Richard Lynn
1,944 words
Richard Lynn
Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations
Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996
When it comes to population, quality matters more than quantity. While educated Westerners never tire of sprinkling their conversations with the word “overpopulation,” voicing concern about population worth is taboo. Put it this way: you have to spend the rest of your life in a city filled with Nigerians or Japanese. You can either pick the ethnic makeup or the amount of people in the city. Which would you choose? As it’s settled that genes influence character and intelligence, could these traits be declining in some or all populations? Has it to some extent? Anecdotes exist about single educated women and fertile welfare queens, but hard data is needed.
While support for eugenics has been around since the time of Plato, the first person to worry about genetic deterioration was French physician Benedict August Morel. He’s an obscure figure today and much better known is the more important Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883. He thought that more genes for lower intelligence and poor character were concentrated in the lower classes, whose higher fertility would lead to a decline in genetic quality. Galton spent his life working to reverse the trend. He eventually convinced Darwin himself of the danger. Biologist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote:
In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive.
It wasn’t until 1974 that Nobel prize winning physicist William Shockley called the process dysgenics. Darwin went on to despair over the excessive breeding of “the scum.” Data has always been needed on whether his fears had been justified. Richard Lynn brings together studies and data from the last 200 years dealing with the connection between fertility and intelligence/socioeconomic status from all over the world. How afraid should we be?
Selection throughout Time
The conditions that hunter-gatherers lived in insured an upkeep of genetic quality. Usually there was a chief who had to have a certain amount of intelligence to acquire and maintain his position. He had the most access to females, there would be relatively high ranking men who had one wife and many of the unfit never bred. Mutations that popped up which adversely affected health would be weeded out. Early nation-states continued with polygamy.
With Western man’s transition to civilization selection was weakened but not eliminated. The higher social classes enjoyed better nutrition so had better health and children more likely to survive into adulthood. Christianity struck a blow against the Western gene pool by enforcing celibacy among the priesthood but probably more than made up for it by prohibitions against adultery. Most who have children out of wed-lock then and now have/had lower intelligence and less self-control. Overall, the years 1500-1800 were good for Europe’s gene pool. In England from 1620-1624 the middle classes reported 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class. Part of the reason why is life expectancy. In Berlin from 1710-1799 the average life expectancy for the upper class was 29.8 years compared to 20.3 for the lower class. The numbers for Geneva, Rouen and Neuruppin in the 18th century are similarly tilted towards the former. This didn’t mean that everybody died when they were 20-30 years old but that more of the lower classes were dying in childhood before they could mate.
Lynn understands that for these numbers to mean anything it would have to be shown that there was social mobility. If everybody was stuck in their own class with no opportunity to rise or fall then we would expect different social classes to be similar and not worry about differences in fertility. Pitrim Sorokin looked at a wide range of societies and found that there has never been one with no social mobility at all. The closest thing has been the caste system in India, but even these classes weren’t absolutely closed. Economist historian S.J. Payling concluded that there was significant social mobility in Europe from at least the 14th century on.
Natural Selection Breaks Down: Health and Intelligence
Mutations occasionally pop up in any population. Since the vast majority are adverse, stable fertility for an entire population still means deterioration. The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit. The results of the slacking of selection in our modern world is apparent in disease. Today, almost 1% of children born have a mutation for a common genetic disorder. Due to carriers of bad genes surviving and new mutations, it’s estimated that the rates of hemophilia, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria are increasing every generation by 26%, 120%, and 300% respectively. Humanity requires that we save children that can be saved but breeding for those with diseased genes needs to be restricted. Lynn hints that better genetic screening and selective abortion can offset some of the consequences of modern medicine.
American psychologist Theodore Lentz was the first to devise a method for finding the relationship between intelligence and fertility. He tested the IQs of children and found out how many siblings they had. Assuming that children have the same IQ as their parents, if those with lower IQs had more brothers and sisters than children with high IQs then it could be determined that dysgenics is happening. In 1927 Lentz calculated an IQ drop of 4 points per generation. Calculations in Britain found a drop of about 2 points per generation. These surveys didn’t include the childless but since they are disproportionately those with higher IQs the studies actually underestimate the extent of dysgenic fertility. Reviewing various studies and using findings from twin and adoption cases showing that IQ is 82% heritable, Lynn calculates a genotypic IQ decline of 5 points in Britain from 1890-1980. In the US he calculates a drop of 2.5 IQ points for whites and 6.2 for blacks over three generations. Interestingly, women are shown to universally have more dysgenic fertility than men. This is partly because low IQ men probably have a harder time finding mates than low IQ women.
The Fall of Greece
Greece is a particularly interesting example. Papavassiliou (1954) looked at IQ, socioeconomic status and fertitlity for men and came up with the following results.
Intelligence and Fertility in Greece, 1950s
| Socioeconomic Status | Number Surveyed | Mean IQ | Number of Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professionals | 41 | 117.2 | 1.78 |
| Skilled Workers | 80 | 100.9 | 2.66 |
| Semi-skilled Workers | 27 | 91 | 4 |
| Unskilled Workers | 67 | 82.2 | 5.56 |
My calculations give an IQ of 96.9 for the parent generation and an IQ drop of 4.9. Using a heritability of .82 for IQ puts the IQ of the children’s generation at 92.9 (IQ of parent generation – .82 x 4.9). Lynn has found elsewhere that the IQ of Greece is 95. This low (for Europe) figure is surprising considering the country’s historical accomplishments. Papavassiliou’s data may solve the puzzle.
Does the Flynn Effect Disprove Eugenics?
While science has shown that traits for IQ and socioeconomic status are heritable and those with poor genes are outbreeding those with good genes, actual performance on IQ tests in the industrialized world has risen over the last century. How can this be? This seeming paradox is called the Flynn effect, after the scientist who estimated IQ gains of about 3-4 points per decade over the 20th century.
We can rule out the effect of increased familiarity with written tests or better education because these gains are present in children as young as two years old. It is doubtful that it is due to increased stimulation because adoption studies show that the effect of shared environment is negligible; two biologically unrelated people raised in the same house are no more alike than any two random strangers. Lynn’s explanation is that the Flynn effect is due to better nutrition. This seems like the best explanation, as over the same time period height and brain size have increased by one standard deviation: the same as the increase in IQ.
So while genotypic intelligence, which can be seen as underlying genetic quality, has decreased, actual performance, phenotypic intelligence, has seen an increase. This increase can’t last forever and the evidence shows that in the developed world, with even the poorest suffering from obesity, the Flynn effect has hit its ceiling. We can now expect a decrease in observed intelligence in the developed even discounting low IQ third world immigration.
The Case of Character
Francis Galton and the early eugenicists weren’t only concerned with the decline in intelligence and health but what they called character: a moral sense, ability to delay gratification and work towards long term goals and sense of duty. Modern psychologists call this conscientiousness and Lynn gives a working estimate for it being 66% heritable. The news here is even worse than the data on intelligence.
Looking at criminals and psychopaths and their number of siblings yields a decline in consciousness that is twice the rate of the decline in intelligence. This has had real life consequences
The straightforward prediction is that the high fertility of criminals has led to an increase in the number of genes in the population responsible for crime and this will show up in increasing crime rates. These increasing crime rates have certainly occurred in most of the economically developed nations during the second half of the twentieth century. In the United States, crime rates approximately tripled between 1960 and 1990; in Britain they quadrupled, and similar increases have occurred in many other countries.
Rates of out-of-wedlock births tell a similar story. Western populations are morally worse than ever and we can expect the modern welfare state to continue to accelerate the decline. Unfortunately, most social scientists and policy makers are too steeped in the environmentalist dogma to deal with these problems.
Does the Universality of the Problem Mean It’s Hopeless?
While there are no direct studies for IQ and fertility in the third world we can check to see how socioeconomic status and education, both correlated with IQ, relate to number of children. Lynn calls the birth rate of the lowest class over the birth rate of the highest class the dysgenic ratio. For example, if those in the lowest class have 3 children per woman and the higher class have 2, the dysgenic ratio is 3/2 = 1.5. Anything over 1 indicates dysgenic fertility and anything under 1 indicates eugenic fertility. While a number over 2 is high for modern Western nations, ratios have been calculated at 3.1 for Columbia, 2.6 for Guatemala, 2.7 for Mexico and 3.1 for Brazil. Muslim and African countries have lower ratios, but only because even the highest classes have large numbers of children. In a worldwide survey the only exceptions are Bangladesh, Fiji and Indonesia who have ratios of 1.01, 0.93, and 0.86 respectively. The developing world can be expected to remain “developing” indefinitely.
So dysgenic fertility is found everywhere: among rich and poor and every race. Does that mean it’s hopeless? We won’t know until we at least acknowledge and try to deal with the problem. Communism once controlled half the planet and today its equivalent is globalization and the supposed triumph of liberal democracy. While communists can say that true communism “has never been tried” and continue to be liberals, the legacy of Nazism poisons the eugenics movement. Of course, blaming the ideas behind eugenics for the crimes of the Nazis is as silly as blaming the ideology of the welfare state for Soviet labor camps. So there is no rational reason why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago. While the facts of differential fertility may discomfort our feminized elites we must never stop repeating that the cost of doing nothing is the end of civilization. There’s no virtue in ignoring that.
Source: HBD Books
8 comments
This is a very two dimensional model. I would not dismiss IQ completely, but to define genetics purely on IQ is to dismiss all other aspects genetics. This is where the scientific method falls short. That is, those things we can measure gain precedent over those things we cannot measure simply because we can measure the former and not the latter.
There was a study done that showed the people with the best grades were not best at approaching a subject with objectivity due to their ideological orientation. Imagine that!
http://www.instaurationonline.com/pdf-files/Instauration-1978-04-April.pdf
Richard Hoste wrote:
In reply:
I can’t help but wonder what it will take for our Posterity to focus on the principles of building Civilization through building better families, rather than following the footsteps of ourselves, and the Self-Proclaimed Greatest Generation.
It will take a horrific pain, one that can not be avoided with the narcotics of tranquilizers, and color television.
Richard Hoste wrote:
In reply:
Very, very afraid.
If the handmaidens of The Adversary take over, the Earth will become a cold, dead orb moving around the Sun, with hominids on its surface who seem human, to outward appearance, but aren’t.
This is what the Fourteen Words are. They are a shorthand for a philosophy in opposition to the Coming Darkness.
The choice is really simple – eugenics, or dysgenics.
Will we decline, living in what essentially will be a Mexico, with snow, or will we rise, in a Northwest Republic?
Your move.
Yours, and our Posterity’s.
“JJ” makes a good point. It ain’t all about IQ, it never was. It’s about the total person. Does anyone here really want to live in your precious all-white country where everybody has an IQ of 150 and nobody want to collect garbage or work for a diaper service? (Do you high-IQ folks even know what a diaper service is?) Inability to understand Hawking’s books doesn’t make a person useless or stupid.
“Humanity requires that we save children that can be saved but breeding for those with diseased genes needs to be restricted. Lynn hints that better genetic screening and selective abortion can offset some of the consequences of modern medicine”
How can IQ fetishist Lynn gab about the importance of high quality populations and then say that humanity “requires” the “saving” of children who, even though they may not be permitted to reproduce, are going to cost all of us plenty of $$$ till they die? Does it look like our resources are unlimited? I’m not suggesting the killing of seriously damaged babies – just don’t keep them artificially alive.
Selective abortion? What if the parents don’t want to abort? There are even people who love adopting seriously disabled children; they wear this like a cloak of rectitude. I wonder what Lynn would do about this.
As is the case with Prof Flynn the founder f the Fynn Effect, I am also not psychologist, an outside observer from the Animal breeding and Genetics, getting deeper involved in the matters of human intelligence.
. Applying animal genetics (breeding) theory to this case, we simply apply the fact that for all traits ( e.g IQ score) with high heritability (> 0.40), the efficient way to improve the trait average in a population is by simply applying direct individual selection based on the individual’s IQ score. This selection can be applied with low to high intensity (best 50 % to best 10% of the population), the higher the intensity the larger the resulting response/improvement (increase in average IQ score). After years of teaching as a professor of animal breeding and genetics in one of the leading Animal Science Colleges in Indonesia (PhD An Breeding from U of Florida) and now as Emeritus Prof, and studying the Inheritance of intelligence, I came to realize that the whole process of education (Formal or Informal) in this world is in fact actually a process of selecting people (individuals) on the basis of their intelligence ( based on the high correllation between IQ score and scholastic performance or time of schooling / final degree obtained). All forms of testing, starting from entrance testing to final degree examination are none other than a selection for a high IQ Score. There is also a surprising fact that after all the efforts of governments to improve average IQ of nations/ populations / (ethnic) groups there is no significant improvement in the average IQ. (e.g the stable B-W IQ gap in the US after all efforts since the start of equal opportunity in education). On the other hand there is the fact that graduates of all levels of education (grade to graduate school) are a selected group with different levels of high average levels of IQ scores or general Intelligence. According to animal breeding theory the next step to gain the genetic improvement (not only phenotypical) is using the selected individual to be the parents of the next generation that will show the improvement. Since humans can not be handled as breeding stock in livestock breeding, we allow random mate choice among the selected individuals. Fortunately the socio-biologists have observed the phenomena of assortative mating (mate selecting) between individuals with similar or almost equal genetic composition (carrying the same genes influencing or regulating intelligence). Thus without any urging or guiding who should marry who, we observe young graduates marry their class mates or somebody with the same or almost equal level of education. This explain how the Flynn Effect happening generation after generation, the secular improvement in average IQ. The high IQ section ( The white collar working force, scientist and politicians ) of the population are the agents of change and improvement deciding the general development of a nation. This is only possible by the presence of the other below average IQ classes of the community in the continuum of the IQ bell curve. We always need the help of farmers, factory laborers to have a thriving modern prosperous community. We will always have ways to design a healthy proportionate numbers of the different classes depending on the development status of a certain nation. We should not be too concern about dysgenics. The poorer left tail of the bell curve will have more death rates and health problems, this should anticipated by the government by inducing birth control/planing beside welfare programs.On the right side of the curve we could always design plans to improve the average child number among the high IQ classes by providing incentives for having more children because these children are deciding factor for a better, brighter (higher IQ average) future generations.
So let us be optimistic about the future of Man dysgenics will always be there, but should be controlled. The Flynn Effect or the secular rising of average IQ should also be improved by increasing the average number of children per high IQ Parent families by incentives for each increase of a child.
The tribal chief (also known as the ‘hero’) theory of multiple sexual partners and wide spread genetic baselining for the most successful genetic pathways only applies when you are hunting game or killing enemies or other, similarly simplistic, task accomplishment goals.
As soon as you want atomic fusion, genomic therapy and exogenic births, you don’t get ‘better’ by following specific, success-oriented, genetic pathways because success only reinforces itself and, as we can see with today’s politicians destroying The West for profit’s and power’s sake, that is not a good path to follow. Indeed, you need modern society to get modern miracle workers and once we hit the big Malthusian break around 10 billion and 2070, the likelihood of a modern society ever rising again is _zero_ because the resources will be gone and the backwash of pollution and massive population warfare (hundreds of millions on battlefields of highway and byway, looking for food and potable water) will render survival entirely random with no identifiable group identity to correlate with whatever ‘intelligence’ is left.
We fix the problem, _now_, or we abandon the notion of a future generation doing so, after another Dark Age.
Ideally, you want to identify the long sequence alleles that contain the most markers for intelligence and RADIATE THEM outwards, rather than suck in poverty and lack of social mores` as some kind of compensatory effect that modern society can ‘soothe’ or mediate.
You DO want to have 150 IQ white kids because if those kids (historical legacy of 99.99% of discoveries in science, philosophy and art) genetic potential is highest across a given spectrum of social cohesion and conceptual as well as logic oriented reasoning, then THEY are the ones you want to harvest the genes to improve the world with.
Genomics, introduced through Exogenic natal systems allow this, by giving the option of introducing DNA replacement and high value hormonal and other supplemental growth options without endangering the mother.
Or requiring high IQ white women to breed 3 kids, ‘as a career’, to stay ahead of the third world.
And for diaper services and garbage collection, the question becomes: why do other ethnies want these jobs? I bet they don’t. I bet that, within 2 generations of coming to The West, they are as spoiled and unhappy with their SES as any white with 7+ generations of indigene breeding.
Robotics can and should allow us to reorganize our societies and spread the wealth to lower IQ populations in Asia and Africa where the ability to create and sustain an infrastructure is neither present nor willed. It is the Western _obsession_ with ‘earning it’ as justification for holding onto their own homelands through competitivism that is preventing them from seeing that we are NOT coincidental with other population groups evolutionary points and that demanding they reinvent the wheel (learn to walk before running) is pointless when all that they see is a Gods On Olympus vision of the nectar and ambrosia.
It pains me, to see that our society can send a man to the moon for next to no reason at all but will not acknowledge that the desire to NOT slave at a limited (short) life for the privilege of saying you put your time in, is a _good idea_.
It is the next step in fact in our understanding of ourselves and our ability to grow past limited perspective outlook on our existence.
Eugenics is conservation. Of genes. Of resources. Of time. That is the first step in seeing the way forward.
The next one is to absolutely minimize the make-work cog existence which rewards a distributionist-centrist economic model by adding useless steps to a thermodynamically compromised system.
Genetic science will help us appreciate this. But only the hardware efficiencies of large scale automation and robotics will proselytize the new model of living fast enough to turn back the enabling factors on Malthusian Outcomes we are now racing towards.
Just look at the drop in fertility in societies where there are alternative ‘distractions’ and consider what happens when you pay for selective sterilization after the first or second child with ‘goodies’ like 500 channel cable television, Air Jordan and Air Conditioning.
Radiate, Not Migrate, Not Overrun nor Subsume from Within.
Some of us high IQ people have figured out how to expand controlled eugenic breeding to counteract random dysgenic breeding but we are afraid of speaking aloud because though the internet has allowed historic freedom of speech that zog controlled television never did, it is too heavily monitored by those same tyrants to really allow that freedom to go unpunished. There is a way, and it is not difficult. Get educated in genetics and technology and teach your white family & friends.
Also, develop some self-respect, dicipline, and learn to do some honest labor. Diaper service? Where I am from, the diapers go in with the garbage but the baby is potty trained A.S.A.P.
The simplest way to think of the IQ income relationship is that for every ten-fold increase in income, average IQ increases 8-10 points. Useing technologies like artificial insemination and crisper you could make as many geniuses as you want. Increasing the total GDP of a country. It wouldn’t be nessesary to discourage people who are disadvantaged in any way genetically to improve the abilities of humanity if you incentivize people by giving the predicted profit (collected in taxes) back to the parents/(sperm and egg donators, those who give birth and those who raise the child). Even with the potentially world changing effect this might have given in the next 10 years we will interface with computers I am doubtful it will be nessesary.
The argument would have a little more force if the writer hadn’t mistakenly written < consciousness > for < conscientiousness > in the 2nd paragraph of The Case of Character section, just two sentences after defining conscientiousness.
Still, persuasive overall and well argued.
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