History

As a term, dysgenics` first use was as antonym of eugenics — the social philosophy of improving human hereditary qualities via social programs and government intervention. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, "dysgenic" was first used, as an adjective, around 1915, by David Starr Jordan, describing the "dysgenic effect" of World War I. Starr Jordan believed that fit men were as likely to die in modern warfare as anyone else, and that war killed only the physically fit men of the populace whilst preserving the disabled at home.

In 1965 Colum Gillfallen speculated in The Mankind Quarterly that lead used by Romans in plumbing and cooking utensils poisoned the water and food of the Roman elite, causing the decline of the Roman Empire. Gillfallen's theory was refuted in 1985 by Needleman and Needleman, who showed that measurements of lead from bones of Romans and other peoples provide no evidence that the fertility of the Roman elite was adversely affected.

William Shockley used the term in his controversial advocacy of eugenics from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. Shockley argued that "the future of the population was threatened because people with low IQs had more children than those with high IQs".

Robert K. Graham in 1998 argued that genocide and class warfare, in cases ranging from the French Revolution to the present, have had a dysgenic effect through the killing of the more intelligent by the less intelligent, and "might well incline humanity toward a more primitive, more brutish level of evolutionary achievement".

Since 1969, a few studies on differential fertility have theorized that it may lead to a decline in population IQ and isolated studies have reported a negative correlation between IQ and fecundity. In 1996, Richard Lynn wrote Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations; Lynn had been previously criticized for distorting and misrepresenting data although others have favorably reviewed Lynn's work on dysgenics. Richard Lynn (along with Daniel R. Vining and William Shockley) is a major recipient of grants from the Pioneer Fund, characterized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights advocacy organization described as "a controversial, liberal organization".

Flynn effect

If the genes underlying IQ have been shifting, IQ throughout the population should reasonably be expected to shift in the same direction, yet the reverse has occurred. However, genotypic IQ may fall even while phenotypic IQ rises throughout the population due to environmental effects such as better schooling, nutrition and television viewing. The Flynn Effect has increased IQ scores as much as 15 points throughout the First World, but some researchers have argued that this trend now shows signs of reversal.

Dysgenic fallacy

James S. Coleman, however, contends that Preston and Campbell's model depends on assumptions which are unlikely to be true, and argues that their dismissal of the "common belief" in the case of IQ is unfounded.

In fiction

Cyril M. Kornbluth's 1951 short story The Marching Morons is an example of dysgenic fiction, describing a man who accidentally ends up in the distant future to find out that dysgenics has resulted in mass stupidity. Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy has the same premise, with the main character signing up for a military hibernation experiment that goes awry, taking him 500 years into the future. While in the Kornbluth short story civilization is kept afloat by a small group of dedicated geniuses, their role has been replaced by advanced automated systems in Idiocracy.

See also

• Breeder (slang)
• Devolution (biological fallacy)
• Degeneration
• Fertility and intelligence
• Human vestigiality
• Societal collapse
• Social Darwinism

Notes