Good Genes: An Argument for Eugenics

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There is no fight between morals and biology. Too much stress, insufficient nutrition and bad living conditions damage people (and in particular their complex brains, bascially when in the wombs of their mothers or as babies), welfare state and relaxed life helps humans and their brains to develop well. There is nothing like a dilemma between either morals and an increase in bad genes or more or less cruel eugenics. This is just one of those stupid ideas hold by people who have a deficient understanding of psychosocial causalities due to their damaged brains (not bad enough to imagine all kind of stupid things, not good enough to get things right).

I really must beg to differ on that.

Having grown up in an upper middle-class area where the social differences, popular vs unpopular, alpha-athletic vs. outcast was as strong if not in some case stronger than other places - bad nutrition and living conditions played no role. I got to see what kinds of traits in guys either attract or repel women, almost universally. I got to see what kinds of traits in women repel men almost universally. The way that distilled out seemed to be right alongside classic evolutionary psychology lines - ie. the guy has to be aggressive enough to be at least socially intimidating to other guys, and if not just that physically intimidating and in almost any case highly competitive to get any respect from women. For both genders confidence was paramount for attractiveness. All of this stuff you see echoed all throughout nature - squirrels, deer, birds, and near last but not least the ape/hominid family.

If you're going to tell me that what I just said above is nonsense you're going to need to qualify that with specifics because it sounds like you're not taking into account the connection between evolutionary psychology and human behavior and I'd need to know if you have a good enough case against that to take any stock in your argument.

and all this time i naively thought that humans were supposed to transcend all the base politicking of the lower animals.

It's humans who are the base ones. Animals are honest and pure.

What're you talking about! Don't ya know animals don't have souls!

The soul is a bunch of chemicals wrapped in a biological sack.

Animals are way beyond us, they don't bother with such nonsense.

Female animals can be pretty devious to those male animals who desire to mate with them.

They can be so coy! They love the male to chase her!

I can't chase anybody. furthermore, I will not.

Meh, they do exactly what we do - by class of activity - without the moral outrage.

That and clearly our level of cultural sophistocation allows us to act much more pernicious and sadistic ways on a mass scale.

And some are furious when they're 30 and single and all the guys who should have chased em said "%^& that - that's sexual harassment".

I can't harp on that too much though - guys do their own things along this line. That and it was really a relief to figure out that people wouldn't choose to be this crappy toward each other; it's really our biology driving us nuts.

With "insufficient nutrition" I did not mean just starving kids, but all kinds of bad diets (too much sugar, one-sided diets, food with low nutritional value) plus abuse of drugs (drinking, smoking, medcial drugs, etc). Certain drugs, like alcohol in Western countries one or two generations ago, thalidomide (contergan) in the 50s or 60s that had such a damaging effect on the babies limbs but partly also their brains or psychatric drugs in the US today, might even be consumed more by the upper classes btw. I think I neednt proof that: babies are made out of substance and it mostly does not come just out of the air their mothers breath but mainly out of the substances their mothers consume.

As for stress, there is the study of Baron-Cohen e.a. on a very large Danish sample that shows that higher levels of steroids in the amniotic fluid of pregnant women are correlated with an autism diagnosis of their babies. Then there is another study that shows that autistic traits in mice get worse then the baby mice are separated from time to time (irregularly) from their mothers. and subsists during some generations, even if the stressor is not upheld in the following generations.

"Bad living conditions" is only partly an objective category (e.g. not enough sunshine, too much noise, smog) and has some subjective part, too (via the stress link). E.g. someone who was before upper class might feel bad with upper middle class, or a woman who has a sister who she perceives as having a much better life than herself, might have the ambition to afford the same things and then get into a lot of trouble. Unfortunately people react much less objectively here than animals do. So in particular in Western societies, objectively relatively bad living conditions might, together with a cheerful disposition and the feeling of being onto an upward trend might largely compensate for objectively much better living conditions of a person with a disposition for envy and who is unable to lower her exaggerated expectations. But here we are back in NT-landia, because people on the spectrum have often (not always) a much harder time to understand the importance of this point.

My theory is that autism numbers have fallen in Europe, and even quite a lot so (please note the complete absence of any crisis talk in Europe compared to the States, 3 generations ago this has been different ), while they are pretty stable in the United States. - Sorry, I am very NT, so I am able to reckon also with perceived stuff, and to objectify it via a kind of inter-subjective reasoning /cognitive empathy, plus to take into account ways of reasoning that are more accessible to people on the spectrum. But there is a part that is and always will remain to a certain extent difficult and even impossible to evaluate properly for the non-initiated.

The reason for the numbers not falling in the US could be: the absence of a welfare state and migration. There are two Swedish studies studies that link the migration of Somali women (or of women of different nationalities that migrated during their pregnancy) and the autism of their kids, plus Somalis calling autism “the Swedish Disease,” because they did not see it back in East Africa. (c. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kir ... 14776.html). People who migrate tend to be also more autistic than those who remain in their countries: people with technical skills and a penchant for a more technocratic state, people who are bullied or somewhat of an outsider (be it just that the family minds a little less that they go rather than other family members, or because they hope that they might do better in a different setting), people with high ambitions/ a minority complex, people who feel less alienated among foreigners than among their own people, stuff like that.

I can't speak one way or another to your hypotheses on what causes autism, just that I see we're literally not talking about the same things at this point. You're suggesting that autism is more environmental than genetic, I'm stating that evidence is overpowering at this point both anecdotally and scientifically that evolution and natural selection go all the way through the chain of life and includes humans in its domain whether we necessarily like that part of things or not. I'm also stating that a large part of how people are treated and mistreated is based on natural selection pressures.

The reported numbers on autism rates in Europe are not consistent with this theory.

The lack of crisis talk in Europe is cultural and not an indicator of rates which are well documented as rising.

Autism rates are rising in Europe and European nations are among those with the highest autism rates in the world.

You asked me about studies and I have delivered. So why cant you say nothing about my hypotheses? Is it just too clumsy for you? Do you feel like you need to do more research, have a closer look at the studies? Yes, I am saying that nutrition, stress and living conditions matter a lot, but I gave material to support this.

What I said in my first comment in this thread - and what you probably havent read - is that genetics is a CONSTRUCT for a perceived RELATIVE stability over generations (Siddhartha Mukherjee's THE GENE: An Intimate History), and that this relative stability is also much less stable than many tend to believe (see epigenetics, DNA metabolism). I argued that there is a triad of good or bad nutrition, exposure to stress /stress hormones (both in the womb and in early childhood) and good or bad education that decides about our nervous system and brain, and that a baby usually gets a more or less synchronized triple package through her parents (so bad nutrition plus more stress plus worse education, or the opposite), so that s/he is unlikely to get rid of most of her more or less favorable "environment", or at least not totally,and "disposition" cannot be changed within few generations, or ideally one generation, although a higher potential for a quicker or much quicker change is actually there.

Genetics (so relative stability) is in any case entirely determined by environment: it is matter composed to organisms, recomposed a lot while developping into other stages, decomposed partly or entirely, all under more or less disturbances from the environment that itself is matter, organisms and communication with materialistic impact. it depends a lot on what kind of matter is available, thrusting or missing.

What I mean is that our conversation started by you quoting me when I was talking about natural selection in general and you made no clarification that you were specifically trying to describe something about what you thought was happening with autism in general. I continued the conversation thinking we were debating whether natural selection is an inherent drive of sexually procreating life that has to be contended with and that it ultimately comes down to genes, you were still arguing a niche point about autism without clarifying that you were until a few posts ago.

I've mostly been arguing in this thread that people who ask the eugenic questions aren't crazy, morally poisoned, or terrible people. In a lot of cases they're observing a dynamic that seems grim enough that a lot of people would want to run from it - I don't know that that's the case for sure but it seems like the state of knowledge in our culture is scrambled enough in origin stories between religious myth, ancient aliens crap, Deepak Chopra, and then the scientific narrative of evolution, that in our present turbulance people will have a tendency not to sit at a computer all day researching this stuff to make sure that they're beliefs are absolutely right but rather they'll believe whatever seems most useful; a narrative as pessimistic and progress-slowing or stopping as the idea that we'd make injustice for the sake of ensuring that perceived weaker or outlying people don't get to procreate or that that's just buried deep in the recesses of how evolution has sculpted us - I can see how people would either dismiss it without examining it for how much that information conflicts with other beliefs they hold.

TBH I didn't read or research what you said because at the time I wasn't interested. AFAIK no one knows the causes of autism, they say that people can have the same genes and either have it or not have it so something in the environment seems to at least trigger the changes, and again AFAIK without the genes autism is a lot rarer. The thing about our natural selective pressures is that they don't think or process that deeply - ie. those selective pressures go for social dominance and will pick people on how they climb social hierarchy over how brilliant they might be, or if two people had the same number of autism genes and one manifested autism and the other didn't - the natural selective wiring we have isn't intelligent enough to put both in the same category and cause the opposite sex to reject them equally - clearly it's based on social functioning and a person could have terrible health but great wealth or social power and it would be a different story.

A couple things to some of the ideas in your post:

1) There was a theory early on that children with autism were neglected by their mothers and hence didn't form a bond, hence they were stigmatized as 'refrigerator mothers'. I don't know how much that has to do with autism, just that it got dropped - either due to lack of evidence, not enough evidence for the stigma, or modern feminism - who knows.

2) For what it's worth when I have met people who had a few kids and decided to take really good care of one pregnancy and treat the other like an unwanted hinderance and take their unhappiness out on the developing fetus - something like ADHD often does happen in the later case, and occasionally Asperger's diagnosis.

The trouble with the autistic spectrum is that I don't think any of these things are consistent and the moment people think they've got a eureka moment on their hands they find out to their chagrin that it only applies to a small subsection of people on the spectrum. That's part of why the whole 'vaccines cause autism' is so seductive - ie. people need some type of story often to validate their situation, and occasionally they'll take that story up just as fervently whether it's true or not.