Eugenics: A Big Scary Word
But scarier still to demonize
Most people like to think of themselves as living in a free society, living in ‘the best time to be alive’, if you will. Materially speaking, this is absolutely true, there has never been a more prosperous time in all of human history than now. At the same time however, in many ways, we are also a lot less free than we are before. This comfort and luxury has brought about a culture that prioritizes harm avoidance and ‘equality’. Most people are not willing to listen to uncomfortable truths, nor will they generally question anything they’ve been told by those in power. After all, doing so requires effort and a willingness to take risks, neither of which people nowadays are able to bring themselves to do. In political discussions, this attitude is extremely clear. There are certain topics that, heated as they might be, are considered acceptable to discuss in schools or debates, and other ones that are considered so unacceptable that not only are they never discussed, but you will be ostracized and have your livelihood ruined for attempting to have a conversation about them. As a result, a lot of words have become emotionally loaded to the point where they’re being used to sustain our modern moral dogma. Words like ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, or ‘nazi’ are just tools to instill fear and encourage self-censorship. People don’t like to get called these things and so get defensive when they are accused of it. For some, taking the risk of being accused of being these things is simply too much, so they’d rather just shut up and be complacent. You don’t want to look like the bad guy now do you? You just want to keep your job and your friends, so better shut up and never speak truth to power and just be a good boy, okay? Now, ‘conservatives’ today would probably consider themselves the biggest victims of this, but the reality is that they’re not completely innocent either. Conservatives throw around the words like ‘communist’ all the time, although I have a feeling that it’s not quite as effective. There is one word though, that everyone seems to like to throw around, and that’s the word ‘eugenics’. Now, if you’re reading this and you’re already alarmed and feeling repulsed because you think that this article is going to be about how the word is just a meaningless moral pejorative and that the idea itself is actually valid, which is correct because that’s exactly what this is going to be, then by all means, stop reading and go do something else. If you’re not a sensitive little baby and do care enough to know however, then stay, and let’s get on with it.
Eugenics, we’ve all heard the word being thrown around before from watching angry seething people accuse their political opponent of supporting it because they have a particular stance on an issue. Leftists often accuse conservatives who want to reduce welfare spending as eugenicists who want to kill black people, and conservatives often accuse leftists who are pro-choice as supporting eugenics. This is quite telling. Rather than actually analyzing the flaws with a belief, it seems there’s an implicit understanding that if one could successfully label it as ‘eugenics’, it would sufficiently discredit it, regardless of how much merit the belief actually holds. In the real world, most people, whether or not they are aware of it, play into a eugenic system. For example, a majority of Americans currently support the death penalty for murderers (Jones, 2020; Pew Research Center, 2021):
There is quite a bit of evidence that criminality has a genetic component. For example, Baker et al. (2007) used 18 different measures of anti-social behavior and derived a staggeringly high heritability estimate of 96% for childhood antisocial and aggressive behavior. Some people might be surprised at how high the estimate is since lots of other studies typically produce lower estimates. This is often the result of measurement error because certain methods like self-report are less reliable for measuring personality traits. One example of this comes surprisingly from the leftist geneticist Paige Harden. In Harden et al. (2020), the researchers found that the heritability of ‘p’, or ‘general factor of psychopathology’, which includes symptoms of anxiety, depression, neuroticism, aggression, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, hyperactivity and inattention, was 49% when measured using self-report, but interestingly enough, using parent report, it was 72%. So, just keep in mind that the heritability for personality traits is often underestimated. Now, looking at criminality itself, a large study by Sariaslan et al. (2016) with 923,259 twin-sibling pairs found using univariate quantitative genetic models that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, substance misuse, and violent crime were all extremely heritable, around 53-71%.
In fact, there’s even some evidence that it’s possible to tell if someone is a criminal just from looking at his or her face. In a paper that had originally been retracted, Hashemi & Hall (2020) developed a convolutional neural network which can predict criminality from faces with 97% accuracy.
If you’re wondering why the paper had originally been retracted, it wasn’t because of any serious methodological flaws, it’s because the original authors didn’t get an approval from their stupid ethics committee before doing this study:
But it’s not just the death penalty. Lots of thing we take for granted is eugenic, because many of the things we consider as good or bad are downstream from aggregate genetic differences. In fact, additive genetic variance is usually the dominant explanation when it comes to explaining differences between individuals on complex traits (Hill et al., 2008). Many things we take as being an en effect of environment for effect are actually genetic effects upon closer inspection. Think educational attainment is important? Well, the best predictor of that is the student’s own ability while teachers have only a moderate effect (Detterman, 2016). Even leftists are not immune to being eugenicists, as their support for abortion is a great example of a eugenic policy which has been repeatedly denounced by conservatives for being, you guessed it, eugenic. For the first trimester, a majority of Americans overall support abortion being legal, and even in the second trimester, a majority of Democrats still support it:
Why talk about abortion? Well, there’s a theory from Freakonomics known as the Donahue-Levitt Hypothesis which posits that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s contributed substantially the eventual crime drop in the 1990s (Donahue & Levitt, 2001; Levitt, 2005). In a more recent paper, the authors also claim that “crime fell roughly 20% between 1997 and 2014 due to legalized abortion. The cumulative impact of legalized abortion on crime is roughly 45%, accounting for a very substantial portion of the roughly 50-55% overall decline from the peak of crime in the early 1990s”. (Donahue & Levitt, 2019).
Now, the authors of this paper probably don’t want to get cancelled because not once was race or genes ever mentioned in their paper. Instead, they speculate that various environmental effects placed upon the unwanted child causes him or her to become prone to criminality.1 However, if you’ve read up to this point by now, you’ve probably realized that the actual reason for this is because it induces a change in the gene pool. The the type of women who get abortions in the first place are more likely to be low in intelligence and high in psychopathic personality and mental instability. As such, abortion, the killing of their offspring, essentially filters out these traits and prevents it from being passed on (Dutton, 2022). Audacious Epigone used data from the General Social Survey asking pregnant woman or the partner of a pregnant woman if she or the partner would support aborting the baby if it has a serious genetic defect, and funnily enough, liberals were actually more likely than conservatives or moderates to support this ‘eugenic’ abortion, although it should be noted that the data was from 2004 since at the time when he made it, that was the most recent one which had that question (Epigone, 2020).
So, if you are someone who supports the death penalty, like most Americans are, then you are someone who supports eugenics, because if the criminal does not have any children yet, then executing him or her guarantees that his or her genes die, including the ones associated with criminality. Likewise, if you support abortion, then you’re also a eugenicist who supports removing undesirables from the gene pool. What’s that? I don’t want to hear any excuses or justifications from you, why should I have to listen to a bigoted evil eugenicist’s defense and pleading of innocence? Okay, jokes aside, I hope it’s pretty clear how stupid it sounds whenever someone dismisses anything based on the fact that it might have eugenic effects. Eugenics by its definition is simply anything that results in an increased inheritance of genes which are desirable within a population, and the truth is that all populations require its gene pool to stay healthy in order to survive. At face value, healthiness is something most people desire. In fact, despite all the concerns about gene-editing, according to Pew Research Center (2022b), most Americans support using it to treat serious diseases or conditions a person has now:
By definition, this would count as eugenics. You know what else is eugenics? Sperm banks. The genetic selection here is so blatantly obvious that it requires effort to not notice it. Most sperm banks generally require the donor to meet various criteria that serve as proxies of physical health and many still go further by adding in requirements for a minimum height or education level. These traits are all heritable of course, so therefore, selecting on them is eugenics. So, most people would consider being genetically healthy to be a good thing, but eugenics which seeks to promote genetic health is seen as a bad thing, how these two views are reconcilable is beyond me. People like to pretend that everyone is equal and any implications that some people might have better genes is treated as bigotry, even though deep down we all know that it’s true. In fact, there’s evidence that when people perceive a trait as being more heritable, they’re more likely to support eugenic policies for that trait (Zigerell, 2019):
To all the activists out there constantly bemoaning how this or that policy is eugenic, please tell me what is it that we are supposed to want? Dysgenic selection? Are we supposed to celebrate the biological deterioration of our species rather than promote its improvement? So progress is good unless it’s biological progress? What sense does that make?
Let’s see how much more absurd we can make this. Do you want a flat income tax and reduced welfare spending? Well then you’re a eugenicist because impoverished people are practically dependent on income transfers to survive. Do you like meritocracy? Well then you’re a eugenicist because meritocracy promotes those who are successful and leaves behind those who aren’t, and intelligence, being around 80% heritable once you take into account the increasing contribution of additive genetic variation with age (Bouchard, 2013; Lynn, 2011; Panizzon et al., 2014; Plomin & Deary, 2015), is a major predictor in the success or many important life outcomes.2
Are you a libertarian who supports the complete legalization of drugs? Well then you’re a eugenicist because people with genetic predispositions towards low impulse control will get themselves addicted and then die from overdose. Are you a cultural conservative who thinks it’s important to promote good behavior? Well then you’re a eugenicist because a culture of virtue would favor people with certain personality traits which are seen as desirable, and personality traits are extremely heritable once measurement error has been corrected for, around 81% (Riemann & Kandler, 2010). Or, are you perhaps a liberal who supports voluntary euthanasia regardless of the severity of the condition? Congratulations, you’re a eugenicist, because a portion of the people who will be eliminated by this will be those who have either severe physical or mental disorders and don’t wish to live anymore. Do you believe women have a right to choose “good husbands”? Or maybe, at the very least, do you believe that your sibling(s) and/or close relative(s) deserves a “good spouse”? I have news for you, that’s promoting eugenics. Oh, and of course, if you’re opposed to marriages between relatives because they might produce a genetically sick and defect offspring, that is just straight up blatantly evil literally a nazi eugenics ideology.
Notice two important things here. Firstly, policies that are often debated within mainstream discussions have major consequences on the gene pool in the long run, and so therefore any positive effects is eugenics, in spite of all the efforts to silence any conversation on eugenics aside from treating it as cartoonishly evil. Secondly, none of these examples that I just gave are coercive in any way, I am not hurting anyone, no more so than how nature promotes the success of members of any species who are strong and wealthy, and penalizes the ones who are weak and sick. In many of these examples, the eugenic effect is simply a byproduct of the natural differences in outcome between individuals due to innate genetic differences.
So, since that you’ve made it to the end, there’s two conclusions that you could have gotten from reading this: either we should now actively oppose all of the examples of ‘eugenic’ policies that I just laid out because we should just let the emotional nature of this word get the best of our judgement, or we should cut the crap about treating eugenics as some kind of evil hateful thing. Calling something eugenics isn’t a mic-drop or a valid way to critique a stance on an issue, it’s just a stupid way for someone to pretend like he or she is a good person by appealing to our modern sensibilities. There’s evidence that in the West, humans have been undergoing dysgenic selection by the end of the Victorian Era due to a collapse in positive selection pressures, resulting in a decline in genetic health over time as we grow ever closer towards sucking dry all the capital we’ve accumulated over centuries (Dutton, 2023; Kirkegaard, 2021). A first world society cannot be maintained with a growing underclass, and if nothing is done, everything will come apart and all the wealth and luxury we have now will disappear, and guess what? Nature certainly won’t give a shit about all the cries about eugenics. We need to be prepared to face reality for what it is or else there will be dire consequences. As Charles Darwin had said in The Descent of Man:
“We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.”
On the proposed environmental explanations people like to throw around as explanations for crime, there are tons of them so I’ll just address the two most common ones: poverty and trauma. Poverty is not causal with crime as demonstrated using lottery experiments (Cesarini et al., 2023), sibling control studies (Sarialsan et al., 2021; 2022), quasi-experimental total population studies (Sarialsan et al., 2013), within-individuals designs (Airaksinen et al., 2021; Sarialsan et al., 2017), and a dozen other methods. Random Critical Analysis (2015) thoroughly examined the role of economics on racial differences in homicides and also found it to be a lacking explanation. Yes, poverty is strongly correlated with crime, but that’s because poverty and crime both share a common genetic risk.
On trauma, this is the same point as poverty. Skaug et al. (2022) utilized a discordant twin design and found no causal effect of childhood trauma on borderline personality disorder after controlling for genetic and shared environmental factors. Moreover, as mentioned earlier in the post, both anti-social behavior and psychopathology are highly heritable. Maybe part of this trauma comes from single parenthood, but one should ask first what kinds of parents leave their children behind? Not very good ones, as Jaffee et al. (2001) found increased rates of psychological difficulties and anti-social behaviors among fathers not living with their own children. Were such a parent around, the effect on the child’s behavior would actually be worse, not better (Artega, 2018; Jaffee et al., 2003).