Preface

John Glad is a brave scholar. He here ventures onto the high seas of contemporary intellectual interdict. The term eugenics has been on an ideological hit list both by the irrational left as well as by an intimidated public. However, as Dr. Glad points out clearly and authoritatively, there is virtually no factual basis for what can only be seen as a totemic reaction. The mere mention of eugenics elicits knee-jerk reaction—

“Nazi genocide, forced sterilization.”

Yet by any standard of rational analysis, this vision of improvement for the human species has a strong humanistic tradition to support its further application.

The real history of eugenics, as Dr. Glad points out is rich in a truly liberal vision for the improvement in the state of all of humankind. And modern research in the biological nature of human function is opening up opportunities for the enhancement of both the physical as well as the mental condition of the human species. This, at a blazing speed of discovery. Thus, we need thinkers such as John Glad who will step up to challenge blind prejudice with fact and possibility. The world is in a descending spiral today, with 6.5 billion people, going on 9-10 billion humans by mid-century, the vast majority living under historically and civilizationally subhuman conditions.

The same powers-that-be, those that blind the educated with a fear of the term eugenics, represent the self-same leadership classes that benefit from the present futile redistributionist social policies that feed into the demographic explosion of the destitute and the vulnerable. What is occurring, and against which Dr. Glad is expostulating, is a shakedown and intimidation of the productive middle classes in order to feed the pathology of poverty, disease, and social disintegration to which we are exposed in the media, each day.

These ideological leadership cadres that stand in the way of the dissemination of the truth concerning the ideals of the old and new eugenics movement indulge themselves luxuriously in the watering places of the “philanthropists,” in Paris, Geneva, New York, Brussels. These international organizations—we know them well—fritter away billions of dollars for their own partying (they call them conferences), the remnant dollars dribbling supposedly into the lands of the needy, but really sucked up by the gangsters who run the tragic show of the Third World. The poor get poorer, their conditions of life increasingly pathological, unprecedented in scope at any time in history.

Eugenics, a vision of human betterment, with real scientific and then social-policy potential for enhancing the evolutionary future of our species, is buried within a demonization of language and misunderstanding. Critical to the linguistic and semantic morass that surrounds this paralysis of understanding is the spectral memories of the German and European perpetration of the Holocaust.

I would like to add a comment to Dr. Glad’s clear and decisive puncturing of the balloon of myth that argues that the Nazis claimed to have actually engaged in a program of eugenics. The Nazis also claimed to be a party of socialism! If we define eugenics as encompassing programs of human betterment, physical as well as mental, practices that benefit community in the local sense as well as the species in general, we can say that the Holocaust was the antithesis of eugenic practice. Not only did the Nazis not argue for their participation in the eugenics movement, but they knew that they were practicing dysgenics.

They hid their practices, as do all totalitarian regimes, within a babble of propaganda that presumably validated to the naïve, this mirage of self-justification. A careful reading of their mission statements, and, of course, their unspeakable practices, clearly reveals that that they recognized that they were eliminating a people who they knew to be superior to themselves, a millennial threat to German dominance. They covered these actions by heaping slime on the Jewish people, their racial heritage, their ghetto and post-ghetto cultural behavior, their arrogance and purported economic conspiracies, above all their dominance in all walks of life, quickly attained only a brief moment beyond the ghetto. To the Nazis, this became a universal challenge to German pretensions to leadership. And this from a people that in Germany was a scant one percent of the population, in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, about four percent.

One has only to read the literature of polemics arising from the German/Austrian political/cultural scene, from the mid-nineteenth century on, to realize that the hatred of the Jews was not a hatred of religion, but rather of race. The solution, clearly and early bandied about by a wide variety of European hate groups, was one of potential cleansing of the Jews from Europe, if not the world. Simply, the polemics of hate was engendered to facilitate the elimination of a dangerous contender for dominance in this self-same continental environment.

Thus the genocide of the Jews, in which all of Europe became eager participants, was not an example of eugenics gone astray, as Dr. Glad suggests. I here, gently demur. Rather, the Holocaust was a vast dysgenic program to rid Europe of superior intelligent challengers to the existing Christian domination by a numerically and politically minuscule minority.
The issue of gypsy genocide has been continuously presented to throw dust in the air, to obfuscate the real significance of the fate of the Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. True, the gypsies were persecuted and Hitler disdained them. Yet the ethnic gypsies, as distinct from West European converts, represented, to the perverse irrationality of the Nazis, an ancient Aryan race.

Thus, as Aryans, the gypsies were not subjected to premeditated total genocide The genocide began with the Nazi accession to power in Germany, 1933; in Austria, 1938. It was both chaotic and bestial, but many German and Austrian Jews made good their escapes. There was truly hatred, a chaos of despicable cruelty in Germany, Austria, and the occupied lands up to January 1942, when the Nazis realized that Britain and the Soviet Union still stood strong against their aggression, while the United States, bruised after Pearl Harbor, rearmed in fury. At Wannsee, north of Berlin, the final solution was conjured up, the industrial annihilation of the remaining Jews of Europe. If Germany would not prevail, no Jews would be left to gloat vindictively of their own victory.

Another sad mental block over the real meaning of the Holocaust, and here within the Jewish community itself, is the Jews’ refusal to accept this event as an exemplar of dysgenics. To do so, many fear, would only reify the view that the Jewish people still considered themselves among the elect, the chosen, as the Torah implies. To admit this would presumably again bring down a vale of tears upon them. The events in Europe during these decades was thus not an exemplification of the theory of eugenics, a supposed liberal and humanitarian vision turned to dross. Rather it was, as noted above, a premeditated program of dysgenics, an aristocide, as with too many other genocides of the twentieth century. How else can we understand the ideology of hate during this century that brought about the destruction of so many talented human beings, members of civilizationally achieving ethnic and social class groups?

Thus we have here witnessed, from Armenia to Biafra and Cambodia, the dysgenic destruction of tens of millions of the most intelligent, productive humans on our planet.

By not recognizing the twentieth century’s true “achievement,” we have thus given in to the defamation of the ideals of the eugenics movement. We have made far more difficult the wider clarification of the true implications of eugenics.
It is doubly important to emphasize the visionary qualities of Dr. Glad’s book. Because, even after throwing over this contemptible myth of “Nazi eugenics,” a twenty-first century campaign for the eugenic ideal must impress upon educated and uneducated alike that the problems that we face require a healthy humanity living in tune with nature. It requires a revolutionary turnabout from present dogmatic international thinking. Instead of dissipating our wealth to remediate what cannot be remediated we need to envision clearly what measures humanity needs to take to create a future of hope. Dr. Glad makes this clear: universal high intelligence, altruism, a pragmatic analysis of the facts of our current situation. Our world simply is running aground in majoritarian incapacity and with this impotence, potential medical and ecological disaster.

What a program of eugenics offers potentially goes far beyond even the ongoing strong eugenic decisions made by millions of families with regard to procreation and the raising of healthy youngsters. Here, individuals, if not the power brokers, are obeying the laws of science and thereby acting to prevent more misery and suffering. What a programmatic campaign for eugenics on a worldwide basis could do over the decades if not centuries is to lift a curtain of hope, to be substituted for the cloud of concern that the middle classes have pessimistically internalized over the last decades. We are on the cusp of a scientific reality, the uncovering of a human biological nature as never dreamed possible before.

Not merely the identification of potential disabilities in unborn children, the solving of the sadness of infertility, even to the extent of cloning a desired child when no other pathway of biological reproduction is possible. Scientists today are, in addition, and all over the world, searching for enzymatic indicators during the earliest stages of gestation, for the genes of high and low intelligence. When these markers are discovered, given the acknowledged random nature of intelligence variability even within families, it will allow mothers and fathers to choose the potential intelligence of their child-to-be. The masses will here no doubt once more vote with their test tubes for a eugenic solution.

It may have been biologist Bentley Glass who once commented, eventually sexual relations would be freed from their reproductive role. Eugenics?

The rub is that we now have to teach the elites that biologically determinant decisions guided by scientific knowledge and careful judicial and moral monitoring can give us the world for which we yearn. Here is real, empirical, scientifically-supported evidence for humanity’s hope, not the tragic morass of pathologies that the so-called egalitarians are pulling down over the heads of our grandchildren.

John Glad’s Future Human Evolution is an important book. It needs many readers. I am sure it will achieve this goal.
 

Seymour W. Itzkoff
 

Return

Introduction

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.

Walt Whitman

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

The Great War and subsequent Depression undermined the mentality of Empire and class privilege, leaving a vacuum which was filled by an intellectual climate of extreme egalitarianism. Western society of the twentieth century came to be dominated by a new, unified ideology. Freudianism, Marxism, B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorism, Franz Boaz’s cultural history, and Margaret Mead’s anthropology all stressed the marvelous “plasticity” and even “programmability” of Homo sapiens. It was explained over and over that human minds differ little in their innate qualities, and that it is upbringing and education which explain the differences among us.

Software is everything; hardware is identical and thus meaningless. The road to utopia lies through improved nurture alone. During the last third of the twentieth century, even while scientists were generally allowed to teach the theory of evolution, that freedom did not extend to raising the topic of humanity’s future evolution. It is remarkable that this suppression coincided with a revolution in our understanding of genetics. The censorship has now been lifted, and there is agreement even among the most implacable foes of the eugenics movement that the taboo on eugenics can no longer stand.

The issues involved are so fraught with consequence at all levels that, tiny as the group of individuals concerned over the future genetic composition of humankind is, a single ideological spark in this area has the potential to set off an all consuming conflagration, so that hostility all too often squeezes out rational discussion. But no matter how desperately society attempts to avoid these issues, they already stand before us, demanding at least recognition, if not resolution. In this book I attempt to present the heretofore largely suppressed arguments surrounding the current renaissance of the eugenics movement.

Much as we humans might pride ourselves on our achievements, we are really little closer to resolving the great questions of being than when we still dwelled in caves. Time extending endlessly backward or forward is as unimaginable as is time having a beginning or an end. Psychologically, however, we need a map –a concept of being and of our place in the universe –and thus we engage in elaborate mythmaking to fill the vacuum that we find so intolerable. To be durable, a worldview must first explain the universe to us, and then assuage our fears and satisfy our longings. Logic is not a prerequisite. Myth can even contradict itself –not to mention be at variance with the real world. Regardless of when or where we live, we inevitably perceive ourselves as the Middle Kingdom, and either we smile condescendingly at the mythmaking of other cultures or we go to war with them to force upon them our (uniquely correct) worldview. And if we are better at crafting weapons, we are generally able to persuade those we have physically conquered of the superiority of our myths over theirs.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Western world accepted a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, but then the theory of evolution presented a radically different explanation of man’s origins.

Today, attempting to reconcile religion with science, we have created a new mythology which, not surprisingly, is ripe with contradictions. Here are some of them:

a) While other species of animal and plant can undergo significant change over a few generations, we maintain that thousands of generations of the most radically varying conditions of selection and selective mating have left only the most superficial genetic variance within our species.

b) Intellectuals (albeit not the man in the street) are firmly convinced that we are the product of evolution, but they are equally entrenched in the odd assumption that human beings are the one species no longer affected by that process.

c) Even as society pays a premium for ability and gumption in virtually any form of activity, it has become fashionable to claim that such factors play no role in the formation of social classes, which are held to be entirely a function of chance and privilege. Indeed, the scholars who dominate the publishing marketplace and academia deny the very existence of innate IQ variance in human populations.

d) We have developed a huge academic testing industry, but its findings are widely declared to be not merely approximate but lacking in any validity whatever.

e) With the transition to smaller families, we have observed that generation after generation of the intellectually endowed are failing to replace themselves–exactly as was feared by earlier eugenicists –but we accept the phenomenon as natural.

f) We are more and more successfully implementing a process called “medicine” for the elimination of natural selection, and are firmly convinced that future generations will remain unaffected by our reluctance to implement a substitute for natural selection.

g) Hard at work deciphering the map of the human genome, we continue to apply moral criteria to behavior which we will soon be able to explain scientifically.

h) While our social conduct, like that of all other animal species, is necessarily centered around the mating ritual, our perception of this process is governed by a myriad of camouflaging taboos and fetishes. The gap between reality and fantasy could not be more crass.

i) We have created a genetic caste society that co-opts talent born into the less privileged castes, efficiently exploiting and manipulating these castes, while at the same time proclaiming equality of opportunity as our slogan.

 j) We refuse to recognize that we are a species that perfectly fits the definition of a disease, freeing itself (very temporarily) from the constraints of natural selection and the limitations of natural resources only to wreak havoc on ourselves and our fellow species in a massive assault on the host that we parasitize –the planet.

k) We have created an unsustainable economy dependent on resource exhaustion. At the same time, we proclaim still greater levels of consumption as the goal of society.

l) We proclaim freedom of speech, all the while ruthlessly excoriating any opinion in the area of human genetics which is found offensive by any significant segment of society.

Thus, the revolution in technology has been accompanied, not by the elimination of myth, but by its modification into a denial of biology. The give and take of any political processes is necessarily determined by the relative power of the participants, so that future generations are not taken into consideration during decision-making.

Despite popular opinion and prejudice, the facts of science are inescapable. In the time you take to read this sentence, humankind will have evolved genetically. There are species such as the coelacanth fish, which –incredibly –has survived more than 400 million years, but they are the rare exception. Homo sapiens is a recent link in the evolutionary chain, and over the past century the conditions governing selection in that population have undergone revolutionary changes.
Ultimately, we have to decide how pleased we are with ourselves as a species. This is the great watershed dividing those who favor genetic intervention and those who oppose it. Regardless of our personal attitudes, however, there is no denying the fact that while the genetic lottery has indeed produced many winners, there are many others who have been less fortunate.

The eugenics movement, which can be understood as human ecology, has long considered itself a lobby for future generations, arguing that while it is true that we should not be presumptuous in our ability to predict the future, we can define what we want –healthy, intelligent babies who will grow up to be emotionally balanced, broadly altruistic adults. Now, when the majority of people live far beyond their child-bearing years, it is not those who have survived a horrendous process of natural selection who will populate the planet in the future, but those who have the most offspring. We now have selection by fertility rather than by mortality –a revolutionary change.

On a theoretical plane we are now – finally – in agreement that equality of opportunity is a desirable goal. At the same time, however, we find ourselves in the grip of a social ethos that insists that not only should we enjoy equal rights but also that we are all virtually identical, differing only in upbringing.

Mercifully, joyously, each of us is a unique individual, and this uniqueness extends to the ethnic and national groups that we form. We are not identical machines with differing software. Without exception, all ethnic groups have produced winners as well as losers in the genetic lottery. Interventionists argue that it is our moral duty to do our utmost to pass on to our children –not the same heritage –but the best, unique heritage possible for each of them. Ant interventionists point out that, in breaking off the precious baton handed on from generation to generation, we can easily produce an irreparable disaster. But no decision is also a decision. Many of our everyday decisions are fraught with genetic consequences. Who is having the babies, and how many? Anything that influences fertility is a factor in the new selection.

This can include a stroll to the nearest pharmacy to purchase contraceptive devices, a visit to an abortion clinic, or a decision to reduce or even renounce childbearing so as to be able to advance career and education. In denying free day care and financial child support to all but the welfare population, government provides incentives to some groups to bear children and disincentives to others, and this policy has already become a momentous factor in genetic selection. Eugenicists argue that we must accept our place within the physical world – as biological creatures.

To survive as a species with greater philosophical significance than the other animals, they believe we have no choice other than to agree in the area of reproduction to subordinate our interests to those of future generations and begin to manage our populations according to principles that are uncontested when applied to all other species. In short, they advocate replacing natural selection with scientific selection. In the words of Sir Francis Galton, the “father” of eugenics and statistics,

What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction. 1

This book concerns the meaning of life and intelligence and our place in the universe. It is based on a rational philosophy of life and love for our children, of a consciousness of the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood. It is proffered in a spirit of collegial friendship to concerned men and women of good will –both the proponents and the opponents of the eugenics movement. Hopefully, many of them will share the same values, hopes, and fears. If nothing else, we should be able to agree on the right to disagree. Fraught with history, values, and emotions, the eugenics movement sees itself as based on science, but is not limited to science.

I will here attempt to tie together a number of fields in a syncretic approach. I ask the reader’s understanding in presenting areas which might seem disparate, but any serious, wide-ranging worldview is necessarily eclectic. Humankind has entered into the first stages of a revolution in the general understanding of genetic mechanisms, new biotechnologies, and scientific explanation of areas of human health and behavior previously viewed through a moral prism. The genie of enlightenment cannot be squeezed back into the bottle of ignorance. The prospect of holding in one’s hands in a few years time the complete human blueprint is awe-inspiring, and we must assume that future discoveries in the field of genetics will give us capabilities that we can barely imagine now.

Disagreements on what is attributable to nature and what to nurture will seem quaint, and we will have to ask ourselves as a species what to do next, how to achieve, if not utopia, at least something closer to it than we now have, or at the very least how to survive. Proponents of eugenics see their cause as part of the struggle for human rights –the rights of people who will come after us. Like Martin Luther King, they argue, we may well wonder whether we will ever reach the Promised Land. Perhaps there is no final goal, just the search, but we owe it to our children to begin the journey, to do our best to ensure that they will be born better people than we are, and that they inherit more of our good qualities and fewer of our flaws.

Back

What Is Eugenics?

This weeping willow!
Why do you not plant a few
For the millions of children not yet born,
As well as for us?
Are they not non-existent, or cells asleep…

Edgar Lee Masters

“Columbus Cheney,” in “Spring River Anthology”

Once the continuity of humankind with the rest of the animal kingdom was established, invigorated attempts to improve the human genome became inevitable. Eugenics is, after all, quite simply, applied human genetics. Five of the first six presidents of the American Society of Human Genetics were also members of the board of directors of the Eugenics Society. Historically, modern genetics is an offshoot of the eugenics movement, not the reverse.

Positive eugenics refers to approaches intended to raise fertility among the genetically advantaged. These include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning. Pro-natalist countries (that is, those that wish to stimulate their birth rates) already engage in moderate forms of positive eugenics. Negative eugenics, which is aimed at lowering fertility among the genetically disadvantaged, is largely encompassed under the rubric of family planning and genetic counseling. This includes abortions and sterilization. To ensure that such services are available to all on a nondiscriminatory basis, it is advocated that, at a minimum, persons with low income receive such services on a free basis.

Genetic engineering, which was unknown to early eugenicists, consists of active intervention in the germ line without necessarily encouraging or discouraging reproduction of advantaged or disadvantaged individuals.
 

Back

Science

Previous Evolution

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
the cheating look, the frivolous word,
the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

Walt Whitman

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

The question of where to draw the line between closely related species and subspecies can be resolved differently by different observers. In the case of modern human populations, where scientists tend to pursue conflicting sociopolitical agendas, demarcation lines are hotly contested. The system of binomial nomenclature established in the eighteenth century by the Swedish botanist Karl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) for mapping the relationships among all living things (at least on our planet) lumps together the totality of modern human populations as Homo sapiens. All humans alive today, whether bushmen, Australian aborigines, Japanese, Eskimos, or caucasoids, are thus included in a single species, and any discussion of subspecies is regarded with suspicion and hostility.

Issued in response to a statement by the rightist French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen on racial inequality, a 1997 statement signed by a group of prominent biologists denied the very existence of race in human populations. Actually, the denial of race had first been made by the eugenicist Julian Huxley in 1935. Again, the assertion had been triggered by political events –in this case the promulgation of Hitler’s anti-Jewish pronouncements.2 Accordingly we now have a single “modern man,” and he comes in different colors. It is true that modern genetic studies have shown remarkable similarity among all humans, but for that humans and chimpanzees share something like 99% of their non-duplicative DNA.

Scientists now generally agree that modern human populations have their origins in Africa, but there is considerable disagreement as to whether current intergroup differences are explained by evolution dating back a million years to Homo erectus (“multiregionalism”) or whether Homo sapiens showed up as a relatively late arrival, roughly 100,000-200,000 years ago, and then proceeded to wipe out competing hominid emigres wherever he came into contact with them (“replacement” theory). The degree to which earlier hominid species interbred remains in the area of speculation, in which the multiregionalists have been accused of making a case for fundamental biological differences that amounts to racism.3

In the words of the scholar Seymour Itzkoff, we are dealing here with a “will to believe [which] is reminiscent of the seduction of intellectuals with abstract ideological models in politics and social thought.”4 The family trees of the cheetah and the horse provide useful contrasting models. Genetic studies have demonstrated that today’s cheetahs display so little diversity that their ancestors must at one time have come through such a narrow bottleneck that only a few individuals were able to perpetuate the species by inbreeding. Horses, by contrast, display tremendous variance as a result of independent taming and breeding in different parts of the world.

Ultimately, genetics is more like a game of chess, where the development of a position is of strictly historical interest and plays no role in determining the game’s outcome, than it is like bridge, where success is determined largely by the player’s ability to remember which cards were played earlier. The variability so obvious in human populations, even on an intragroup basis, opens the possibility of intervening in human evolution to guide it and even to search for new horizons, regardless of how present variability came about. Where we came from is a fascinating question, but where we are heading is quite another.

Even the replacement school of thought concedes that the human species developed for at least some five to eight thousand generations outside of Africa under radically differing conditions of selection. Such a sequence is sufficient to produce significant differences in the various subpopulations. In addition, still greater diversity would have to be postulated on the basis of the biological diversity that must have been in evidence at the time the various populations left Africa. Since human populations have had a far longer time to evolve in Africa than outside the mother continent, African populations display far greater genetic diversity than do other races, and the tiny populations who wandered out of Africa may well have reflected at least part of this diversity. Moreover, the émigrés may have interbred with other hominid species both in Africa and with those that had arrived still earlier. Animal breeders, by comparison, can achieve significant changes in just a few generations.

These factors, combined with the professional specialization of modern society and selective mating, represent the chief sources of intra-species variance. If Homo sapiens has been around for perhaps 150,000 years, our future existence may be considerably more ephemeral. Humanity is thus a colony with a beginning and evidently an end and is viewed here, not just as all people alive at any given moment, but as the totality of future people over the entire lifespan of this community. Eugenicists reason that our moral obligations are to all of them, that we are not only part of the planet’s ecology, its custodians as well.

As the mythologist Joseph Campbell put it, we are no less than its consciousness.5 The renowned geneticist James V. Neel studied the society and genetic makeup of the Yanomama of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil and persuasively argued that the structure of their society was typical of human populations during the period when people still lived exclusively in bands, that is, for all but the last 10,000 years.

These were small, isolated populations which practiced polygamy and incest, permitting nature to select among a rich variety of genotypes in widely differing environments. Such conditions were conducive to rapid evolution. Panmixia may still be a long way off, and indeed may never be total, but the ever-increasing outbreeding of human populations is reducing human diversity while at the same time creating large populations that are, perhaps, less prone to sudden, major genetic fluctuations.

History clearly demonstrates that social harmony is especially difficult to achieve in the face of diversity, whether religious, linguistic, or ethnic. The great historical crimes have all been instances of group-on-group violence. And when two or more ethnoses are clearly distinguishable from one another, the situation is fraught with even greater stress. The United States, which renounced the monstrous crime of slavery only to retain blatant discrimination for a century, is now attempting to achieve racial equity, but the fear of racial conflict is and will undoubtedly remain both large and, unfortunately, well founded. At the same time the issue has been blurred, racism being defined as,

a) group discrimination and hatred

b) discussion of intergroup differences

The two topics are really quite different, albeit not unrelated.

Society’s elites have decided that studies of intergroup differences are too volatile to permit them to be widely discussed and have falsely presented such studies as claiming total separation of group qualities rather than relative statistical frequency of specific characteristics.

We should all be able to agree that intergroup differences are a scientific, not a moral question. As far as the eugenics argument is concerned, they are irrelevant in the most fundamental fashion. Even if the desired breeding resource proves to be distributed differently in some populations than in others, each group contains a vast pool of talented individuals to draw upon in parenting future generations. Regardless of the magnitude of such intergroup differences, the reality is that even on an intragroup basis we ought to be less than pleased with ourselves.
 

Back

Testing

A sure test, an easy test:
Those that drink beer are the best,
Brown beer, strongly…

Robert Graves

“Strong Beer”

Since IQ testing was first initiated in the early part of the twentieth century, it has been utilized intensively by the US army both to select recruits and to determine the areas in which they might best be employed. Proponents of the egalitarian grain have delighted in attacking century-old science and then applying their conclusions wholesale to modern science. Certainly early IQ tests contained questions that elicit embarrassed smiles among today’s testers. For example, was the Knight engine used in the Packard, the Lozier, the Stearns, or the Pierce Arrow? Or does Velvet Joe appear in advertisements of tooth powder, dry goods, tobacco, or soap?7

While such questions might have had some limited validity when addressed to young people who had grown up in America, they were obviously inappropriate for people who had recently immigrated to the United States and barely spoke English. Such persons performed badly on the test, but it does not automatically follow that modern tests, which have been worked on assiduously by thousands of psychologists, are equally flawed and thus totally invalid.

Hopefully, the massive expansion of education throughout the world in the twentieth century has helped people not only to acquire specific facts, but also to use their minds more efficiently. But the fear is that dysgenic fertility patterns inherent in modern society have created a population with less innate ability than that of its predecessors.

To approach this question we must first make clear the difference between genotype and phenotype. Genotype is genetic potential; phenotype is realized potential. For example, statistics show a constantly rising mean height in most of the world. The cause is obviously not altered genes but improved nutrition (and, perhaps, meat laced with hormones). But genotypes set limits. If a group of pigmies were to be given excellent food and a group of Massai tribesmen were to be distributed low-quality nourishment, the pigmies would obviously enjoy a height increase and the Massai a decrease, but the pigmies would not become taller than the Massai, and there would be no Lamarckian carry-over to their children.
 

As the psychologist Edwin Boring quipped in a debate with the columnist Walter Lippman, “IQ is what IQ tests measure.” This is not necessarily the same thing as raw intelligence. One must distinguish between a conceptual variable and its operational definition. IQ is simply one possible measure of phenotype.

Some estimates of genotypic IQ decline are in the range of 1 to 4 points per generation,8 but the New Zealand political scientist James R. Flynn has produced a seminal study claiming that IQ scores have actually been steadily increasing. Such tests as the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler regularly measure subjects and establish new mean scores and standard deviations. From 1932 to 1978 testers steadily reset norms, each time raising the bar. When the norms are held constant, the mean IQ has risen 13.8 points –nearly one standard deviation over the course of 46 years.9

This is a potentially very encouraging result. It indicates that IQ differences may prove to be relatively more malleable than was previously thought, and the egalitarian ideal, which lies at the heart of the eugenic cause, may be more easily realizable than previously believed. On the other hand, we still can only surmise the constraints laid upon phenotype by genotype. What evidently has happened, if Flynn is correct, is a phenotypic improvement that has overridden genotypic deterioration. The SAT I is intended as an aptitude test, as opposed to the SAT II, which measures knowledge in specific subjects. The SAT I consists of two parts, the SAT V (verbal) and the SAT M (math). Flynn goes on to point out that, simultaneous with the above-mentioned IQ gains, an opposite trend was noted in SAT verbal scores.

SAT scores can be raised by coaching, but improvements are subject to a law of diminishing returns. Math scores rise by roughly 30 points after 40 hours of coaching, and verbal by about 20. But continued improvement of even 50% in scores is not achieved by putting in even six times that number of hours.10

Testing has generally enjoyed broad public support. In 1979, the Gallup Organization asked a representative sample of Americans what they thought of standardized tests. Eighty-one percent responded that they were “very useful” or “somewhat useful.”11 At the same time, a powerful coalition of the National Education Association, National Association for Colored People, and Ralph Nader’s followers adamantly opposed them. The coalition had many influential supporters in government and the press. Dan Rather, for example, in the 1975 CBS news special The IQ Myth declared that not only were IQ tests relatively useless as measures of intelligence, but that they were biased as well, for “it’s economic class that marks the main dividing line on IQ scores.”12

But the coalition did not have the general support of one group that is allied with it on many other issues. Jews invariably come off well in testing, and thus it is not surprising that the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Congress have all filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in opposition to Affirmative Action programs.
 

Back

g-loading

Lord, make me to know mine end,
and the measure of my days, what it is;
that I may know how frail I am.

Psalm XXXIV, 4

Does such a thing as general intelligence (“g”) exist, or does each individual possess a disparate collection of unrelated abilities –that is, multiple intelligences? Any scientific discussion of “unitary intelligence” is fraught with political significance for it can be interpreted as providing the measure of a person’s overall worth or ranking.

Proponents of general intelligence, beginning with Charles Spearman in the early twentieth century, have pointed out the positive correlation between spatial, numerical, and verbal abilities. An IQ score is essentially a numerical expression of g. On the other hand, there is no denying the existence of idiot-savants –people who have difficulty in coping with even the most elementary everyday tasks but who may be accomplished musicians or sculptors, can add a series of numbers with no less precision than a calculator, or can easily recount weather conditions on a randomly selected day in the eighteenth century. In other words, the correlation between their one special ability and their other abilities is negative.

And we need not limit ourselves to the exceptional. When specialized aptitude tests were administered to a group of students in place of global measures of intelligence, more than half of them scored in the top 10% on a specific ability.14 How then to compare or evaluate disparate abilities? The significance of g-loadings may well be exaggerated –or even a non sequitur. Given the limited physical space occupied by the brain, hyper-development of certain abilities may even necessarily come at the expense of others. In many ways the question is like the proverbial glass which is either half empty or half-full. It all depends on the observer’s point of view.
 

Back

IQ Decline

Tis folly to decline,
And steal inglorious to the silent grave…

Sir William Jones
“An Ode: In Imitation of Alcaeus”

How can we best protect the interests of still unborn generations? This is extremely difficult in a world where many regard children as an ordinary commodity. The so-called “demographic transition,” in which people in advanced societies choose to have fewer children, is even studied by economists and demographers in all manner of curves, graphs, and charts, establishing the cost of one child as the equivalent of X number of automobiles, televisions, or what have you. What are the consequences for the gene pool of selecting out young women of ability to pursue education and careers, thus reducing their fertility (in 20% of U.S. couples, delayed fertility turns out to be cancelled fertility) while remunerating young women of lesser ability on the basis of how many children they bear, even denying them abortions when they themselves request them?
 

Whereas girls in countries with developed welfare programs can choose to escape school by becoming pregnant if they find themselves unable to cope with an academic program, an early 2001 study showed that fully a third of American women earning more than $55,000 a year are childless at age 40 and are likely to live out their lives without ever giving birth.15 While “Total Fertility Rates” (TFR –the number of children a woman has in her lifetime) represent an important yardstick in measuring fertility patterns, generational length also plays a role. Obviously, the earlier a woman begins having children, the more offspring she can bear. Imagine two groups, in one of which women have their children at the average age of 20 and the other at 30. The first group will effectively have 50% more children than the first even if the TFR is identical. In the New York Longitudinal Study of Youth, for example, women in the bottom 5% of intelligence had their first baby more than seven years earlier than women in the top 5%.16

Abortion is significant in terms of the eugenics argument to the degree that it affects selection, particularly when the service is readily available to high-IQ groups, who can easily pay for it, but is denied to low-IQ groups, who are dependent on receiving the service on a subsidized or free basis. The abortion rate is related to years of education, which can be used as an imperfect substitute for IQ. In 1979, the standardized U.S. abortion rate by years of education for women 20 years of age and older was 44.3 for women with a high school education but only 3.2 for those who had less than eight years of schooling.17 Another significant dysgenic factor is war.

The creature who sees himself as molded in the image of God has used his improved technology to do vastly greater violence not only to his environment but also to himself. And it has been the egalitarians, not the hereditarians, who have been the least squeamish about murder and exile, be it in Russia, China, or Cambodia. There is a sad consistency to their logic: if everyone is the same, anyone who interferes with achieving utopia in our time can simply be eliminated and replaced when the next generation shows up.

War as a destructive mechanism of natural selection became a frequently discussed topic when “the flower” of Europe’s youth marched off to die en masse in the trenches of World War I. It was, after all, this particular conflict which introduced IQ testing to select out young men of ability more accurately for use as cannon fodder.

In instances of violent civil conflict, too, force is targeted most heavily at the real and potential opposition. Since opposition by definition involves thought and ideological dedication, the targets of destruction, more frequently than not, are persons of ability. The historian Nathaniel Weyl christened the phenomenon “aristocide.”18 Statistical analysis demonstrates that such a process produces a relatively modest lowering of the mean population IQ, but disastrous reductions in the number of persons with exceptionally high scores.19

The contribution of outstanding individuals to culture, science, and the general quality of life is disproportionate to their numbers. Just imagine what the history of music would be like without just a handful of the great composers –Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn. The same sort of “short list” could be made up of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers. Eliminate these geniuses and the average ability level of the next generations will not be altered perceptibly, but how impoverished our world would be!

The consequences of such a process are obviously alarming. Even with a relatively stable mean IQ, a society in which the intellectual leadership is significantly reduced is an impoverished society – at least relative to its original state. The lesson to be drawn is that the turbulence and magnitude of social upheaval do not have a necessary relationship to their genetic consequences.
 

Back