Una verdad simulada

While I am in the mood of qouting others, here is another excellent piece from Pharyngula. In this relatively long post, PZ Myers refutes the eugenics’ argument and the belief that rapidly reproducing dummies will result in overall decrease in the average intelligence of human populations. Quote:

[…] The eugenics movement built on the same us-vs.-them mentality, that there are superiors and inferiors, and the inferiors breed like cockroaches.

The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it’s intrinsic. “They” are lesser beings than “us” because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It’s the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like “three generations of imbeciles are enough“—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.

People, they are us.

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence.

PZ then goes on to put this in the current socio-political context: that the fear of immigrants in unfounded. Eventually, through inter-racial marriages, all the “genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity.” That is no reason to worry about, biologically:

Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.

Misunderstanding about evolution and biology are widespread. Just recently, I was discussing with someone who believed that the centuries of oppression of women in India has resulted in women being meek. “You can’t fight the genes,” so went the argument.

In the discussions about reservation policies (affirmative action), I have encountered more than a fair share of individuals who oppose reservations* because giving opportunities to the less intelligent people — as judged by an incompetent and overburdned examination system — will cause the average intelligence of our country to drop and us to lose our educational edge**.

Such misunderstandings arise because intelligence or specific abilities are indeed innate. However, one fails to distinguish between individuals and populations. Evolution acts on populations and on time scales of several generations, much longer time than an individual’s life span. You might find an individual more intelligent than the next, or that on an average, children of “intelligent” people to be more intelligent or children of athletes tend to be more athletic. That does not mean selective breeding between intelligent people will lead to improved intelligence of the population. That idea is eugenics and is unsupported by our understanding of biology and evolution. PZ covers this aptly:

I know there are constraints on intelligence; there is individual variation in capacity, and there are almost certainly some biological bases for that, and also for differences in the kind of intelligence individuals express. This isn’t about that. It’s about whether there are significant differences in the distribution of the genetic constraints on human intelligence between subpopulations, and whether we are justified in writing off segments of our population as incurable morons whose progeny are similarly tainted. I say no to both.

You’d be hard-pressed to argue that the diverse groups marked by ethnic and class distinctions in the U.S. even count as distinct populations in any biological sense. There are social barriers to breeding, but they are sufficiently porous that over the course of time needed to set up genetic differences that matter, they’re negligible.

Unless you ship off the two populations to different planets (or two different islands), with no contact, given sufficient amount of time (perhaps spanning millenia or more) the two populations will drift due to the different selection pressures. But you keep the two subpopulations in the same country, you will be hard-pressed to find a biological reason that suggests such a genetic shift. As PZ concludes:

There are mobs of stupid people out there. Sterilizing them or shipping them off to Venus won’t change a thing, though, no matter how effective your elimination procedures are, because you’ll just breed more from the remaining elite stock. Similarly, lining up the elites against the wall won’t change the overall potential of the population — new elites will arise from the common stock. The answer is always going to be education and opportunity and mobility.

Read the entire post at Pharyngula.

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* I oppose reservations too, because (i) it treats the symptoms not the cause of the problem in our country, (ii) takes our focus away from addressing these causes, and (iii) it casts education / opportunity as a zero-sum game.

** A rant about our perceived “eduational edge” will be a matter of another day. While we are talking about education, scoot over to Atanu’s blog to his multi-part series on Indian Education.

Tags: General //