Strategies For Effecting Eugenic Change

Eugenics is poorly understood by most people at best. The typical American is largely oblivious to the concept and what it entails. I have written this essay to explain what eugenists really want, what we stand for, and how we plan to go about working towards a better future for humanity.

Outline Myths About Eugenics Socialized Birth Control Voluntary Measures Welfare Reform Prison Reform Immigration Reform DMV Reform Research Conclusion

Myths About Eugenics

Many people have simplistic ideas about what eugenics ultimately boils down to. The two main methods for affecting eugenic change which come to mind when you mention the word "eugenics" to someone is either mass sterilization or genetic manipulation, neither of which are seriously spoken of amongst modern eugenists regardless of religious or political affiliation. I will consider both in turn.

In many cases, I have prefaced discussion by stating my opposition to totalitarian sterilization schemes, only to find people angrily "debating" against the concept as though I somehow supported it. Now obviously, mass sterilization would work to affect eugenic change. But the amount of dissatisfaction and unhappiness caused by such a heavy handed solution is not only counterproductive, it is infeasible in a democratic society. As long as more humane and more effective measures exist, there is no reason to promote such a thing, which is why few eugenists bother discussing it anymore except with people who have no idea about what eugenics really is.

The other misapprehension non-eugenists have about the science of eugenics is that it's just another word for genetic manipulation. We can thank the lurid imagination of modern screenwriters for such ideas, but no one is suggesting that we splice feline DNA into human beings to make them run faster or splice in DNA from birds to make people grow wings. Not only are most such ideas impossible, but there is simply no need for them.

Most eugenists concern themselves with the intelligence and health of humankind. We are not interested in pushing the envelope on what it means to be human, but instead simply want the best for everyone. This doesn't mean that we are opposed to scientific solutions to the dysgenic threat, but that's not what usually comes to our minds when we talk about solving the problem.

Normal, natural human variation has given us scientific geniuses like Isaac Newton, famous beauties like Marilyn Monroe, and Olympic athletes like Michelle Quan, and there isn't much reason to tamper with the fabric of our genetic code out of a desire to improve on what we already have. There is an absolutely astounding amount of natural genetic variation in our gene pool, and eugenics will allow us to make use of that potential without resorting to science-fictionesque experiments in gene splicing or chromosomal tampering. And that's a good thing, too, because science hasn't progressed adequately to allow for a scientific solution at this point, and it may never reach that point, if dysgenic trends accelerate.

So if we're not interested in mass sterelization, and we're not holding our breath waiting for genetic manipulation, then what's left? Just what can we do to improve humanity? The answer is, "quite a lot, actually."

Statistics show that, while the numbers appear to be improving, around half of pregnancies in the United States are unplanned. Common sense should tell us that prudent people are less likely to have accidental children, which means that most of these unplanned pregnancies come from those who are low in traits like conscientiousness and intelligence. According to research shown at The Alan Guttmacher Institute, In 1994, 49% of pregnancies in the US were unplanned, with the highest rates occurring among young women, the unmarried, and low-income mothers. Only 39% of pregnancies for women below the poverty line were intended, compared to 59% of pregnancies for women earning at twice the poverty line or more. This is the primary source of our dysgenic troubles; those who are wise have taken far greater advantage of birth control than those who are careless, and the result is a decline in the numbers of the wise.

It is therefore obvious that if something could be done to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, it would disproportionately reduce the fertility of individuals low in intelligence and conscientiousness, and thereby negate the primary source of dysgenics. Since unintended births among the lower class are 31% (with 30% resulting in abortion), we could theoretically reduce their fertility by a maximum of 31%.

Of course, this is merely a theoretical maximum. Making birth control free and widely available - especially in poorer neighborhoods where it would do the most good - would certainly reduce the number of children born to the underclass. But it wouldn't stop people from having as many children as they wanted, of course. For most members of the underclass, this is two.

For underclass couples, socialized birth control would be a dream come true - far too many of them struggle with the financial burden of children they cannot support, and reduced fertility would raise their standard of living and prevent many of them from ever needing welfare.

For this reason, the benefits of a socialized birth control program would be visible even before any eugenic effect could be perceived. The average child costs $190,528 to raise from birth to age 18; this is money which the underclass sorely needs! So not only would fewer children grow up in poverty, but fewer adults would live below the poverty line because of the money they would save by having fewer children.

To answer this question, imagine if you will a small society of perhaps ten thousand souls who choose to put eugenic principles into practice in their own lives and made an effort to increase their intelligence. If each of the more intelligent couples of this population had an average of three children, while each of the couples in the lower half of intelligence paid no attention to eugenic ideals and simply made use of free birth control to have an average of two children, after a single generation, their average IQ would have risen by two and a half points.

This may sound insignificant, but it has been found that a meager increase to the average intelligence of a population would have powerful effects on social indicators such as crime and productivity. According to The Bell Curve, when their sample is altered (by discarding low IQ individuals at random from the data pool) to reflect a mean IQ of 103 instead of 100, the poverty rate falls by 25%, High school dropouts decrease by 28%, the number of children living without their parents falls 20%, Welfare recipiency falls 18%, and the proportion of men interviewed in jail falls 25%. These aren't just numbers - these figures represent dramatic differences in the lives of real people. This means fewer people being robbed and raped. It means fewer people struggling academically. It means fewer children growing up in poverty. For hundreds of individuals in our little town - or millions throughout our entire country - it could mean everything.

It's clear then that an increase of just 2.5 IQ points should render a phenomenal effect on the social and economic fabric of this little town after just one generation. Assuming that this would continue for four generations - one hundred years - the average IQ would have risen to 110, and all it would take to reach this goal would be a small difference in the number of children born to each couple.

Welfare Reform

The dysgenic trends facing our society didn't appear out of nowhere. We created them through our own actions. One of the ways we currently encourage dysgenics is by subsidizing births in the underclass. Rather than paying them not to reproduce, which might be sensible socially and eugenically, we pay them to do the opposite.

Chronic welfare recipients, as a group, are not well equipped for parenthood. It has been shown that the less intelligent and responsible an individual is, the less capable he or she is of making mature decisions as a parent. The typical neglectful mother is of low intelligence (below 80 IQ) and doesn't have much money. Even with welfare payments, such a woman will have trouble fully caring for a child financially or emotionally. We should not be encouraging such women to bring children into the world even if only out of consideration for the child's future, let alone the future of society as a whole!

Paying women for the children they create gives them an incentive to create more children, and the effects are all too obvious. Rather than spend governmental money encouraging them to burden society with children they cannot properly support, we should give money to women below the poverty line who do not have children. If a woman cannot support a child, she does not need to draw governmental money to care for it - she can always put it up for adoption or in foster care. Under such a scheme, no woman or child would starve. We would save money, there would be fewer babies born and raised in poverty in the short run, and in the long run the genetic quality of humankind will be protected.

Prison Reform

In their Book, Crime and Human Nature, Wilson and Herrnstein showed that criminality is linked to extroversion, impulsivity, assertiveness, and low verbal intelligence. In fact, the average IQ of a criminal is around 85, and criminals have much higher reproductive rates than non-criminals. The consequences for this are more disturbing than those for "ordinary" dysgenics, because it means that we will be seeing more and more violent individuals lacking in impulse control and moral fiber flooding our society as time goes by.

One very important reason to crack down on crime is the subject of recidivism, or the incidence of crimes committed by criminals released from prison. According to the United States Department of Justice, Sixty-seven percent of former inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within the following three years. Most former convicts were rearrested shortly after getting out of prison. 30% were rearrested within six months, 44% within one year, 59% within two years and 67% by the end of three years.

The obvious question is, why were these people released at all? If two thirds of them are going to turn around and commit another "serious" crime within three years of their release, it's sheer insanity to reintroduce them into the company of innocents waiting to become victims. All this is going on while everyone obsesses over the ethics of capital punishment! Does it matter whether we kill them or lock them up until they die of natural causes? The important issue is that they be prevented from hurting more innocent people and from propagating more criminals! This should be obvious to everyone without even considering eugenic issues, but we have to consider them, because the fact remains that these criminals, while free, are reproducing like mad, and this is cause for earnest concern!

Many will blithely claim that there is no concern, that criminality isn't "in the blood." But adopted children are twice as likely to lead a life of crime if their biological parents had criminal histories than their adoptive parents; according to The Causes and Cures of Criminality, by Eysenck and Gudjonsson, the heritability of criminality is approximately 60 percent. Also, consider the common misconception that rapists and molesters are simply made the way they are as a result of abuse in their upbringing; according to the U.S. Department of Justice, two thirds of sexual assault offenders reported never having been physically or sexually abused as children. It isn't that upbringing doesn't matter (what about the other one third?) but genes play a very important role in criminality and cannot simply be swept under the rug.

For this reason, we should reform our current criminal-justice system. Prisons should be enlarged. The law should be fully enforced. Sentences should be lengthened, parole revoked. Restrictions should be placed on money spent in court to prevent criminals from buying their freedom. And most importantly, sentences, when pronounced, should be served.

This is an extremely simple concept, but somehow rapists and murderers "do their time" (or rather half of it, or a quarter of it, or some other fraction of it) and are then released on parole or set free. Once again, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 45% of prisoners surveyed committed a crime while out on probation or parole.

Most people realize that this is cause for alarm, but they only imagine the terrible crimes such a person can himself commit. What of the crime of creating a child they cannot care for? What of the crime of inflicting future generations of criminals onto an otherwise law abiding society? Criminality should not be tolerated, and this means not only taking steps to deal with criminals today, but to prevent the existence of criminals tomorrow.

We need to apprehend lawbreakers, we need to put them in jail, and we need to keep them there for as long as their sentences demand.

Immigration Reform

Differential fertility isn't the only way for gene frequencies to change; immigration and emigration can also have a profound effect on the genetic character of a population. So what is the situation in America? According to USA today, there are currently 8.5 million illegal aliens living in the United States today. 300,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States every year. Although Americans are beginning, after the events of September 11th, to awaken to the security threat that such illegals present, most are unaware of the genetic threat.

Give me your tired, your poor... The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...

- Inscription on the Statue of Liberty

We have a problem. Our abysmal immigration policy has flooded America with criminals, and with uneducated welfare recipients. According to Leadership U, there were around nine thousand criminal aliens in US jails in 1980. In 1994, this number swelled to fifty-nine thousand. As of the year 2002, criminal aliens accounted for over 25% of all inmates in federal prisons. They represent the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

But that's not the worst part. For as little as $40, illegal aliens can purchase documents guaranteeing them unquestioned entitlement to health care and welfare. Taxpayers are paying an estimated 40 billion dollars every year so that these illegal aliens can propagate themselves.

What is the government doing about this? The National Anxiety Center reports that of the eleven million illegal immigrants in the US in 1999, the INS deports fewer than 2%.

Eugenists have been worried about immigration for many years, and have frequently sufferred accusations of racism on account of their concern. I would like to remind you that it isn't "racist" to worry about a real threat. If we were getting quality immigants, well educated members of their host societies, who came here honestly and legally, and improved the genetic capital of our country, that would be one thing. The current situation is another thing entirely.

There is absolutely no justification for the flood of immigration which is sweeping across America. Our underclass is too large as it is, which is why a minimum wage must be set - there is already a surplus of uneducated people willing to do blue collar work. We are allowing criminals to cross our border illegally, to victimize law abiding native citizens and legal immigrants, and to breed like locusts.

The magnitude of this problem cannot be overstated. 70% of the population growth in the previous decade is attributable to immigrants and to their children. And these immigrants are hardly the "cream of the crop;" not only are they more likely to commit a jailable offense and end up in prison, but, according to Immigrants and Welfare, immigrants are much more likely to be poor:

About 15 percent of U.S. citizens fall below the poverty line, whereas 29 percent of non-citizens do so. About 11 percent of non-citizens have incomes less than 50 percent of the poverty line, compared to six percent of citizens.

Two things, therefore, must be done. The first is to reform and expand the INS so that it is able to effectively identify illegal immigrants, safely apprehend and deport them, and keep them out. The second is to put greater restrictions on who is allowed to immigrate legally. We cannot allow criminals and the uneducated to swamp our systems. For eugenics to work, we need to ensure that our efforts aren't being undermined by immigration. We don't have the resources to improve the genetic quality of the entire planet! Most eugenists will agree that we should set global genetic quality as our ultimate goal, improving the health and intelligence of all nations everywhere, but first we need to look after our own genetic quality. If we don't, we won't be around to do the rest of the world any good in the future.

DMV Reform

Since I am discussing governmental reforms it would be good to include a brief note on the subject of licensing. The following data, taken from O'Toole's Accident Analysis and Prevention, shows the death rate due to motor vehicle accidents for Australilan men between the ages of 20 and 34:

As you can clearly see, individuals with IQs below 85, who comprise the lower 16% of the population, are three times as likely to have a fatal accident than individuals with IQs above 100; we can infer that a disproportionate number of the 100+ IQ deaths were caused by individuals below 85 IQ. As it is now in America the overwhelming majority of individuals drive. But driving is a privilege, not a right, and we could probably save many lives, not to mention millions of dollars in damages and legal fees, if we made our driving exams more stringent and put forth a better effort to prevent less capable drivers from endangering their own (and other people's) lives. Similar arguments could be made about gun licenses; these issues are not really related to eugenics, but do merit consideration in their own right.

Research

The recent scientific advances to the area of human genetics offer a great deal of hope to an otherwise frightening future. With greater understanding of genetics, we may someday be able to pinpoint the very genes which boost intelligence in order to refine our knowledge of just who does have good genes, and even make technology such as gamete selection widely available. Venter believes that in ten years, we will be able to sequence our own personal DNA for less than $10,000; in the next fifty years, it's reasonable to suggest that this figure may drop as low as $100. Once DNA sequencing becomes practical, the efficiency of eugenics will dramatically increase - and so will the potential.

It's been the dream of parents throughout history to give their children a better life than they had. Imagine being able to look at all the things you don't like about yourself, and make certain that your children never have them. With gamete selection, we would be able to select our very best genes, by choosing only our best sperm and eggs, and use these to make our children. This isn't the same as "tampering with nature;" this is simply taking the very best that nature has to offer.

Research into social science can also help us discover exactly where our reproductive patterns are taking us. Right now it isn't known exactly what dysgenics is doing, beyond eroding our intelligence. Conscientiousness is decreasing as well - how fast? What about creativity or health? When we have a more complete understanding of the situation, we can fine tune our eugenic efforts to increase their effectiveness.

But most importantly, we need to begin practicing on eugenics on a small scale and do research on the results. Right now the effectiveness of eugenics is academic; before we can take large scale action we will need to know exactly what the effects will be. Reforms to the welfare system, the criminal justice system, and the immigration system are obvious places to start, and we already have enough experience with these issues to know what the outcomes will be. But if we want to go further with eugenics, it is wiser to go carefully than to simply rush ahead.

Conclusion

These are only a few of the options available to us for increasing the genetic quality of humankind; there are many others which are sometimes sensationalized, such as sperm banks, cloning, or charities which pay people not to have children. Then there are less well known ideas, such as advertising - the "Truth" is that cigarettes are an insignificant problem in the grand scheme of things, but if you really want to decrease smoking rates, boosting intelligence and conscientiousness is a great way to start.

But these issues which I've outlined are those which deserve unified public support. If nothing else, we must be aware that the decisions we make as a society and, most importantly, as individuals, have powerful repercussions on the future. Everything we have came from those who lived before us. What will we leave to those who go after?