Richard and Jonathan discuss the Eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular focus on its American pioneers, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Eugenics has become taboo today--in the wake of Boasian anthropology and political correctness--but it was hegemonic in the first half of the 20th century, informing the thought of politicians and writers across the political spectrum.

I’m sure by now everyone has heard about James Lee, the homeless Korean-American man who, inspired by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and enraged that his ideas for cable programming were rejected, stormed the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland, bandied a weapons, and took hostages. He might have been carrying a bomb.

Lee’s central demand was that the Discovery Channel revamp its primetime lineup.

We should be cautious reaching any sweeping conclusions about bizarre cases like one, regarding environmentalism, Asian immigration, or what have you. Lee was what people, before our age of therapy, called a lunatic. Sane people are all alike; every insane person is insane in his own way.

That said, commentators and activists love to latch on to sensational news stories like this one for the sake of their own pet projects (much as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, by another crazed Korean, was turned into a call for gun control.) My sense is that the Discovery Channel Gunman will lend himself to many a “You know what that leads to…” argument.

Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children in The Wall Street Journal.

The main problem with parenting pessimists, though, is that they assume there's no acceptable way to make parenting less work and more fun. Parents may feel like their pressure, encouragement, money and time are all that stands between their kids and failure. But decades' worth of twin and adoption research says the opposite: Parents have a lot more room to safely maneuver than they realize, because the long-run effects of parenting on children's outcomes are much smaller than they look.

Think about everything parents want for their children. The traits most parents hope for show family resemblance: If you're healthy, smart, happy, educated, rich, righteous or appreciative, the same tends to be true for your parents, siblings and children. Of course, it's difficult to tell nature from nurture. To disentangle the two, researchers known as behavioral geneticists have focused on two kinds of families: those with twins, and those that adopt. If identical twins show a stronger resemblance than fraternal twins, the reason is probably nature. If adoptees show any resemblance to the families that raised them, the reason is probably nurture.

Parents try to instill healthy habits that last a lifetime. But the two best behavioral genetic studies of life expectancy—one of 6,000 Danish twins born between 1870 and 1900, the other of 9,000 Swedish twins born between 1886 and 1925—found zero effect of upbringing. Twin studies of height, weight and even teeth reach similar conclusions. This doesn't mean that diet, exercise and tooth-brushing don't matter—just that parental pressure to eat right, exercise and brush your teeth after meals fails to win children's hearts and minds.

Parents also strive to turn their children into smart and happy adults, but behavioral geneticists find little or no evidence that their effort pays off. In research including hundreds of twins who were raised apart, identical twins turn out to be much more alike in intelligence and happiness than fraternal twins, but twins raised together are barely more alike than twins raised apart. In fact, pioneering research by University of Minnesota psychologist David Lykken found that twins raised apart were more alike in happiness than twins raised together. Maybe it's just a fluke, but it suggests that growing up together inspires people to differentiate themselves; if he's the happy one, I'll be the malcontent...

If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you're not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job. The same goes for the other dilemmas that weigh on parents' consciences. Watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids' development, so it's OK to relax. In fact, relaxing is better for the whole family. Riding your kids "for their own good" rarely pays off, and it may hurt how your children feel about you.

I've known for years that science has shown parenting within a normal range means almost nothing but when I read what cross-adoption studies tell us I'm still in awe.  Then again, we are biological animals, so why should such a thing be surprising?  It's most likely because of the extent to which we've been misled, sometimes purposely and sometimes not.  The Left needs environment to matter because they want to remake society and acheive equality while conservatives need to stress the importance of parenting to defend the traditional family.  Though while your kids are financialy dependent on you you should be able to control their behavior, and it's sad how many parents can't, culture, their social group and genes will determine what kind of adults they become.

I made the same argument in a book review I wrote for The Occidental Observer after comparing the results of middle and lower class child rearing case studies and reviewing the exhausting and expensive regimes many of the better off subject their children to.

Environmentalist ideology has led society’s genetic elite to absurdly overestimate what a stimulating environment can do for their children, and needlessly fear a less managed existence.  After giving a son or daughter the basic necessities of life and educational opportunities, further investments likely result in diminishing returns.  If intelligent parents knew this, they would be less busy, have much less anxiety and possibly have more children, since doing so would be more financially feasible and enjoyable.

Caplan puts it in economic terms: as parents are artificially imposing a higher cost on themselves for each child the demand goes down.

So on this Father's Day to all readers with a decent IQ (if you read a site like this for pleasure it's likely adequate) and no hereditary diseases, criminal record or monstrous deformities, know that the most important thing you can do to have successful children is make sure they come into existence in the first place.  Nature will take it from there. 

We’ve finally found all that white privilege we’ve been hearing about.  It’s on the other side of the world.

NOT LONG AGO I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

I was.

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave...

As we waited for the ceremony to begin, a foreman standing beside me barked at workers still visible on the construction site. They scurried behind the scaffolding.

“Are you the boss?” I asked him.

He looked at me quizzically. “You’re the boss.”

Actually, Ernie was the boss. After a brief introduction, “Director” Ernie delivered his speech before the hundred or so people in attendance. He boasted about the company’s long list of international clients and emphasized how happy we were to be working on such an important project. When the speech was over, confetti blasted over the stage, fireworks popped above the dusty field beside us, and Ernie posed for a photo with the mayor.

This reminds me of Richard Lynn’s closing prediction in Eugenics: A Reassessment.  Apparently, the technology for selectively inserting superior embryos is coming soon and he sensibly believes that the first country to embrace such practices will rule the world.  This will probably be China and when they colonize whites they’ll keep them around out of cultural appreciation for their past accomplishments.  The status of whites will be like that of the Greeks under the Romans or the Arabs under the Ottomans.  We’re seeing the beginnings of this in the white man trade.  Being fronts for the interests of another ethny shouldn’t be too big of an adjustment for more than a few European Americans though.  Many, such as the gentiles who are among the main public faces of neo-conservatism, have plenty of experience.

According to statistics released on May 17, Germany’s birthrate is now at an all-time low of 1.38 children per woman.  Every year there are 190,000 fewer Germans.  The news is rarely much better anywhere else in the high IQ world.  South Korea and Japan are at 1.25 and 1.37 respectively.  I don’t want to go into why this is the case here, but express surprise from an evolutionary perspective at the fact that such low birth rates persist.

Let’s agree that the following propositions are indisputable.

-Evolution is about survival and reproduction.  Let’s say the equation is (S)(R) where S is either 0, died before being able to reproduce, or 1, living long enough, and R how many children one has.  
-In first world countries all but a negligible few are alive at puberty and for a good many years after that.  For all practical statistical purposes, S is 1 for everybody and can be removed from the equation.    
-This is unique in evolutionary history, even among humans.  In the United State at the beginning of the twentieth century 10% of babies died within their first year, compared to about 0.5% today.
-For at least a generation now reliable contraception has been available for the masses.  
-TFR is not about financial incentives/disincentives as we see the fewest babies in the wealthiest countries and culture (being Muslim) and HBD factors (being black) seem to predict fertility better than econonmics.

Considering these points, there are five, and only five, things in the modern world being selected for or against assuming that these traits are heritable.

1) Ability/willingness to find (and settle for) a heterosexual partner
2) Number of children desired
3/4) Against IQ/conscientiousness, as it takes foresight to use contraception consistently and effectively
5) Virility/fertility

Unique living circumstances make for unique selection pressures.  Think of all that a bird living in the wild has to contend with for its offspring to be born and survive.  For the S part of the equation it must avoid diseases, outwit/outfly predators and find food.  To do this it depends on its brain, limbs, wings and senses to be in working order.  It then needs to find a partner and have the offspring itself avoid predators and disease.  Even in our hunter-gatherer past a full thirty percent of males died violently.  A significant percentage of people died young from disease up until the last several decades.   All that has been neutralized.

Modern human evolution resembles husbandry more than it does anything in the state of nature.  Since a conscious breeder has the advantage of taking luck out of the equation and equalizing S (sometimes prey or a murder victim is just unfortunate!), the animals under his control evolve much more rapidly.  Just look at how quickly dogs and cats have appeared compared to the time it naturally takes for a species to develop.  With practically no humans in first world countries being unlucky from a survivalist perspective, personalities and predispositions are almost all that count in how we are being selected.

To go back to our five big traits, we see that the first and last have little variation within a population.  Most people find a partner and are able to reproduce.  Pace the “gamers,” 90% of white men still get married at some point, making number one all but irrelevant.  And only a small minority are impotent, asexual, exclusively homosexual or unable to have children for some other reason.  These traits have always been selected against. This leaves intelligence, conscientiousness and desire for children as the big three being selected for/against.  We’ve seen from more than a few studies that IQ is falling about 0.8 points a generation, or 3-4 points a century.  A little multiplication will tell us that at this rate of decline whites would become as simple as Australian aboriginals in a millennium, a heartbeat considering that the major races have been separated for 50,000-100,000 years and have about 50 points between the most and least intelligent populations.  It would take less than 200 years for whites to equal Mexicans.  As I said before, our grandchildren could see one of the racial achievement gaps closed!  I’m sure something similar would be found for conscientiousness.

As for birth rates, the desire for children should be growing at least as fast as IQ is dropping.  In West Germany the pill was released in 1961.  Two generations should be enough to see a slight up tick in the TFR not just for Germans, but all first world populations.

I believe we are seeing here the demographic equivalent of the Flynn Effect for the trait of wanting children.  Throughout the twentieth century in the Anglo-American word the lower classes had a higher birthrate than the wealthy, but regardless IQ increased.  This would be a refutation of the dysgenic hypothesis, if the evidence and logic behind it weren’t impeccable.  What seems to be the case is that while genotypic intelligence dropped, i.e. the potential average a population can be expected to reach in any given environment/culture, phenotypic IQ went up as improvements in nurture outpaced the deterioration in the gene pool.

There is some emperical basis to my speculation.  Harpending, Cochran and others found in 2007 that evolution has been speeding up ever since the switch to agriculture.  Extreme changes in living conditions and bigger populations have served as catalysts for rapid biological tansformation.  As the world population has never been larger and technological advancement never faster the rate of change is likely to be accelerating still.

So while we can be certain that in the same environment/culture the German population of 2010 would have more children than the German population of 1961, the cultural changes of the last fifty years mask the genotypic increase in desire for children.  The low overall birthrates among more intelligent and responsible populations will eventually rebound though, as culture swings in many directions but strong selection for wanting to be a parent will remain as long as nobody in the West is starving or otherwise dying too soon.  In the long run, we can simply close the borders and not worry about Western nations becoming underpopulated no matter how bleak things look in the immediate future.  Now if only the drops in IQ and conscientiousness had such a simple solution.

In the journal Intelligence Gerhard Meisenberg contributes another analysis showing that IQ and fertility are negatively correlated.  Here's the abstract:

Although a negative relationship between fertility and education has been described consistently in most countries of the world, less is known about the relationship between intelligence and reproductive outcomes. Also the paths through which intelligence influences reproductive outcomes are uncertain. The present study uses the NLSY79 to analyze the relationship of intelligence measured in 1980 with the number of children reported in 2004, when the respondents were between 39 and 47 years old. Intelligence is negatively related to the number of children, with partial correlations (age controlled) of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males, respectively. This effect is related mainly to the g-factor. It is mediated in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more “liberal” gender attitudes of more intelligent people. In the absence of migration and with constant environment, genetic selection would reduce the average IQ of the US population by about .8 points per generation.

All these patterns have been found before, including the more negative correlation among black females.  Here are the results in graph form.  

As you can see, for white women the most fertile range is 70-80, well below the black average of 85.  The second best place to be, from the perspective of a white woman's genes, is legally retarded!  

The smartest black females suffer from there being so few good bruthas out there.  While intelligent black males can either dip into the general population of the community or go white to find a partner, these options tend not to be available for black females who are not attractive to educated whites and don't usually want typical black men.  

0.8 points doesn't seem like a lot, but it means 11.7% fewer people with IQs higher than 130.  In a century there will be a drop of 2.9 points and 37.7% fewer gifted individuals.  Considering that whites and Asians have been genetically separated for tens of thousands of years and only differ by about five points, a change of three within a hundred years should horrify us.  Just imagine, if the "natural" IQ difference between whites and Hispanics is five points, our grandchildren could live to see one of the current gene-based racial gaps all but disappear within their lifetimes (assuming Hispanics don't also suffer dysgenics, etc).  No Child Left Behind will finally be a success! 

And don't count on the Flynn Effect to bail us out, as it's all but ended in the developed world.  Improved environment has done what it could for us and all future genetic deterioration will be noticeable.  Also, as Meisenberg explains, the 0.8 point drop is assuming that the nurture component stays the same, which it won't because a genetically lower IQ population will create a less stimulating environment.  

...if the cognitive returns on environmental improvements are indeed diminishing in the most advanced societies, small genetically caused declines can entail far larger declines of phenotypic intelligence than predicted by genetic selection alone. This is because a less intelligent population is less able to maintain near-optimal environments, thereby reducing its intelligence even more. For example, small reductions in the average intelligence of educational administrators will result in an increased probability that educational reforms will reduce rather than enhance students' intelligence, and thereby lead to even lower intelligence in the next generation of educational administrators and even greater deterioration of the educational system.

On the other hand, a lower societal IQ may cause Americans to reject socialism, thereby making the economy better than it otherwise would've been and increasing resources. Early twentieth century Russia could've certainly done better with fewer high IQ Jews and Georgians.

An interesting observation is that when you look at fertility of whites with IQs of >100 the rules don't apply. The Caucasian birthrate is almost exactly the same whether one is at 100 or 130.  Perhaps 100 is the bare minimum required to use contraception consistently and effectively.  

So what is to be done?  Those who have taken to the sport of burning strawmen say "Leave things as they are or Nazism.  Nothing in between!"   Obviously there are other options.  What would happen, for example, if colleges drilled the educated on the heritability and importance of IQ to one tenth the degree they preached feminism and environmentalism?  Even if childbearing and rearing made women less happy on a daily basis than working 9-5, and I truly doubt it, intelligent people tend to look for higher reasons to live.  That's why they endure physical discomfort to go to Africa with the peace corps or volunteer to teach in an inner-city neighborhood.  Some actual literacy in the human sciences would teach those with high IQs and a sense of social consciousness that the most important thing they could leave behind is their genetic makeup.  If this was widely understood, large families (made up of one's own biological children!) for women who have already demonstrated intellectual ability by say graduating from a top university would become a status symbol the way adopting a black baby is today.  There's some evidence that societies which revere families and traditional values have more eugenic fertility than those where acceptance of a sterile egalitarian humanism is a main marker of status.  In early twentieth century China the wealthier and literate tended to have more children and Richard Lynn has found Muslim Indonesia to have the most eugenic fertility of any contemporary nation studied.  

As for the other end of the spectrum, there doesn't seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn't include coercion.  Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can't even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.  If we say we don't want government making these decisions, then we have to ask why we allow government to institutionalize crazy people who haven't been convicted of a crime, a power that is just as open to abuse.