

A Brave New World in China? - tokenadult
http://geniusblog.davidshenk.com/2009/08/a-brave-new-world-in-china.html

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dimitar
Brave New World is a great dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley in which eugenics
plays a central role. I think that reading it will greatly alter your view of
such governmental interventions.

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yters
Huxley shows China's genetic experiment being successful, contra linked
article.

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wynand
Brave New World doesn't suggest that this kind of engineering was successful
in terms of making people better, only that it led to a controllable world in
which happiness took precedence over truth.

A country that achieves what is described in the book will almost certainly
fail to compete with countries that reward creative endeavours and free
thought.

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mynameishere
Hyperventilate all you want. If China actually creates an effective eugenics
program (which is what I assume the end-goal of this is), the rest of the
world is curtains.

Look at the title of this guy's book:

 _The Genius In All Of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics,
Talent and IQ is Wrong_

Well, what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ
honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Will his
book disabuse the world of this notion...or, does it merely repeat it?

[http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=978038...](http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523653)

 _DNA does not make us who we are_

Well, I guess that explains why humans so frequently give birth to squirrels.

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quizbiz
But identical twins are very different people despite the same DNA.

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daniel-cussen
The identical twins I know are very similar to each other. Just my two cents
of a data point.

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tokenadult
I have nieces who are identical twins (they were tested for monozygosity after
being born). But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at
telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. Professional
geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in
height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of
those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.

~~~
byrneseyeview
_Professional geneticists are aware of cases_

They are also aware of statistics, and confirmation bias, right?

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tokenadult
How would confirmation bias tend to run on this issue?

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byrneseyeview
Depends on how many people grew up watching Sesame Street and listening to
NPR, compared to how many people grew up watching... uh... all those
mainstream media sources that take the yes-there-is-human-biodiversity side of
the human biodiversity debate.

~~~
tokenadult
I referred to professional geneticists, persons who enter a graduate program
of study of genetics and gain a Ph.D. and academic position in that
discipline.

From above:

 _Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite
discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of
interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks
on human genetics._

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tokenadult
I really like this comment in the submitted article by Professor Mark Blumberg
on experimental design:

"What we will never see are two groups of subjects, chosen randomly or chosen
based on the possession of certain genes, who are then afforded the greatest
enrichment and training programs available. The question would then be: Are
there significant differences in accomplishment and excellence between the two
groups?"

He has good insight into how organizations respond to incentives, including
incentives to junk proper science

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

while pretending to do science for commercial gain.

