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Dysgenics

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For the book by Richard Lynn, see Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations.

Dysgenics is a term describing a system of breeding where selection is for deleterious traits. Similarly, it is also described as "the study of factors relating to or causing a decrease in the survival of the genetically well-adapted members of a line of descent." Dysgenic mutations have been studied in a variety of animals such as the mouse and the fruit fly . Dysgenics is used by eugenicists to mean the opposite of eugenics and has been used by researchers to refer to a decrease in human intelligence due to differential fertility. Although the hypothetical existence of a dysgenic trend in humans is not a topic of significant scientific endeavor, the concept appears occasionally in fiction and film.

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 while the disabled stayed safely at home.

In the 1930s, Julian Huxley, who later became the first director of UNESCO, was concerned by dysgenics and described eugenics as "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range".

In 1963, Weyl and Possony asserted that comparatively small differences in average IQ can become very large differences in the very high IQ ranges. A decline in average IQ of only a few points will mean a much smaller population of gifted individuals.

In his 1965 article "Roman Culture and Dysgenic Lead Poisoning" Colum Gillfallen argued that lead used by Romans in plumbing and cooking utensils poisoned the water and food of the Roman elite, causing the decline of the Roman Empire. In 1985, the Gillfallen paper was refuted by Needleman and Needleman. 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".

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."

Research on differential fertility

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A small group of researchers has studied differential fertility throughout the first world; demographic studies indicate that, in affluent nations, women with higher IQs and better education have much lower reproductive rates than women with lower IQs and less education. Because IQ and educational attainment are both known to have high additive heritability, these researchers argued that this could cause a persistent decline in IQ in these nations.

Some of the first studies into the subject were carried out on individuals living before the advent of IQ testing, in the late 19th century; researchers checked for differential fertility by looking at the fertility of men listed in WHO's WHO, these individuals being presumably of high intelligence. These men, taken as a whole, had few children, implying negative differential fertility.

But more rigorous studies carried out on those alive during the Second World War suggested a slight positive differential fertility, or at least the absence of negative differential fertility with respect to IQ. The findings from these investigations were consistent enough for Osborn and Bajema, writing as late as 1972, to conclude that fertility patterns were eugenic, and that "the reproductive trend toward an increase in the frequency of genes associated with higher IQ... will probably continue in the foreseeable future in the United States and will be found also in other industrial welfare-state democracies." But reviewers considered the findings premature, claiming that the samples were nationally unrepresentative, generally being confined to whites born between 1910 and 1940 in the Great Lakes States. Other researchers also began to report a dysgenic decline in the 1960s after two decades of neutral or eugenic fertility.

In 1982, Daniel Vining sought to address these issues in a large study on the fertility of over 10,000 individuals throughout the United States, who were then aged 25 to 34. The average fertility in his study was correlated at -0.86 with IQ for white women and -0.96 for black women, which Vining claimed to indicate a drop in the genotypic average IQ of 1.6 points per generation for the white population, and 2.4 points per generation for the black population. in considering these results along with those from earlier researchers, Vining wrote that "in periods of rising birth rates, persons with higher intelligence tend to have fertility equal to, if not exceeding, that of the population as a whole," but, "The recent decline in fertility thus seems to have restored the dysgenic trend observed for a comparable period of falling fertility between 1850 and 1940."

To address the concern that the fertility of this sample could not be considered complete, Vining carried out a follow-up study for the same sample 18 years later, reporting "the same negative relationship is found between IQ and fertility," although "the overall decline in mean IQ implied by these data is less".

Regardless of the methodology employed, later research into fertility patterns has supported Vining's finding of a dysgenic trend with respect to IQ.

In a 1988 study, Retherford and Sewell found the now well known inverse relationship between IQ and fertility, noting that if children had, on average, the same IQ as their parents, IQ would decline by .81 points per generation. Taking .71 for the additive heritability of IQ as given by Jinks & Fulker, they calculated a dysgenic decline of .57 IQ points per generation.

In 2004 Richard Lynn and Marian Van Court attempted a straightforward replication of Vining's work. Their study 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 and Van Court are controversial figures; Van Court has written for Occidental Quarterly, "a magazine that espouses white nationalism" and Lynn has been criticized by other scholars for distorting and misrepresenting data on previous occasions although other scholars have favorably reviewed Lynn's work on dysgenics. Richard Lynn (along with Daniel R. Vining and William Shockley) is a major recipient of grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights advocacy organization which has been described as "a controversial, liberal organization" , has characterized the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. An award-winning author and geneticist, Steve Jones, said that Lynn's 1996 book "misunderstood modern ideas of genetics". "A flaw in his argument of genetic deterioration in intelligence", Jones said, "was the widely accepted fact that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has actually increased over the past 50 years".

Another way of checking the negative relationship between IQ and fertility is to consider the relationship which educational attainment has to fertility, since education is known to be a reasonable proxy for IQ, correlating with IQ at .55; in a 1999 study examining the relationship between IQ and education in a large national sample, David Rowe and others found not only that achieved education had a high heritability (.68) and that half of the variance in education was explained by an underlying genetic component shared by IQ, education, and SES. One study investigating fertility and education carried out in 1991 found that high school dropouts in America had the most children (2.5 on average), with high school graduates having fewer children, and college graduates having the fewest children (1.56 on average).

Among a sample of women using a reliable form of birth control, success rates were related to IQ, with the percentages of high, medium and low IQ women having unwanted births during a three-year interval being 3%, 8% and 11%, respectively. Another study found that after an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, higher IQ couples are more likely to obtain abortions ; and unmarried teenage girls who become pregnant are found to be more likely to carry their babies to term if they are doing poorly in school. Conversely, while desired family size is apparently the same for women of all IQ levels, highly educated women are found to be more likely to say that they desire more children than they have, indicating a "deficit fertility" in the highly intelligent.

Although much of the research into fertility patterns has been sadly restricted to individuals within a single nation (most of them living within the United States), Steven Shatz has recently extended the research into dysgenics internationally; he finds that "There is a strong tendency for countries with lower national IQ scores to have higher fertility rates and for countries with higher national IQ scores to have lower fertility rates."

The Flynn Effect

The most important contraindication to dysgenic declines in IQ has been that IQ scores themselves have not been falling, but rising, in a trend known as the Flynn Effect. As noted by Steve Connor in his refutation of the existence of a dysgenic trend: "intelligence as measured by IQ tests has actually increased over the past 50 years."

If it is true that the genes underlying IQ have been shifting, it is reasonable to expect that IQ throughout the population should also shift in the same direction, yet the reverse has clearly occurred. However, as pointed out by Retherford & Sewell, genotypic IQ may fall even while phenotypic IQ rises throughout the population due to environmental effects (e.g. better schooling, nutrition, television, and so on). The Flynn Effect has increased IQ scores as much as 15 points throughout the first world, but some researchers claim that this trend now shows signs of reversal, which, if true, would be consistent with the reported dysgenic declines to IQ becoming visible when the environmental mask of the Flynn Effect is removed. See the section on the possible end of the Flynn Effect for further information.

Dysgenic fallacy

It is well-established that a negative correlation between fertility and IQ has existed in many parts of the world at various times. It has even been argued that this was true of Ancient Rome. While it may seem obvious that differential fertility would result in a progressive change in IQ, it is a fallacy that applies only to closed subpopulations. As long as child IQ can be higher or lower that that of the parents, an equilibrium is established. Subsequently, the mean IQ will not change, in the absence of a change in the differential fertility. The steady-state IQ distribution will be lower for negative differential fertility and for positive, but these differences are small. Even for the extreme, and unrealistic assumption, of endogamous mating in IQ subgroups, a differential fertility change of 2.5/1.5 to 1.5/2.5 (high IQ/low IQ), causes as shift of only 4 IQ points. For random mating, the shift is less than 1 IQ point.

In music, film and literature

  • 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.
  • Cyril M. Kornbluth's short story "The Marching Morons" is an example of dysgenic fiction.
  • 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.
  • The 1998 song "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger finds lighthearted humor in dysgenics with the lines "Been around the world and found/That only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning and feeding/And I don't even own a tv"
  • The 2003 song "The Idiots Are Taking Over" by NOFX suggests that the effects of dysgenics are already evident.
  • Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy is a comedy about a future where dysgenics has contributed to mass stupidity.
  • The 2007 music video of Korn's song "Evolution" discusses the topic of dysgenics.

See also

References

Cited

  1. Definition of dysgenic from "The CancerWEB Project", Newcastle University.
  2. Encarta definition of dysgenics
  3. Restoration of excitation—contraction coupling and slow calcium current in dysgenic muscle by dihydropyridine receptor complementary DNA
  4. Evolution of hybri dysgenesis determinants in Drosophila melanogaster
  5. GONADAL HYBRID DYSGENESIS IN DROSOPHILA STURTEVANTI (DIPTERA, DROSOPHILIDAE)
  6. Vining, Daniel (1982). "On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials". Intelligence. 6 (3): 241–264.
  7. Steve Sailer - The Morons Shall Inherit the Earth
  8. 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)
  9. McNish, Ian "David Starr Jordan on the Dysgenic effects of dysfunctional culture," Mankind Quarterly. Washington: Fall 2002.Vol.43, Iss. 1; pg. 81
  10. Huxley, Julian (1936). "Eugenics and Society". Eugenics Review. 28 (1): 24. Retrieved 2007-09-25.
  11. Huxley, Julian (1936). "Eugenics and Society". Eugenics Review. 28 (1): 11. Retrieved 2007-09-25.
  12. Weyl, N. & Possony, S. T: The Geography of Intellect, 1963, s. 154
  13. 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)
  14. ^ 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)
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  16. "William Shockley 1910 - 1989". A Science Odyssey People and Discoveries. PBS online. 1998. Retrieved 2006-11-13.
  17. 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
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  20. Huntington, E., & Whitney, L. The Builders of America. New York: Morrow, 1927.
  21. Kirk, Dudley. "The fertility of a gifted group: A study of the number of children of men in WHO'S WHO." In The Nature and Transmission of the Genetic and Cultural Characteristics of Human Populations. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund, 1957, pp.78-98.
  22. Osborn, F. (1972). "The eugenic hypothesis". Social Biology. 19: 337–345. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  23. Osborne, R. (1975). "Fertility, IQ and school achievement". Psychological Reports. 37: 1067–1073.
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  25. Kirk, Dudley (1969). "The genetic implications of family planning". Journal of Medical Education. 44 (supplement 2): 80–83.
  26. Vining, Daniel (1982). "On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials". Intelligence. 6 (3): 241–264.
  27. Vining, Daniel (1995). "On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials: an update". Personality and Individual Differences. 19 (2): 259–263.
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  31. Andrew Murr. Dating the White Way. Newsweek, August 9, 2004.
  32. Kamin, Leon (1995). "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life". Scientific American. 272. Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  33. ACADEMIC NAZISM Steve Rosenthal, Department of Sociology, Hampton University, Hampton VA
  34. Black Intellectual Genocide: An Essay Review of IQ of Wealth of Nations by Girma Berhanu, Gotberg University, Sweden
  35. Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, reviewed by John C. Loehlin. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1999.
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  38. Southern Poverty Law Center Race and 'Reason'; Academic ideas a pillar of racist thought. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  39. Southern Poverty Law Center Into the Mainstream; An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  40. ^ Connor, Steve (December 22 1996). "Stalking the Wild Taboo; Professor predicts genetic decline and fall of man". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 2008-04-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  41. Neisser, Ulric; et al. (1996). "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". American Psychologist. 51(2): 77–101. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  42. Rowe, David C. (1999). "Herrnstein's Syllogism: Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on IQ, Education, and Income". Intelligence. 26(4): 405–423. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  43. Bachu, Amara. 1991. Fertility of American Women: June 1990. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Current Population Report Series P-20, No. 454. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
  44. Urdry, Richard (1978). "Differential fertility by intelligence: the role of birth planning". Social Biology. 25: 10–14.
  45. Cohen, Joel (1971). "Legal abortions, socioeconomic status and measured intelligence in the United States". Social Biology. 18(1): 55–63.
  46. Olson, Lucy (1980). "Social and psychological correlates of pregnancy resolution among adolescent women: a review". American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 50(3): 432–445.
  47. Vining, Daniel (1982). "On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials". Intelligence. 6 (3): 241–264.
  48. Weller, Robert H. (1974). "Excess and deficit fertility in the United States". Social Biology. 21 (l): 77–87.
  49. Shatz, Steven (2008). "IQ and fertility: A cross-national study". Intelligence. 36 (2): 109–111.
  50. Retherford, R. D., & Sewell, W. H. (1988). "Intelligence and family size reconsidered." Social Biology, 35, 1−40.
  51. Teasdale, Thomas (2008). "Secular declines in cognitive test scores: A reversal of the Flynn Effect". Intelligence. 36 (2). {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  52. Lynn, Richard (2008). "The decline of the world's IQ". Intelligence. 36 (2). {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  53. Preston, Samuel H. (Mar., 1993). "Differential Fertility and the Distribution of Traits: The Case of IQ". The American Journal of Sociology. 98 (5). The University of Chicago Press: pp. 997-1019. Retrieved 2008-04-22. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  54. Lam, David (Mar., 1993). "Comment on Preston and Campbell's "Differential Fertility and the Distribution of Traits"". The American Journal of Sociology. 98 (5). The University of Chicago Press: pp. 1033-1039. Retrieved 2008-04-22. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

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.
  • Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems Scott-Townsend, 1992
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