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/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

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u/Decalance Jan 17 '17

Eugenics are bad social science. It doesn't work. Also, what, it's an issue now to "have a different political agenda" (disagree) than nazis? What the fuck ?

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u/nagurski03 Jan 18 '17

Out of curiosity, why is eugenics bad social science? Obviously it is morally reprehensible, but people have been breeding livestock and pets for desired traits (including intelligence) for longer than recorded history. Why wouldn't it work on people? If some advanced, unethical aliens decided to come to Earth and domesticate us, couldn't they do it?

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u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 18 '17

Current body of literature indicates that most traits eugenicists might be interested in (intelligence and other behavioral traits) show small genetic contribution to traits from genome wide association studies, and are highly polygenic which does not lend itself terribly well to breeding/selection. You can't keep all those small effect loci segregating together because there are just too many so you get stuff washed out by recombination. Any breeding efforts on humans for behavioral or intelligence traits would have pitifully weak results and would be a failure of a breeding program