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  1. #21
    Hung Angel Platinum Poster trish's Avatar
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    So many very good points in this discussion. I’ll just take a stab at the last question which Stavros brings to our attention, “...why Genetics so often bothers itself with ‘things that go wrong’...?

    I’m not at all sure the science of genetics is as obsessed with ‘things that go wrong’ as are the press and science popularizers when they discuss genetics. The science is concerned with function (and of course as a corollary malfunction). The function of this gene, that enzyme, that protein? How do they serve the cells? How do the cells in this tissue serve this organ? What is the function of this organ in the overall physiology of the plant or animal? What role does this animal play in the flock? Why is it singing? Or chirping an alarm? Tracing the flow of ‘cause and effect’ from a microscopic complex of genes to the singing of a bird is tenuous at best. One may be able to establish statistical correlations between genes and behaviors but following the path of causation (in my opinion) will almost always be impossible because (again in my opinion) there isn’t a deterministic dynamic to follow. This, I think, is because genetics and biology only ever give us half the information we need to understand the behavior of an individual as he/she/it interacts with a chaotic world. Yet species do have behavioral characteristics. You can generally distinguish avian species by their songs. Still the songs have to be learned. But I’ve gotten off track.

    Back to ‘things that go wrong.’ Of course medical science and medical practitioners are totally obsessed with things that malfunction and genetics does seem to offer promising avenues toward treatments and cures. It’s not surprising the press would pick up on these.

    Sociobiology concerns itself with the evolution of inheritable animal behaviors. The premise is that some populations exhibit behavioral traits that are genetically coded and naturally selected for in the process of evolution. Barring a direct understanding of the flow of cause and effect from gene to behavior many of the arguments are ‘just so stories’ that sound reasonable but are impossible to test. The central nervous system of a simple flat worm might have less than a hundred neurons and it may be possible to completely understand its complete set of displayed behaviors in terms of its genetic makeup. But even here I’m pessimistic. The instinctual behaviors of insects may also be subject to this kind of analysis. Birds? Reptiles? Mammals? As the complexity and range of behaviors grows the ability to say with any conviction that the source of any particular behavior is genetic is doubtful.

    If you’re a sociobiologist you’re always looking for evolutionary explanation of various behaviors. Men are more likely to cheat on their wives than women are to cheat on their husbands because men invest less in reproduction than women do; i.e. a sperm is just a packet packet of DNA whereas an egg is a cell with organelles and machinery for sustaining its own metabolism and reproduction once its supplies with the complimentary strands of DNA it’s waiting for. This paraphrases the actual explanation of cheating given by Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene!

    I seen (wish I could remember the reference) an attempt explain the freeloader’s paradox with genetics. An analysis of the freeloaders paradox is that there is a mathematical limit to the how many freeloaders a population can sustain. Either there are mechanisms in place to keep the number of freeloaders below the limit or the population will collapse or at least its cooperative institutions will collapse. Some conjecture that freeloading is a genetic trait, freeloaders are genetically connected subpopulation and that natural selection maintains the optimal balance. Since the hypothesis that freeloading is genetic solves the freeloader’s paradox it must be correct - not withstanding the fact that you or I could offer a dozen other hypothesis that solve the freeloader’s paradox (like the transmission of social consciousness through education, or mechanisms that enforce cooperation or make it less profitable to freeload).

    Guess I’ve gone astray again (demonstrating 'things do go wrong'), so I’ll stop now. Thanks again for all the great discussion on these matters.


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    "...I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."_Alice Munro, Chaddeleys and Flemings.

    "...the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way". _Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's, BLOOD MERIDIAN.

  2. #22
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    Either there are mechanisms in place to keep the number of freeloaders below the limit or the population will collapse or at least its cooperative institutions will collapse. Some conjecture that freeloading is a genetic trait, freeloaders are genetically connected subpopulation and that natural selection maintains the optimal balance. Since the hypothesis that freeloading is genetic solves the freeloader’s paradox it must be correct - not withstanding the fact that you or I could offer a dozen other hypothesis that solve the freeloader’s paradox (like the transmission of social consciousness through education, or mechanisms that enforce cooperation or make it less profitable to freeload).

    I don't know about socio-biology (it has a dark past), but demographers plotting population growth perceive that one of the factors that will initiate -has already initiated in some parts of the world- a mean decline in population growth is infertility, particularly in Vietnam, while there may be cultural factors at work in the decline of the core populations of Germany and Italy. Whether or not in a mystical or practical sense, Gaia can only support x humans (more than 10 billion seems an upper limit) it is intriguing that after a peak around 2025, demographers believe that the global population will decline thereafter. Hans Rosling is very keen on the way in which globalization, by increasing basic income creates its own dynamic of which smaller families are the result, while medical science removes the need for multiple babies as the eradication or control of disease reduces infant mortality.

    It is when the analytical process that you say intends to describe our genes and how they work is taken a stage further that morals enter the frame. On the one hand, stem-cell research that aims to either clone genes or 'manipulate' them in the foetal stage has medical benefits for mother and child, but when the arguments are pitched at the level of human intelligence, with or without IQ tests, the radical question must be: what do you propose to do with this information?

    In the past, armed with the 'evidence' that society has 'useless' or 'dangerous' humans the proposal as I referred to in the OP was to round up these people and exterminate them. For the Nazis the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and Communist were all deemed surplus to requirements, while the belief that a new regime of hygiene would produce an even stronger and robust Aryan race was not so far removed from the idea that developed in the USSR that they too would be breeding a 'new Soviet man'.

    There is no doubt in my mind that when people produce scary stats that suggest the US in a generation will have Spanish as its mother tongue, or that Black Americans are doomed to live in urban hells of crime and poverty because they are Black, or that in more general terms 'we' the White People of Europe and America are 'threatened' by the mass migration of the global south, there may not even be an attempt to prove that such people are so genetically different as to be a threat to an established way of life, though some do construct elaborate theories as to why Muslims should stay in the Middle East, Latinos anywhere south of the Mexican border, and so on. And, its most extreme, there are those for whom this is not enough, and who want the mass expulsion of 'them' from the Homeland, with the sinister proposition that at some point force will be used.

    Thus science takes a back road to the place where violence is the solution, a threat embedded in the so-called debate on immigration that most people it seems are reluctant to engage in. There isn't much science in the government of either the UK or the USA although, unlike the USA the UK still has a Chief Scientist -the US these days can't find anyone to do the job or doesn't think it means anything. Maybe we have always lived in perilous times, but I have noticed with the spread of the internet that fundamental truths that informed the way we live, such as the chilling reality of the Holocaust and the ideas behind it, are revived by those who regret its passing, and feed on a wave of distrust in government to promote precisely those ideas about genetics that we thought had been discredited.

    It must be dispiriting for those engaged in the science of the future to have to waste time debunking the rubbish science of the past, but we may never get over the fact that there are people who simply do not want to believe the depths of depravity humans are capable of, or worse, think these are 'necessary' strategies of survival. They were led for the most part by cranks like David Icke, Lyndon Larouche and David Irving, yet we now see internet cretins like Alex Jones taken seriously by some, while in politics Erdogan, Putin and Trump are determined to smash to pieces generations of effort to improve human rights, freedom and equality for a fantasy future in which they know only economic, financial and political success. That might not have anything to do with Eugenics as science, but it is not far from a 'Eugenics' of political change we can all do without.


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  3. #23
    Hung Angel Platinum Poster trish's Avatar
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    Just came across this headline today: The Famine Ended 70 Years Ago but Dutch Genes Still Bear the Scars. https://nyti.ms/2GyrzLg


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    "...I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."_Alice Munro, Chaddeleys and Flemings.

    "...the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way". _Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's, BLOOD MERIDIAN.

  4. #24
    Hung Angel Platinum Poster trish's Avatar
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    Ran across a nice half-hour lecture on the role (or lack thereof) epigenetics in evolution. The 1944 starvation of the Dutch population by a nazi blockade which I linked to above is discussed.


    2 out of 2 members liked this post.
    "...I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."_Alice Munro, Chaddeleys and Flemings.

    "...the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way". _Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's, BLOOD MERIDIAN.

  5. #25
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    I just watched it and found it very interesting. Nessa Carey was similarly cautious about the transmission of epigenetic changes but I liked the way Myers explained it. I recall Carey talking about the resetting of changes in gene expression but did not recall why it takes place. The diagram showing the multitude of cell lines each with their own modifications makes it clear that an expressed change in a muscle cell is unlikely to continue to be expressed in a germ cell, the zygote, and every muscle cell in the next generation. But I didn't hear him discuss why occasionally some extreme events can cause trans-generational changes (for instance in the mice), however unlikely, though maybe I missed it or got distracted.

    Even though he dismisses a lot of wild claims, and he does talk about the norm of reaction and its importance, I wonder if he considers that some targeted interventions can have subtle but beneficial effects on phenotype. For instance, there are people who have meditated for thousands of hours who have stress responses and structural changes in their brains that make them profoundly different from those of non-meditators. If deprivation can change gene expression, it may be possible for targeted approaches to have subtle but ameliorative effects but not across generations in "Lamarckian" fashion. Just speculating! Thanks for the video!



  6. #26
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    Quote Originally Posted by broncofan View Post
    Even though he dismisses a lot of wild claims, and he does talk about the norm of reaction and its importance, I wonder if he considers that some targeted interventions can have subtle but beneficial effects on phenotype.
    Actually, probably just outside the scope of what he was discussing which is its lack of relevance to evolution and how it has become a bit of a mania with people discussing it without evidence of where and how it exerts its effects.



  7. #27
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    Default Re: The return of Eugenics? What is it for?

    When one thinks of Eugenics the Nazis of course come to mind, but one also thinks of phrenology and craniometry, and more recently the use of intelligence testing to try to demonstrate intellectual differences between races. It is difficult to not look at intelligence testing through the prism of the previous abominations that tried to palm themselves off as science, but Andrew Sullivan and Charles Murray have tried to mainstream this discussion more recently. Sam Harris had Charles Murray on his podcast, in what he claimed was an attempt to de-stigmatize "forbidden discussions" but he could not seem to make up his mind about whether he wanted to defend Charles Murray's beliefs on the merits or remove stigma from the discussion only.

    I am skeptical of intelligence testing first based on the previous attempts to reduce human mental abilities to something quantifiable and all of the obvious biases and ignorance of human anatomy that were involved in the enterprise. I also just think the entire idea of reducing human ingenuity is dehumanizing and have difficulty imagining that someone could innocently have a lifelong interest in what they believe are differences in human intelligence across races. From the little I've seen of it, the more likely cause of any difference is statistical noise, biased sampling, or failings of the tests themselves (meaning they don't test something immutable).

    Another consequence of this enterprise is that even when the science is poorly done and worse, the ideas permeate our culture and express themselves through the worldview of prejudiced people: enter Donald J. Trump. He has a history of calling black people who are accomplished and critical of him "low iq" and other epithets that are not justified by anything he has objectively observed but informed by what he thinks about black people. He even insinuated that Obama got terrible grades at Harvard Law which is not true.
    While I don't think there's any perfect measure of intelligence, I do think it's a real thing and there are some things that are imperfect indicators of it. Compare Obama and Trump. Obama graduated from Harvard Law Magna Cum Laude and was Editor in Chief of Harvard Law Review. Before his supporters claim he got preferential treatment, I can remind you that law school grading is blind, and that so is writing on to law review. He was in every way an exceptional student. Trump, on the other hand, transferred into University of Pennsylvania using family clout, graduated without any distinction in an undergraduate program, and was described by one of his professors as "the dumbest student I ever had" (descriptions of Obama are the opposite). Just thought I'd clear that up...


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