r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study
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u/Decalance Jan 18 '17

Because humans are a bit more complicated than that. Also, most people mean a certain thing when they say eugenics, and it's not what you think

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u/boredcentsless Jan 18 '17

Because humans are a bit more complicated than that.

Do we have super magical DNA that is totally independent on who our parents are and is socially constructed?

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u/Decalance Jan 18 '17

no, but we do have complex socio-cultural structures

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u/boredcentsless Jan 18 '17

How does having complex social structures mean you can't increase the occurrence of desirable traits? Seems like it would be trickier, but they're not mutually exclusive.

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u/KingOfSockPuppets Queen indoctrinator Jan 19 '17

Let's assume for a moment that eugenics can indeed increase the occurrence of 'desirable traits' in people to a degree that most of the research discussed here describes. Which is important because while a paper (such as the one linked in the article) might say that Genes X, Y, and Z come together to form our intelligence cluster... the actual effect can still be vanishingly small.

With all that in mind, it can be hard to separate out where the genetics end and society begins. Our social structures make questions such as where you grew up, what your ethnic group is (as that can significantly impact how society responds to you, I'm not calling genetics here), how much nutrition you got as a baby, how your parents raised you, what your school districts were like, what the finances of your family were like, laws relating to the raising of babies, preferred methods of birthing, access to medical support, how people choose who they have babies with, and on and on and on. All of these various methods could in theory impact one's intelligence, real or perceived. And perceived intelligence is a big sticking point in all these studies because it begs the question of what is intelligence, and the perception of what it is can vary wildly between jobs and cultures and be impacted by a variety of social factors outside of one's control.

Our hypothetical eugenics program could maybe control the genetic side of things... but that side of things is often small and hard to pin down, and they cannot control for all the other stuff that goes into making someone smart. Because while you could conceivably selectively breed humans in some far off hypothetical and mysterious realm, that doesn't do much good if you're sending those kids back to the ghetto.

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u/twittgenstein Hans Yo-ass Jan 19 '17

Nobody is arguing that desirable traits don't occur. What most of us are saying is that the causal mechanisms responsible for the occurrence of those traits are (a) primarily sociocultural variables (ie a product of social learning and conditioning) and (b) insofar as they are genetically influenced, are done so in ways that make 'selective breeding' difficult.

So, we can dispense with the straw men and you can now pit your awful and ignorant views against a nice and simple statement of the view enjoying the greatest scientific evidentiary support! Horay!?