Good Genes: An Argument for Eugenics

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Sorry for coming back a little late.

1. Evolutionary psychologists tend to be those with the damaged brains, so they dont get things right. They basically try to find a clue for why they are having more trouble in getting a partner than others, and come up with something that is not too denigrating for themselves.

2. There is no continuum between humans and apes. Imagination (homo picturalis, homo ludens) and the capacity to find and promote explanations (good and bad ones) for things (real phenomena and imagined stuff) changes everything.

3. The laws of attraction between men and women (or between same-sex people) are very complex. Confidence plays a bigger role, but a certain degree of shyness can be very attractive, too, for some more than for others, and for better and not so good reasons. Aggressivity can be positive or negative. Some people get intimidated easily and/or they look for an fighting ally, in particular if their life is tough (!). Women (or people in general) usually stay away from people that scare them, while scary people dont always perceive themselves as such, Rodger Eliott s redemption video is an extreme example of someone who, even in a less psychotic stage, must have come across as scary, but considers himself the "perfect gentleman". But a scary person might also raise the curiosity of someone who wants to find out more about it (the attraction of scary movies) and maybe possesses some healing power.

These seem to go together so I'll respond to them together.

You seem to be confusing evolutionary psychologists with PUA authors and MRA's. Would you say that Gad Saad, for example, is in the category you described in your first point of response? Would you say that Jordan Peterson, happily married with kids and an extra-sharp intellect, or his mentor on this topic, Jean Piaget, are in this category?

I see a dismissal here based on assumptions about the scientists and researchers involved in evolutionary psychology but it's not at all addressing their points.




This also somewhat encapsulates what you said in your third point as well - ie. there's more complexity in human beings than there is in the animal kingdom.

I'm confused as to how that changes the fundamental pull to action that we have and the root causes such as where our priorities come from, what gets triggered when we're under what we see as an authoritative or even existential threat, etc.. We can sublime negative impulses quite well if we happen to be self-aware, there are a lot of people who aren't and especially with people who have the whole human-as-animal part of the human condition completely in their blind-spot you'll see their animal hanging out between the various rules that they've excepted whether religious or postmodern. When things are chaotic such as in the case of wars, shortages of supply, etc. you see atavistic rollback and it takes a very tough-minded individual not to go savage if their environment is really pulling on them. The point being if we like living in a society and having things function smoothly we get good as subliming or reordering these issues, just that a lot of our internal crises that we have to sublime in the first place (or in other cases express with abandon under a rogue religious interpretation or political ideology) comes from evolutionary drives and needs. We multiply the civility with which we can manifest or work out these needs by creativity, imagination, and we pry a lot of space between feelings and action by having complex inner worlds where we can work out our problems through daydreaming, art, sports, etc. instead of physical violence. Regardless what's at our foundations is generally the same things that drive bears, squirrels, and deer.

If you're criticizing ladder-theorists and Dave D'Angelo I'd agree that they've got a lot of very skewed anecdote. Some of them might be able to say a lot about what a guy who's unattractive to women has to do in order to pull certain levers and it's a very small portion of the social tool-kit that a guy who is attractive to women is allowed to work with and get much better results because they don't have to extort psychological triggers in such an exaggerated manner. Similarly I've seen guys who were super-wimps but at the same time super-judgmental do fine. I've seen guys who were the biggest dorks, but they were cuddly and harmless dorks (without anything eerie or uncanny in their body language), do fine. I'd agree that it's complex, but I'd also disagree that this is a disproof of evolutionary psychology, it's just shows that the really bullheaded and macho interpretations of evolutionary psychology are just pop and have about as much sway for invalidating it as a 'yahoo science' article could discredit physics, astronomy, etc..

I'd really have to recommend that you check out Gad Saad or Jordan Peterson on this to get a better sense of what it's about because I don't think, from your suggestions, that we're talking about quite the same claims or ideas under the auspice of evolutionary psychology.

On the topic of how I'm starting to view eugenics - the CRISPR-Cas9 revolution we may see an end to genetic determinism. I really think the best way for us to handle eugenics is this - a couple are planning to have a child, they're tested to see if anything they have would combine for particularly bad outcomes, and the least possible invasion, such as one partner or the other having that specific recessive gene switched off or replaced, means that they're in the clear. I'd recommend a really conservative approach on this stuff because we don't know how easy or difficult it would be to try and artificially recapture diversity if it was lost. For the first time instead of answering to the call of doing whatever we can to make our kids the most alpha and popular kids in school we'd have to deeply consider the consequences of what could happen to humanity in the future if we fixate on homogenizing a generation.

In any case whether over environment or the sheer power and invasiveness that our new technologies can yield we're going to actually need to - probably for the first significant time in human history - evaluate our evolutionary proclivities as a problem that would lead us right off of a cliff if we run bullheadedly at it rather than the way to make everyone cookie-cutter social butterflies and ties for who's the closest to the center of the cultural bellcurve.

Something I want to add to this - to be fair I realize that I used relationships in the example you quoted.

I think that a lot of the issues of preference people have in mating is based on evolutionary principles. It doesn't mean that soft and pudgy 'dads' are necessarily cuckolds or that stereotypical alpha males are socially successful, just that when you look at the pernicious proclivities men and women tend to have in their dating, sexual, and marital habits you often see it coming down to either a) abuse or b) net of abuse in a less exaggerated but stable form you see cost/benefit analysis happening with respect to peoples influence, standing in society, how well they conform (or conversely how stylishly they don't), and there seem to be some pretty clear principles as to how that works in general. Competing traits and different people taking different trade-off baskets? Sure.

One of the studies I remember Gad bringing up was with respect to men's attitudes toward women's proportions. Included in something like a 12-part metastudy there was a study included that men who were congenitally bind from birth preferred the same measurements in woman as men who could see. Similarly you have studies where children will choose more proportional, thin, and attractive dolls or respond better to such images when they're too young to have procured that preference from socialization. There's a lot to our preferences that seems to assemble instinctively and rather than being caused by culture I think its fair to say culture as it stands is a result of said instincts.

We can't have "genetic determinism" in autism----because there are many causes of autism.

It would be a recipe for abject disaster.

The problem with eugenics is that it's a destination without a roadmap. Eugenics supporters seem to think that they're putting cold hard science infront of petty emotional worries, and that the ends justify the means. But saying "we can benefit humanity by making genes better" is no more of a plan than saying "The Police should defeat crime by catching criminals".

Sure we want humanity to be improved but is making irreparable changes to our gene pool based on arbitrary judgements really the best way to do it? Like the issue with designer babies, the changes will most likely be made by parents who are looking for a fashionable cookie-cutter 'look' rather than what's best for the child. For example, if a baby has Autism then its chances of survival will rest entirely on whether his/her parents are reading things written by Autism Speaks or by real Aspies. Even if the changes are decided by scientists there is still the issue that loosing genetic diversity is never a good thing.

Also the whole 'Nazi' thing is a bit of a red herring. Yes modern eugenics is better than what the Nazis were supporting but 'better' is a relative term; 70 years later it's still a load of quack bulls***

I am not sure that genetic diversity would be lost (especially if we are aware that it must be maintained.)

I don't think the burdens of having autism or a loved one with autism should be discounted so easily.

It seems sometimes that people feel that the behaviour exhibited by some autistic people should be accepted by others even if it is unpleasant. But why?

we're not even convinced how autism occurs yet though. It may not even be completely genetic (although it is likely a contributer)

Also ethically how would you prevent undesirables from mating and who/how decides who is an undesirable and who is not?

I'm afraid we're ultimately slaves to some type of resonance between available technology and furthering our own ambitions - especially if we believe our social competitors will and will surpass us if we choose to abstain. To that end I fully sympathize with your misgivings and I'm worried about the same things. Unless we have some hope of turning our culture inside-out and seeing ambition and social-climbing as one of our greatest threats to survival we'll climb the pyramids right to heaven and leave little but the wreckage of a race that almost made it from type 0 to type 1 but which had too intense of lemming-like impulses to survive its own technological success.




It's the later part because we're aware of what little we know and barely aware of the vast amounts of things we don't know. To right-size our tampering with genes we'd have to have some external point of reference or massive archive to know what results in what and that's just it - we don't.

The only hope of us getting it right, more than likely, will be absolute minimum invasion based on hereditary diseases themselves. Am I particularly optimistic that we'll have that kind of self-control? The way most people function? I'm afraid I'm not.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but what I seem to be reading is it can not happen. I am very cynical of claims that things can not or will not happen because I have seen so many things I and most others thought would never happen actually happen. See President Trump. Even if you are correct the damage caused by quackery pseudoscience eugenics might very well be more than "successful" eugenics.

Side note - I read back and noticed my own dialog in this topic changing over the last three or four months.

On one hand I see that genetic judgments and caste-sorting is a large part of the misery in the world, at the same time though while I might have earlier on suggested that freedom from that, ie. perhaps being able to merit one's way through their life rather than being held back by genes necessarily, would yield the possibility of a true meritocracy. OTOH it seems very true that disease, need for genetic diversity for the going concern of the human race, etc.. means that if we all rush the center peak of the bellcurve to be like everyone else we run serious risks of never being able to recover large parts of what we had, resistances to who knows what diseases that might be coming down the pike at us, the the unintended consequences could go absolutely anywhere.

I have to take this analogy back to politics though - if anyone is looking for a race, religion, or class boogeymen to blame the pyramid structure of society, the hierarchies, haves and have not's on, etc. it seems like it a quest incompatible with truth because it'll never yield a fitting boogeyman. The human condition is macabre enough to absorb really most of the pain in the world. To the extent that people try to throw it on whoever's across the political isle, of a different race, etc.. they're also getting to LARP at everyone else's expense and on top of it make political decisions that make everyone else's lives harder.

Who says that I am discounting the burdens of Autism? Not wanting it to be discriminated against and removed doesn't mean that I think an all-Aspie world would be a utopia.

Again I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. NTs also do some unpleasant things.



People will likely try it, and at least on a theoritical level it might even be possible to work; my point was that modern eugenics is alot more arbitrary and potentially counter-productive than its supporters realise.

Last edited by TUAndrew on 03 Mar 2017, 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My point being that there are behaviours specific to people with autism (specifically social deficits) which can result in us being unpleasant. It's not Autism Speaks versus autistic experience. There is the middle-of-the-road neurotypical experience.

Speaking in terms of eugenics and the desirability of autistic offspring, I don't know why autism wouldn't be screened out along with other disabilities.

Yes and that middle ground is just the sort of place that we need to be winning hearts and minds rather than creating horror stories which fuel prejudice.



Because Autism isn't just something you can 'remove' like a shell. If you remove the autism then you remove the person; lots of great people wouldn't have existed if they were "screened". It's like saying that you'd remove lots of great female scientists and musicians because periods are undesirable.

If you don't want Autism to exist then I'm honestly not sure why you're even on this forum as it's full of people who you apparently find to be unpleasant.

Last edited by TUAndrew on 03 Mar 2017, 4:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nothing wrong with ambition and changing someone with technology, just as long as that person is an adult and they concent to it. For exmaple; high-tech cybernetics is great, eugenics not so much.

What horror story have I created?


It's not about removing people who exist, it's about determining who exists in the first place.


I think it's me who is found to be unpleasant.

I'm here because I have autism and I'm entitled to express my thoughts.

For me, autism is a horror story and I'm not going to shut up about it so that others can pretend that it is somehow desirable.