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Dysgenics is a term applied by some researchers to describe the progressive evolutionary weakening of a population of organisms relative to their environment, often due to relaxation of natural selection or the occurrence of negative selection. Because of fertility differences between social groups it is argued that IQ and other socially valued traits are deteriorating in human populations.

History of the term

The term first came into use as an opposite of eugenics, a social philosophy advocating improvement of human hereditary qualities, often by social programs or government intervention.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "dysgenic" was first used as an adjective as early as 1915 by David Starr Jordan to describe the "dysgenic effect" of World War I. He believed that fit men were as likely to die from modern warfare as anyone else, and war was seen as killing off only the physically fit male members of the population whilst the disabled stayed safely at home.

Colum Gillfallen in 1965 argued that lead used by Romans in plumbing and cooking utensils poisoned the water and food of the Roman elite. He concluded, "It follows ... that whatever qualities enabled Roman individuals to make money, or to marry or mate with money, were rigorously bred out of the race and culture by lead and other forces" and caused the decline of the Roman Empire. In 1985, the Gillfallen paper was refuted by Needleman and Needleman. They found that "the lead employed in the main water-supply system was almost certainly harmless". Calcium deposits from hard water prevented contact with the lead. Where the water was soft (rare in the most populated areas), continuous flow of water caused dissolved lead concentration to be small. They agree that lead poisoning from cooking utensils was potentially hazardous. However, measurements of lead from bones of Romans and other peoples provide no evidence that the fertility of the Roman elite was adversely affected.

William Shockley (a Nobel laureate in Physics) used the term in his controversial advocacy of eugenics from the mid 1960s through the 1980s; he and his theories were unfavorably portrayed in the press. Shockley argued that "the future of the population was threatened because people with low IQs had more children than those with high IQs," and his theories "became increasingly controversial and race-based".

Julian Huxley (the first director of UNESCO) was concerned of dysgenics and described eugenics as of "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range".

Robert K. Graham in 1998 argued that genocide and class warfare, in cases ranging from the French Revolution to the present, have had a dysgenic effect through the killing of the more intelligent by the less intelligent, and "might well incline humanity toward a more primitive, more brutish level of evolutionary achievement."

Dysgenics and IQ testing

See also: Inheritance of intelligence

Most of the focus on dysgenics in human populations in recent years has investigated the change in genotypic intelligence. Demographic studies generally indicate that the more intelligent and better educated women in affluent nations have much lower reproductive rates than the less educated, which has led to concern regarding the future of intelligence in these nations. The most cited work is Vining's 1982 study on the fertility of 2,539 U.S. women aged 25 to 34; the average fertility is correlated at -0.86 in IQ for white women and -0.96 for black women, and indicated a drop in the genotypic average IQ of 1.6 per generation for the white population and 2.4 points per generation for the black population.

In his controversial 1996 book, Dysgenics: Genetic deterioration in modern populations, psychologist Richard Lynn argued that intelligence in Western nations had been decreasing due to the effects of the demographic-economic paradox. In addition to other concepts he mentioned, Lynn also concluded that China may overtake the West due to continued deterioration of intelligence in the Western nations, especially the USA.

A 2004 study by Richard Lynn and Marian Van Court returned similar results, with the genotypic decline measuring at 0.9 IQ points per generation for the total sample and 0.75 IQ points for whites only.

Richard Lynn suggests in Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, that the isolated effect of dysgenics may have been masked by the countervailing Flynn effect, the steady increase of IQ in Asian and Western nations during the 20th century, thought to be related to better diets and other environmental factors. Current research shows that the Flynn effect might have already ended around 1990 in several European nations. Teasdale & Owen (2005) "report intelligence test results from over 500,000 young Danish men, tested between 1959 and 2004, showing that performance peaked in the late 1990s, and has since declined moderately to pre-1991 levels." They speculate that "a contributing factor in this recent fall could be a simultaneous decline in proportions of students entering 3-year advanced-level school programs for 16–18 year olds."

Consequences

Comparatively small differences in average intelligence can become very large differences in the very high I.Q. ranges. A decline in average psychometric intelligence of only a few points will mean a much smaller population of gifted individuals. Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan T. Possony write that this natural elite of gifted people and of geniuses does most of the really creative work of the world, gives civilizations their shape, and its presence or absence determines which nations are to lead the world and which are to follow.

Weyl and Possony present us with the following scenario. Assume that the average I.Q. of a population declines by 15 points, possibly because of intermarriage with mentally less gifted groups, perhaps for other reasons. Under these assumptions, the production of highly intelligent people, those with I.Q.’s of 130 and over, would decrease from about 2.27 % to about 0.13 % of the population. In other words, a 15-point decline in average I.Q. would suffice to wipe out 92 % of the minority with markedly superior minds.

In fiction

• Cyril M. Kornbluth's short story The Marching Morons is an example of dysgenic fiction.
• Mike Judge's film Idiocracy is a comedy about a future where dysgenics has caused everybody to be stupid.
• T. J. Bass's novels Half Past Human and The Godwhale describe humanity becoming cooperative and "low-maintenance" to the detriment of all other traits.
• H. G. Wells' 1895 novel, The Time Machine, describes a future world where humanity has degenerated into two distinct branches who have their roots in the class distinctions of Wells' day. Both have sub-human intelligence and other putative dysgenic traits.
• The 2007 song Evolution by Korn warns against dysgenics.

See also

• Devolution (fallacy)
• Degeneration
• Human vestigiality
• Societal collapse
• Social Darwinism

References

Cited

1. Richard Lynn: Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Praeger Publishers (December 1996)
2. Jordan, David Starr (2003 (Reprint)). War and the Breed: The Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific. ISBN 1-4102-0900-8. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
3. McNish, Ian "David Starr Jordan on the Dysgenic effects of dysfunctional culture," Mankind Quarterly. Washington: Fall 2002.Vol.43, Iss. 1; pg. 81
4. Gillfallen, S. Colum (1965, Jan-Mar). "Roman Culture and Dysgenic Lead Poisoning". The Mankind Quarterly. 5 (3): pp. 131-148. ISSN 0025-2344. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
5. Needleman, Lionel (1985). "Lead Poisoning and the Decline of the Roman Aristocracy". Classical Views. 4 (1): pp. 63-94. ISSN 0012-9356. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
6. Grout (October 10 2006). "Lead Poisoning and Rome". Encyclopaedia Romana. James. Retrieved 2006-04-30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
7. "William Shockley 1910 - 1989". A Science Odyssey People and Discoveries. PBS online. 1998. Retrieved 2006-11-13.
8. Van Court, Marian (1982) "Eugenics Revisited," Mensa Bulletin, #254
9. Graham, Robert K. "Devolution by revolution: Selective genocide ensuing from the French and Russian revolutions," Mankind Quarterly. Washington: Fall 1998.Vol.39, Iss. 1; pg. 71
10. Lynn, Richard (1996). Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-275-94917-6.
11. Lynn, Richard (2004). "New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States". Intelligence. 32 (2). Ablex Pub.: p. 193. ISSN 0160-2896. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
12. Weyl, N. & Possony, S. T: The Geography of Intellect, 1963, s. 154
13. Ibid.

General

• Galor, Oded and Omer Moav: Natural selection and the origin of economic growth. Quarterly Review of Economics 117 (2002) 1133-1191.
• Hamilton, W. D. (2000) A review of Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Annals of Human Genetics 64 (4), 363-374. doi: 10.1046/ j.1469-1809.2000.6440363.x
• Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems Scott-Townsend, 1992
• Thomas W. Teasdale and David R. Owen (2005). "A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse." Personality and Individual Differences 39(4), pp 837–843.
• Vining, D.R., 1982. On the possibility of a re-emergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials. Intelligence 6, pp. 241—264.

• Articles to be merged from August 2007
• Eugenics
• Evolution