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Home site (ctrl+click): http://www.NeoEugenics.net/index.htm Inequality, higher education, and eugenics. (Dec. 2012) It has been almost a year ago that I read Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray, 2012. I meant to write an article then on how his book fits into eugenics, but other issues got in the way. It might have been for the best however, as over the months his book has been discussed often and mentioned in articles dealing with inequality. Note that Charles Murray is the pariah who coauthored The Bell Curve in 1994, documenting the genetic basis for differences in racial intelligence, so it was somewhat surprising that he was given as much exposure as he did in Coming Apart. The equalitarian dogma after all is firmly entrenched in the mass media, and is readily accepted both by liberals and conservatives alike—even though evolutionary orthodoxy readily adheres to the view that group selection will produce racial differences between competing population groups. On the Left and on the Right, the belief is that Blacks fail and East Asians excel because of culture, not genes. In that framework, both Murray and those reviewing his book both looked at culture as the culprit dividing White America into castes, while genetic changes underlying this trend were apparent in Coming Apart, but not fully developed. I will link the data into a eugenic explanation that is readily accepted but never mentioned as "eugenics in action." Eugenics became increasingly popular towards the end of the 19th Century until about the Second World War, when Nazi ideology, according to the eugenic myth, revealed it as a pseudoscience. A careful reading of the history of eugenics however reveals that in fact it lived on for several decades, and morphed into programs such as Planned Parenthood, and later was subsumed into the genomic revolution still developing. Still, the eugenic agenda as a state sponsored program has abated, while cultural changes have made natural eugenics a new force in dividing populations into cognitive castes with increasing inequality. In Coming Apart, Murray lays out the changes that took place after the Second World War. From 1940 to about 1970, America was never so equal in income and status, at least for White people. After the war jobs were plentiful, average people were now going on to higher education thanks to the GI bill, and people were less inclined to marry the girl next door and more inclined to marry someone as smart as they were. We were entering the age of associative mating—like-minded people were aggregating into more definable castes naturally. Murray notes, "Perhaps the most general cultural difference—one that can be bad or good depending on individual cases—is that mainstream America is a lot more relaxed than the new upper class about their children. I don't mean that other American parents care less, but that, as a group, they are less inclined than upper-class parents to obsess about how smart their baby is, how to make the baby smarter, where the baby should go to preschool, and where the baby should go to law school." So while Americans are separating into breeding castes based on cognitive abilities, the public is still naïve about what makes a person intelligent. The common notion that intelligence is environmental still predominates thanks to the media's adherence to the egalitarian dogma, while psychometricians using behavior genetics and increasingly molecular genetics have recognized that intelligence is primarily genetic—60 to 80% as one approaches adulthood. So while the Left has been able to maintain the dogma that cognitive ability is a matter of socio-economic status (SES), assortative mating— at least among the upper class—is driving the elite to marry while the neighborhood dullards stay behind in the hood and marry their equals. And this split is accelerating as each generation becomes more inclined to marry according to ability—even across racial divides. At the upper end of the continuum: Whites, East Asians, and Jews are increasingly marrying each other as they gravitate towards the most prestigious universities, while less intelligent Whites, Hispanics and Blacks gravitate towards less demanding advanced education, a high school degree, or dropping out of school entirely. The creation of a caste society is then firmly entrenched. As Murray points out, "The segregation of the college system now means that the typical classroom in a third-tier public university is filled with students who are not much brighter than the average young person in the nation as a whole, whereas the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive talent, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth of the distribution. Both sets of students are technically 'college educated' when they get their BAs, but that's where the similarity stops…. The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children. For example, one of the basics for having a decent chance of getting into an elite school is a high SAT score, with 'high' defined as at least 700 on the SAT verbal and SAT math. Among college-bound seniors who took the SAT in 2010, 87 percent of the students with 700-plus scores in the math and verbal tests had at least one parent with a college degree. Fifty-six percent of them had a parent with a graduate degree. This is not a function of coaching—the dispassionate studies of coaching show average gains of only a few dozen points—but of ability to do well in a challenging academic setting. That ability is reflected in the other measures—grades, teacher evaluations, and many types of extracurricular accomplishments—that admissions committees use. In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the tests aren't the problem and bias in the admissions process isn't the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart in large part because their parents are smart. That brings us to the role of homogamy." Yes, homogamy or eugenics if you like. Murray makes bold statements supporting this now commonly academic observation, usually falling under the term "assortative mating." But it is all the same. "Homogamy refers to the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics. Educational homogamy occurs when individuals with similar educations have children. Cognitive homogamy occurs when individuals with similar cognitive ability have children. Before the age of mobility, people commonly married someone from the same town or from the same neighborhood of an urban area. The events that threw people together seldom had anything to do specifically with cognitive ability. Similar cognitive ability was a source of compatibility between a young man and young woman, and some degree of cognitive homogamy existed, but it was a haphazard process. Meanwhile, educational homogamy was [not] high, because hardly anyone went to college. In large proportions of married couples, both had less than a high school education or both had a high school diploma. As the proportion of college graduates increased, so did the possibilities for greater educational homogamy at the top, as college graduates found they had more potential marriage partners who were also college graduates. Drawing on the extensive technical literature and the CPS, sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare examined trends in 'assortative marriage,' as it is known in the jargon, from 1940 to 2003. They found that homogamy has increased at both ends of the educational scale— college graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high school dropouts grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts." This sounds a lot like eugenics—a state sponsored program in many countries 100 years ago—returning as a natural process when countries promote universal education using cognitive ability as the primary selection criteria. Some may argue that the desire for diversity and/or multiculturalism will dampen selection based on cognitive ability. However, research has shown that ethnic diversity leads to increased inequality, decreasing social capital, and eroding social trust within a community. See research done by Robert Putnam, but also take note of nations and states with varying diversity such as the success of northern European countries in contrast to the more diverse southern European countries in economics, unemployment, etc. There simply is no research that shows that diversity in itself is preferable to a more homogeneous country or community. But even in predominately White majority neighborhoods, there is a separation between communities of wealth and those of despair. Murray paints a portrait to two such communities—Fishtown and Belmont. Fishtown is the quintessential White underclass community where many people never marry, high rates of divorce, an increasing number of people qualifying for federal disability insurance who are in fact "able" but disinclined to find work, males increasingly embracing leisure time activities like sleeping and watching television, etc. For women the situation was no better: "For unmarried women with no more than a high school education, labor force participation never got higher than 83 percent. After its peak in 1986, the rate in Fishtown declined, dropping to 74 percent in 2008, slightly lower than it was in 1960." Belmont diverges from Fishtown in almost every criterion that measures success—though both communities have become far less religious. So not only are Whites separating and sorting themselves by the educational paths they find themselves in, the communities they live in are also increasingly self-sorting into an overclass/underclass separation. Each community is finding a new normal for themselves. Murray does not address class position changes, but it seems to me that in every generation there will be those from Fishtown who will find their way into Belmont and vice versa. Intelligent parents will have mostly intelligent children with a few sliding down to Fishtown, while the underclass will produce mostly dullards with a few winners headed to Belmont. Though more intelligent and educated than the Fishtown community, Belmont's elite status continues to distort their worldviews. Influenced by liberal academics and a liberal media they are generally no more "scientific" when it comes to human nature than the Fishtown folks. Murray observes that "[The] upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births. You will probably raise a few eyebrows even if you use a derogatory label for criminals. When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites…. As the welfare state evolved over the twentieth century, two more specific beliefs about the nature of Homo sapiens were woven into its fabric. The first of these was the belief that people are equal not just in the way that the American Declaration of Independence meant—equal in the eyes of God and before the law—but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. To some extent, this belief applies to individuals— the idea that all children should aspire to get a college degree reflects a kind of optimistic view that all children are naturally smart enough for college if only they get the right kind of instruction. But the strict interpretation of the equality premise applies to groups of people. In a fair society, it is believed, different groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the children of poor people and the children of rich people—will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life: the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs, the same proportions who become English professors and theoretical physicists, the same proportions who become stand-up comedians and point guards. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, the premise that significant group differences cannot exist has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation reaching into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase 'politically correct' eventually comes back to this premise. The second of the beliefs about Homo sapiens that became an intellectual underpinning of the welfare state is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten—they got it because they were born into the right social stratum." Murray does hold out some hope for a more empirical worldview to prevail. As I discussed above, both the Left and the Right seem to dismiss genetics for SES or laziness respectively as the causes for success/failure. The welfare state will then continue to be supported by most sectors of society—minorities, Left elitists, academics, the media, Hollywood, etc. However, there are big changes coming according to Murray: "During the next ten or twenty years, I believe that all of these intellectual foundations of the modern welfare state will be discredited by a tidal change in our scientific understanding of human behavior that is already under way. The effects of that tidal change will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard's Edward 0. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book titled Consilience. As the twentyfirst century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology—specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists." To date, behavior genetic studies have shown overwhelmingly that intelligence is primarily genetic, but the Left continues to embrace the importance of SES while dismissing the known fact that SES is primarily genetic. High intelligent parents are also high SES parents and that intelligence—not SES—is the reason they have more intelligent children than the norm. Linking SES to educational attainment is the last "confirmation bias" on the Left. By ignoring or denying the link between SES and parental intelligence, they can continue to deny the importance of genes in cognitive ability. Since the unraveling of the human genome, we are now in the process of using molecular genetics to "directly" link specific genes with cognitive ability as well as athleticism and personality traits. Intelligence alone is not enough if a well-bred child suffers from low conscientiousness or clinical anxiety. In the future, the well-heeled will use genetic engineering as well as expensive private schools to make sure they produce superior children. And with wealth, they can even opt out of the burden of having children using surrogate mothers, nannies, and posh boarding schools—while they continue the good life of the super-elite. I just finished Chrystia Freeland's new book Plutocrats. She mentions Charles Murray's book: "the 1 percent and the 99 percent live in different cultures; the big issue in the 2012 Republican primary was whether Mitt Romney's hundreds of millions put him at too far a remove from ordinary voters." (All of the discussion about Coming Apart has been about the differing cultures, and not eugenics.) Freeland makes the case that the new plutocrats are working super-elites rather than rentseekers, and they also tend to marry for brains rather than beauty as often happened in the past—the rich and powerful marrying their secretaries. She is also aware of the increased eugenic selection taking place: "And it is graduates of Yale Law School and the like who are the housewives of the plutocrats. In 1979, nearly 8 percent of the 1 percent had spouses the IRS described as doing blue-collar or service sector jobs—government speak for bosses married to their secretaries. That number has been falling ever since. What economists call assortive mating—the tendency to marry someone you resemble—is on the rise. But while the aggressive geeks of the super-elite are marrying their classmates rather than their secretaries, their highly educated wives are unlikely to work." The New York Times ran a story similar to the one in Coming Apart: Two Classes in America, Divided by 'I Do,' July 14, 2012. The article completely misses the deeper eugenic message in Murray's book: "Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute, comparing lower-middle- and upper-middle-income families, found that single parenthood explained about 40 percent of inequality's growth. 'That's not peanuts,' he said. Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed. (That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of [Coming Apart], which attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of economic opportunity.)" This was a common dismissal by those who commented on Murray's book, but some of that can be attributed to Murray's own failure to clearly focus attention on assortative mating as the primary cause, with income inequality resulting from the increasingly cognitive divide. Assortative mating was one of the primary goals of the eugenics' movement during America's progressive era—which promoted public health, mass mobilization, political reform, eugenics and segregation (see Olivier Zunz in 12/2012 Foreign Affairs). Now it is occurring on its own without any push from government or academic advocates. The main driving force in the near future will be the understanding of the connection between genes and a child's success later in life, a desire for one's children to succeed, and the economic incentives of the reproductive enhancement industry linking genomics with new selection technologies. Murray shows that university placement is hierarchical—placing men and women together with similar cognitive ability—and is the primary place where "likes" marry "likes". In The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, 2008, he shows how people are sorting themselves into like-minded communities based on religion, politics, worldviews, income, etc. Bishop notes that "Psychologists know that people seek out others like themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon could be taking place between people and communities isn't all that surprising. 'Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of [eugenic/dysgenic] assortative mating,' explained social psychologist David Myers. Assortative mating—the tendency of similar types to pair up—has been studied as a cause of poverty and autism. But Myers was making a different point. Our wealth, education, and ability to move have allowed us to seek 'those places and people that are comfortably akin to ourselves.'" This trend has steadily increased since about 1990 and shows no sign of abating. So even without match-making in college, assortative mating will continue among the less educated as well as among the educated who marry after leaving college. America is dividing up into clusters of people that are alike in many ways, and intelligence will be a strong attractor for assortative mating throughout one's life. As the Belmont super-elite become increasingly filtered by cognitive ability, the Fishtown underclass will sink into irrelevancy. The breeding pattern as I see it shaping up is such that increasingly inequality will produce two types of populations. The super-elite will primarily be made up of enclaves consisting of either conservative racial ethnics— primarily Jewish, East Asian, Asian Indian, or Whites—or racially mixed enclaves that includes primarily the same four races above. The Fishtown Whites will eventually intermarry with Blacks, various Amerindians, South Asians, etc. This cognitive divide will accelerate as the super-elite begins to take advantage of genetic engineering to enhance their children's endowments—the underclass will simply be left behind. A recent documentary, Technocalyps Part One: Transhuman[ism], states that the losers will not be treated well, just like the American Indians were decimated when Whites took their lands away from them. This time perhaps the super-elites will not make the mistake of putting the unemployable on reservations but will just have them sterilized. The human species will simply branch into two or more culturally separated—then genetically separated—species. It would be a mistake to look at this separation as the 99% against the 1%, as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done. Within the 1% cognitive super-elite there is an increasing inequality. Yes, they control most of the wealth around the world, but they are fragmented by enormous inequality within—the 0.01% controls far more wealth than the 0.1%, who controls far more wealth than the 1%. This has set up a competitive drive within the 1% to reach the very top—the competition is between those within the 1% as they will increasingly ignore the needs of the 99%. This is seen by the super-elites' increasingly liberal concerns with the environment, animal rights, support for the arts, etc. They are turning their backs on minority issues like high incarceration rates, the homeless, etc. The super-elite are creating a separate culture that transcends race and national boundaries as they become globalists. Murray summarizes: "I am predicting that over the next few decades advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and to hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. These same reasons explain why society's attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don't work and will never work." And, "People grouped by gender, ethnicity, age, social class, and sexual preference, left free to live their lives as they see fit, will produce group differences in outcomes, because they differ genetically in their cognitive, psychological, and physiological profiles." Eugenics failed during the progressive era because our understanding of human behavior and genetics at that time were far more complicated than anticipated. Now that the human genome has been unraveled and new tools are being developed to find the correlations between a person's genes and expressed phenotype, genetic engineering, transhumanism, homogamy, neoeugenics, assortative mating—whatever one wants to call it—will come into play for those who have the will and the resources to the enhance the human condition. New human types will emerge that are increasingly free of genetic disease and personality types that hinder potential, increased intelligence, athleticism, and attractiveness, leading to new humanoid species that will overtake those who deny the biological sciences for human improvement. There will not be a committee deciding the best human traits to be embellished— just individuals making choices about how best to enrich their children's journey through life. (www.neoeugenics.net)