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> perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations Are you implying here that curiosity a

by eicossa 10y ago

> perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

golemotron 10y ago
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder. The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
- light_hue_1 10y ago
  The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
  - golemotron 10y ago
    Wow. You need to read some behavioral genetics. Let me know if you care to. I'll give you references. They've found g heritable in primates other than humans as well. The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
    - light_hue_1 10y ago
      I've read quite a bit. I have a PhD in a broadly related field. I tried to explain that you're just confused about what heritability means in this context, what the relative effect sizes are of environmental factors vs parents, that these studies have crazy confounds, and the fact that these things aren't settled and are highly controversial in academic circles but clearly that's not working. I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean. There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
  - killbrad 10y ago
    Did you mean "vehemently disagree"?
    - light_hue_1 10y ago
      I meant violently, although politically not physically. People are quite aware that science was perverted once to justify racism and sexism and that scientists everywhere did inhuman things to subjects even very recently (at small scales some unscrupulous scientists continue to do pretty evil things that harm subjects but nowhere near the kinds of things that used to happen). Every student that runs human subjects experiments has to take a mandatory course about this now so that we don't go down this route again (at least in the US, I assume Canada/EU have the same rules but I don't have firsthand experience). People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Ask your cat! Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful? Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!
qb45 10y ago
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas? > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :) If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves. Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.
Frozenlock 10y ago
>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Nothing! I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene. It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available). Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument. You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them. Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0 Again, we are animals. We are subject to the same rules. If we decide to ignore them, our children will pay the price.
- qb45 10y ago
  > You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
  - wbl 10y ago
    You say that like being an Aspie is bad. Of course IQ genes don't as far as we know have bad side effects. It seems Fischerian, and actually uncorrected to ASD.
olalonde 10y ago
Of course intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable, I doubt this was ever an argument against eugenics. (I don't have an opinion to be honest, just thought it was a weird remark)
pliny 10y ago
This is an instance of the fallacy A implies B I don't like B therefore (not A)
tokenadult 10y ago
You ask a legitimate question. My first part of my answer to your question is that my previous comment provided a link. The link is to a thoughtful review article by a careful scientist (Eric Turkheimer). Professor Turkheimer's writings are just about all available for free downloading from his faculty website at the University of Virginia, so you can follow the development of his thought over decades of active involvement in behavior genetics research, often in collaboration with other leading researchers on the same topic. Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions. But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should. Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.
Retra 10y ago
Eugenics is already practiced on a small scale by individual mate selection. It is morally indefensible on a large scale because no existing large scale systems have the decision-making granularity to appropriately make those kinds of decisions, nor are those decisions relevant to what humans generally need their cultures to accomplish.
dang 10y ago
"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 and marked it off-topic.

by eicossa 10y ago

golemotron 10y ago

> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder. The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.

light_hue_1 10y ago
The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
- golemotron 10y ago
  Wow. You need to read some behavioral genetics. Let me know if you care to. I'll give you references. They've found g heritable in primates other than humans as well. The amount of work we do to believe that biology is not a factor is stunning. This is what a 'cultural taboo' looks like.
  - light_hue_1 10y ago
    I've read quite a bit. I have a PhD in a broadly related field. I tried to explain that you're just confused about what heritability means in this context, what the relative effect sizes are of environmental factors vs parents, that these studies have crazy confounds, and the fact that these things aren't settled and are highly controversial in academic circles but clearly that's not working. I'll repeat something from my previous post because it's very important. When scientists talk about heritability they don't mean it the layman's sense of "these people have low IQ and that is conserved over time unless they go and breed with others". There's 0 evidence for this even if you look at a small and until recently fairly isolated population like that of Iceland. The correlation between your IQ and your cousin is almost non-existent even if you're part of the same cultural group in the same village. You're simply misinterpreting headlines without taking the time to understand what people mean. There's no "cultural taboo" here. Scientists want to find the truth and we all work very diligently at it. We're just lucky that reality doesn't back up racist and sexist viewpoints and that the scientific evidence is clearly not on your side.
- killbrad 10y ago
  Did you mean "vehemently disagree"?
  - light_hue_1 10y ago
    I meant violently, although politically not physically. People are quite aware that science was perverted once to justify racism and sexism and that scientists everywhere did inhuman things to subjects even very recently (at small scales some unscrupulous scientists continue to do pretty evil things that harm subjects but nowhere near the kinds of things that used to happen). Every student that runs human subjects experiments has to take a mandatory course about this now so that we don't go down this route again (at least in the US, I assume Canada/EU have the same rules but I don't have firsthand experience). People would be quite upset if someone started to justify racism or sexism with science once more. Take the example of Larry Summers who had to resign from his position as president of Harvard because of a lunchtime talk where he made reference to science that he interprets to support a sexist position that women are inferior to men. That's a (at least politically) violent (and in my opinion correct) reaction. So it's not that people would just disagree. They would happily damage or end someone's career over it.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Ask your cat! Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful? Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!

qb45 10y ago

> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? And you think they aren't? Like there's no difference between humans and amoebas? > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Now, are you implying that eugenics is defensible? I'm getting lost :) If you're asking why eugenics is considered indefensible, I'd say it's because nobody really knows what's good and what's bad. Lots of the time people can't even decide well for themselves. Also, if we took the idea of killing people considered "worse" to the extreme and killed everybody who is considered worse by anybody, there would be probably no one left. So people are somewhat reluctant to try.

Frozenlock 10y ago

>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Nothing! I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that my children could have a chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene. It would be wise for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy, once it will be available). Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized in the name of it? That's only one approach. You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... I don't care at this point, it's only for the sake of the argument. You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is subsidizing them. Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid financial foundation the ones with the most children? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0 Again, we are animals. We are subject to the same rules. If we decide to ignore them, our children will pay the price.

qb45 10y ago
> You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we are doing.
- wbl 10y ago
  You say that like being an Aspie is bad. Of course IQ genes don't as far as we know have bad side effects. It seems Fischerian, and actually uncorrected to ASD.

olalonde 10y ago

Of course intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable, I doubt this was ever an argument against eugenics. (I don't have an opinion to be honest, just thought it was a weird remark)

pliny 10y ago

This is an instance of the fallacy A implies B I don't like B therefore (not A)

tokenadult 10y ago

You ask a legitimate question. My first part of my answer to your question is that my previous comment provided a link. The link is to a thoughtful review article by a careful scientist (Eric Turkheimer). Professor Turkheimer's writings are just about all available for free downloading from his faculty website at the University of Virginia, so you can follow the development of his thought over decades of active involvement in behavior genetics research, often in collaboration with other leading researchers on the same topic. Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions. But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should. Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.

Retra 10y ago

Eugenics is already practiced on a small scale by individual mate selection. It is morally indefensible on a large scale because no existing large scale systems have the decision-making granularity to appropriately make those kinds of decisions, nor are those decisions relevant to what humans generally need their cultures to accomplish.

dang 10y ago

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11794723 and marked it off-topic.