The Dysgenic Age
"Strong men create good times..."
There are few words in the English language which elicit such a vicious recoil than that of “eugenics”. In the post-WW2 mythos of the West in which we currently inhabit, the word is inherently associated with ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization, and the Holocaust. On this foggy association alone, the word and what it purports - whatever that may be - is rejected instantaneously by all walks of life from race-Marxist revolutionaries in Ibram Kendi to naive Christians such as Alex Jones in his analysis of the Great Reset.
It’s a remarkable decline for a position that was nearly universal as social policy throughout the early 20th Century, and additionally remained as a mainstay in the biological sciences up until just a couple of decades ago. Watson & Crick, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA; W.D. Hamilton, who’s Kin Selection theory I covered in my first substack article on tribalism; John Maynard Smith, another legendary geneticist & mathematician known for his theories on sexual selection - all of these heavyweight geneticists were vocal advocates for eugenics until their deaths in the early 00’s. The one exception being Watson, who of course was stripped of all of his titles in 2019 for suggesting racial IQ gaps are predominately genetic (and, to be honest, he sort of had this coming by also saying in 2007 that working with blacks tells you all you need to know about why Africa is Africa. What a guy.)
Contemporary political discourse, particularly from the right, features a lot of gesturing of certain elites as “eugenicists”. This is particularly comical, because these accusations are being thrown at the exact moment the accused are doing everything in their power to dramatically increase the rate of deleterious genes in the human population through a number of means. Eugenicists don’t mass-produce vaccines, they argue in favor of the philanthropic and dharmic power of smallpox skyrocketing infant mortality.
The Discourse™ has become absolutely riddled with stupid misrepresentations and abuse of the eugenic position, and how its alarming findings have been swept entirely under the rug out of ideological fervor from every angle. This article seeks to clear up some of the confusion and restating the problem described by some great thinkers such as Hamilton, Smith, Watson, & Crick.
Galton & The Bell Curve
The eugenic position was first idealized by the British polymath Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who’s work he was particularly interested in. Once Darwin’s theory of evolution became undeniable, many later made the obvious connection that if these hereditary principles such as “survival of the fittest” applied to all life without exception, then mankind itself was subject to evolutionary pressures. Galton was specifically interested in the insight that if man was able to radically direct the evolutionary trajectory of plants and animals, then it should be able to direct its own trajectory. Not just that, but mankind has a moral and religious imperative to use this tool for philanthropic good.
What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly. - Galton, Hereditary Genius
What’s less known about Galton is that he was the first to develop a number of statistical observations regarding the association between fertility and what he called “character”. This quality encompassed a number of desirable traits, such as economic success, independence, intelligence, good moral sensibility, differed-gratification, and so on. The important observation is that the people of good character were having less children than those of poor character. Not only that, but that “good moral sensibility” and “economic success” part about the former encouraged them to share their wealth with the latter, further exacerbating the problem.
One could easily translate Galton’s character to modern academia’s intelligence/IQ, or g, and see the same observations regarding the heritability of these desirable traits (see Herrnstein/Murray’s The Bell Curve for dozens of associations between IQ and Galton’s definition of character):
The current scientific corpus has no problem showing that there is indeed a relationship between character/intelligence and fertility, with a regression (this statistical method was invented by Galton, by the way) of about-0.6 to -0.8. The Bell Curve cites available IQ data and states that in the US White women with an average IQ of 111 had 1.6 children, while White women with an average IQ of 81 had 2.6 children. This phenomenon is known as dysgenic fertility, and it confirms what is readily observable in contemporary society. Upper-class Westerners shun large families, often opting-out entirely, while lower-class blacks and immigrants continue to have an average of 6 children per mother in some countries. One explanation for this could be the association between IQ and the ability to delay gratification, a key trait necessary for good family planning.
A rudimentary knowledge of evolution should make the alarming problem pretty clear: over time, qualities of poor character will become increasingly common over time. The tree will have an increasing supply of rotten apples.
W.D. Hamilton and Maynard-Smith: Narrow Roads
Hamilton naturally took a straight-forward and mathematical approach to the issue of genetic health in an evolutionary lens. Modern medicine does exactly what it has sought out to do: save the lives of the sickly. The problem is that there is an unintended consequence in this, in that the relative quantity of deleterious genes in the population increases as modern medicine allows the carriers of these genes to reach adulthood.
What are some of the problems we’re facing? The list is pretty daunting, and worse of all common sense. We just never recognize the harm we’re doing. Let’s bullet off a few quick examples:
C-Sections: Mothers who were delivered by C-Section are themselves 55% more likely to require C-Sections to deliver their children. Birth complications will become more common as this continues. The same is true for IVF and fertility, those birthed by IVF will likely need it themselves to reproduce.
Breastfeeding: Have you noticed the absurd number of women who don’t breastfeed their children, and just shrug it off because formula is available? Just a quarter of mothers breastfeed through 6 months. Along with formula is the availability of hormones to assist with lactation. In the good old days, if mother couldn’t breastfeed, you just died. Complications with breastfeeding will become more common as this continues.
Sickle-Cell Disease: SCD historically meant not surviving beyond puberty. Today, there are huge efforts to ensure that people with SCD not only live to adulthood, but are given treatments to allow them to have children. Sickle-cell has been increasing in incidence for decades, and will continue to do so as this continues.
Cystic Fibrosis, Hemophilia, PKU: same story as SCD. There are hundreds of examples. Vaccines and general immune system function falls into this category. This will continue to get worse.
Down Syndrome: Assistance and life-saving medical intervention has allowed the prevalence of down syndrome to skyrocket. Furthermore, women with down syndrome have no problem having children of their own, who in turn have a 100% chance of inheriting the disease. Take for example this woman who was puzzled by birthing 3 children with down syndrome, only to discover she herself has it. This, as we have all witnessed, will continue to get worse.
For Hamilton, this was simply intolerable. The long-term health of the gene pool overrides the the short-term quality of life of individuals. The following quotes landed him in some mild controversy:
"For me, tiny embryos that seem to be in fish-like stages of human development, or earlier, are genuinely fish-like or even more primitive. Indeed, I believe additionally that they experience less of pain, fear, and danger than fish experience. Because of this I would genuinely be happier 'terminating' such early human embryos in a Petri dish than I would be 'terminating' an adult fish in an aquarium." (p. 460)
"By kidding ourselves about some weird kindness to embryos, to neonates, and the like now, we are actually being very unkind to numerous far more sentient persons of the future." (p. 476)
"If one is going to kill a baby, clearly it is only tolerable for it to be killed painlessly" (p. 481 Vol 2 Narrow Roads).
John Maynard Smith, another heavyweight, came to somewhat of the same conclusion in his short paper Eugenics and Utopia. Medicine is going to ironically make people sicker, and we should expect to, over time, be forced to dedicate increasingly more resources to caring for the carriers of these deleterious genes. However, he suggests a way out: through eugenics and gene therapy, we could identify and remove these genes from germ lines without needing to kill or sterilize anyone. Or, simply, we could ban marriages between carriers:
The ability to recognize heterozygotes for such conditions as phenylketonuria makes it possible in principle to eliminate the affected homozygotes by preventing marriage between heterozygotes. (The statement in the previous paragraph that almost everyone is heterozygous for something does not invalidate this conclusion: all that has to be avoided is marriage between two people heterozygous for the same gene; and this would rule out only a small fraction of possible marriages.) It is admittedly difficult to see how this can be achieved, but a start might be made by testing relatives of affected persons and partners in prospective marriages between cousins.
Hamilton was unsure of how viable this would be. The sheer frequency and variability of genetic illnesses, which are rapidly increasing in both respects, likely exceed our capability to ever detect them in any meaningful way. Simply put, we would be overrun by wasting our time trying to carefully test and engineer out specific genes:
"If humans turn out to be near the Kondrashov limit—that is, if on average every gamete has one bad mutation created during the lifetime of its producer—it is obviously not going to be nearly enough to test a baby for the subset of the few hundreds or so of well-characterized genetic defects.” (p. 465).
Hamilton was evidently distraught by the problem and pulled no punches until his death in 2000. He even went as far to praise Richard Lynn’s book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, even as The Establishment™ condemned him as a White supremacist pseudoscientist.
Sensible Moderate Centrist Eugenics
Okay, so we have all of these problems growing within our genes and there’s seemingly little we can do about it. Unilaterally killing everyone with illnesses won’t do any good, because we’ll just go right back to allowing medicine to propagate more deleterious genes. We’re stuck in a paradox that healing people makes us sicker, long term. Further, like it or not, this is not exactly the kind of proposal you want to endorse in an age of popular sovereignty.
The position of “neo-eugenics” has become increasingly popular over the past decade as the problem of genetic health rears its ugly head again. It restates the position, just pinky-promises it won’t go about it in a super evil way like Hitler did. No forced sterilizations, no gas chambers. Just informed consent waivers, large-scale pharmaceutical operations, and testing. Lots of testing.
Hamilton wanted to “close the hospitals”, but the neo-eugenicists want to expand them. Their reasoning somewhat revolves around the idea that the human genome isn’t an end, but a means. Civilization is the end - what could they possibly mean by that?
“Variations in gene sequence or expression of the human genome may have adaptive or maladaptive consequences, but they cannot be reduced to an error of nature that should be corrected. The hallmark of an enlightened society is its inclusion of homosexuality, ethnic differences and disabilities.” - Laurent Mottron
The sensible moderate centrist position on eugenics is that we can do what we can do without offending the sensibilities of modern secular humanism, but no further. The consequences of violating that line are worse than the long-term deterioration of the human race into a species of genetically botched hospital patients who are utterly reliant on technology and mass-production to simply rear a child. I must disagree! None of these sensibilities will matter at all in 10,000 years, if they even survive that long, because the character of the average human will have deteriorated to the point where this idea of an “enlightened civilization” will be ancient Atlantean magic.
Practical Suggestions
What I write here is going to have absolutely zero impact on social policy, but here’s a few policy suggestions that we could enact, today, without a serious ideological upheaval in the West:
Incentivize fertility in the upper-class, disincentivize it for the lower-class. Welfare policy rewards the low class’s high fertility with big checks, this could be inverted or disbanded entirely for a meritocratic system. Further, paying the low class with drug money to get sterilized has worked, and is honestly pretty funny how it happened in some cases.
Encourage large-scale research into genetic disorders, testing for newborns/couples, and germline therapy. This will not remove the general problem of medicine removing natural selection, but it will slow it significantly down. Some mitochondrial diseases have been successfully “removed” from bloodlines through this technique.
Encourage practices that increase human potential to compensate. Sure, we may be doomed to be crippled retards, but we can be crippled retards with 185 IQ mean. There’s a number of ways to do this, Richard Lynn suggested in Dysgenics that couples already receiving IVF treatment could select the most “genetically intelligent” embryo to implant. The technology isn’t there yet, but this theoretically would increase IQ by entire standard deviations in a single generation, such there is a +/- 15pt variability in IQ depending on the sperm/egg from each parent.
Let nature run its course. If the trend continues, it seems unlikely that we could outrun the problem forever. If we become weaker, dumber, and less empathetic in each successive generation, it follows that we would be less capable of dealing with the problem. At some point, that threshold will be crossed, and we will have to deal with the laws of nature as they are. A similar Malthusian approach can be seen in antibiotic resistance and global carrying capacity - we can do what we can for now, but it’s only borrowing time. At some point, we will have to answer.
On a personal level, I should note that each of us control the single greatest eugenic act available to us as individuals - sexual selection. We have the full power to pick and choose who we want to be the other half of our children, and what qualities we want to persist in our bloodlines. Before any general suggestion for human civilization in the next 10,000 years should be considered, we should recognize that the basis of eugenics is selective reproduction. Marriage, if taken with any degree of care at all, is a eugenic act. You control what your descendants look like, first and foremost.
But things aren’t always perfect. It may be your child that is diagnosed with down syndrome, and you’ll be forced to make a decision. Will you do everything in your power to give them life, or will you detach yourself and think on longer time scales? I’m not going to claim which is better.
You control what your descendants look like, first and foremost.
Women would rather pick a 6ft tall retard than a short intelligent scientist.
There is a reason that only those civilizations which put women on a leash survived.
I had a libtard class in college that talked about how birth rates plummeted when women had access to education and “family planning” resources. I wonder if improving the material conditions of say, American blacks and Hispanics, will lower their fertility.
Perhaps treat being a Microsoft office suite sharecropper like the Industrial Revolution and move white America to a post computer Revolution society. Where women no longer feel prestige from making PowerPoint slides for corporations.