Dysgenics

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In population genetics, dysgenics is a term describing the progressive evolutionary "weakening" or genetic deterioration of a population of organisms relative to their environment, often due to relaxation of natural selection or the occurrence of negative selection. The antonym of dysgenic is eugenic (see also eugenics).

History of the term

The term first came into use as an opposite of eugenics, a social philosophy advocating improvement of human hereditary qualities, often by social programs or government intervention.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "dysgenic" was first used as an adjective as early as 1915 by David Starr Jordan to describe the "dysgenic effect" of World War I. He believed that fit men were as likely to die from modern warfare as anyone else, and war was seen as killing off only the physically fit male members of the population while the disabled stayed safely at home.

In the 1930s, Julian Huxley, who later became the first director of UNESCO, was concerned by dysgenics and described eugenics as "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range".

In 1963, Weyl and Possony asserted that comparatively small differences in average intelligence can become very large differences in the very high I.Q. ranges. A decline in average psychometric intelligence of only a few points will mean a much smaller population of gifted individuals.

Colum Gillfallen in 1965 argued that lead used by Romans in plumbing and cooking utensils poisoned the water and food of the Roman elite. He concluded, "It follows ... that whatever qualities enabled Roman individuals to make money, or to marry or mate with money, were rigorously bred out of the race and culture by lead and other forces" and caused the decline of the Roman Empire. In 1985, the Gillfallen paper was refuted by Needleman and Needleman. They found that "the lead employed in the main water-supply system was almost certainly harmless". Calcium deposits from hard water prevented contact with the lead. Where the water was soft (rare in the most populated areas), continuous flow of water caused dissolved lead concentration to be small. They agree that lead poisoning from cooking utensils was potentially hazardous. However, 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 (a Nobel laureate in Physics) used the term in his controversial advocacy of eugenics from the mid 1960s through the 1980s; he and his theories were unfavorably portrayed in the press. Shockley argued that "the future of the population was threatened because people with low IQs had more children than those with high IQs," and his theories "became increasingly controversial and race-based".

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.

Scientific Investigation

See also: Heritability of IQ

The scientific community has focused most on declining intelligence throughout the first world; demographic studies indicate that, currently, the more intelligent and better educated women in affluent nations have much lower reproductive rates than the less educated, which has led to concern regarding the future of intelligence in these nations.

Some of the first studies into the subject were carried out on individuals living before the advent of IQ testing, in the late 19th century; researchers checked for dysgenic trends by looking at the fertility of men listed in WHO's WHO, these individuals being presumably of high intelligence. These men, taken as a whole, had few children, implying the existence of a dysgenic trend.

But more rigorous studies carried out on those alive during the Second World War returned more optimistic results suggesting a slight eugenic trend, or at least the absence of dysgenesis with respect to intelligence. The findings from these investigations were consistent enough for Osborn and Bajema, writing as late as 1972, to conclude that fertility patterns were eugenic, and that "the reproductive trend toward an increase in the frequency of genes associated with higher IQ... will probably continue in the foreseeable future in the United States and will be found also in other industrial welfare-state democracies. But reviewers considered the findings premature, claiming that the samples were nationally unrepresentative, generally being confined to whites born between 1910 and 1940 in the Great Lakes States. Other researchers also began to report a dysgenic decline in the 1960s after two decades of neutral or eugenic fertility.

In 1982, Daniel Vining sought to address these issues in a study on the fertility of individuals throughout the United States, who were then aged 25 to 34. The average fertility in his study was correlated at -0.86 with IQ for white women and -0.96 for black women, which Vining claimed to indicate a drop in the genotypic average IQ of 1.6 points per generation for the white population, and 2.4 points per generation for the black population. in considering these results along with those from earlier researchers, Vining wrote that "in periods of rising birth rates, persons with higher intelligence tend to have fertility equal to, if not exceeding, that of the population as a whole," but, "The recent decline in fertility thus seems to have restored the dysgenic trend observed for a comparable period of falling fertility between 1850 and 1940." To address the concern that the fertility of this sample could not be considered complete, Vining carried out a follow-up study for the same sample 18 years later, reporting "the same negative relationship is found between IQ and fertility," although "the overall decline in mean IQ implied by these data is less".

Later research has generally supported that of Vining. One 2004 study by Richard Lynn and Marian Van Court returned similar results, with the genotypic decline measuring at 0.9 IQ points per generation for the total sample and 0.75 IQ points for whites only. Richard Lynn has been criticized for distorting and misrepresenting data by some scholars. Van Court has written for Occidental Quarterly, "a magazine that espouses white nationalism".

Another way of checking the negative relationship between IQ and fertility is to consider the relationship which educational attainment has to fertility, since education is known to be a reasonable proxy for IQ. One such study carried out in 1991 found that high school dropouts in America had the most children (2.5 on average), with high school graduates having fewer children, and college graduates having the fewest children (1.56 on average).

Among a sample of women using a reliable form of birth control, success rates were related to IQ, with the percentages of high, medium and low IQ women having unwanted births during a three-year interval being 3%, 8% and 11%, respectively. Another study found that after an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, higher IQ couples are more likely to obtain abortions ; and unmarried teenage girls who become pregnant are found to be more likely to carry their babies to term if they are doing poorly in school. Conversely, while desired family size is apparently the same for women of all IQ levels, highly educated women are found to be more likely to say that they desire more children than they have, indicating a "deficit fertility" in the highly intelligent. In her review of reproductive trends in the United States, Van Court argues that "each factor - from initially employing some form of contraception, to successful implementation of the method, to termination of an accidental pregnancy when it occurs - involves selection against intelligence."

Although much of the research into intelligence and fertility has been sadly restricted to individuals within a single nation (most of them living within the United States), Steven Shatz has recently extended the research into dysgenics internationally; he finds that "There is a strong tendency for countries with lower national IQ scores to have higher fertility rates and for countries with higher national IQ scores to have lower fertility rates.

One important objection to claims of dysgenic declines in intelligence has been that IQ scores themselves have not been falling, but rising. However, genotypic intelligence may fall even while phenotypic intelligence rises because of environmental effects (e.g. better schooling, nutrition, television, and so on). The secular increase to IQ scores known as the Flynn Effect has increased IQ scores as much as 15 points throughout the first world, but some researchers claim that this trend now shows signs of reversal. See The Flynn Effect for further information.

Bioethical debate

Some parents might choose to use reproductive technologies to select genetic traits which are commonly regarded as diseases or handicaps by the majority of the social matrix. For example, some deaf parents might want to use reproductive technology to guarantee that their children would be deaf. Some authors have argued that their wish to have disabled children should not be condemned but Rui Nunes points out that this practice could be regarded as unethical "because the basic human right to open future is violated".

In Music and Literature

Cyril M. Kornbluth's short story "The Marching Morons" is an example of dysgenic fiction.
Mike Judge's film Idiocracy is a comedy about a future where dysgenics has contributed to mass stupidity.
T. J. Bass's novels Half Past Human and The Godwhale describe humanity becoming cooperative and "low-maintenance" to the detriment of all other traits.
H. G. Wells' 1895 novel, The Time Machine, describes a future world where humanity has degenerated into two distinct branches who have their roots in the class distinctions of Wells' day. Both have sub-human intelligence and other putative dysgenic traits.
The 1998 song "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger finds lighthearted humor in dysgenics with the lines "Been around the world and found/That only stupid people are breeding/The cretins cloning and feeding/And I don't even own a tv"
The 2003 song "The Idiots Are Taking Over" by NOFX suggests that the effects of dysgenics are already evident.

References

Cited

General

Galor, Oded and Omer Moav: Natural selection and the origin of economic growth. Quarterly Review of Economics 117 (2002) 1133-1191.
Hamilton, W. D. (2000) A review of Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Annals of Human Genetics 64 (4), 363-374. doi: 10.1046/ j.1469-1809.2000.6440363.
Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems Scott-Townsend, 1992

External references

Future Generations, Personal eugenics website of Marian Van Court

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