Pragmatism
If ideological, political, and moral considerations aren't part of how you define whether a social policy "works," you've already gone completely off the rails. https://t.co/kLJ5ZJnuVD
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 16, 2020
This eugenics crap is so dangerous. In the US it lead to forced sterilizations of women in the South — sometimes against their wills, often without their knowledge — that became so common that they came to be referred to as “Mississippi appendectomies.” https://t.co/TKFQGFc0dL
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) February 16, 2020
My observations over the years have led me to conclude that people tend to partner up with individuals like themselves in traits they consider important. So the tendency is towards non-random mating; auto-eugenics if you will.
Environments select individuals best suited to them, and individuals tend to gravitate towards environments most advantageous to them, where their chances of meeting up with similar others are increased also. Small stature, while no advantage on the open plains, is very handy in a dense rainforest environment: where unsurprisingly, one encounters pygmy deer, pygmy hippos and pygmy humans, all trying to avoid encounters with low in height though long head-to-tail ‘pygmy’ reptiles: by which I mean snakes.
The idea that whether a thing can be said to work supervenes on its moral connotations is utter nonsense. Of course we can say that something evil works, just as we can say that something good doesn’t. God, I hate moralistic asshats.
Apropos of the topic: https://youtu.be/owI7DOeO_yg
But what does it mean to say eugenics “works”? It’s straightforward to say what it means to say an engine works, or a car, or a machine for making pieces to make other machines…but what does it mean to say eugenics works? That depends on what the goal is, doesn’t it? Eugenics doesn’t just take you from a to b or power a fan, so saying it “works” has to depend on what you think “eu” means. The “eu” is in the word itself, so I don’t think you can separate eugenics from morality all that easily.
Jerry Coyne’s take seems somewhat more benign:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/dawkins-makes-a-tweet/
Well, he always defends Dawkins. But we’re saying the same basic things – that Dawkins isn’t a fan of eugenics and that that was a bad tweet.
I’m a little curious about the Venn diagram between “people who think ‘eugenics could work with humans’ is a true statement” and “people who think ‘communism could work with humans’ is a true statement.” Somehow I suspect there is very little overlap.
What does it mean to say that eugenics works? My first blush answer would be: Eugenics, the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics, works if-and-only-if controlled breeding within a human population can increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.
I mean … That doesn’t seem that opaque to me. The points of potential vagueness are what characteristics are desirable and whether their increased frequency constitutes improvement. From an evolutionary perspective, those points are easily cleared up.
But really, anything is susceptible to the “it depends on the goal” attack. You might say that an engine works because it powers your car, but I might just need it to make noise, or explode, or be a display piece in an exhibit.
I recall Dawkins saying something that struck me as ignorant about evolution early on in his media splash, a few decades ago. He said that the human little toe would be evolved away. It seemed Lamarckian to me. Dawkins didn’t like the little toe (fair enough, I don’t like mine – too many hangnails), he didn’t see the point, so he would wish us better. But what was the basis for supposing that people with smaller little toes would have greater fertility? Wishful thinking? I have been suspicious of Dawkins since.
Likewise, when we start talking about assortative mating – lawyers marry lawyers, etc. – we ought to consider fertility rates. Sure it’s true that PhDs tend to marry other PhDs, etc, but it’s also true that professionals of any stripe have lower fertility rates than society as a whole. Maternal higher education, in specific, is the biggest damper on reproduction known to man. So the population effect of assortative mating, if any, may be more to reduce propagation of whatever traits lead to higher education rather than increase it.
If we want to consider the way in which homo sapiens are evolving, we should consider actual fertility rates first, not as an afterthought.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
It’s been said that eugenics lives on in the arena of purebred dog breeding. There are plenty of examples of once healthy, happy breeds that have been encumbered with hereditary disease and loss of esoteric traits like “good temperament to be a pet for children” to the obsession over superficial “perfection”.
Nullius @ 8 – but what you say eugenics is isn’t all there is to say about what eugenics is. It’s the first definition that Google gives, but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to say about it. It has historical baggage that means that definition is…too thin.
Papito,
But what evidence do you have that there are any genetic traits that lead to people having higher education?
It seems to me that the thing that would lead to that is not genetic, but environmental. Kids who have educated parents are more likely to be educated themselves (partially because they have the money, partially because they are encouraged, and partially because that is what you do in that particular social circle). That doesn’t mean that lesser educated parents will produce lesser educated children, because there are many instances of first generation college changing the pattern. So yeah, I suspect not genetic at all…though some people would like to believe it is, because it makes them part of a superior group, rather than a privileged group.
iknklast,
Yeah, it seems pretty clear that whatever genetic factors may go into determining level of education, they’re dwarfed by social and economic factors (just think, how many times have you read about so-and-so that they were the first person in their family to attend college?).
You both make good points, and I expect they are true – environment probably does more to determine higher education than genetics.
That said, we here in America are also working towards reducing the preponderance of the environments that induce people to higher education.
Ophelia @11:
Could not the same be said of any number of things? There’s a whole range of things that have historical baggage outside their bare-bones definitions.
For instance, that is why we have a hard time convincing people like Chris Matthews that socialism doesn’t mean rounding him and his family up for public executions in Times Square. Socialism has historical baggage that makes its dictionary definition thin. At bottom, the tension is between the term’s denotation(s) and connotation(s). Those connotations are the historical baggage of the Cold War. The connotations of socialism are salient in Matthews’s mind, so they dominate his thinking on the subject.
Or consider segregation. That’s got a lot of historical baggage, but we separate denotation and connotation regularly when we talk about the need for sex-segregated prisons, restrooms, sports, etc. Because the thing we are talking about is the mere division of spaces and access, not the racist/caste-ist/whatever-ist history of racial segregation in the States (and Japan, and China, and and and …) or caste-segregation in India.
Or consider viewing something as abnormal or unhealthy, such as with anything under the LGBTQIA2S+ umbrella. That’s got historical baggage, and it’s the inability to see the thing-in-itself that prevents people from recognizing that there are qualitative differences between LGB, T, I, Q, and the rest. Now any sort of non-affirming view is forbidden, and our discourse is caught in a prison of history.
Yes, it is important to acknowledge, understand and consider historical context. However, it is at least as critical to be able to see a thing-in-itself. History is replete with ideas tainted by suffering and blood. Some are intrinsically flawed; some, inherently evil; some, failures of implementation. If we accept the baggage of concepts as inextricably constituent of them, then we cannot learn from the past—we can only be shackled by it.
Interesting question. I’m not sure. I’m not sure there is a thing-in-itself bare bones definition of contested ideas or ideologies. Socialism? Feminism? Libertarianism? Utilitarianism? Catholicism? Puritanism? They aren’t really things in themselves, are they, they’re…things in how they’re understood, things in what people make of them. That’s why one doesn’t go to a dictionary for a definition of any of them: it won’t be enough.
Segregation doesn’t quite fit the pattern, because as you say racial segregation is one thing and other kinds are another. But eugenics was a movement as well as the bare bones thing, and that makes it tricky.