…Breeding the Human Herd is an ideal introduction to the topic of eugenics. In admirably clear and engaging prose, Prof. Dutton’s book lays out the basic concepts of eugenics as well as the history both of its rise and its decline. Prof. Dutton defines eugenics as “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population in order to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.” “Positive” eugenic policies are intended to increase the prevalence of desirable traits in a population (e.g., encouraging intelligent people to have children), while “negative” eugenics involves decreasing undesirable traits (e.g., “incentivizing those with low intelligence to limit their fertility”).
If all the book did was explain the basic concepts of eugenics, it would perform a valuable service. But the heart of Breeding the Human Herd is a demonstration of the power of eugenic theory to explain the decline of the West. Drawing upon a vast number of studies in the social sciences, Prof. Dutton argues that what we have witnessed since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is a dysgenic collapse, resulting in a steep decline in mental and physical health, as well as the decline of vital social institutions and social cohesion.
Particularly worthy of note is Prof. Dutton’s treatment of Leftist perversities as the result of a lack of genetic fitness. Leftists are, to use his unforgettable term, “spiteful mutants” whose “high mutational load” results in an unusually large number of physical and mental abnormalities. In the pre-industrial era, such individuals would probably have never reached adulthood. Prof. Dutton supports these claims by appealing to cutting-edge research in the social sciences — for example, studies that show a high correlation between espousing left-wing views and various heritable psychopathologies. This part of the book is particularly fascinating.
…The trouble, however, is that conservatives are likely to be religious, which in the West usually means Christian. Christianity acts to thwart the healthy tendency of its adherents toward what we might call “natural eugenics” (i.e., the “gut feeling” that health and intelligence are good and that those with them should breed, and those without should not). As noted earlier, in the modern West, opposition to eugenics has frequently come from religious conservatives. Whatever psychological benefits may accrue to its adherents, Christianity is a fundamentally dysgenic belief system, for it preaches egalitarianism and opposes “love of one’s own” with an impossible ideal of “universal love.” (Nietzsche was right about Christianity, too.)
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To add one idea to this wide-ranging discussion of eugenics, our ability to manipulate gametes and zygotes already allows for selection of offspring. When physical and digital insertions of genes into gametes and zygotes becomes more fully developed, parents will be able to choose even more of their offspring’s traits. Before too much longer, children eugenically selected by the free-will of their parents will have IQs two and three times greater than their parents and physical traits to match those high IQs. It is conceivable that these changes will be accepted societally without much fuss, thus producing a rapid transformation in human evolution to a stage that might be called ‘post Darwinian evolution’ or ‘conscious evolution’. In my view, this is something to be looked forward to and not feared. It will quickly solve many of humanity’s most vexing problems. ABN
American Buddhist Net 