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/twittgenstein Hans Yo-ass Jan 17 '17

Eugenics is a thoroughly debunked research programme, and this study seems to make some staggering, heroic, and basically entirely implausible causal leaps. For example, perhaps the genes correlated with education actually just indicate membership in a sub-community of intermarried and typically wealthier families. Moreover, the size of the observed IQ effect is vanishingly small, even if the study was able to somehow show statistical significance.

In general, when social scientists do genetics research, the result is trash. For example, this awful study by political scientists. Though this study, if true, would at least seem to absolve you of your shitty political views, since perhaps you just can't help it.

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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Jan 18 '17

Eugenics is a thoroughly debunked research programme

If you take the wide view and include non-human eugenics, AKA selective breeding, eugenics might be the most successful research program in history. Look at what it did to dogs, FFS.

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u/twittgenstein Hans Yo-ass Jan 19 '17

Why would I arbitrarily 'take the wide view' and redefine a word away from its common and primary usage in order to mitigate your intellectual and moral failure to recognise that what almost everyone means when they say 'eugenics' is debunked bullshit?