I'm not sure I'd describe Aktion T4 as a high-IQ move, precisely?
I'd also say that genuine bioconservatism would involve not allowing your gene pool to deteriorate over time, which among other things would require counteracting negative mutations, and at that point it's indistinguishable from low-end bioprogressivism.
Aktion T4 was certainly eugenic, mainly targeting people with severe mental issues and physical defects. Of course it was extremely cruel, inhuman etc. The benefit of embryo selection is that all of this can be avoided to the benefit of parents, society, and the people with unfortunate genetics themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
This is excellent news. A few other countries are doing this, but should be the case in all advanced countries. Eventually, genetic enhancement will follow.
Interesting! When people discuss cultural elements of fertility, they usually talk religion and nationalism is rarely mentioned. It is worth noting that people like Ben-Gurion were atheist socialists. He did not keep kosher. In many ways they were super "liberal" - the kibbutz had famous levels of gender equality, complete economic equality, and all that. But they were nationalists. In a way that today would overlap with racism - they did not just want to assimilate Palestinians to Israeli culture - they wanted "biological" Jews to displace them.
But note that it does not always work either! In Armenia, there is an incredible level of hatred for Azeris. The media is full of their atrocities, everybody is very intensely against them, this is the No. 1 "thing", this gets talked about all the time. And the birth rate is 1.58.
It's a good article, but people should remember that Israeli TFR is much less impressive when you subtract the ultra-orthodox Haredi population- educated liberal ashkenazim have about the same birthrates as western populations do. So religion is probably still the dominant factor here.
I'm having difficulty digging up exact references, but secular Israelis dipped below replacement lately, and if you looked specifically at liberal ashkenazim (as distinct from mizrahim or arabs and so on) you're going to find lower TFR again.
I don’t think so. Secular Israeli Jews are right around replacement. That is probably deflated by secular immigrants who have not yet converged to the Israeli mean - Russian Israeli Jews who moved circa 1990 used to have lower tfr but it went up. I saw a stat that Israeli born Israeli Jewish women have an even higher tfr than overall Israeli Jewish women.
And it probably went up post 10/7. The Haaretz article is over the top nonsense based on one slightly lower year … read BirthGauge for the real stats.
There was a small drop in the late 2010s after a decade of increasing. I doubt that it will keep dropping, and would bet the numbers went up after 10/7.
There is a factual error in the article. Israel now allows surrogacy for same-sex couples as well as single men and women following a decision by its Supreme Court.
The Israeli supreme court is held hostage by leftist judge. So when the Israeli far right will take power with Ben Gvir dont worry they will increase eugenics tech (contrary to popular beliefs it's not only ultra orthodox jews who support them) and they will take over the court
A million LOLs. If Israel had eugenics, Ben Gvir wouldn't have any voters. The entire Israeli Right is motivated principally by resentment of low IQ MENA Jews. Have you even been to Israel?
That's no longuer the case. Many elite askehnazi and the middle class sefardis are starting to realize that the Israeli left made extremely naive decision which happen to be very costly today. The Israeli society started to understand that there is no such things as a two state solution and Ben Gvir happen to be the guy who make the less compromise with palestiniens. Also Israeli society started to appréciate the productivity and living standard gain realised by free markets policies. The socialist era of post Indépendance Israël is gone
You're in cloud cuckoo land. The Israeli Right is about massaging the ego of low IQ brown Jews, and trying to start up fights with low IQ brown Arabs. That's it. Try going to an Otzma Yehudit meeting and talk to them about eugenics; you'll get punched in the face by a 75 IQ fat Moroccan.
It depends on whether you are talking about 20th century eugenics or 21st century eugenics.
It's not like these OY voters are against genetic screening. I'm sure they support it. That Moroccan guy would make his kids smarter. Israel's IVF program already screens for genetic diseases that Mizrahim have. If you tell that guy he shouldn't have kids and that secular Ashkenazis should, he would get mad. That's 20th century eugenics. But that's not what we are dealing with here and what that article is about. If you tell him that all the Israeli Jews should do IVF and IVG to make themselves smarter, genetically superior to the Arab morons, more able to develop great tech and defend the country and so on, he will happily do that and his rabbi would be happy about that too. No Otzma Yehudit voter is going to be against having lots and lots of genetically superior Jewish kids to conclusively defeat the Arabs once and for all.
Anyway, Israel is getting more and more Ashkenazi due to Haredi birthrates. Just solve Haredi integration. Working-class right-wing Mizrahi Jews in Israel will embrace genetic enhancement, and will intermarry with Ashkenazi Jews. So technology and time will save this problem. Not to mention property values in Israel are going up and having kids is culturally valued, so I would expect fertility in Israel to just get more eugenic than it is already. I'm quite sure it's already eugenic among Jews, for instance Ashkenazim have a lot more kids because of the Haredi. I'd guess otherwise it's flat among females and positive among males. Income tax cut per kid and tons of paid maternity leave would help too.
You may be right that it will be possible to sell a version of eugenics to the Israeli Right (though maybe they will choose to engineer their children to be even more ignorant and boorish since these are the qualities they cherish and value most). However, I was responding to the claim that Otzma Yehudit are presently pro-eugenics, which is totally divorced from reality. The objective reality is that the Israeli Right is totally opposed to HBD, the more so the further Right you get.
And one thing we can rely on in human nature is the relentless pursuit by those few great (not good) men of never ending improvement. We don't want to remain mediocre homo sapiens forever. We want our distant progeny to be better than we are in every single way possible. And great men can absolutely achieve that. The cowardice of those who cry and pearl clutch about "evil eugenics" can only delay our conquest of all magisteria, including and especially biology, for so long.
We will never lack for those who believe the human being may be perfected or freed from his nature. That might be possible if we were only material. Our nature is also spiritual and that must be addressed; and cannot be through eugenics.
Our very important spirituality is entirely material. Everything about who you are exists under your skin and under the skin of those who you have relationships with. It's all meat and electricity. We can conquer that.
The irony of the Jews who were almost exterminated for eugenics reasons picking up on eugenics is striking. Will they start selecting for blond hair and non hooked noses?
I dont know if jews were exterminated for eugenics reasons because jews were always a very smart ethnicity (both askhenazi and sefardi). However I think that they were exterminated for ethno centric reasons (the majority ethnic group not accepting the fact that a minority ethnic group had important financial power). But you would argue that the extermination had eugenics effects on jews, because only high IQ jews survived
There is no such thing as avarice. Stop coping 🤣. Each ethnicity is ethnocentric and naturally seek it's own interests in order to accumulate ressources and spread their DNA. When Europe started industrialising by allowing the existence of free markets, it enabled smart individuals who were marginalised before in Feudal Europe such as jews, protestant and bourgeois families to use their cognitive ability in order to accumulate wealth( the aristocracy was monopolising everything without creating value thats why Europe was poor asf for many centuries and when cold winters and famine came , people such as the French started overthrowing their kings ) . Hitler was a socialist and highly ethnocentric guy, he hated many ethnicities outside the jews however he was obsessed with jews because he saw their overrepresentation in elite position (because of their high IQ and the effect produced by free markets), so he was convainced that jews were a threat to Germany because you could find jew in US politics but also in USSR politics (the two countries he hated the most). He tought that exterminating jews was a solution but he made a stupid move because accidentaly he enabled the jews to become even smarter as rich jews were garanteed to survive which wasnt the case for low IQ jews.
The development of free trade/capital networks in Europe certainly generated a lot of wealth (although the early phases of the industrial revolution didn't distribute it very evenly), but I've seen it argued that the land-tied clergy-backed feudal aristocracy was a necessary counterweight to the processes of migratory brain drain, political corruption, and demographic/dysgenic collapse that had plagued the roman empire (and which we can certainly see today.)
In other words, it's plausible the ultraconservative social mores of the middle ages laid the foundation for the great divergence, rather than being purely inhibitory.
Wrong, avariciousness is found in all races and ethnicities. It is wrong to conflate avariciousness with intelligence. People of high intelligence seek knowledge, not wealth.
...Are you saying that looking after your own ethnic group is not virtuous?
I'd say the Ashkenazim's track record for knowledge-production is pretty good, actually, though maybe you could argue that Marx and Neumann cancel out in that regard.
Do you have evidence that jewish denominations are wealthier than would be predicted based off factors like IQ, urban residence and/or fertility rates?
So far as I can tell, banking industries in countries like Germany or Britain that have relatively little jewish involvement were not noticeably more resistant to speculation bubbles.
Wrong, Nazi eugenics was similar to other eugenics programs at the time (including the British eugenics program, which Churchill supported) and distinct from Nazi racial ideology.
I'm pretty sure Nazi sterilisation programs extended to schizophrenics and the intellectually disabled as well, regardless of racial/ethnic background? Setting aside the people in hospital wards who were straight-up murdered.
I'm supportive of embryo selection for similar purposes, but drawing the line at 40 days in the womb seems like a reasonable ethical safety margin.
I too oppose compulsory sterilization and obviously oppose euthanasia! I think abortion should be allowed after 40 days though. Anyway my point was not to justify Nazi eugenics programs, which I definitely believe were unjust, but to just highlight the Anomaly paper where he talks about how Nazis only wanted to do “racial hygiene" (ie eugenic sterilization) on Aryans and not on Jews. They didn’t sterilize defective Jews under their eugenics laws, but of course genocided them along with the other Jews.
I didn't realize how many actual Nazis are in the Aporia comments section. Perhaps I should have made it more clear.
Right, so saying that Nazi eugenic policies were similar to other eugenics policies at the time and different from the racial hatred leading to the Final Solution could be construed as a defense of those policies. It's not. It's just an argument against the "we shouldn't do embryo selection because Nazi eugenics" nonsense.
No need to panic, dude, I'm not accusing you of anything. :)
I agree abortion as a topic gets complicated and based on what I know about neuroscience I'd probably extend the safety margin past 40 days as well, but I thought it was interesting that talmud law specifically had an ES-compatible ruling on this point.
Again I feel a need to stress that Nazi eugenic policies were standard for the time and distinct from their racial ideology, not because I support their eugenics policies (I don’t), but because I think it’s important to push back against this extremely stupid idea that anything that smacks of “eugenics” is Nazi. Certainly embryo selection for IQ is much less Nazi than abortion for Down syndrome at 20 weeks. I’m pro choice, but abortion for Down syndrome at 20 weeks is more unethical and problematic than ESIQ.
I don’t want the government restricting abortion rights at all though. I do agree that T3 abortions are very unethical if done frivolously but it should be a medical issue, a hospital that does them a ton without a very good reason should be investigated for malpractice like one doing surgeries for no reason. They’re almost always done for a good reason, and I would prefer to risk some T3 fetus dying over some bureaucratic obstacles preventing a life-saving abortion.
But I think abortion is much more morally fraught and unclear than ESIQ which is obviously good.
My point was not to justify Nazi sterilization programs but to point out that this is what everyone in the early 20C was doing, and it was very distinct from the Final Solution. A bit ahistorical to say that eugenic ideology led to the Final Solution.
Inbreeding doesn't actually make deleterious mutations more common, it just makes them more likely to be expressed due to increased runs of homozygosity (i.e, you're more likely to inherit two copies of the same gene.)
It's a problem that's relatively easy to solve through either outmarriage or pre-marital genetic screening, which would not be true for mutational load in the broader sense.
Jews are highly resistant to breeding outside their tribe. For all the whining about white supremacists and Nazis no one is more racialist than Jews, no other group even comes close.
While I agree that Israel is more chilled out about eugenics-adjacent policies that Europe, the explanation given for high Israeli fertility is not convincing. I offer an alternative explanation here based on certain facts about Israeli society that are not widely known to outsiders. https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
How much of Israel's fertility rate is attributable to their Arab population? How much of it is due to ultra religious Jews? As a secular pronatalist I'm of course interested in the Israeli case but isn't it so that Arab Muslims and heavily religious Jews have many more children? How many children due secular Israeli Jews have on average? I'm in Sweden (American dual citizen) and while we have very generous parental leave, subsidized daycare etc the birth rate isn't that high and the culture is maybe marginally more child friendly than the US on a social level. Americans practice really intensive parenting though, I suspect that is lowering fertility of families who would have preferred more kids and are just too worn out..
Surprised you didn't mention this book. Jewish Eugenics by John Glad. I met him in 2014, at the first London Conference on Intelligence. He was old and died next year.
Germans went from Aktion T4 under Nazism to Disabled Embryo Lives Matter under bioconservative "anti-eugenicist" ideologues.
Well, Jews do have a 10 point IQ advantage over Germans. 🤷♀️
Israeli Jews are actually a bit duller than ethnic Germans, no? Their Ashkenazim are probably a bit smarter, but probably not by 10 whole IQ points.
I'm not sure I'd describe Aktion T4 as a high-IQ move, precisely?
I'd also say that genuine bioconservatism would involve not allowing your gene pool to deteriorate over time, which among other things would require counteracting negative mutations, and at that point it's indistinguishable from low-end bioprogressivism.
Aktion T4 was certainly eugenic, mainly targeting people with severe mental issues and physical defects. Of course it was extremely cruel, inhuman etc. The benefit of embryo selection is that all of this can be avoided to the benefit of parents, society, and the people with unfortunate genetics themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
You should raise this with Michael Sandel.
I'd be happy to, but he's not exactly on my rolodex
This is excellent news. A few other countries are doing this, but should be the case in all advanced countries. Eventually, genetic enhancement will follow.
Interesting! When people discuss cultural elements of fertility, they usually talk religion and nationalism is rarely mentioned. It is worth noting that people like Ben-Gurion were atheist socialists. He did not keep kosher. In many ways they were super "liberal" - the kibbutz had famous levels of gender equality, complete economic equality, and all that. But they were nationalists. In a way that today would overlap with racism - they did not just want to assimilate Palestinians to Israeli culture - they wanted "biological" Jews to displace them.
But note that it does not always work either! In Armenia, there is an incredible level of hatred for Azeris. The media is full of their atrocities, everybody is very intensely against them, this is the No. 1 "thing", this gets talked about all the time. And the birth rate is 1.58.
It's a good article, but people should remember that Israeli TFR is much less impressive when you subtract the ultra-orthodox Haredi population- educated liberal ashkenazim have about the same birthrates as western populations do. So religion is probably still the dominant factor here.
My understanding is Israeli libs are above fertility.
I'm having difficulty digging up exact references, but secular Israelis dipped below replacement lately, and if you looked specifically at liberal ashkenazim (as distinct from mizrahim or arabs and so on) you're going to find lower TFR again.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-02-09/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israels-fertility-rate-is-entering-a-dramatic-new-era/0000018d-8a6b-d9cc-a5cd-fffb664b0000
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6241072/
I don’t think so. Secular Israeli Jews are right around replacement. That is probably deflated by secular immigrants who have not yet converged to the Israeli mean - Russian Israeli Jews who moved circa 1990 used to have lower tfr but it went up. I saw a stat that Israeli born Israeli Jewish women have an even higher tfr than overall Israeli Jewish women.
And it probably went up post 10/7. The Haaretz article is over the top nonsense based on one slightly lower year … read BirthGauge for the real stats.
Far as I can tell, Birth Gauge confirms the same general story.
https://x.com/BirthGauge/status/1498346160372822019
There was a small drop in the late 2010s after a decade of increasing. I doubt that it will keep dropping, and would bet the numbers went up after 10/7.
There is a factual error in the article. Israel now allows surrogacy for same-sex couples as well as single men and women following a decision by its Supreme Court.
The Israeli supreme court is held hostage by leftist judge. So when the Israeli far right will take power with Ben Gvir dont worry they will increase eugenics tech (contrary to popular beliefs it's not only ultra orthodox jews who support them) and they will take over the court
A million LOLs. If Israel had eugenics, Ben Gvir wouldn't have any voters. The entire Israeli Right is motivated principally by resentment of low IQ MENA Jews. Have you even been to Israel?
That's no longuer the case. Many elite askehnazi and the middle class sefardis are starting to realize that the Israeli left made extremely naive decision which happen to be very costly today. The Israeli society started to understand that there is no such things as a two state solution and Ben Gvir happen to be the guy who make the less compromise with palestiniens. Also Israeli society started to appréciate the productivity and living standard gain realised by free markets policies. The socialist era of post Indépendance Israël is gone
You're in cloud cuckoo land. The Israeli Right is about massaging the ego of low IQ brown Jews, and trying to start up fights with low IQ brown Arabs. That's it. Try going to an Otzma Yehudit meeting and talk to them about eugenics; you'll get punched in the face by a 75 IQ fat Moroccan.
It depends on whether you are talking about 20th century eugenics or 21st century eugenics.
It's not like these OY voters are against genetic screening. I'm sure they support it. That Moroccan guy would make his kids smarter. Israel's IVF program already screens for genetic diseases that Mizrahim have. If you tell that guy he shouldn't have kids and that secular Ashkenazis should, he would get mad. That's 20th century eugenics. But that's not what we are dealing with here and what that article is about. If you tell him that all the Israeli Jews should do IVF and IVG to make themselves smarter, genetically superior to the Arab morons, more able to develop great tech and defend the country and so on, he will happily do that and his rabbi would be happy about that too. No Otzma Yehudit voter is going to be against having lots and lots of genetically superior Jewish kids to conclusively defeat the Arabs once and for all.
Anyway, Israel is getting more and more Ashkenazi due to Haredi birthrates. Just solve Haredi integration. Working-class right-wing Mizrahi Jews in Israel will embrace genetic enhancement, and will intermarry with Ashkenazi Jews. So technology and time will save this problem. Not to mention property values in Israel are going up and having kids is culturally valued, so I would expect fertility in Israel to just get more eugenic than it is already. I'm quite sure it's already eugenic among Jews, for instance Ashkenazim have a lot more kids because of the Haredi. I'd guess otherwise it's flat among females and positive among males. Income tax cut per kid and tons of paid maternity leave would help too.
You may be right that it will be possible to sell a version of eugenics to the Israeli Right (though maybe they will choose to engineer their children to be even more ignorant and boorish since these are the qualities they cherish and value most). However, I was responding to the claim that Otzma Yehudit are presently pro-eugenics, which is totally divorced from reality. The objective reality is that the Israeli Right is totally opposed to HBD, the more so the further Right you get.
Thank you for your comment. Could you provide a link to a source for this?
https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2021-07-29/israel-supreme-court-authorizes-surrogacy-arrangements-for-gay-men/
The quest for the ubermensch has never ended well.
The quest for flight never ended well either, for who knows how many thousands of years. Until it did.
True, that. Physics and human nature are quite separate things; both predictable and immutable in their own ways.
And one thing we can rely on in human nature is the relentless pursuit by those few great (not good) men of never ending improvement. We don't want to remain mediocre homo sapiens forever. We want our distant progeny to be better than we are in every single way possible. And great men can absolutely achieve that. The cowardice of those who cry and pearl clutch about "evil eugenics" can only delay our conquest of all magisteria, including and especially biology, for so long.
We will never lack for those who believe the human being may be perfected or freed from his nature. That might be possible if we were only material. Our nature is also spiritual and that must be addressed; and cannot be through eugenics.
Our very important spirituality is entirely material. Everything about who you are exists under your skin and under the skin of those who you have relationships with. It's all meat and electricity. We can conquer that.
Or it isn't. The opposite is frightening for some, exhilarating for others.
The irony of the Jews who were almost exterminated for eugenics reasons picking up on eugenics is striking. Will they start selecting for blond hair and non hooked noses?
Snicker.
I dont know if jews were exterminated for eugenics reasons because jews were always a very smart ethnicity (both askhenazi and sefardi). However I think that they were exterminated for ethno centric reasons (the majority ethnic group not accepting the fact that a minority ethnic group had important financial power). But you would argue that the extermination had eugenics effects on jews, because only high IQ jews survived
IQ is not the only characteristic one can select out, avarice would be another.
There is no such thing as avarice. Stop coping 🤣. Each ethnicity is ethnocentric and naturally seek it's own interests in order to accumulate ressources and spread their DNA. When Europe started industrialising by allowing the existence of free markets, it enabled smart individuals who were marginalised before in Feudal Europe such as jews, protestant and bourgeois families to use their cognitive ability in order to accumulate wealth( the aristocracy was monopolising everything without creating value thats why Europe was poor asf for many centuries and when cold winters and famine came , people such as the French started overthrowing their kings ) . Hitler was a socialist and highly ethnocentric guy, he hated many ethnicities outside the jews however he was obsessed with jews because he saw their overrepresentation in elite position (because of their high IQ and the effect produced by free markets), so he was convainced that jews were a threat to Germany because you could find jew in US politics but also in USSR politics (the two countries he hated the most). He tought that exterminating jews was a solution but he made a stupid move because accidentaly he enabled the jews to become even smarter as rich jews were garanteed to survive which wasnt the case for low IQ jews.
The development of free trade/capital networks in Europe certainly generated a lot of wealth (although the early phases of the industrial revolution didn't distribute it very evenly), but I've seen it argued that the land-tied clergy-backed feudal aristocracy was a necessary counterweight to the processes of migratory brain drain, political corruption, and demographic/dysgenic collapse that had plagued the roman empire (and which we can certainly see today.)
In other words, it's plausible the ultraconservative social mores of the middle ages laid the foundation for the great divergence, rather than being purely inhibitory.
"There is no such thing as avarice."
Wrong, avariciousness is found in all races and ethnicities. It is wrong to conflate avariciousness with intelligence. People of high intelligence seek knowledge, not wealth.
Yes. Jews wouldn't know virtue if it smacked them in the face.
Troll. Muted.
...Are you saying that looking after your own ethnic group is not virtuous?
I'd say the Ashkenazim's track record for knowledge-production is pretty good, actually, though maybe you could argue that Marx and Neumann cancel out in that regard.
"Yes. Jews wouldn't know virtue if it smacked them in the face."
That is true of some Jews, but not all.
"IQ is not the only characteristic one can select out, avarice would be another."
I understand selecting out avarice, but why would you want to select out intelligence?
Perhaps their level of avarice causes more damage than their level of intelligence brings benefits?
Do you have evidence that jewish denominations are wealthier than would be predicted based off factors like IQ, urban residence and/or fertility rates?
So far as I can tell, banking industries in countries like Germany or Britain that have relatively little jewish involvement were not noticeably more resistant to speculation bubbles.
Yes actually I do.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/
There is nothing in the universe that brings more benefit than intelligence
"Perhaps their level of avarice causes more damage than their level of intelligence brings benefits?"
You seem to conflate intelligence with avariciousness. I believe there is no conflation.
No I am saying they just happen to have both.
How would know survivors high IQ?
You could argue *
Wrong, Nazi eugenics was similar to other eugenics programs at the time (including the British eugenics program, which Churchill supported) and distinct from Nazi racial ideology.
https://philpapers.org/rec/ANOREA
https://philpapers.org/archive/ANOREA.pdf
Nazi eugenic sterilization laws were only aimed at "defective" Germans, not "defective" Jews.
I'm pretty sure Nazi sterilisation programs extended to schizophrenics and the intellectually disabled as well, regardless of racial/ethnic background? Setting aside the people in hospital wards who were straight-up murdered.
I'm supportive of embryo selection for similar purposes, but drawing the line at 40 days in the womb seems like a reasonable ethical safety margin.
I too oppose compulsory sterilization and obviously oppose euthanasia! I think abortion should be allowed after 40 days though. Anyway my point was not to justify Nazi eugenics programs, which I definitely believe were unjust, but to just highlight the Anomaly paper where he talks about how Nazis only wanted to do “racial hygiene" (ie eugenic sterilization) on Aryans and not on Jews. They didn’t sterilize defective Jews under their eugenics laws, but of course genocided them along with the other Jews.
I see what you mean, but I don't think that was clear from the earlier post.
I didn't realize how many actual Nazis are in the Aporia comments section. Perhaps I should have made it more clear.
Right, so saying that Nazi eugenic policies were similar to other eugenics policies at the time and different from the racial hatred leading to the Final Solution could be construed as a defense of those policies. It's not. It's just an argument against the "we shouldn't do embryo selection because Nazi eugenics" nonsense.
No need to panic, dude, I'm not accusing you of anything. :)
I agree abortion as a topic gets complicated and based on what I know about neuroscience I'd probably extend the safety margin past 40 days as well, but I thought it was interesting that talmud law specifically had an ES-compatible ruling on this point.
Again I feel a need to stress that Nazi eugenic policies were standard for the time and distinct from their racial ideology, not because I support their eugenics policies (I don’t), but because I think it’s important to push back against this extremely stupid idea that anything that smacks of “eugenics” is Nazi. Certainly embryo selection for IQ is much less Nazi than abortion for Down syndrome at 20 weeks. I’m pro choice, but abortion for Down syndrome at 20 weeks is more unethical and problematic than ESIQ.
I don’t want the government restricting abortion rights at all though. I do agree that T3 abortions are very unethical if done frivolously but it should be a medical issue, a hospital that does them a ton without a very good reason should be investigated for malpractice like one doing surgeries for no reason. They’re almost always done for a good reason, and I would prefer to risk some T3 fetus dying over some bureaucratic obstacles preventing a life-saving abortion.
But I think abortion is much more morally fraught and unclear than ESIQ which is obviously good.
My point was not to justify Nazi sterilization programs but to point out that this is what everyone in the early 20C was doing, and it was very distinct from the Final Solution. A bit ahistorical to say that eugenic ideology led to the Final Solution.
Screen for serious diseases like Tay-Sachs (lifespan 3-4 years) is not eugenics as I think of it.
Admitting you people have a lot of deleterious mutations like Tay Sachs because you are so inbred is a good start.
Inbreeding doesn't actually make deleterious mutations more common, it just makes them more likely to be expressed due to increased runs of homozygosity (i.e, you're more likely to inherit two copies of the same gene.)
That’s true but does nothing to weaken my argument. But hurray for prissy midwit scolding points I guess?
It's a problem that's relatively easy to solve through either outmarriage or pre-marital genetic screening, which would not be true for mutational load in the broader sense.
Jews are highly resistant to breeding outside their tribe. For all the whining about white supremacists and Nazis no one is more racialist than Jews, no other group even comes close.
While I agree that Israel is more chilled out about eugenics-adjacent policies that Europe, the explanation given for high Israeli fertility is not convincing. I offer an alternative explanation here based on certain facts about Israeli society that are not widely known to outsiders. https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
How much of Israel's fertility rate is attributable to their Arab population? How much of it is due to ultra religious Jews? As a secular pronatalist I'm of course interested in the Israeli case but isn't it so that Arab Muslims and heavily religious Jews have many more children? How many children due secular Israeli Jews have on average? I'm in Sweden (American dual citizen) and while we have very generous parental leave, subsidized daycare etc the birth rate isn't that high and the culture is maybe marginally more child friendly than the US on a social level. Americans practice really intensive parenting though, I suspect that is lowering fertility of families who would have preferred more kids and are just too worn out..
Genetic cleansing from Jews. How apt.
This was inevitable in one form or another. Selection can't be escaped, there are just more and less civilised ways to go about it.
"Good parents should have more children than bad parents" would be another example of 'genetic cleansing'.
Surprised you didn't mention this book. Jewish Eugenics by John Glad. I met him in 2014, at the first London Conference on Intelligence. He was old and died next year.
https://archive.org/details/jewisheugenics0000glad