Eugenics / Dysgenics
I will complete the rants in my last post sometime later.
For now, I will pen one other flash of thought I have had -
Why is ability to have children related to social ability?
Why you need to have a good personality to impress others so that you can marry others...and then have children?
This will motivate the growth of people with strong social skills...rather than those with strong overall skills and evolutionary abilities....
This is horrendously wrong.
If a scientist is brilliant, and lets say he made contributions that had impact on the whole of humanity....but he is not good socially, and people dont like his company...then he will probably not have any children....his genes will be lost....they will not survive to continue to be in the human pool...they will vanish....
On the other hand, if you are good socially, and have a good personality then it is almost certain that you will marry, and have children, in fact, many children (2 or more). [ "Many" is important, since if you have just 1 child, then you are reducing your type of genes from 2 - you and your wife - to 1, so having 2 children is a must - having more increases population - so 2 is preferable - leave 3 or more children to the nobel laureates ].
People in the scientist/techy/philosophers (usually high IQ) group are brilliant and have lower social skills, so, on average, they tend to have 1 child or often none. So their genes are reducing rapidly.
End Result: Avg IQ of people is lowering.
The Indians (not red-indians, but from country India), in the ancient times, realized this (Indian civilization is very old - they had enough time to find this out), and then did a very ingenious thing to avoid this to happen.
I dont know how they achieved it....but they did it.
Whats that ingenious thing? That thing is this:
They sow the word into society, they made it a custom of society, a tradition, that parents should decide the girl their child has to marry. And they must do compulsory do it for them, at the age of around 25-30. So even if you are not liked by a girl enough that you marry, the parents will get you married anyway. And then they made having children almost compulsory for a married couple, as a societal tradition.
Now this results into a society where everybody ends up getting married whether they have good social skills - and then have children. (Note: those who are not capable of living upto their adolescence die anyway, and hence the gene pool gets rid of such people.)
This does not increase the average IQ, but this atleast works to make it relatively constant.
I have a feeling that one other thing they did worked towards increasing it. That thing is they sowed the culture of "untouchability". People were identified who were very incapable in terms of abilities, and they were termed untouchables, and made all "normal" people stay away from them. They had realized that the sons of incapable people will also be incapable, and so they effectively outcaste them and their children - thus their whole family - from the soceity. They ended up having less children. So effectively the average IQ increased. (Note: This untouchability concept has been abandoned in India in the past century or so)
In the United States, a free society exists, and this "decreasing average IQ effect", called as dysgenics, is prominant here - as compared to India, where it is almost non-existent.
The US must do something about this.
If you are a scientist or consider yourself more evolved, then please have children. :-). It will help the civilization.
Do checkout this related article on eugenics/dysgenics.
Comments welcome. I will shortly make a yahoogroup on this topic on who want to discuss the topic. I will edit this post then to include the name of that group.
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Comments
This is only half the story. If India's marriage practices had been eugenic throughout history while other mating customs were dysgenic, India would be more intelligent than other nations. This is not what we see; India's IQ is a good 20 points below Western nations.
Much of the Indian caste system is, put into very direct language, a result of an intelligent race having conquered a less intelligent race and attempting to prevent interbreeding. This attempt was not entirely successful, although the upper caste Indians do score better on measured IQ than the lower castes. In fact, Arthur Hu claims that these high caste Indians do better in Western society even than the Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians do.
The rest of your essay was spot on.
Posted by: Mark | March 14, 2005 12:02 AM
Hi Mark,
Though I now do not consider eugenics as highly as I was considering when I wrote this, just wanted to add one comment:
The definition of IQ today does not consider other kinds of intelligence -- they only proble the ability of the mind to manipulate symbols.
Many other human faculties which can be part of the measure of a person's fitness are not included in an IQ test -- many people will agree on this.
One more thing, today I think biological fitness is growing less important -- social darwinism is more important, since our minds have reached a basic stage where we can continue to grow on the basis of our ability to store and communicate information, irrespective of whether our actual intelligence grows. (of course, this is only true within limits -- if IQ goes too low, then we will face problems)
Posted by: Gaurang | October 8, 2005 4:38 AM