Umm, excuse me, but what the hell does this nugget mean, Trixie?
Moderator’s Note: Science Girl, if you check our current Registration Agreement, you will note that (regardless of any copyright issues or lack thereof) we don’t allow anyone to post “spam” on this board. Threads whose original posts consist mainly or entirely of copy-and-pasted articles from other web sites, with very little contribution from you, come close to that line; post too many threads like that and you’ll cross the line.
Also, in the nature of helpful advice, you’ve been here for about a day now and have already started 5 threads. It might be a good idea for you to concentrate a little more on starting one thread and sticking with it, or on replying more to existing threads.
Hard to know where to begin with this but this jumped out at me. He keeps saying the Jews practice eugenics. What is the evidence of this? It isn’t in the posted material.
Cite for this proposition? I’ll take three examples of extant laws that most Americans support that are violative of the Constitution, please.
Oh, affect human behavior now, not determine it? So how can a breeding program result in a positive change?
yawn
Knock yourself out. Three ignorant people doesn’t make for one smart person.
That isn’t what I meant and you know it.
Tough? You copy and pasted some rambling gibberish that was instantly debunked, and never showed your face again to defend your “ideals.” That isn’t tough. That is pathetic. You actually consider yourself to be part of a superior breed? The first thing they would do is send you to the gas chambers with the other invalids.
I think you were. You certainly weren’t busy proving yo- er, sorry, other people’s - points.
Cite? You’re going way beyond IQ now, you’re asserting that your genes can determine other aspects of your personality – and implying, at least, that they are more influential on personality than the environment you grow up in.
This is actually a very old idea. In 19th-Century Britain, most people would have assumed, hardly even would have questioned, that if an Irish and an English baby boy were inadvertently switched in the cradle, the Irish boy would astonish his English family by growing up to be a passionate, violent, hard-drinking poet; and the English boy, despite his home environment, would grow up to be a cold-blooded, rigorously honest prig. But I’ve never heard any cases of such results happening in real life.
What’s more, there’s a cultural assumption that certain distinctive psychological characteristics inhere not only in races or nations, but in families. Remember the 1988 film Big Business? (Which I think is based on a plot much used in ancient Roman farces – e.g., a slave boy and a senator’s son are switched at birth.) In a small town in the Appalachians, a local woman and a superrich woman who is just passing through both give birth to twin girls at the same hospital on the same night. One girl of each pair is swapped into the other’s family by a nearsighted nurse. The Appalachian family produces one dark-haired woman (Lily Tomlin) who is honest, high-minded, and entirely at home in her world; and one red-haired woman (Bette Midler) who watches shows like Dynasty and dreams of wealth and power. The rich family in New York produces one woman (Midler again) who is a natural ruthless businesswoman, and one (Tomlin) who is sentimental and given over to fashionable causes.
But, again, I’ve never heard of anything like this happening in real life.
Then you ought to be painfully aware of the historically close association between eugenics and racism.
I got rather interested in the idea of eugenics when I was a teenager (a high-IQ teenager, you understand, and surrounded by so many people I wished had already been filtered out of the gene pool – you Dopers have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?) – but I always envisioned eugenics in color-blind terms. It was not until much later that I learned that the idea of eugenics has a vast intellectual heritage dating from the first half of the 20th Century – and most eugenicists of that period were actually racists, concerned with stopping the nonwhites of the world (or of their particular countries) from out-breeding the whites. There was a famous and influential racist named Lothrop Stoddard, who in 1922 published a book called The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. (You can read the whole thing at http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/STODDARD.html.) His thesis was that the white gene-pool must be preserved in purity, because the white race is inherently mentally superior to others, which is what made modern scientific-industrial civilization possible; and any race-mixing degrades its genetic quality, because white mental superiority is a recent evolutionary development “but lately stamped on the germ-plasm” and therefore too fragile to survive cross-breeding with more primitive races. But in light of modern genetic science, all this is obvious nonsense. There is no real evidence that whites, however defined, are mentally superior to other races (the Bell Curve hypothesis has been pretty effectively debunked); and there is no evidence that any characteristic of the human genome is more “fragile” than any other. (There are dominant and recessive genes, but the recessives cannot be show to be more “advanced” than the dominants in any way, nor are they more recent developments.)
Now, perhaps we could develop a non-racist form of eugenics that might have relevance to the 21st Century. But it won’t come from people like the ones who run the NeoEugenics Website, the basis of your OP. These people are racists and you don’t have to lean very close to smell it on them. Just take a quick look at their article headings and their bibliography. There are even some very disturbing assertions in the Mission Statement:
The very idea of wanting to promote a sociopolitical movement that can be described as a “secular religion” is disturbing. Communism and fascism are secular religions. The ranting about the EU and UN takes us into tinfoil hat territory – and Matt Neunke, who apparently wrote this, show some really sloppy thinking in citing U.S. unilateralism as an example of creeping internationalism! And, for historically obvious reasons, any mention of Jews and their gene-pool in this context should be enough to set off an alarm bell. (Furthermore, the Jews have never practiced eugenics or artificial selective breeding in any conscious or systematic way. If the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is unusually high, it is probably because for many centuries their ancestors lived as despised minorities within larger gentile societies, and such an environment tended to kill off the stupid. But we should not ignore environmental factors – the Ashkenazi culture has always placed a high premium on learning and scholarship, things very useful in modern society.) And that talk about “competing groups” of human beings is really disturbing. It gets even more disturbing a few paragraphs later:
Historically, competition between nations has not been friendly. Just about as far from friendly as you can get, in many instances. Yet Neunke wants to encourage and perpetuate it, so that each national gene-pool can seal itself off and improve its bloodlines, and then engage in “competition” with other nations to provide a sort of Darwinian selection process. That’s pretty close to Hitler’s thinking.
And there’s one point you haven’t addressed at all, Science Girl: What form would a practical eugenics program take in the U.S. or anywhere else? First of all, who gets to decide which genetic traits are to be promoted and which are to be culled? Some Congressional committee, or a national Department of Eugenics? What criteria will they use? Does IQ trump everything else? (I have a very high IQ, and I have bronchial asthma, likely a hereditary problem. Should I be encouraged to reproduce, or discouraged?) And then, do we have to conduct a genetic assessment of all living persons in the country, and enter their gene-codes in a national database, and assign them all a breeding grade? (And this Neunke is afraid of “totalitarianism”!) And finally, how is the culling to be done? Will people with undesirable genes be discouraged from breeding by economic pressure? (E.g., if your IQ is below a certain level you don’t get to claim any dependents on your income tax, no matter how many you have. Or, you can’t collect welfare benefits unless you get a vasectomy or a tubal ligation.) Or will the undesirables be forcibly sterilized? Or simply gassed?
In any case, if scientific research is allowed to progress without restrictions (such as the ban the Clinton Administration imposed on human cloning research), then in a few decades eugenics, insofar as it involves classifying certain people as unfit to breed, will become completely irrelevant – because anyone will be able to use new gene-splicing technology to craft and tailor the gene-codes of their children. (We’ve all seen Gattaca, right?) A given hereditary disease could be eliminated in one generation, if all carriers of it could be identified, and persuaded (or compelled) to have the trait deleted from their offspring. High IQ’s, robust health, and superior athletic abilities could be designed into every child. And everybody could still have children. Nobody could be considered “unfit to breed” because any “unfitness” could be eliminated in the laboratory.
Ya, when ever one’s opponent posts credible links, the defender find’s it amusing. You guys are so subjective and unscientific. Even i am often. Doesn’t human nature suck?
You don’t even understand why it is amusing, do you?
I’m curious, what is your opinion on Asians? They statistically outperform every other race on standardized testing, even first generation students for who English is a secondary language. Shouldn’t you have some opinion on them?
I didn’t post any full text, so I didn’t break any copyright laws.
“spam” is no longer an objective term. It is used to describe those who have a different opinion that one does not agree with. Proof of dysgenics.
No, rather, posting other people’s works shows rationalism, practicality, and efficiency, something most humans are not. Why waste time using my own words when others have already done the work and who may even be better qualified than me? There is no rational reason to deny this.
Again, no, it is not crossing the “spamming line” since your definition if spam is wrong.
I started 4 threads.
Thanks for clarifying your rules, I will do as you wish, even though its not rational. I like this forum!
Regards,
Science Girl
Please learn the rules of debating at News Wire – Internet Infidels
Asians? East Asians specifically are very smart, much smarter than my race, on average.
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This is not a formal debate forum. It is a discussion format.
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Logic is overrated. Logic leads to complete misunderstandings of human emotion and reasoning, which are by nature illogical.
Ah, yes, your mystery race. So how do eastern Asians fit into your Master Plan? How is it that they have “bred” themselves into a specifically smarter, on average, race? And if they are so smart, why are their societies dysfunctional?
[The following is the first essay from Jewish Eugenics and Other Essays,
Three Papers Read Before the New York Board of Jewish Ministers, 1915,
Bloch Publishing Company, New York, 1916.]
Jewish Eugenics
By Rabbi Max Reichler
Who knows the cause of Israel’s survival? Why did the Jew survive the
onslaughts of Time, when others, numerically and politically stronger,
succumbed? Obedience to the Law of Life, declares the modern student
of eugenics, was the saving quality which rendered the Jewish race
immune from disease and destruction. “The Jews, ancient and modern,”
says Dr. Stanton Coit, "have always understood the science of eugenics,
and have governed themselves in accordance with it; hence the
preservation of the Jewish race."1
I. Jewish Attitude
To be sure eugenics as a science could hardly have existed among the
ancient Jews; but many eugenic rules were certainly incorporated in the
large collection of Biblical and Rabbinical laws. Indeed there are clear
indications of a conscious effort to utilize all influences that might
improve the inborn qualities of the Jewish race, and to guard against any
practice that might vitiate the purity of the race, or “impair the racial
qualities of future generations” either physically, mentally, or morally.2
The Jew approached the matter of sex relationship neither with the horror
of the prude, nor with the passionate eagerness of the pagan, but with
the sane and sound attitude of the far-seeing prophet. His goal was the
creation of the ideal home, which to him meant the abode of purity and
happiness, the source of strength and vigor for body and mind.4
Complete text at http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rabbi+max+eugenics&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=b7j8f9%245qi%241%40reader08.wxs.nl&rnum=1
Thanks for the debating fun, I’m done now. Mods, thanks for the free trial. I must now get back to my studies.
And south, southwest, and central asians are…?
You were debating? I thought that was preaching.
Have fun. I hope you learn something.
WTF? How are we going to practice eugenics without support of the state? And in what country are you proposing revolt that the proportion of the population necessary to implement eugenics couldn’t change the government directly by voting or possibly force?
Hello,
I’ve decided to stay here longer if the moderators will allow me this great privilege. I’ll try to improve my debating. I apologize if I have lead anyone to believe I am some genius or more enlightened or what have you than anyone else. To be specific, I am just someone with an average intellect, pretty much starting out in college and still trying to decide which way I want to go. Since many want to know my ethnicity, I am an American born Mestizo.
Some has said I am a “troll.” Well, if the definition of a troll can be stated as one who is insincere and is just here to upset people without an honest belief in what he says, then no, I am not a troll. Everything I have stated is sincere and is what I actually believe, though I try to keep on open mind and stay objective since my beliefs can indeed be wrong - I would never know if I remained unbiased and close-minded.
Regards,
Science Girl
Eugenics means “bettering of genetics.” It can be state enforced, or can be practiced from a Libertarian perspective where parents have the options to use genetic technologies to improve the quality of their offspring.
But, we currently are actually practicing state sponsored Dysgenics: the redistribution of wealth allows the least intelligent and most crime prone to proliferate, instead of allowing natural selection to do away with them. So the question is, why can we have state sponsored dysgenics, but not state sponsored eugenics?
I don’t hink you need to worry about that.
Professor Richard Lynn has studied the national IQ averages of some 185 nations, the chart is at http://www.rlynn.co.uk/pages/article_intelligence/t4.htm
Highest national IQ averages are found among the pacific rim Asians, followed by nations with European majorities, with African nations scoring the lowest. South and South-East Asians are below the European figures, but higher than African ones. Of course, it is up to you whether you trust Professor Lynn’s research.