The Eugenics Question

Andrew Atkin:

When the forestry industry plants pine trees, they plant three trees in the small space that will eventually only support one. Those three trees then fight it out for the territory, with the result being the strongest tree wins and takes the place of the other two. This is how the forestries ensure they grow only good trees.

Nature plays this heartless game constantly, with both plants and animals. It is what's necessary to ensure that a given species of life is kept strong and healthy, as a totality. And with this insight we can see the ruthless though maybe necessary function of over-breeding, which in turn means leaving youthful specimens to fight it out for survival, so to speak. It serves as a pruning exercise to resist biological herd-decay.

From here we can see the negative in stabilising human (or other) populations unnaturally; meaning, with direct fertility controls. We lose the pruning dynamic and in the process risk dysgenics, as the breeding pool no longer selects for the strongest specimens and instead breeds all specimens indiscriminately.

Is this a problem?

If we don't want future generations to quickly inherit weak genes that will no doubt compromise intelligence, longevity, and physical health and wellbeing, then logic tells us that humanity has a difficult question to confront. In fact a question that would be irresponsible for us to not confront.

If we're going to play the game of direct population control, and we do not want our species to progressively decay, then we must take the game further and impose eugenics - to some degree.

Today, in the industrialised world, we impose dysgenics in fact because we devote mass-resources to facilitating the fertility of the weak, and at the direct expense of the strong. This is because pure democracy allows this to happen. It doesn't matter how weak you are you can still vote for the welfare party at the ballot box.

To a degree we are already imposing a kind of voluntary eugenics. Women are free to dispose of their babies if they can recognise defects in the womb. And if women do not want their babies at all they can abort them at their convenience. As morbid as it might sound, abortion can help to reduce children born to loveless parents, and in turn reduce the neurosis and social dysfunction that would otherwise develop from that.

However, easy abortion is a black way of dealing with a profound social problem, and it inescapably degrades the inherent value of human life. If you can abort an unwanted baby - why not an unwanted adult? When is a human a human?, etc.

The real solution to this most difficult of all social problems will come down to fertility controls imposed by the state, to restrict the fertility of those who are not by any reasonable measure strong. It's painful because you cannot stop people from breeding without delivering the ultimate insult. However, reason tells me it's still a necessity because the costs of not doing as such are far worse, in fact bad enough to eventually ruin our species. Sooner or later we may agree we have no choice. Unless, of course, we prefer the natural method of eugenics, where we go back to over-breeding and killing each other.

I made a further video on this here: Social Welfare and Social Evolution

Here are some old thoughts on fertility policy: Time to consider Breeding licenses?

Respectful comments welcome: