No no, I’m sorry if I completely mangled up what I was trying to say. My hypothetical assumes that say your goal was to achieve a higher IQ (just an example), you could do so through certain principle of eugenics, not the other way around. In the extreme, the goal of breeding is not to produce an Airedale, but if your goal is to produce an Airedale, breeding is one of the ways this can be accomplished.
No, this is an imperfect medium and I read more into it, than you meant.
Ah, OK. You probably could use eugenics to bring up average IQ, and you could even use positive eugenics to do it. Have everyone take an IQ test, and provide some sort of subsidy to those with higher IQs to encourage them to have more children.
Of course, you’d want to do something about cultural biases and coachability in IQ tests first…
Of course, if raising average IQ is your goal, there are a lot of things other than eugenics that you could do to accomplish that, and those things might be more socially acceptable or cost-effective. Something like providing better nutrition to kids, universal preschool, and that sort of thing might be at least as effective, because IQ is affected by environment as well as heredity.
At the end of the day the concept eugenics is built into our biology. Sexual selection seems to serve a variety of purposes including
- encouraging the breeding of the genetically successful
- discouraging the breeding of the genetically inferior
- purging the gene pool of the defective. This is called the deterministic mutation hypothesis and it implies that we develop mutations over time and to purge ourselves of these mutations we have sex, a few of the kids inherit all the crappy genes and they die early, eliminating those genes from the gene pool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex
0.5% of all males (16 million) are direct descendants of genghis khan
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis.html
Whereas on the other side people with massive defects (physical illness, mental illness, personality abnormalities, social stigmas) are generally not considered desirable mates by either men or women. So on the one hand the genetically superior (attractive, normal, healthy, powerful) people mate prolifically while the genetically inferior (ugly, abnormal, sickly, weak) people mate far less. At the same time we, by our very nature, engage in a Nazi like purging of the weak via deterministic mutation.
I don’t think any culture gave birth to eugenics, it is built into us. In my view, asking which nation gave us eugenics would be like asking which nation invented the idea of religion.
Lynchburg Virginia. It began in the 1920’s before the Nazi Party even existed.
Involuntary sterilization was still practiced there by the Commonwealth, until well past 1970.
Now days, it is all blamed on “Evolutionists” in power at the time, in Lynchburg.
Lynchburg also gave us Lynching, The Moral Majority, and Fleets Enema’s.
Tris