Leftists often reject Darwinism when applied to humans, as it seems to imply our nature is fixed and flawed. But this is a mistake, as several prominent leftists have argued.
"Due to its odious past, no politician of any ideological stripe would engage with policy proposals besmirched by the dread term ‘eugenic’ — Lindt’s proposal is therefore a non-starter."
Uhh...Lindt's thought experiment sounds an awful lot like "gender-affirming care", which disproportionately harms those with mental health comorbidities, autism and histories of abuse. Democrat politicians are "engaging" with this wholeheartedly.
How and in what way does this concept "harm" those with mental illness, autism and/or a history of abuse? On the contrary, it helps prevent the perpetuation of suffering into the next generation.
Actually, there's a private charity known as Project Prevention which already pays chronic drug addicts to use long-term birth control (or, in some cases, sterilisation.) And given that 80% of children born to such individuals are both unwanted and unplanned this is, on balance, giving them what they want.
I'm fuzzy on the logic of why Child Protection Services are allowed to forcibly remove people's offspring but not incentivise them to use the pill, personally. It's not like you're not making implicit judgments about who is worthy to be a parent.
CPS removes children based upon abusive and neglectful behavior, including prenatal drug exposure.* I support providing and encouraging birth control for those exhibiting such behavior.
*This is unfortunately changing in two ways:
1. Not removing babies and children from drug users, because systemic racism, which in some jurisdictions, after enacting these policies, has led to more kids dying from drug exposure and extreme abuse.
2. Removing kids from families based upon ideological beliefs (considering lack of affirmation as abusive).
I have to disagree with your take on abortion; most of the strong emotions for and against abortion is amongst women than men. Most men in the developed world never think "how can I force women to have children?" The modern problem isn't a patriarchal desire to have women "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" but an increasing reluctance of men to marry women and sire children, since it's seen as very likely to end in paying alimony and/or child support.
There might be a generational divide here, but as I understand it women are more likely to be both strongly opposed to abortion and strongly in favour of abortion access, relative to men. They're more divided on the topic.
"Take the chapter on eugenics (the idea of selectively breeding humans to improve their genetic quality)."
That phraseology 'selectively breeding humans' is a big problem. While I am a strong advocate of embryo selection and genetic enhancement. I would only support it as a voluntary situation.
"The moment we stop asking questions for fear of the answers, we consciously blind ourselves and destroy one of the greatest assets we have as a species: our intellectual curiosity."
That is a very profound statement.
"Given the US Supreme Court’s recent rejection of the constitutional right to abortion, Hrdy’s quarter-century-old warning appears remarkably prescient."
The SCOTUS found that there is no 'constitutional right to abortion', not that it should be illegal. It was rightly left up to the states.
Most leftists, rightists, and many of the rest have an extreme inability to accept reality.
What’s the term used to describe someone who notices the similarity in the surnames all of these so-called public intellectuals? Hmm. Must be just a coincidence. Must be.
It’s worth pointing out that the “racial science” of the Nazis was NOT based on Darwinism. They firmly opposed Darwinism, the Nazi conception of biology and of race was creationist.
Nazis were closer to evolution, maybe by coincidence, than the Out-Of-Africa theory which has been debunked by modern genetics I’m sure you’re familiar.
First, Nazi racial ideology that the different races (Aryan, Slav, Negros, Jews, etc) were literally different and distinct creations. That is not at all akin to evolution. Second, what exactly are you saying has been refuted by genetics? Just saying "Out of Africa theory" is vague.
OOA Theory is what I was taught in college: a single human ancestor from Africa migrated to Asia & Europe evolving slightly due to sunlight & winter etc…
You weren't taught that (or at least shouldn't have been) since no "Out of Africa" theory involves a *single* human (who would they mate with?); any such migration would be a few hundred people or more. And individuals don't evolve, populations do. But anyhow, there likely were indeed multiple migrations out of Africa at different times.
I have to agree with Coel here. Unless you're going to strawman Out of Africa to the point of parody (2% neandertal DNA!) I don't see how it hasn't been buttressed by mountains of archaeogenetic evidence.
Yes, I believe that a rejection of biology is one of the key weaknesses of the ideological Left. Any worldview that does not rest on solid foundations cannot survive a confrontation with reality. The Left will never be able to improve society without accepting the constraints of factors such as geography, energy, and biology.
I think one needs to start with a few key propositions
1) The differences between humans and non-human animals are largely determined by genetics.
2) The characteristics that humans hold in common are largely determined by genetics.
3) The differences between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics.
That is why the goal of the Left to achieve Equality of Outcome is doomed to fail:
We're probably running up against diminishing returns on material progress as well, is the problem- on a planet with shrinking young-age demographics and virtually no improvement in academic test scores for decades the only way to squeeze out more growth is through AI and robotics, which creates other difficulties.
I don't see how the argument for upward mobility fares much better, to be honest, if your mobility is largely determined by either luck or genetic factors.
Let me sum up by saying that you have given no evidence that there are inherent constraints to future economic growth or the ability of individuals to experience the benefits of that growth.
There is no evidence for "diminishing returns on material progress." And even if there were, this by definition means that material progress is continuing.
I'm acquainted with the Pinkeresque litany of data supporting the Whig theory of history, and the case for it is fair at the global level, but there's obvious evidence for slowdown across the developed world in recent decades and much of the increase in GDP-per-capita has been either fake or unsustainable (e.g, cannibalising family formation and home life for the sake of higher workforce productivity/consumer spending.)
Twin studies seem to indicate that lifetime income is about 40-50% genetic and the remainder is due to non-systematic environmental factors. "Life choices" are always going to be informed by some combination of innate temperament, environmental factors and personal whim, which covers all possibilities- it's not really a very informative description.
In any case, social mobility is a zero-sum game- any one person's gain in status is going to be at the expense of someone else's loss in status, so mobility per se is morally neutral. Meritocratic allocation of status to maximise the impact of the most competent/trustworthy individuals in a given society is non-zero-sum, but since genetics impacts on competence and SES there's no particular argument for why class boundaries should be unusually porous there.
You probably *could* get some growth out of scrapping the more parasitic elements of the education pipeline and re-focusing on vocational training, but in itself the benefits of this re-alignment would be substantial but finite, which is compatible with my limits-on-growth scenario.
I guess what I'm asking is: given that we already inhabit a vastly wealthier world than a century ago and none of the left's basic complaints seem to have gone away, what makes you think that squeezing another X% improvement out of GDP will satisfy the progressives, so long as equality keeps receding into the distance?
Pumping more and more young adults into the credential inflation meatgrinder is one of the primary drivers of our current civilisational dysfunction, not the solution to it. In cases where college qualifications are meaningful, there are plenty of genes that influence an individual's academic aptitude and/or desire to learn.
I'm not opposed to trade schools and apprenticeships, but if you're using the term "upward mobility" as something distinct from social mobility, I'm not sure why you don't just use the word 'growth'.
I am also opposing credential inflation. I specifically argue that fewer people go to four-year universities. That is very different from get a job certification in a practical employment skill.
You obviously did not read the articles above very carefully. I specifically oppose the Whig theory of history.
There is a leveling off of per capita GDP in Western Europe due to very bad public policies, but it is far from clear that this is a long-term trend.
Again, "Slowdown" is not the same as growth ending. Except for Covid economic growth has been very robust in USA over last 10 years.
Per capita GDP is not fake. It closely related to all other measures of material standard of living.
Social Mobility is NOT the same as Upward Mobility. Social mobility and Status are zero-sum, while Upward Mobility is not.
I acknowledge the importance of genetics in the article. Yes, Life Choices are informed by the environment, but there is no evidence that they determine it.
There is no evidence that ALL environmental factors are "non-systematic." There is a huge amount of evidence that the Life Choices that I outlined lead to higher material standard of living.
"Per capita GDP is not fake. It closely related to all other measures of material standard of living."
Yeah, obviously there's gonna be a global correlation, but if you take a bunch of economic activities that used to be done within the home and move them out to private restaurants and childcare facilities, this will show up on the balance sheets as "economic growth" even though no real increase in living standards has occurred. (Often there doesn't even seem to be much benefit in terms of economies of scale.)
You are correct that shifting services from inside the family to outside it increases per capita GDP, but that is a long way from saying that increased material standard of living does not exist or that it is slowing down.
Use of the label "Leftist" is a dated strawmen which allows the echo chamber here to become a safe place for peeps who are triggered by skin pigmentation, while thinking they are above average, and for whom evolution means they are right about this in their anti-vaxxer gated community of sovereign citizens who do shamanic yoga, and ignore the thought that Homo sp. became such because we began policing narcissism in the long ages of the paleolithic and creating a world in which primitive primate hierarchies look ridiculous. The evolution continues, but recidivists and narcissistic parasites are still among us on the both "right" and the "left" let them be: Boris Johnston, Donald Trump, Keven Rudd, Scott Morrison, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin. The end of history was eaten up by our failure to deal with narcissists. The sideshow here on aporia is witness to a capitulation to the lazy thought that allows narcissists to destroy what we have all made, each and every, and 'worlded' into society, by negotiating in good faith and not calling each other names, and calling out the names of those who should have been policed before adulthood. Not dealing with narcissism is an aporia. narcihttps://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
This whole article is dumb. The Right don't uniformly believe in Creationism. And for those who do, it's just a religious belief, with few policy implications.
It's the Left that denies reality (of human evolution) and wants to change EVERYTHING based on that
"Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, plus the dismal history of failed ‘egalitarian’ revolutions the world over"??
I don't know about Stalin's or the Khmer Rouge's revolutions, but Mao's was neither egalitarian nor a failure. It was and is the successful China you see today.
Mao caused the deaths of over 60 million people in his quest for revolution which was swiftly abandoned by his successors. If Mao’s goal was to create an authoritarian state-capitalist ethnostate he definitely didn’t need to cause the deaths of so many people. Furthermore I don’t know in what way China is a successful country at least by western standards.
Your comment also speaks a lot about what kind of values you hold when you claim someone of killed so many of his own people to be successful.
I’ll give you sources anyway. During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").
Of course you can give a source, but you won't, because you've realized you don't have one and that you've just repeated what millions of people would say.
There is no reliable source for that claim, any more than there is a reliable source for the claim that 'millions died in Tiananmen'.
What is the source for your claim, "Mao caused the deaths of over 60 million people in his quest for revolution which was swiftly abandoned by his successors"?
It’s not that they specifically ignore Darwin and other forms of evidence: they are in a cult of self-affirmation and their messiah is Marx. They will devolve everything to that. It’s an article of faith
"Due to its odious past, no politician of any ideological stripe would engage with policy proposals besmirched by the dread term ‘eugenic’ — Lindt’s proposal is therefore a non-starter."
Uhh...Lindt's thought experiment sounds an awful lot like "gender-affirming care", which disproportionately harms those with mental health comorbidities, autism and histories of abuse. Democrat politicians are "engaging" with this wholeheartedly.
And MAID as practised in Canada.
How and in what way does this concept "harm" those with mental illness, autism and/or a history of abuse? On the contrary, it helps prevent the perpetuation of suffering into the next generation.
Actually, there's a private charity known as Project Prevention which already pays chronic drug addicts to use long-term birth control (or, in some cases, sterilisation.) And given that 80% of children born to such individuals are both unwanted and unplanned this is, on balance, giving them what they want.
I'm fuzzy on the logic of why Child Protection Services are allowed to forcibly remove people's offspring but not incentivise them to use the pill, personally. It's not like you're not making implicit judgments about who is worthy to be a parent.
CPS removes children based upon abusive and neglectful behavior, including prenatal drug exposure.* I support providing and encouraging birth control for those exhibiting such behavior.
*This is unfortunately changing in two ways:
1. Not removing babies and children from drug users, because systemic racism, which in some jurisdictions, after enacting these policies, has led to more kids dying from drug exposure and extreme abuse.
2. Removing kids from families based upon ideological beliefs (considering lack of affirmation as abusive).
Agreed.
I have to disagree with your take on abortion; most of the strong emotions for and against abortion is amongst women than men. Most men in the developed world never think "how can I force women to have children?" The modern problem isn't a patriarchal desire to have women "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" but an increasing reluctance of men to marry women and sire children, since it's seen as very likely to end in paying alimony and/or child support.
There might be a generational divide here, but as I understand it women are more likely to be both strongly opposed to abortion and strongly in favour of abortion access, relative to men. They're more divided on the topic.
Women: "how can I make this about me?"
lolol
The left are nothing but spiteful mutants. They cannot be reasoned with. The left must be subjugated seriously.
"Take the chapter on eugenics (the idea of selectively breeding humans to improve their genetic quality)."
That phraseology 'selectively breeding humans' is a big problem. While I am a strong advocate of embryo selection and genetic enhancement. I would only support it as a voluntary situation.
"The moment we stop asking questions for fear of the answers, we consciously blind ourselves and destroy one of the greatest assets we have as a species: our intellectual curiosity."
That is a very profound statement.
"Given the US Supreme Court’s recent rejection of the constitutional right to abortion, Hrdy’s quarter-century-old warning appears remarkably prescient."
The SCOTUS found that there is no 'constitutional right to abortion', not that it should be illegal. It was rightly left up to the states.
Most leftists, rightists, and many of the rest have an extreme inability to accept reality.
What’s the term used to describe someone who notices the similarity in the surnames all of these so-called public intellectuals? Hmm. Must be just a coincidence. Must be.
What do you mean?
It’s worth pointing out that the “racial science” of the Nazis was NOT based on Darwinism. They firmly opposed Darwinism, the Nazi conception of biology and of race was creationist.
Nazis were closer to evolution, maybe by coincidence, than the Out-Of-Africa theory which has been debunked by modern genetics I’m sure you’re familiar.
First, Nazi racial ideology that the different races (Aryan, Slav, Negros, Jews, etc) were literally different and distinct creations. That is not at all akin to evolution. Second, what exactly are you saying has been refuted by genetics? Just saying "Out of Africa theory" is vague.
OOA Theory is what I was taught in college: a single human ancestor from Africa migrated to Asia & Europe evolving slightly due to sunlight & winter etc…
You weren't taught that (or at least shouldn't have been) since no "Out of Africa" theory involves a *single* human (who would they mate with?); any such migration would be a few hundred people or more. And individuals don't evolve, populations do. But anyhow, there likely were indeed multiple migrations out of Africa at different times.
A single “human ancestor” a staring population, not a single person 🤣 just stop.
What has this got to do with any contrast of Nazi racial ideology, which was creationist, to evolution? What has Out of Africa got to do with this?
I have to agree with Coel here. Unless you're going to strawman Out of Africa to the point of parody (2% neandertal DNA!) I don't see how it hasn't been buttressed by mountains of archaeogenetic evidence.
Yes, I believe that a rejection of biology is one of the key weaknesses of the ideological Left. Any worldview that does not rest on solid foundations cannot survive a confrontation with reality. The Left will never be able to improve society without accepting the constraints of factors such as geography, energy, and biology.
I think one needs to start with a few key propositions
1) The differences between humans and non-human animals are largely determined by genetics.
2) The characteristics that humans hold in common are largely determined by genetics.
3) The differences between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics.
That is why the goal of the Left to achieve Equality of Outcome is doomed to fail:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-achieving-equality-is-an-impossible
Fortunately, there is a better option: material progress and upward mobility:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
We're probably running up against diminishing returns on material progress as well, is the problem- on a planet with shrinking young-age demographics and virtually no improvement in academic test scores for decades the only way to squeeze out more growth is through AI and robotics, which creates other difficulties.
I don't see how the argument for upward mobility fares much better, to be honest, if your mobility is largely determined by either luck or genetic factors.
Let me sum up by saying that you have given no evidence that there are inherent constraints to future economic growth or the ability of individuals to experience the benefits of that growth.
We will see in 20 years whether you are correct.
There is no evidence for "diminishing returns on material progress." And even if there were, this by definition means that material progress is continuing.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/evidence-of-progress
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/evidence-for-progress-per-capita-4df
And Upward Mobility is not largely determined by genetics. It is primarily driven by Life Choices:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-life-choices-are-key-to-upward
I address the role of genetics and luck towards the bottom of the article.
I'm acquainted with the Pinkeresque litany of data supporting the Whig theory of history, and the case for it is fair at the global level, but there's obvious evidence for slowdown across the developed world in recent decades and much of the increase in GDP-per-capita has been either fake or unsustainable (e.g, cannibalising family formation and home life for the sake of higher workforce productivity/consumer spending.)
Twin studies seem to indicate that lifetime income is about 40-50% genetic and the remainder is due to non-systematic environmental factors. "Life choices" are always going to be informed by some combination of innate temperament, environmental factors and personal whim, which covers all possibilities- it's not really a very informative description.
https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/6fecb8ea-b600-4f5a-83a2-273022d11e55/content
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592970/
In any case, social mobility is a zero-sum game- any one person's gain in status is going to be at the expense of someone else's loss in status, so mobility per se is morally neutral. Meritocratic allocation of status to maximise the impact of the most competent/trustworthy individuals in a given society is non-zero-sum, but since genetics impacts on competence and SES there's no particular argument for why class boundaries should be unusually porous there.
What gene determines whether or not a youth gets a job certification at a community college?
You probably *could* get some growth out of scrapping the more parasitic elements of the education pipeline and re-focusing on vocational training, but in itself the benefits of this re-alignment would be substantial but finite, which is compatible with my limits-on-growth scenario.
I guess what I'm asking is: given that we already inhabit a vastly wealthier world than a century ago and none of the left's basic complaints seem to have gone away, what makes you think that squeezing another X% improvement out of GDP will satisfy the progressives, so long as equality keeps receding into the distance?
I am not the slightest bit interested in "satisfying the progressives."
My goal is to completely annihilate the popularity of their ideological views so they become politically irrellevent.
I am perfectly happy with 3 percent economic growth per year. Not sure why you consider that "squeezing"....
Pumping more and more young adults into the credential inflation meatgrinder is one of the primary drivers of our current civilisational dysfunction, not the solution to it. In cases where college qualifications are meaningful, there are plenty of genes that influence an individual's academic aptitude and/or desire to learn.
I'm not opposed to trade schools and apprenticeships, but if you're using the term "upward mobility" as something distinct from social mobility, I'm not sure why you don't just use the word 'growth'.
You dodge my question:
"What gene determines whether or not a youth gets a job certification at a community college?"
I am also opposing credential inflation. I specifically argue that fewer people go to four-year universities. That is very different from get a job certification in a practical employment skill.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-pathway-to-success-1-of-3
I do not use the term "growth" because it is about individuals, not societies.
You obviously did not read the articles above very carefully. I specifically oppose the Whig theory of history.
There is a leveling off of per capita GDP in Western Europe due to very bad public policies, but it is far from clear that this is a long-term trend.
Again, "Slowdown" is not the same as growth ending. Except for Covid economic growth has been very robust in USA over last 10 years.
Per capita GDP is not fake. It closely related to all other measures of material standard of living.
Social Mobility is NOT the same as Upward Mobility. Social mobility and Status are zero-sum, while Upward Mobility is not.
I acknowledge the importance of genetics in the article. Yes, Life Choices are informed by the environment, but there is no evidence that they determine it.
There is no evidence that ALL environmental factors are "non-systematic." There is a huge amount of evidence that the Life Choices that I outlined lead to higher material standard of living.
"Per capita GDP is not fake. It closely related to all other measures of material standard of living."
Yeah, obviously there's gonna be a global correlation, but if you take a bunch of economic activities that used to be done within the home and move them out to private restaurants and childcare facilities, this will show up on the balance sheets as "economic growth" even though no real increase in living standards has occurred. (Often there doesn't even seem to be much benefit in terms of economies of scale.)
You are correct that shifting services from inside the family to outside it increases per capita GDP, but that is a long way from saying that increased material standard of living does not exist or that it is slowing down.
Use of the label "Leftist" is a dated strawmen which allows the echo chamber here to become a safe place for peeps who are triggered by skin pigmentation, while thinking they are above average, and for whom evolution means they are right about this in their anti-vaxxer gated community of sovereign citizens who do shamanic yoga, and ignore the thought that Homo sp. became such because we began policing narcissism in the long ages of the paleolithic and creating a world in which primitive primate hierarchies look ridiculous. The evolution continues, but recidivists and narcissistic parasites are still among us on the both "right" and the "left" let them be: Boris Johnston, Donald Trump, Keven Rudd, Scott Morrison, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin. The end of history was eaten up by our failure to deal with narcissists. The sideshow here on aporia is witness to a capitulation to the lazy thought that allows narcissists to destroy what we have all made, each and every, and 'worlded' into society, by negotiating in good faith and not calling each other names, and calling out the names of those who should have been policed before adulthood. Not dealing with narcissism is an aporia. narcihttps://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
For someone accusing others of strawmaning, you sure do it a lot.
so you see how bad it is... its quite deliberate
This whole article is dumb. The Right don't uniformly believe in Creationism. And for those who do, it's just a religious belief, with few policy implications.
It's the Left that denies reality (of human evolution) and wants to change EVERYTHING based on that
Selectively breeding humans? When do we get the Kwisatz Haderach?
"Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, plus the dismal history of failed ‘egalitarian’ revolutions the world over"??
I don't know about Stalin's or the Khmer Rouge's revolutions, but Mao's was neither egalitarian nor a failure. It was and is the successful China you see today.
Mao caused the deaths of over 60 million people in his quest for revolution which was swiftly abandoned by his successors. If Mao’s goal was to create an authoritarian state-capitalist ethnostate he definitely didn’t need to cause the deaths of so many people. Furthermore I don’t know in what way China is a successful country at least by western standards.
Your comment also speaks a lot about what kind of values you hold when you claim someone of killed so many of his own people to be successful.
Really?
I've been studying China for 60 years and have found no evidence of such atrocities, whether under Mao or anyone else.
What is your trustworthy source for these allegations?
Are we having a semantic disagreement or do you flatly deny that Mao’s regime failed economic plans lead to the death of 60 million people?
Answer my question first, then I'll answer yours.
That's how conversation works, after all. Again: your source?
I’ll give you sources anyway. During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1973284?origin=crossref
https://books.google.pt/books?id=nadqrYU10eMC&redir_esc=y
https://www.scmp.com/article/723956/revisiting-calamitous-time
I can’t give a source if you don’t clarify the misunderstanding. I’m not trying some clever trick here.
Of course you can give a source, but you won't, because you've realized you don't have one and that you've just repeated what millions of people would say.
There is no reliable source for that claim, any more than there is a reliable source for the claim that 'millions died in Tiananmen'.
What is the source for your claim, "Mao caused the deaths of over 60 million people in his quest for revolution which was swiftly abandoned by his successors"?
“Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought”https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/myth.pdf
It’s not that they specifically ignore Darwin and other forms of evidence: they are in a cult of self-affirmation and their messiah is Marx. They will devolve everything to that. It’s an article of faith
I am much more relaxed in urban areas when I rely on my hard wired visceral instincts to detect potential predators.
A sloppy left wing academic treatise in my pocket would probably fare rather badly against said predators.
An interesting piece folks !
Fascinating and timely. I've never understood the resistance to evolutionary thinking so this was enlightening.