a total of six) would score only 1.8 points higher on an intelligence test than a person with none of them.
A study of the genomes of 17 supercentenarians (people who lived past the age of 110) detected no genetic variants associate with longevity, though high intelligence appears to be a strong predictor of good health and longevity.
At present, it is simply not possible to screen an embryo–or a child–to predict polygenic traits (ones caused by many genes), such as height and intelligence, though it is an interesting theoretical possibility. Great efforts have already been made to screen for these traits, and as soon as they succeed, there will probably be tests available on the market.
One exotic method that could be used to promote good health and intelligence is time-separated twinning. It involves collecting and fertilizing human eggs, which can be artificially caused to divide into identical twins. If preimplantation genetic screening showed no detectable disorders, one of the twin embryos could be implanted in the womb and the rest frozen. If the resulting child proved to be healthy and intelligent, the other twins could be implanted with high confidence that they, too, would be intelligent and healthy. Parents would be getting a child who was a perfect genetic copy of someone who was already living.
How long would you have to observe the first twin to be sure the frozen embryos were of high quality? Predictions of mental retardation can be made by age two, with 85 percent accuracy. Reasonably good assessments of intelligence are possible at ages five to seven, but waiting until 11 to 13 gives better results. For late-onset diseases such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s one should wait 50 years or even longer. The predictive power of the frozen embryos would increase over time.
Some people would be disturbed by the idea of bringing into the world the identical twin of someone who was already an adult–or even already dead–but time-separated twinning would be a very accurate way of predicting what a child would be like and would lower rates of complex hereditary disorders. This paper explains how time-separated twinning could prevent complex diseases.
SIRM Las Vegas is a company that is already investigating the use of artificial twinning to improve the odds of helping women get pregnant. When there is only a small number of embryos available for implantation, creating twins increases their number and gives a woman that many more chances to have a child.
The next logical step would be to establish a bank of demi-embryos, that is, frozen embryos that were identical twins of highly capable people who had already been born–some may be adults or even deceased. A childless couple could conceivably meet and directly evaluate the person whose identical twin they were considering for implantation. Most people have a strong desire to be the parents of their own genetic offspring. Choosing to implant a demi-embryo might be more attractive if it were the twin of a particularly capable relative. Implanting identical twins may seem futuristic and disconcerting, but if such options were available, some people would certainly use them.
A certain number of people would be happy to implant the twin of a famous beauty queen, intellectual, or sports star. A fertility clinic would have to make sure that a single desirable person was not copied too many times, with a limit of, say, no more than 20 per generation. This, along with good record-keeping, would limit the chances of someone in the next generation unwittingly marrying someone who was, genetically, a half sibling.
If it is not possible to use such techniques as CRISPR to snip out genetic load, the accumulation of load could be greatly slowed simply by freezing genetic material from the present and using it in the future. It is entirely possible that people 100 years from now will look back at today’s genetic material as healthy and highly desirable. This is by no means an absurd idea for anyone who thinks about the long-term prospects for our species.
At present, low birth rates among the most capable mean there is a tremendous waste of good germinal material. What we take for granted and discard today could become an extremely valuable commodity in the next century. Future generations could benefit greatly from sperm and egg donations from the brightest and fittest, and augment these advantages with artificial twinning and trans-generational cryoconservation. It remains to be seen whether our species has the wisdom and foresight even to think in these terms.
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pass laws that are as abuse proof as possible. make the entire selection process completely, 100% transparent, I will support it 100%.
Indeed, a very well written piece. I agree with the concepts completely.
Too bad Marcus Aurelius had only one son. If Commodus had a twin the Middle Ages could have started earlier. (And if Lucia Joyce had one maybe their dad would have skipped Finnegans Wake.)
I’d like to take this opportunity to start a support group for survivors of regression towards the mean (SRTM). My dad had an IQ in the 150s. I don’t.
Some people would be disturbed by the idea of bringing into the world the identical twin of someone who was already an adult …
Namely my wife, upon learning of my covert attempts to clone Raquel Darrian, which would give me a Reason to live until 2033. It would also be interesting to concoct a brood of me, putting them in radically different environments to see if Jayman’s right. Surely they won’t all start drinking in fourth grade. How would the feral one procure booze?
I think that a more likely scenario is that CRISPR will be used to create bio-weapons. The ensuing wars may do something about the dysgenic trends.
But…but…THIS ISN’T FAIR!
you may not have the same IQ as your father, but there is a chance for your off springs. But there is also a chance for them to inherit from your wife 🙂
shit, jayman is right unless both parents have high IQs.
”Therefore, it would be possible, through arranged marriages, to breed people with desirable traits such as good health, intelligence, and NOBLE CHARACTER”
pfffff, imagination to think how Galton define ”Noble”.
Galton helped poor families to stop having children like rabbits ** (and to end the cycle of poverty)
He stopped eating meat thinking about the unnecessary suffering that this causes the species domesticated by humans **
He came from a wealthy family, had money, is not it * He could have done a lot, showing how noble in spirit he was. But I have the *impression* that he did not very noble in his life, also has not done anything bad. But apathy in itself is not a positive neutral attitude.
I see, every day, on facebook, communities, mostly with women, who rescue dogs and cats from the streets. They do not seem to ” have ” very high IQ’s. They are even religious, on average. PETA is the atheist version.
Many of them continue to eat meat and do not extend their concern to other ”animals”. Contradiction i know, but they still do more in terms of noble behavior that many of the people, including those who are ” smarter ”. But it’s just a matter of raising awareness to stop eating meat from other animals, non-pet.
”middle classes had 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class”
These data do not seem correct and the analysis was poor. Of course, the working class had few children who managed to survive until more than 30 years, besides the nonexistence of modern Western medicine, there were still huge social inequalities.
But these figures seem wrong. In the past, everyone had many children at least 4 children per couple. The difference was in the percentage of children who survive to childhood diseases. It seems unlikely that only two children per couple, on average, of working class, who survived to reach adulthood in England, if at that time, the working class was very large, in any European country.
You do not have to let ” stupid ” people starving in the street, to practice eugenics.
Sometimes I think of autism as a low-functioning gifted, which could have been born ” normal ”, but because of a mutational excess, just pass the border of functionality.
”In China and Russia in the 19th century, as many as half of all babies died before adolescence. Imagine genetic load accumulating to the point that death rates returned to that level (16 to 20 percent would be a theoretical minimum) despite modern medicine. Then imagine a societal collapse that eliminates modern medicine or sharply limits its availability.”
What amaaaaziing!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 😉
IDEOLOGY: when you believe that research on a particular subject (indeed, almost ALL subjects) is complete and goes on to consider all ‘evidences” as absolute truths.
Charles Wood,
Why you can not accept that there are more than one kind of intelligence ** And that cognitive tests can not access all intelligence dimensions *
I’ll say again, I am not a classical ” iq-denier ” I am not against eugenics, it depends on how you define it. I am in favor of a humanitarian eugenics, correct, accurate, but before many other things are needed, including some of philosophical content, how to separate the individual’s essence in relation to any of its unfavorable biological conditions because EVERYONE, including the large Most of you, always take this kind of discussion at personally. But you guys, the defensors any eugenics, it seems, are responsible for these extreme reactions on the other side. It’s not just the way we speak / communicate, but also the way to internalize new knowledge, in this case, of a philosophical nature.
Nobody have guilty to born:” less intelligent ”, asthmatic, or even psychopathic. No one asked to be born, first, it seems stupid to think so is unrealistic, there no would be like someone anticipating the own birth and ask to be born of this or that way, only if it was created consciousness before the body. Still, it’s unlikely.
This is what I like, a little thoughtful humor to go along with our D & F.
The first step is to promote policies which encourage the most intelligent and fit among us to have more children. As it stands now, the educated upper middle class have fewer children because they’re so expensive and because parenting takes time and resources away from developing one’s career.
I recommend massive per-child tax exemptions. These must be exemptions, not tax-credits because tax credits appeal to low income earners too. (I’d actually reduce or eliminate tax credits.) Something like a $20,000 per year tax exemption for the first 5 years of a child, which drops to $5000 or so once the child hits 6. A family with an income of $120,000 or so would pay virtually no taxes if they had a large family. Smart families would have kids young, and keep the grandparents around to help raise them while they go off and work.
Why do we need more of these? They are the ones that have driven us to the edge of complete collapse. They are the ones that will give us a choice between two open borders presidential candidates.
If something is not working, try something else.
IQ is much more mutable than suggested by this sinister article. School kids at the end of the long summer holidays tend to have lower IQ tests cores than at the beginning of the summer, for example.
I am pretty sceptical about the uses to which these kinds of arguments are put. The Occcidental Observer crowd, exemplified by Phillippe Rushton will often use IQ differences not merely to explain differences in achievement between populations, but between individuals also. I don’t accept for a nano-second that George W Bush is any more intellectually advanced by myself. He has piggy backed on social networks like Skull and Bones to get where he is today (loathed and in the political wilderness). Others just resort to criminality – white collar criminality that is, although I get the distinct impression from the Occidental Observerites that the only crime that they are at all bothered with is low level, thuggish crime of the races and classes they love to hate.
The fundamental problem is the abject denial that intelligence exists as a trait which can be measured, that it is heritable, and that it matters. In our insane world folks spend thousands on purebred dogs and millions on purebred horses, but scream in rage if you suggest people are born with the same traits. In Michigan, Detroit Public Schools spends more per pupil than any other school system yet 93% of its students are not proficient in reading and 96% are not proficient in math. In many northern Michigan districts those numbers are reversed with 93% and 96% proficient while spending half the $14,000/pupil DPS spends. The difference is DPS is 95% African and northern Michigan is still 90%+ white. And despite this being a universal rule in every school in America, we must never, never, never even think that Africans have cognitive defects relative to whites, Asians, or Jews. To utter such a thought out loud is to lose your livelihood completely.
Eugenics will return, but it won’t be in America even if the technologies for genetic engineering are perfected here. Smart and affluent parents of all races will surreptitiously travel to China or Bolivia or wherever to have their future children engineered for greater intelligence and desired personality traits while back home loudly condemning anyone with the temerity to suggest the smallest reduction in welfare benefits for unmarried African mothers. Anti-abortion Christians will continue to blockade abortion clinics serving low IQ African populations while abstaining from reproduction themselves due to the cost of child rearing and tax burden on productive middle and upper middle class workers. Some will adopt African children who will grow up to become predatory of the adoptive parents and their peers. And due to the innumeracy of a population with average IQ of 100, they will continue to identify and glorify African unicorns like Ben Carson and Thomas Sowell, saying “Look! See what Jesus did? All Africans can be just like this if we just give them enough money!”
Just like Israel will ultimately be destroyed because it is surrounded by a billion (with a B) Muslims, intelligent whites will be devoured by Africans, Arabs, and Mesoamerican Indians. Israel at least has the sense to try to defend itself (although sheer numbers will prove that futile) while whites the world over invite their eventual destroyers into their nations with heaps of free goodies to lure ever more of them. There is no question “if” but only “when?” The northeast Asians shall inherit the earth.
The only accumulated load here is a giant load of donkey dung. This is just another progressive proposal, one that will fix ‘them’ but won’t effect ‘us’. As iffen points out, the very concept is flawed from the start, increasing the primary beneficiaries of government largess.
If William Shockley or Charles Wood wants to donate their seed money, or seed, more power to them. Keep the government out of it. The last time —and I write from knowing those who were sterilized and those who ran the programs— all the best intentions twisted into cultural enforcement, moral judgments, and power. What can you expect from a government program? Less than 10% of coerced or forced sterilizations in Ohio or Virginia had anything wrong with either their intellectual capabilities or ‘genetic load’.
Nobody should respect a proposal made by someone —IQ score be damned— who can’t see the obvious next step(s) or consequences of a their plan.
Arranged marriages already exist throughout the world and has been the case for many generations such as marrying within one’s caste in India or having parents negotiate marriages for their children, etc. Have the people of India or Pakistan or any of the other arranged marriage societies produced a superior breed of human by now?
It’s a commonplace, and old, observation that the dimmer bulbs have more children than the brighter ones. But what to do about it is always kept rather vague and packaged as something inoffensive; it’s always “voluntary”, supposedly. Or test the entire population for their IQ and then pay those below a certain point to have their tubes cut. If there’s no groundswell of volunteers from this class what then?
Who will do the appointing to those “committees”? To have children people will have to please a ‘committee’ first? Thanks but no thanks, I wouldn’t want to live in this dictatorial brave new world bent on instituting “purifying selection” schemes. Utopianism is always a Trojan Horse for loosing a host of evils upon the world.
Academic discussions of IQ are interesting. But social-planning IQ is shortsighted. IQ is intelligence. It’s good stuff. But only a modest number of a well-functioning society need be high IQ. Talent, which differs from intelligence, also comes into play. Many skilled individuals aren’t all that smart but serve society well. Many intelligent individuals aren’t that talented but make valued contributions.
Culture may be more important in both the case of the low IQ rioter and the high IQ predator.
All this heady stuff.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to get rid of all blacks ?
Charles,
Nice try … but nothing you suggest will work in even a moderately free society. In short, in that society, women would have to be restrained and forcibly inseminated to carry and birth someone else’s child. Likewise, men would not, under duress, voluntarily labor to resources someone else’s child to the next generation. Hence, once born, the question is, who would raise the so-called genetically superior children? The only recourse would be human breeding farms. Didn’t the Nazis already try this? Would we get “nature” right only to totally screw up “nurture”?
Two more issues: (1) Superior genetic material does not make moral and socially responsible human beings. Indeed, you might be breeding genetically superior psychopaths with high IQs. My take (experience) is that many people with high IQs develop a sense of election that plays out in a disdain for the rest of humanity. The disdain often expresses itself in systematic exploitation and abuse. (2) The elite (doctors, scientists, senior managers, politicians) would naturally consider themselves part of the election (regardless of their genes) and manipulate the system to carry their genes to the next generation via the human breeding farms. Consider the possibilities!
Charles, I could also hope for a totally rational world — Plato’s Republic in one variation or another — but I fear your ideal world would become a failed dystopia of pretense and illusion. It cannot survive the reductio ad absurdum. Sorry, but “natural selection” (which means we humans are not in charge) continues to be the only viable genetic selection process at hand. Let the games begin!
Only if you ”have” an iq of a ant.
It is a question too stupid to have an educated answer, sorry.
The science of genetics is just starting. It is just a matter of time, supercomputers, and big data before the relationship between the different genes that affect intelligence and degenerative diseases are understood.
It is just a matter of time before gene testing and incubators will product children. People will want to pass on their genetics (even if altered) – and give their new offspring perfect nutrition. When will this happen – in 100 years – certainly in 200 years? Certainly as a life time extends to 150 years and beyond, our current human cultural norms will change.
A new species will come about – we humans will be like the Neanderthals.
All that sounds so great, but I’d find it more palatable if there were some sense of the tragedy involved in the death of “we humans”.
Kind of like the respect native Americans expressed (supposedly) for the animals they killed.
Since few beyond John Hawks have much sympathy for the Neanderthals that’s probably asking too much.
Hear! Hear this good man!
I have mixed feelings on forced sterilization. On the one hand, we definitely don’t want or need folks with IQ of 70 reproducing. But on the other hand, we cannot trust government.
My solution, which does leave some gaps, is to make sterilization voluntary. Tie it to government money. You can (1) sell your fertility to government for say $20,000. That would save us billions of dollars in the long run as those who sell their fertility would otherwise impose the lifelong cost of their offspring on society. Or (2) you can trade your fertility for benefits. If you cannot feed yourself on an ongoing basis, it goes without saying that you can’t feed any offspring. So we will give you your welfare benefits, but you are giving us your ovaries or testes for the EBT card. Of course despite the inherent logic in both proposals, both the socialist and the Christers would have throes of conniption fits so it’s an exercise in fantasy.
No. Not unless we learn its okay to shoot intruders. Europe will be subsumed within a generation as each wave of Africans and Arabs encounters zero resistance. Very soon they’ll realize they can simply take what they want as the rapists have done in Sweden already. The Europeans show no signs of willingness or ability to stop this. Similarly, Americans allow vast mobs of Mesoamerican Indians to gather and “protest” with impunity. Remember that Africa’s population is forecast to grow to over a billion this century. And Africans are already fully dependent on foreign food and medical donations. When the Camp of the Saints ships appear off the coast of Maryland, will the US Navy sink them or welcome the “refugees” ashore with a gift basket of goodies like food, housing, clothing, etc?
The ability of a handful of wealthy elites to genetically engineer their children will be subsumed by the tsunami of third world fecundity.
“I don’t accept for a nano-second that George W Bush is any more intellectually advanced by myself. He has piggy backed on social networks like Skull and Bones to get where he is today (loathed and in the political wilderness). ”
GWB has the IQ of a corn dog, but what has that to do with the article?
stop giving aid to africa, problem solved.
We live with a form of government that allows idiots to vote…..that is a problem.
As I stated in my post, the eugenicists don’t stop at the idea of intelligence differing between groups. They make the wholly unreasonable suggestion that intelligence is inexorably linked to success in life. Maybe you can posit such a link for large groups but reading the Occidental Observer I can see that eugenicists link this to individual differences in intelligence. They tend to discount the role of social networks (unless they are talking of the Jews).
We’ve had plenty of those to choose from in the past: Roman Catholicism, medieval Judaism, colonial-era Puritanism, Latter Day Saints, etc. all have enjoyed great success in getting the gifted to breed. With gusto.
But scientific eugenicists lack anything similar. I don’t know, there’s just something uniting those systems that isn’t present in the scientific method and the arts (such as eugenics) that it engenders.
I seem to remember some guy who said, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
Whatever happened to him?
Well, he did get his degrees from a couple of backwater Bible colleges, didn’t he?
He’s an idiot. What’s your point?
There has NOT been a near one standard deviation decline in average IQ since Victorian times. Period.
Almost zero? I shouldn’t be here then, should I?
Parents aren’t having children later these days. Indeed, if anything, they may not have them as late. Older parents today are because people start having children later. But they also stop sooner than they did in the past. There were many children born to old parents back in the day because people had children so much longer.
But the increase (if such an increase is in fact real) has nothing to do with increasing genetic load. Evolution simply doesn’t act so quickly (see the breeder’s equation).
Many of the diseases you mention (type I diabetes, allergies/asthma, deafness) have some pathogenic involvement. They can still be heritable, but looking only at genes is only getting part of the story.
It’s my understanding that all of the purported growth is due to diagnostic changes.
This post does convey a good many important facts, but there are key errors that might serve to be counterproductive.
Idiots have an IQ of 25 or lower. What’s your proof?
Not to stir into your argument, but if you are curious there seems to be a lot of evidence accumulating that implicates autoimmune effects in asthma and allergies.
One theory is that our modern lives are so lacking in exposure to “dirty” things that young systems do not get primed for dealing with the world. According to this theory/hypothesis the increased lack of “priming” accounts for the increase in these diseases.
Some extend this theory to diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease.
In whose world do the “best” men masturbate for a three-digit check and then turn their backs on their progeny? That’s the kind of r-selection behavior we want to keep out of the gene pool!
The first future generation will suffer greatly from having one or both natural parents stripped from them. We aren’t field mice. We have evolved to connect with our own parents, a rare species with fathers rather than sires.
We will likely look back at the various third-party reproduction methods with the same disgust we now do at the castrati craze which swept Italy, in which children were likewise subjected to monstrous crimes in the quest for some vague future public benefit.
That is, unless genetic load reduces us to morons incapable of the simplest moral calculations. But the “sperm babies” will be the last to fall that far, as they were selected for high intelligence.
Check out the stories of the intelligent sperm bank and surrogacy children at http://www.anonymousus.org, to see how high intelligence deals with the degrading manner in which it is brought into the world.
I stopped reading TOO when MacDonald wrote about a time he had unironically sent “the mantra” to his colleagues. I mean I’m all about simplicity in branding but The Mantra is absolutely laughable for reasons I assume I don’t need to explain here.
But anyway… even though I don’t read TOO anymore I think you are painting with too broad a brush. I don’t think KM or most of his disciples would deny that social networks play a role among goyim. He would merely posit that Jews are better at networking than goyim, with exceptions among the rarified WASP elite who have essentially come to form somewhat of a Jew/WASP hybrid class in the last few generations.
If anything I imagine Jews, while ethnocentric when dealing with goyim, are much more intraethnically meritocratic than WASPs. Can you imagine Israel choosing someone like GWB to be its leader simply because of his family ties? I think Jews have mastered the balance between ethnocentrism and meritocracy, whereas WASPs seem to have gotten the short end of both of those sticks.
“Sometimes I think of autism as a low-functioning gifted, which could have been born ” normal ”, but because of a mutational excess, just pass the border of functionality.”
Autism, interest in things, their control and use, has a broad spectrum of intelligence and abilities – as does its counterpart, psychopathy, which has an interest in people, their control and use, and has a broad spectrum of intelligence and abilities.
High function autists/Aspergers benefit society while high function psychopaths are the ones who will undermine and destroy civilization.
Why is all of the focus on severe autism and not on severe psychopathy – i.e. politicians?
His actions.
Ah, but there’s the rub.
Whites can produce the kind of agricultural output that makes it possible for a large percentage of the enormous black and brown population to exist. They cannot do it for themselves: if whites withhold the unction of their presence, there will be, has to be, a huge reduction in their populations.
Whites are also capable-were they sufficiently and correctly motivated-of fighting wars of huge asymmetry against black or brown, or most yellow, opponents. Indeed, they have done so several times in modern warfare, albeit never with the benefit of whites as a primary goal.
If Whites decided to band together and to apply their full resources to the problem of white survival via taking and holding an exclusive territory no other people on earth would give them any substantial difficulty in doing so.
Neocon pundit Hugh Hewitt said something many people on the whiteright simply cannot comprehend in a book several years ago. He said, “Majorities require the votes of some not-very-bright people”. That’s especially true of those of us who came up under libertarianism or some variant thereof, most of whom hate “talking points politics” with a vengeance. The fact is that for a very substantial number of people, including a lot of people who are not low IQ at all, talking points politics is all the politics they are going to get. That’s why the libtys consistently get about one percent of the vote.
I left libertarianism for the usual reasons (at least amongst the racially conscious) a long time ago, but the lesson remains. “The Mantra” is talking points politics reduced to a stiletto edge. It can penetrate very thick skulls. And it deliberately provokes its antagonists in the same way that Hitler’s use of a red background for his swastika on the Nazi flag further outraged the Communists. He wanted them to be outraged as possible. In this way, it was they who became the reactionaries and went overboard, showing themselves for who they were to the onlookers (who outnumbered Nazis and Communists together six, maybe seven to one) at the least and at best putting themselves imprudently in a situation where the Nazis could pound them down.
“Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White” is a devastating statement, far more so than I thought until I tried saying it myself. In certain parts of my dreary Midwestern city it will start a fistfight with the leftists. I found that out the hard way once. (I won, but still….)
Most sperm bank babies are unaware that they are sperm bank babies until they are adolescents and some never find out. They have a family life identical in most cases to those children that are sired by their “real fathers”. Any sane positive eugenics program would seek to impregnante women in stable married relationships whose husbands have become infertile through disease or because Dad got snipped and later events caused them to change their mind on having more children.
In my case, I am both a sperm bank baby and a sperm donor myself. I have fathered three children, I am informed, by the sperm bank, as well as being the father of two children by my wife.
My father was diagnosed with testicular cancer in the early 1960s, shortly after the birth of his first child with my mother, and was, let’s be blunt, castrated. Aside from the peculiarity of never having seen my father naked growing up, I had a completely normal childhood and adolescence, as did my younger sister, who was also conceived with donor sperm (by a different donor). I graduated 13 out of 4xx in my class in high school, was offered (but turned down) an appointment to the US Coast Guard Academy, and graduated one seat down from the top 10% of my class with an engineering degree from one of the most prestigious engineering colleges (besides MIT or Caltech) in the U.S. (Hint: one of our alumni was the first of 12 men, all white ,who went someplace no one else had before, and no one has since.) I’ve had what I think is a pretty successful life.
I made the decision to donate myself in my twenties. It wasn’t for the money, which was something like $75 per sample, and that only after several donations. The sperm bank put me through a huge battery of tests and a very invasive physical and a very invasive interview. I felt as if I had had a good life and wanted to pay it forward, so to speak. I do not regret it at all.
Of course, this makes me the biological father of three children whom I will never meet and whose lives are completely beyond my control. I feel that this is irrelevant since those children were going to be conceived with or without my involvement, and I think their chances for a good life are at least as good as mine were.
Sure, by why does the immune system go haywire? Industrial pollutants may be one thing, but pollen has been around forever. It simply makes no sense that it would give people trouble – unless certain microorganisms were involved.
Clinically ”idiot” tend to score 50-80, and among eurasian population, seems.
Conceptually idiot** Most of humankind.
Yes, exactly. Well, according to evolutionary psychologists, psychopathy is normal while autism is a dysfunction. The high-functioning autism do not seem very dysfunctional. People need to leave the mental laziness aside and correctly analyze events and phenomena. The high-functioning autism may have comorbid antisocial personality. Another thing that should also be taken of the head is that people who go around shooting the other are all mentally ill. Many of them are not, however, be even more rational than the mainstream. And more, nobody believes the ” our government ” as mass murderers.
I think the following, the vast majority of functional autistic, high and low functioning, are very intelligent, many of them the level of genius, the arts, politics, science, philosophy … But they tend to have a larger excess of mutations that make them more sensory hypersensitivity. The overlap between autism spectrum and giftedness is huge and many of the cognitive, if not all of them, which add up to a gifted, are present and are part of the symptomatology of autism.
Human rights are to protect ” psycho/sociopaths ” 😉
especially blacks psychopaths, being created to kill many whites.
It is ‘our kind elites’ do not like to speak them aloud. 😉
Autism tends to affect the facial muscles and depending on the case, even the body, the typical Huber-bumbling nerd. Psychopathy, by contrast, does not affect the facial muscles, and humans have evolved to recognize facial expressions, that psychopaths are very good to play.
The difference between ”patho-genics” and ”genics” is the level because genes are like vaccines.
Diabetes increase clearly because nutrition change. Today, we eat sugar every day/every weak while in the past, candies and others were few and expensive.
There are 7.3 billion souls currently in the world. Think of them as all the water in the earth’s oceans. It is preposterous to believe that any scheme dreamed up to influence the evolutionary course of humanity, as the ones described in this article, could have any significant effect. It may be a great topic for conversation and discussion, a form of entertainment and intellectual calisthenics, but who are we kidding?
Better to spend our efforts helping as many of our fellow human beings as we can, and hope for the best. It’s the least we can do with the limited amount of time each of us has as a drop of water in the vast evolutionary ocean.
I fully agree that “anti-racist” means “anti-white” in virtually every context that it’s used. Who could dispute that? My beef is more with the “Asia for the Asians…” as if Asia and Africa arent full of countless ethnic and racial groups in many different countries with many different types of immigration policies, etc. Basically it treats Asians and Africans as monolithic racial groups and Asia and Africa as monolithic political entities. I cant get on board with a saying that anyone with an IQ above 85 should be able to deconstruct. I do understand though that talking points politics is unavoidable in a world where most people lack the time, inclination and/or cognitive capacity to think deeply about politics.
If I may ask: what city and can you tell me about that fight? Sounds like an interesting story
The meek were supposed to inherit the earth
But they aren’t the ones who most frequently birth
It’s those without will
Who can’t swallow a pill
Whose love of their children is their source of self worth
I wrote that a while back, hope you folks appreciate it
Science will move forward, with or without the ideological opinions of the babbling masses, well represented I see in the comment section here at Unz review. For those thinking we have to get of the lower classes, me thinks you shouldn’t be throwing the first stone. For those too stupid to believe in evolution I hope to be there to see the look on their dumb faces when they come to the realization, they are next.
Nice primer Charles Wood, blogs will fill with millions of words from the teeming masses, hands will be wrung and fingers pointed self righteously and it won’t make a dog turds difference. You can’t stop progress, fairly soon there will be a singularity kicking in under the grand title better brains and hurricane winds of change will blow us to some place we can’t even imagine.
Why not just force DNA tests and, depending on what is found, either neuter or execute people with poor DNA.
Science is disgusting.
Glib oversimplifications don’t help anyone – not least when they are wrong and founded in ignorance. Your remark about politicians suggests that you have been pretty well isolated from the species. I have known hundreds quite well enough to know that a very large proportion go into politics to do some good to the world including both the ideologues and the old fashioned carriers of noblesse oblige (not necessarily either rich or of the nobility but confirming Maslow’s description of the Hierarchy of Needs). Nor do most get corrupted or change their personalitues after time in politics. My knowledge of the US may be less than yours but I doubt that you could make a case for US politicians being more than rarely psychopaths.
I can’t resist an instant nitpick before rushing off to gasp on the tennis court… Populations made up of immigrants might be OK with some pollen but not that of their new country for several generations….
And what about offsetting benefits? After all a bit of hayfever isn’t disastrous…
I find it more plausible that there are more than a negligible number of successful climbers to high positions in large business and other corporations who are psychopaths. A priori one would expect politicians to detect and eliminate their psychopathic peers more efficiently than most, partly because they do tend to be more like peer relationships than boss and subordinate. On the other hand politicians have to be clear eyed or just cynical realists more than, say, school teachers, so they probably are pretty good at getting away with things like overclaiming expenses, keeping a bimbo on the payroll or other misdemeanours which I don’t suppose you, Drapetomaniac, would put down to psychopathy more than incidentally.
“I find it more plausible that there are more than a negligible number of successful climbers to high positions in large business and other corporations who are psychopaths.”
Certainly, and it is obvious that they are as adept at controlling and using government as are those in government are adept at controlling and using corporations. Is it not interesting that corporations are a legal construct of government?
Those hundreds that you have known “quite well” would undoubtedly kill any and all to maintain their rule over the masses. That is, to kill the people who resist government – the tool which is used to steal trillions of dollars, destroy trillions in wealth, kill hundreds of millions, and enslave virtually everyone on Earth.
Only a psychopath, an abject moron, or an abject psychopathic moron could willingly embrace something as vile and anti-human as that. And I bet that those in government think of themselves as warm, wonderful people, doing Gods work.
Perhaps you would qualify as such.
What offsetting benefit could there be?
The only one could be better immune response. And that means to pathogens.
No matter how you slice it, there is pathogenic involvement.
Your aprioristic (“it is obvious”) mode of thought (quasi-reasoning if you like) is useless for understanding the real complex world. And even the abstract quasi logical connections you make are dodgy. Your idea of political psychopaths and business psychopaths reciprocally manipulating each other is beyond parody once you connect it to corporations being “legal constructs of government”. I presume you are not including corporations sole but maybe think that politicians are forever threatening (very quietly) to take away one of the normal incidents of the modern joint stock corporation – like limited liability – to name only one which is particularly problematic for your fantasy because it didn’t exist in California (yes California!) till 1931.
Try to get out, meet people, and use your eyes and ears to learn a bit about the people you write about with such grandiosity.
And presumably the pathogens are evolving to keep ahead of the evolving defences? So where would one look – in some DNA samples presumably – for the empirical evidence of such co-evolution?