The First Dysgenics Awards
The First Dysgenics Awards
Whose genes did we lose in 2022 that made our species weaker?
Most of our readers have probably heard of the yearly Darwin Awards. To quote from the Wiki:
Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival.
However, we at ISF think there should be a Dysgenics Award equivalent!
That is to say, who are the best people humanity lost in the previous year?
More specifically, who was selected out of the gene pool? Hence, there are some obvious rules:
The person did not reproduce, or:
The person was sterilized. Also:
The person demonstrated excellence in some socially desirable sense (they were not, for example, excellent ax murderers).
ISF puts the question to you, our readers.
You can submit a candidate in the comments below until the end of February.
You must provide evidence of either (1) or (2), and (3).
ISF will award the best nomination with a $250 Amazon gift card (or whatever your chosen currency is).
If the same person is nominated more than once and we decide they likely had the “best” genes, the winner will be the person who nominated them first.
We will announce the winner in early March.
Do remember that this is very much tongue-in-cheek, just like the Darwin Awards. We don’t want any autists in the comments calculating that Joe Bloggs’ IQ and GFP were 75.78% more likely to beat Alan Smith’s.
One of the bonus questions we’ve started asking our podcast guests is, who is the most intelligent person you’ve ever met? That’s the type of exclusive content only our supporters can access. Sign up today!
Candidate: Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI.
1. Evidence of childlessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes
He isn't on the list of sexually active popes and the vow of celibacy is active in the Catholic Church.
3. Evidence of eminence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI (Academic career: 1951–1977). He was the Pope. He was smart based on his writings and speeches. I wish he had sired thousands of children. Also, he died just before the start of 2023, which is unfortunate. I want to die on the first day of the new year.
I nominate Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who joined the choir invisible on December 31, 2022, a nail-biter time to qualify for the newly-christened Dysgenics Award of 2022, almost as though he prophesied the existence of this award and was angling for it. True to his lifelong service to Rome, not once (to our knowledge) did he ever service a reproductively-aged female.
But, why, you may ask, is the omission of his genome from our collective gene pool a loss to humanity? Yes, he had a Dixie-cup-and-string telephone line to God, but does that really mean his genitals were useless in averting humanity's impending collision with Idiocracy? I asked myself the same thing when I decided to nominate His Holiness, and I found some half-convincing ad hoc reasons why his genitals were so useless.
For one thing, one of the first things he did upon ascending to the Papal Chair is to force the resignation of Marcial Maciel, a leading priest with a history of sexual abuse of boys, girls and women. In contrast to His Holiness Benedict XVI, Padre Marcial Maciel contributed fruitfully to our collective gene pool, fathering six children total. Two of the mothers were among those he allegedly abused.
Now, you may think a move to defrock such a sex fiend is a low bar, but we are talking about the Catholic Church, after all. If anything, I expect Popes throughout history would have promoted such dirty perverts to the higher ranks, to allow even more prolific sexual contributions. But, no, His Holiness Benedict XVI, perhaps listening to that telephone line, decided the opposite. This would reflect an IQ of AT LEAST 100.
To send that minimum IQ possibility even higher, perhaps as high as 104, His Holiness was leading the Church at a time when it seemed much like NAMBLA except less reputable. That thing with Father Maciel was just one of many decisions in which he had to expertly balance the benefits of a thriving sexual perversion society with the many costs. During His Holiness' reign, the blasphemers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were calling for His Holiness' arrest. And yet His Holiness never noticeably attempted to murder either of them. Would you be able to show such restraint? I know nobody who would not be happy to hasten the meeting between Richard Dawkins and his Maker.
There must be other reasons, but I think I wrote enough: Benedict XVI is deserving of this award. We have His Holiness to thank for our descendant's arrival toward Idiocracy, not only because he withheld the contributions of his own genes, but also because he barrenized other potential fertility leaders.
Yours,
Abel Dean