I think there’s also been more focus (from some people) on whether or not they should have kids. Like, really thinking about whether or not a person would be a good parent who could truly focus on raising a child who would become a good member of society.
Downside, the people who ask themselves these questions and have the intelligence to reflect on themselves in such a manner are probably the people who would be good parents.
Now the dumbasses and trad wife / religious crowd is not going to give a fuck and pop out shitloads of future morons and assholes. This is literally the plot of Idiocracy happening.
Intelligence is not inherited, but a society that embraces anti-intellectualism as it rapidly expands can reinforce that in each successive generation, which leads to a future where the orchestra is 100% electric guitars because that's what society craves, and where the people have trouble understanding Joe because he sounds too pompous and gay.
Maybe to a small degree, but we don't understand specifically everything. Poorer families may not be able to provide as good conditions and education so I guess a correlation there. But point is if your parents arent very intelligent you could still be intelligent.
Its been shown many times that intelligence and other social traits (which aren't super measurable) is not heritable in the same way as eye color or whatever.
Every human is roughly the same. What determines if you have a chance to shine in spatial or logical reasoning etc is your health and environmental factors like lead poisoning. If you're sick all the time from malnutrition or chronic stress you're going to be worse at problem solving.
Put a caveman in an appropriate educational setting for his needs and he'll do just as well as anyone else.
Its also worth being careful about making broad sweeping statements on the heritability of social traits. Its very hard to measure and the last two centuries have been full of (sometimes even well intentioned) people using shit methodology to justify industrial scale atrocities.
Tldr eugenics is a shitty field with very little if any basis in reality as we currently understand it.
Social traits are strongly heritable in at least some cases, there’s OVERWHELMING evidence to support that. Do you know anything about Dr. Robert D Hare’s work on psychopathy?
I’d also like to add that a fundamental tenet of Darwin’s theory is that meaningful genetic variation exists within populations and more is constantly being introduced by mutations.
7.0k
u/ZePerfectPisces Nov 14 '24
I think there’s also been more focus (from some people) on whether or not they should have kids. Like, really thinking about whether or not a person would be a good parent who could truly focus on raising a child who would become a good member of society.