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.
I think that reading it will greatly alter your view of such governmental interventions.
I wasn't sure if the "you" here is "you, the person who posted the link," (singular, referring to me) or "you, the readers of this comment of mine" (plural, referring to anyone who reads your helpful comment). I agree that Brave New World, which I read in childhood and reread in childhood and in adulthood, is a very thought-provoking novel.
On my part, I posted the link under the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" clause of the HN guidelines
after it came up in a Google News alert that I've had set for months (which only rarely yields blog entries worth reading). I endorse this submitted blog entry as worth reading for better-than-average research and for important subject matter, without claiming I agree with all of the author's conclusions. Maybe I'll agree with more or fewer of the author's conclusions after I read the discussion here. I'm willing to be convinced by evidence. I see an interesting discussion is developing through your comment and others. Thanks.
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.
The genetic experiment in BNW is successful insofar as maintaining social harmony and general efficiency but at the cost of individualism and freedom generally.
Now, BNW is sci-fi. In the real world and the 21 century we don't have soma or such a promiscuous culture or the abolition of the family to pacify the individual. If we emulate the policies from the 26 century setting of the book we will not end up with a single anomaly - Bernard, but with many or even everyone having the same feeling of inferiority and the thirst for freedom and expression outside the influence of the state.
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
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?
what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life.
Who told you that? Someone here on HN, or someone somewhere else?
Just yesterday, writing a review of a different book, I came upon this interesting quotation from Thomas Sowell:
"The taboo against discussing race and IQ has not left this an open question. On the contrary, it has had the perverse effect of freezing an existing majority of testing experts in favor of a belief that racial IQ differences are influenced by genetics. No belief can be refuted if it cannot be discussed."
Agreeing with Sowell on the endorsement of open inquiry, I would love to have people discuss carefully, thoughtfully, and without name-calling what they mean when they talk about genetic influences on human intelligence and all other influences on human intelligence. This is a much-researched issue, and I have taken care to meet some of the eminent researchers in person and to read the peer-reviewed journal articles and major monographs of many more researchers on the issue for more than a decade. Facts are established by careful observation and experimentation, and the implications of those facts are discovered by considering yet more facts.
Anyway, the "nature vs. nurture" argument invariable avoids a simple fact: Nature has a one-time cost, nurture has an infinitely-ongoing cost.
I mean: Even if the left is right about schools, institutions, teachers, practices, education, etc, etc, being able to equalize the differences between people, you are essentially dividing the population into two parts:
1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and
2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard.
2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard.
What is your proposal for determining which group a person belongs to, if we accept the existence of two such disparate groups?
How would your proposal take into account such known facts (from psychometric psychology) as
1) error in estimation in IQ testing,
2) individual variability in IQ over the course of childhood,
3) the influence of personal drive and motivation (acknowledged by ALL psychologists) in the expression of IQ as academic achievement,
4) the known malleability of IQ under less expensive interventions in some experimental studies of individuals and across whole societies over recent generations?
The real problem is thinking that IQ and reason are the same thing. Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality.
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.
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.
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.
Identical twins are amazingly similar - even when they're separated at birth. In fact identical twins reared apart are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together. Check out the wikipedia page on this, they have some nice charts of various traits.
in the Wikipedia article you kindly linked. What that chart shows, of course, is that twins can be quite DISCORDANT in a variety of socially important traits, even though they share a common genome. That should alert us to the fact that more than genes matter in human development. (Pretty nearly everyone agrees that genes matter for something, but the issue is how much expression of genes can be influenced by nongenetic influences on human development.)
Well yes, I don't disagree with you there. If you plant two seeds with identical DNA but only give one of them enough water and sunlight then of course they're going to be different heights and weights after a few weeks. But you'll probably not find identical twin brothers where one becomes a NBA pro and the other a jockey.
I should have jumped right in while posting my first comment to mention the pair of twins (tested for monozygosity, which no one would believe without testing) whose photograph appears in one edition of the Vogel-Motulsky textbook on human genetics. They are very discordant in height, and one is thin enough to be a horse-racing jockey (but maybe not strong enough for that) while the other is within the height range of professional basketball players, I think. People who read the literature on the subject find amazing examples (which serve as counterexamples to what people in the general public might guess) of all kinds of interesting phenomena of genetics.
