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See, earlier (2010) The Fulford File: “Eugenics” Is What Happens When Cousins Don’t Marry
Writing a “popular science” book is no easy task. You must deftly walk a tightrope between making your arguments exciting, absorbing and comprehensible to the “educated layman” but, also, nuanced, objective and scientifically sound. If his fellow Leftists scientists and commentators quoted on its Amazon page are to be believed, then Adam Rutherford [Tweet him]’s new book, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics, has accomplished this task . According to TV scientist Prof. Alice Roberts [Tweet her] Control is “weighty and serious but accessible and perfectly pitched” while for journalist Alex Preston [Tweet him] it is “breathtakingly brilliant and dark, a popular science book that doesn’t talk down to you.” Actually, the book is OK, well-written if not very original, up to a point. That point is when Rutherford’s emotions, arguably driven by his alienation as a mixed-race child of immigrants, take over and cause him to join in the intensifying Woke War Against Science.
For the most part, Control is an introduction to the history of “eugenics.” It explains that from the mid-nineteenth century until about the mid-twentieth century, there was a significant movement in Western countries that favored policies to improve the genetic stock of populations so that would become more intelligent, more pro-social and healthier.
There was also concern, especially among scientists such Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, about “dysgenics.” Prior to the Industrial Revolution, social class was correlated with fertility, child mortality was approximately 50%, and so the genetically sick, and those with low intelligence and poor moral character (correlates of low socioeconomic status) were purged every generation. But, despite its reputation, the Industrial Revolution, and especially the rise of inoculation against killer childhood diseases, created easier conditions and, thus, dysgenics. This risked the breakdown of civilization in the view of the early eugenics advocates.
By 1900, eugenics was massively influential among Western elites. Conservatives, such as former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, perceived it as a means of creating a great people. Leftists regarded it as a means of reducing suffering, and some of the most vocal advocates of eugenics were committed leftists—George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells. Opposition came from conservative traditionalists, such as G.K. Chesterton, who felt that eugenicists were playing God. [Eugenics and the Left, by Diane Paul, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1984].
Laws were passed in various countries, some not revoked until the 1970s, allowing the sterilization of “mental defectives” and, in some cases, encouraging those considered of good “quality” to be more fecund.
It is at this point, however, that Rutherford’s historical scholarship starts to go awry. Rutherford asserts that “Winston Churchill was a key driver of eugenics policy in the UK in the first decades of the twentieth century.” There is something of reappraisal of Winston Churchill occurring in the UK, with Leftists increasingly attacking his “hero” status and arguing that he was “racist.” Rutherford appears to have been drawn into this emotional revulsion against the embodiment of the old, pre-Multiculturalism Britain and has, thus, lost his critical faculties on this point.
In fact, other than separating males and females in asylums to avoid pregnancy, Britain did not have a “eugenic policy.” No eugenics laws were passed in Britain (something which Rutherford concedes later in his book).
Worse still, Rutherford tells us: “The toxicity of the idea of eugenics no doubt emerged from our collective discovery of the horrors of the Second World War.” There is, indeed, a popular belief that the association between Nazism and eugenics is the reason why it is now taboo. However, this is simply inaccurate.
As Daylanne English [Email her]has argued in in her book Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; it was the Great Depression that started to make eugenics less popular. The reason: “it was clearly an external force” and “many middle—and even upper-class individuals were adversely affected.” It “forced many eugenics advocates to realize that unemployment did not necessarily signify ‘individual weakness’”
Then, as English psychologist Richard Lynn has argued in his book Eugenics: A Reassessment, the individualistic, egalitarian, pro-equality, harm-avoidance-focused culture that commenced in the 1960s made eugenics increasingly taboo.
“Nazi eugenics” is plainly a post hoc justification. For Rutherford to simply assume otherwise is less than impressive historical scholarship.
In terms of exploring the science of eugenics, Rutherford does make some good points. Gene editing, focusing on specific genes, may have unpredictable effects when lots of genes must work together to create certain desirable traits. Moreover, increasing one trait—for example, intelligence—may result in us becoming worse in another trait. As F. Roger Devlin has put it, in reviewing my book Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma and Being Born Prematurely,
A person ignorant of viticulture would probably assume that the best wine would be produced by the best soils. In fact, when vines are planted in especially rich soil, the result is an enormous profusion of leaves and very few grapes. High-quality wine grapes are grown in relatively weak—but not too weak—soil: it is precisely the vine’s struggle against a suboptimal environment which brings out the best in grapes
[Premature Birth and Genius, Occidental Observer , February 9, 2022].
Similarly, the complex processes that have led to us reaching this stage of our evolution may go wrong, indeed likely will, if we attempt to make simplistic interventions.
But Rutherford’s definition of “eugenics” is extremely tendentious, seemingly to avoid the counterargument that eugenics-critics are just hypocritical virtue-signalers.
Eugenics is defined by the OED as “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.”
This being so, if you abort a child with Down’s Syndrome, or any physical or mental defect, you are engaging in “negative eugenics”: eliminating the unfit. Conversely, if you find the qualities of intelligence, moral character, and beauty (a proxy for genetic health) attractive in a partner, and breed with that partner, you are practicing “positive eugenics.” If this was how your parents felt about each other, you are product of “positive eugenics.” If, like Adam Rutherford, you are half-Indian (indeed your mother’s maiden name is Sitaram, part of the high caste Kalingi), then you are a product of many generations of deliberate eugenics.
To get round this problem, Rutherford redefines “eugenics” as being “designed to sculpt society through selective breeding,” I.E. creating a centrally planned “Brave New World”, contrasting this with “medical interventions designed to offer options to parents, enabling them to make choices about the medical health of lives they may want to bring into the world.”
However, surely, even being offered these “choices” cannot be divorced from promoting “desirable characteristics.”
But the most obvious problem with Rutherford’s book is that he has tremendous trouble even trying to seem objective.
Rutherford is still seething against those who attended “London Conference on Intelligence,” which took place at University College London between 2015 and 2017 and was smeared as a “eugenics conference” despite definitive proof it was no such thing [Communicating Intelligence Research, by Michael Woodley of Menie et al., Intelligence, 2018]). Rutherford was part of the Woke mob that suppressed the conference, telling the rabidly CultMarx London Guardian newspaper that the views of certain participants were “deeply obnoxious…pseudoscientific nonsense,”
He unnecessarily uses his book as a means expressing how he feels; as a kind of therapy. He is simply unable to discuss this conference, which I attended, in a dispassionate way. Thus the attendees, which included a number of senior academics, are referred to variously as “fringe, race-obsessed cosplayers,” “controversial science hobbyists and racists,” “self-styled heretics and racist fools” (I get the impression this is a reference to my podcast “The Jolly Heretic”), and as “a small cabal of researchers, writers and oddballs for whom race and eugenics are the enduring passion of their lives.”
Manifestly, this is not the language of a scientist. It is the language of an ideologue who is attracted to science for whatever personal reasons.
Emotion is the enemy of scholarship, and it is difficult to produce quality scholarship—or even sufficiently objective popular science—when you have strong negative feelings about the subject matter, cognitive dissonance in relation to it (being a product of eugenics yourself) and a deep loathing for some of the scientists about whom you need to be objective.
Which makes Rutherford’s book, although it makes some good points, just part of the extraordinary reversal of the Scientific Revolution that is now leading us to a new Dark Age.
Edward Dutton (email him | Tweet him) is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, Łódź, Poland. You can see him on his Jolly Heretic video channels on YouTube and Bitchute.
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I think the idea of eugenics is a good thing. Too many view this as something force IMPOSED by the state on all people residing in that state.
But IMO, in the relatively new future, as we gain better control of genetic modification, it is likely that there will be much genetic ‘tuning’ of offspring to improve children to meet parental desires on an individual basis. Of course, the wealthier people will get and take first crack at such modifications.
Further on, mods will be performed to the germline to propagate the changes naturally going forward, so that virtually everyone will have no diseases, everyone will be good looking, have builds like athletes/models with 150+ IQ’s.
There are no shortage of SF authors who have covered this subject from a positive viewpoint. Examples include famous books like ‘Beggars in Spain’ by Nancy Kress, where sleep is genetically abolished but only in the wealthy as the process is expensive, Iain Banks ‘Culture’ universe novels and Alastair Reynolds in his ‘Revelation Space’ novels where genetic modification is easy and people can be or become anything they like from alien beings adapted to an environment that humans could not live in to winged beings able to fly and so much more.
I am likely too old to take advantage of such advances but younger people may have such an opportunity.
Nature practices eugenics every single second. If prey is too slow, too weak or too stupid, it dies. If a predator is too slow, too weak or too stupid, it dies. Plants that cannot produce cellulose correctly die. Humans are the only organisms that think it’s a good idea to piss in the gene pool.
You want eugenics? Do what I did: marry a healthy, friendly, and intelligent woman and knock out some babies. If you are lucky, you will get healthy, friendly and intelligent offspring but there are no guarantees. The industrial revolution has turned out to be a two-edged sword for eugenics: it has reduced the misery of childhood disease and death and initially greatly improved the nutrition of the young. We are now past that stage and the young are now increasingly suffering from chronic diseases caused by corporate medicine and corporate processed food. I noted the other day that Col. Douglas Macgregor, in making the case against war with Russia, observed that only 30% of American youths between 18 and 25 were fit for military service. Dysgenics pales in comparison to this disaster.
I’ll repeat something I’ve said many months ago – because, given THIS article, it’s still relevant:
In his video about eugenics, Mr. Taylor should have mentioned, to gain ‘brownie points’, that one of the GREATEST biologists EVER, W. H. Hamilton, an intellectual mentor of Richard Dawkins (but far more courageous than Dawkins), did review Richard Lynn’s book on dysgenics – and, reviewed it POSITIVELY, even saying “Galton was right”!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1469-1809.2000.6440363.x
You don’t need luck if you use IVF… and embryo selection.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/03/genomic-predictions-stephen-hsu-making.html
See segments (19:00) and (43:15)
But it is expensive.
There is a history of cystic fibrosis in my family. Consequently, we are careful to have ourselves and prospective partners tested to determine whether we carry the recessive CF gene; we have no wish to bring CF children into the world. So we are practising eugenics. No apologies; there’s nothing wrong with that, as far as I can see.
Coercive governments are inherently dysgenic. Indeed, any “eugenics” policy run by the State will be a mockery at the best of times. They have no idea what merit is and the idea of them finding out is utterly ludicrous. In practice it will be, as every legislative law is, a way to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Anyone who objects to this base and animalistic regime will count as their enemies, so guess what the effect is.
Neither “individualistic” nor “harm-avoidance” are the correct terms for the ideas which Dutton wishes to refer to.
Individualism is an unalloyed good. I think he wants to talk about atomization or something along those lines. Rather than promoting individual free will, they are explicitly banning the following of any leader except the coercive State. Including e.g. husbands.
The phrase “harm avoidance” in fact refers to utopianism. Utopianism is the idea that everything can be costless and everything is perfectible. If you have to pay for anything or there is a bad thing anywhere in the world, Something Must be Done. It’s quite clear that Utopians are allowed to inflict as much harm as they want on the way to Utopia, because it’s literally a philosophy of mental illness. If it weren’t contradictory and self-defeating we wouldn’t call it crazy.
Any State eugenics program is in fact a dysgenics program. Conquest #3. In this case, gene editing is laughably primitive. Analogous to a child’s finger-painting. They have less than no idea what they’re doing.
The correct way to do a eugenics program is to not violate the don’t-be-Stalin principle. You could in theory kill/sterilize 90% of the population every generation, but the other thing you can do is create an invite-only city and invite the 10% you wish to keep. The noninterference version.
This way, when you inevitably fuck up your animal husbandry and create a Morlock race instead of an Eloi race, the 90% are still around.
Caveat: a non-deviant State could happily execute the criminal 10%.
Or rather, several traits. E.g. the special genetic diseases which Jews are prone to.
Emotion is the enemy of children pretending to be grownups. Yes it is true that thinking rationally is difficult when emotionally activated – at first. It’s a personal vice, not an inherent flaw. Train yourself, don’t be an amateur.
The woman’s body already uses embryo selection, and a vastly more sophisticated version than the human version. It is true that it misses a few things, but in general trading the one benefit for several downsides is not a good trade. E.g. IVF doesn’t select good spermatozoa.
Abortion is a better option. Once the embryo is big enough to sample its genome without causing noticeable harm, do so.
You have a serious lack of understanding here.
Projection. It’s clear you’re too short for this ride, and it seems you’re self-aware of this fact.
No, there is nothing wrong with that; it’s perfectly rational and humane. But such off-the-record eugenics is practiced mainly by responsible people, who think of consequences of their behavior beyond “I want … ” (two children, seven children, 15 children).
Probably many people would approve of freelance selection of qualities in offspring, although they’d be careful not to say so in writing or where anyone might overhear. But the unofficial party line is “Eww, Nazis, Hitler, concentration camps, discrimination.” That’s all the masses know:
“Hey, no worries, if we can’t afford to raise them the government will take up the slack.” Possible transmission of undesirable health conditions? “Duh, children with genetic disabilities are just like anybody else! Everybody’s equal!”
So the status quo is, personal eugenics is okay as long as you don’t call it that, but societal eugenics is cursed.
As I’ve suggested before…
Addictive birth control pills (for women and men). Pregnancy would then require a specific and coordinated effort by both parents, resulting in strong selection in favor of intelligence and conscientiousness.