Back at it ... The Absurdity of Eugenics

After a gloriously unproductive hiatus, I'm back at it with an article on eugenics that I planned to finish up before the break. Actually, it’s more like a list of points, since there isn’t a whole lot of structure.


Evolution is not directional. (Not in nature, that is. I suppose we could make it that way ... but I suggest considering the final two lines of this piece for some reflection about how much direction we could offer.) We should certainly try to survive as a species, but we don't know what attributes will help us the best.

However, as pointed out by Marx, we both create our (social) environment and face evolutionary pressures from it. Sure, we can influence all aspects of our environment, but reality is way to complex to know exactly what will happen.

If reality is too complex at the macro level, then eugenics is eternally bound to be useless, except as a morally corrupted tool to enhance the benefits of some particular social group (who define their own characteristics as being the most fit, then try to make it true by imposing their vision on people). It is therefore eminently beyond our ability to figure out which specific bits of the complex whole should become the target of any such eugenics-minded project.

Even if we were to disregard the distasteful elements of eugenics, I quite strongly believe that an absolute precondition would have to be perfect equality of opportunity. Any other starting point would bias the whole process and lead to suboptimal results. (Haha... eat that! Pure socialism as a logical and necessary pre-condition to eugenics. If that’s the precondition, I’d like to know just how many of these neo-Nazis would still embrace the project.)
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While we can conceptually grasp the pieces of the whole (individuals) and think we can understand it, and we can also grasp the whole (humanity, and the infinite ways that it relates to our environment), and think we understand it, each of these are filled with uncertainty and poor knowledge.

To then suppose that the individual (the eugenicist) is able to unite such completely flawed packets of information so as to find the most 'perfect' ways that they must match up, counting for all possible future effects, is not exactly an endearing example of the sort of intelligence they claim to favour. The sheer absurdity of the proposition is, in fact, my primary thrust. This paragraph largely constitutes my entire argument.
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Consider the following possibility ... In the year 2100, a person with a low IQ but great sensitivity to social situations becomes a political leader and staves off what would otherwise have been a nuclear holocaust. The leader on the other side agrees, because his schizophrenic nephew, on new meds, was full of a certain joie de vie during a recent visit, which rubbed off on the guy and made him more conciliatory.


YOU JUST DON'T KNOW! My God, how much more clear can I get! There is only one group of people that I find more frustrating than hard-core fundamentalists, and that's hard core eugenicists. Let me tell you why.

A fundamentalist is typically unshakable in their position and takes honour in such. They see such inherent truth in their views that it would never cross their mind to pretend that you might be half-way right just to turn around and try to convince you. But the eugenicist will pretend to agree with you in any way that is conducive to opening the space for an argument that makes eugenics sound palatable.

Self-censorship and social admonition with respect to reproduction? Sure, sounds great. Our evolutionary direction is almost sure to be affected by "sexual selection" (in the Darwinian sense) that includes greater knowledge about our genetic composition. Individuals will, or will not, choose to have babies. Certain social and economic incentives affect these choices. However, I'm hard pressed to think of anything that is more fundamentally an inherently natural right, as a living organism, be it a cell or a rabbit, let along a human being, than the right to enter the market of sexual activity and reproduction, if one so chooses.