Dawkins makes a tweet that triggers outrage & shaming from ideology sphere

[C C]

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com...s-a-tweet/

EXCERPT (Jerry Coyne): [UPDATE] Crikey, there’s a whole Twitter “event” devoted to Dawkins’s tweet. People can’t wait to jump all over him.

When Matthew sent me this new tweet from Richard Dawkins this morning, I thought “Oh no! I know what he means, but there are a gazillion people out there ready to misinterpret it as an endorsement of eugenics.” And Matthew said, “Yeah, and everyone’s going to jump on that word ‘work’.”

"It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology." — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 16, 2020

Yep, what we predicted happened.

I didn’t read Richard’s followup (below) until a few minutes ago, and I don’t know whom he was arguing with, but his tweet was clearly intended to show that many human traits are heritable—that is, they would respond to artificial selection, which is what eugenics is. (In “negative” eugenics, you cull or prevent from breeding individuals with undesired traits; in “positive eugenics”, the other side of the same coin, you breed from individuals with desired traits.) As I’ve written before, nearly every artificial selection experiment conducted, on a gazillion different species, has been successful: the mean value of the trait has changed in the direction the experimenter wanted. (Two of the few unsuccessful experiments have been mine: attempts to select for directional asymmetry in flies.)

[...] The heritability of IQ, as I recall, is about 50%, so if we wanted to improve the IQ of humans, we’d just let the smartest ones breed, and lo, we’d get a fairly substantial change in a few generations. Should we do that? Hell, no!! Nobody wants to go back to the era of eugenics [...] In general, no biologist that I know wants to return to the bad old days of wholesale eugenics, which involved not only killing or sterilizing people but demonizing whole groups for their genetic endowment. So I understood what Richard was trying to say.

Should Richard have issued that tweet? Again: Hell no!! Richard knows (or surely must, just as Matthew and I knew) that there are many people out there ready to misinterpret what he says [...] Here’s someone else who didn’t get the tweet at all [...see blog entry...] Crikey, can’t Dr. Blommaert read?

I see that Richard has already gone his usual route of trying to explain what he meant [... see blog entry...] So what is Richard guilty of? Unwise tweeting! ... knowing him, I know for sure that he’s not in favor of eugenics... (MORE - details)

[Zinjanthropos]

lol.... can we ask Richard to donate his DNA?

[Secular Sanity]

lol.... can we ask Richard to donate his DNA?

Last I heard, he did try one of Einstein’s thought experiments but it was an epic fail.

Going up? Probably not at his age. 

[Syne]

Actually, there is reason to conclude it wouldn't work in practice. Aside from the permanent underclass mentioned, it was already tried, and I never heard of any significantly smarter, stronger, etc. humans as a result. Like socialism and communism, it sounds like Dawkins is repeating the old chestnut that "it's never been done right".

[C C]

'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'
https://unherd.com/2020/02/eugenics-is-p...s-is-good/

EXCERPT (Tom Chivers): . . . The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” = “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other.

I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit... (MORE - details)