It would totally work
I saw that “Dawkins” was trending on Twitter so I had to look.
But what is meant by “work” here? What is the “eu” in “eugenics”? What kind of “eu” are we talking about? What “facts” are we invoking?
He didn’t say. The tweet just stands alone, with nothing leading up to it and no elaboration following it. He did later respond to the fact that people responded though.
So the “eu” he has in mind is faster running or higher jumping?
If so…I still don’t see what his point is. The “could” in “we could breed” leaves out the fact that it would take a whole new arrangement of society to do that – which is to say no, actually, we couldn’t, unless you think we “could” also install a Brave New World type of social structure that would be stable for generations. It’s not true that we “could” do that for the simple reason that no woman is ever going to agree to gestate babies for the purpose of Higher Jumping.
Plus I still don’t see what his point is because who disagrees with what is apparently his basic point that it’s theoretically possible to breed humans for particular desired traits? It’s also theoretically possible to breed humans for food; we know that; it’s not really something we need to be told.
He’s wrong, it would not work in practice. It has been tried before and failed, by the Nazis actually. It works in theory, but it’s precisely because of the ideological, political, and moral grounds that it would never work in practice. Your logic is flawed sir.
LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I only remember the Dawkins who wrote good books about science and then disappeared from public view and all social media and SHUT UP YOU CAN’T MAKE ME PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!
Cows are mammals.
Cows have been selectively bred.
Humans are mammals.
Therefore humans can be selectively bred.
Absolutely absurd.
And what’s with the “heaven forbid”, are you no longer atheist?
We’re not missing the point Richard, but it looks like you have much less of a well rounded intellect than I would have presumed.
I don’t think it even works in theory, it might work in a human society full of genocidal rapists, but that’s another shitty theory ain’t it…
The only way to do it is to emulate how we breed animals and plants for specific traits: you have to very carefully select for the traits you want and literally force them to breed. People wouldn’t have any choice on who to breed with or indeed whether to breed at all. And any inferior offspring would be killed. It’s even more dystopian than Brave New World.
Anyway, electing for high intelligence would probably be in contradiction to docility. In authoritarian regimes, killing off the intellectuals is fundamental for a reason. You can’t have a docile herd without it. And we are not naturally herd animals, whereas most domesticated animals are. They’re easier to handle.
I’m not defending Dawkins here but I can see where he’s coming from in a way that would probably be lost on most people outside of biology. It’s easy for me to see this dispassionately, as Dawkins does, with humans as just another animal. Unlike Dawkins, I appreciate the concepts of sociology, anthropology, and psychology – humans (and some of the non-human primates) are not in fact quite like other animals. Although, for clarity, I don’t consider him a part of my field. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not a geneticist. And frankly, not a particularly good one, just a loud one.
But most importantly, he’s wrong.
Francis Galton, who is considered one of the fathers of genetics and in more specific terms one of the pioneers of my specific field. He was a big fan of eugenics and was Darwin’s cousin. He spent years studying trait variation in populations and this led naturally (naturally at the time, this was the 19th century) to considering how to improve the stock of the human race. I won’t go into more detail because it’s a whole lecture series on its own but he actually invented a number of methods and approaches we still use today.
This is the context that Dawkins has stripped from this conversation. Twitter is not the right medium for this kind of discussion.
It’s an uncomfortable heritage (the irony of which is not lost on me). Those of us in population genetics, genetic epidemiology, and statistical genetics owe a lot to Galton, but some of his ideas were hideous. We have to accept that.
So, why are Dawkins and Galton wrong?
When we raise cattle for milk or pigs for meat or wheat for flour, we observe traits and deliberately select for the ones we want. But to do that, we have to account for the traits that come with that. Cattle raised for milk or meat would not survive in the outside world. Their biology has been distorted to the point that they are reliant on humans to support characteristics that evolution would otherwise select against.
The idea of breeding (or genetically engineering) a superior human is biological nonsense. You select for one trait, you’re selecting for and against a bunch of others and you never know what they are in advance. Most genes are pleiotropic (which means they have more than one function) and they interact, so it’s just impossible to engineer either by breeding or by engineering a “superior” human, whatever your metric of superior is. They wouldn’t be able to survive.
tl;dr Any species that can’t afford to be reliant on another’s care for survival cannot survive on its own. All species survive by being adaptable. A human herd bred for “superiority” would die off pretty quickly because evolution is no longer working with the environment of the outside world. The environment always wins.
He goes on…
“A eugenic policy would be bad. I’m combating the illogical step from “X would be bad” to “So X is impossible”. It would work in the same sense as it works for cows. Let’s fight it on moral grounds. Deny obvious scientific facts & we lose – or at best derail – the argument.”
He’s denying the obvious scientific facts about human society, mainly by ignoring the morals and ideology, therefore it’s him who loses the argument. It would not “work” unless human beings were not human beings. It’s not impossible in some twisted theory, but it is impossible in practice, which is what he said, in practice.
Your logic is still flawed sir.
“If so…I still don’t see what his point is.”
His point is a more general one. Plenty of people these days leap from how they would like the world to be, to asserting that it must therefore be that way. (e.g. “I don’t want there to be climate change; therefore climate change is a hoax”).
Or, another one: “On ideological grounds, I don’t want there to be any biological difference between trans women and women; therefore there *is* no biological difference between trans women and women”.
Similarly: “On moral grounds, I don’t want eugenics to work; therefore it doesn’t work”. Dawkins is challenging this logic.
“… because who disagrees with what is apparently his basic point that it’s theoretically possible to breed humans for particular desired traits?”
You’d have thought “no-one”, wouldn’t you? But plenty do! (See the replies to his tweet for examples.) Plenty deny the obvious biological differences between trans women and women! Motivated reasoning is common, and Dawkins is countering one example of it.
If you are wanting to promote a kind of eugenics you make sure professions and sports and the arts are open to both sexes. Lawyers these days marry lawyers, and produce baby lawyers (at least in my firm). That wouldn’t have happened 40 years ago, when there were far fewer woman lawyers, whereas actors and actresses have been producing acting dynasties for hundreds of years, ditto musicians. These days tennis players marry tennis players and I would guess their children have a far better chance of becoming tennis players than the average person.
So if Dawkins is really interested in promoting geneticists marrying geneticists and produce baby geneticists, make sure that the science of genetics is as welcoming to women as possible.
@Claire – aah interesting. Like those poor dogs that are bred for looks which you would guess could never survive in the wild.
“I can see where he’s coming from in a way that would probably be lost on most people outside of biology.”
Claire, I can understand how reproduction can be controlled and manipulated, but biological truisms don’t exist in a vacuum, they have to work in the real world, and while it may work with animals who are subject to control and manipulation by humans, it does not work in any human societal model that makes any sense. It would not work in practice, and I would say, mostly not in theory either, not any well informed one anyway.
@ twitliter You misunderstand me. I meant I can see where he’s coming from in the context of Galton (and the others in the eugenics movement of the 19th century). It’s not a history most people know.
@KBplayer Actually, my sub-fields of genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics are remarkably welcoming to women. Our international society (IGES) is overwhelmingly female (about 70% last time I looked at our stats). Why? Because it was one of the few fields mostly ignored by male scientists when it was coming into being as a separate field. It was seen as a soft science because it was biology, which has always had a female slant because of that view. So add complex math, computation, and statistics and you have a science that welcomes math-oriented women.
It’s changing now, the balance is tilting more male because it’s becoming a really big deal now we can sequence people quickly and cheaply and there aren’t a lot of us. Training programs have lagged demand. I don’t often blow my own trumpet (yay female social conditioning!) but I’m really in demand at my university because I am one of literally a half dozen with that expertise on campus. It’s both wonderful and tiring but I wouldn’t want to do anything else.
Larry Niven imagined a “soft” version of eugenics where you are not told whom to breed with but you are told how many children you can have. Everyone is allowed one. The 2nd, 3rd (etc) children have to be earned by excellence in any of a number of fields. That could probably be done in a country like China, and would (I imagine) succeed in changing the population over the long term.
Sorry Claire, I read that too fast I think. :)
O dear, he really has to stay off Twitter.
The way I read the statement, he’s correct, in that, from the standpoint of biology and genetics, it would be theoretically possible to breed a group of humans for a particular trait. The fact that, from the standpoint of our society it would be completely impractical as well as completely immoral doesn’t impact his rather banal point, which might well be something people he’s run across have indeed disagreed with because they’re pushing some form of human biological exception is over other animals. Or maybe he’s imagining such people, unless he’s been dealing with the Spiritual in which case probably not.
He’s wrong. The fact that human beings can reproduce in certain combinations ignores the other biological fact that we have brains that are not compatible with any practical application of controlled reproduction on a large scale. We would have to be very not-human in order for that to work. Any coherent biological theory of human beings has to necessarily include our brains.
@twiliter:
He’s not wrong if he’s doing a thought experiment in which those factors can be controlled for. Consider a large breeding population of humans in captivity. Add in that the captors are space aliens. Plus, they’re clever at hiding anything you think it in the nature of humans to rebel over. They’re trying to increase human height by an incremental but significant level. It’s biologically possible even if human brains are taken into account.
As I said, it’s a trivial point unless someone would argue that Nature would not put up with this, or that there’s some other magical element which would force human height to remain the same because when breeding is artificial then it won’t work.
[…] a comment by Claire on It would totally […]
Coel @ 9 – If you’re right that that’s what his point was, he made a terrible hash of it.
Sastra – but he’s not doing a thought experiment, he’s just making a flat assertion. It riles me not so much because I think he’s cheering for eugenics (I don’t think that), it riles me because it’s SO sloppy.
@Sastra Human height is highly polygenic so breeding for it might produce peculiar results. And actually although human height is not uniform, the distribution isn’t that broad. The range is roughly between 4.5 and 6.5 feet.
We can’t breed an ever-increasingly species of taller and taller humans. Other physical factors start to become an issue. Then you have to start modifying to counteract those. Once you get above 7ft, things become problematic because of the strain gravity puts on the skeleton. Equally at smaller heights, at some point, you have your organs too squashed up or too small to function properly. There are limits. This is true of all living things. There’s a reason there are no spiders bigger than a cow, or mammals the size of ants.
Don’t get me started on intelligence. I get very mad, very quickly and want to throw bricks at Bob Plomin’s head. Suffice it to say that we have no measure of intelligence that is completely objective in the way that height or weight is. Confounders abound and are hard to control for combined with fuzzy phenotypes equals suspect genetic associations. Don’t believe the headlines about genes for intelligence or educational attainment. They’re total bollocks, and certain high-ranking journals should be ashamed of themselves.
“Coel @ 9 – If you’re right that that’s what his point was, he made a terrible hash of it.”
Yes, maybe he did; Twitter is not a place to supply a lot of context. But, it seemed to me (on reading the first Tweet) that that was his intent. And his third Tweet on this supports that intent: “I’m combating the illogical step from “X would be bad” to “So X is impossible”.”
Maybe I think like Dawkins and so interpret him as he intends. Maybe others just think in somewhat different ways (we all have different styles of thinking) and so don’t see what he’s getting at. Maybe some strive to interpret him in the least charitable way they can (some of the replies to that Tweet certainly do).
I’m convinced that the intent of the Tweet was indeed against motivated reasoning. Maybe he picked eugenics as the example because he thought it was so obvious that everyone would be against eugenics that the intent of criticising the logic would be clear.
He could have picked: “I want trans women to participate in women’s sport, therefore I need to argue that male physiology provides no advantage”.
Exactly.
It’s bad rhetoric, because it concedes WAY too much to the other side. As people have pointed out in this thread, the claim that eugenics “could work” is highly dependent on what you mean by “work.” Proponents of eugenics generally aren’t making the very narrow argument that one could, under highly artificial circumstances, manipulate one very specific, easily measurable trait like height or resistance to a particular virus. They’re typically making broad sweeping arguments about vague constellations of traits (like “intelligence,” the definition of which people have written entire books about), or even vaguer pronouncements about “superiority.” Dawkins is letting them off the hook on that — even if he’s deliberately setting aside that issue for argument’s sake, he isn’t being clear that he’s doing so, and he knows by now that any “concessions for the sake of argument” get misused by the other side.
Eugenics proponents want to play the same kind of motte-and-bailey game that religious apologists do: make broad, sweeping claims, and then when challenged, redefine their terms so that their claims are much narrower and more defensible (but much less interesting, and less appealing to their fans). “God is real and will reward you in the afterlife if you hate gays and send me money!” “What’s your evidence for that?” “Oh, well, ‘god’ is just a metaphor for life, the universe, and everything, which clearly exist, so you must admit that I’m right that god is real!”
Or, to use another example: homeopathy “works” in the sense that the placebo effect is real. But I don’t think you’d catch Dawkins saying, “oh, well OF COURSE homeopathy WORKS, only a fool would deny it, but that’s not the point….”
Exactly. First thing I said – “But what is meant by “work” here? What is the “eu” in “eugenics”? What kind of “eu” are we talking about? What “facts” are we invoking?”
It can’t be that he’s too thick to grasp that very obvious point.
Coel @ 23 – yes but I don’t really care what he actually meant. As I said @ 21 I don’t think he’s literally cheering for eugenics. I think what matters is what he said. He’s not a random person, he’s an “influencer.” It matters what he says because lots of people listen.
Well if he’s saying it violates the fact/value dichotomy, he’s still wrong. Eugenics is not biologically possible due to our biology, our being in possession of brains that are even able to make fact/value comparisons. It doesn’t matter whether we can imagine it not having moral implications, it matters that human beings do. Our brains are part of our biology and cannot be left out. Even if, in the case of height, we were to have large groups of tall people reproducing, there would be no way to enforce it without sterilizing or exterminating short people. Our brains simply don’t work that way, in a very real biological sense. Dawkins says it would work in practice, but it clearly would not, maybe in a thought experiment in a world of morally exempt genocidal rapists, but not in any real world scenario. There is no such thing as a group of human beings without brains capable of moral judgements, and even if there were in a thought experiment, what kind of humans would you be breeding?
Screechy Monkey wrote:
My understanding of Dawkins’ quote was that this was what he was addressing — not a genetic Ubermensch of Utopian eugenics thinking, but a simpler form of eugenics, in which a single factor like “increased height” is measured without considering the concomitant problems of “brittle bones” or whatever. To not care about such trade offs is not a biological failure, but a moral one. Which is Dawkins’ point.
Sastra @28,
I’m not sure how you can say it isn’t a biological failure as well.
It’s like saying that if someone invented a cure for baldness that has the unfortunate side effect of brain cancer, that’s not a medical failure, just a moral one. Nobody around the research lab would be high-fiving each other over this and saying, “well, we succeeded, it’s just a shame we can’t market it for moral reasons!”
Now, I suppose you could tweak your hypothetical so that the “enhanced trait” seemed highly beneficial and the associated problems minor, and then you could argue that’s a biological success…. but again, that concedes too much in my opinion.
I’m not qualified to judge Dawkins’ contributions as a research scientist. But for the past several decades at least, his claim to fame has been as a communicator. I think he has some skills in that area — again, I loved many of his books — but he’s also got some glaring weaknesses that are really kind of surprising for someone who made his living as a communicator.
@Ophelia: “First thing I said – “But what is meant by “work” here?”
“Work” just means: “If you wanted to treat humans like farm animals, and bred them to enhance traits X, Y and Z, then (after multiple generations) traits X, Y and Z would indeed be enhanced”.
Dawkins was simply saying that whether you want to do it is logically distinct from whether it would work. (And I think he’s right, it would work; sure there are developmental constraints, but then there are in cow’s milk production or the size of ears of corn.)
Coel, humans are not biologically capable of being treated like farm animals, our brains prevent it. It would not work. Humans that have been treated like farm animals die off pretty quickly, it would not work.
Dawkins logic on this is deeply flawed.
@twiliter #31: “Coel, humans are not biologically capable of being treated like farm animals, our brains prevent it …”
I’m unconvinced. If advanced aliens conquered Earth, I would think it in-principle possible that they could treat us like farm animals. Anyhow, that’s anyhow pretty irrelevant to Dawkins’s intent.
His intent appears to be how it’s only our values that prevent it, but he’s wrong, it’s not biologically possible either.
@KBPlayer #10
Do the offspring of lawyers tend to become lawyers for genetic or environmental reasons?
Coel @ 30 –
As you noted yourself by quoting what I said, I said “what is meant by “work” here?” Emphasis added. I was asking Dawkins what he was talking about. It’s not clear that Dawkins meant what you say “work” just means. That’s especially true since he mentioned eugenics. Eugenics does not just mean “If you wanted to treat humans like farm animals, and bred them to enhance traits X, Y and Z, then (after multiple generations) traits X, Y and Z would indeed be enhanced.”
I can figure out for myself what Dawkins could have meant, but as I keep saying, that’s not the point. The point is that what he said is ludicrously sloppy and vague, which is not clever when you’re talking about eugenics.
@Colin Day Environment would have the largest effect size. There may be genetic variants that make becoming a lawyer easier, but it would be impossible to find them because the environmental effect is so strong.
In theory, you might be able to model it to adjust for it but you’d need an absolutely mind-bogglingly large sample size of randomly mating individuals (and we all know that doesn’t happen in real life) AND keep the environment absolutely balanced across the population AND worry about genetic population substructure AND a bunch of other potential sources of error or bias.
I’m sorry. I teach and mentor graduate students and this is my field. I can’t help sliding into educational mode. :-)
@Colin Day – environmental in that lawyers only ever meet other lawyers and so are forced to breed with each other, as you used to get in-breeding in villages.
I’m just nonplussed why he would even make the comment. It seems odd, out of the blue, without a context that might have triggered it.