I don't know whether you're right that "it doesn't make sense". I think what he was saying is basically:
- humans are sexual organisms. They're a bit slow to get to sexual maturity but otherwise they're like horses.
- We can breed horses for traits.
- There is nothing in our understanding of the mechanics or dynamics of horse breeding to say that it wouldn't work for humans, given sufficient time and disregard for ethics.
Now, are you saying that "eugenics" isn't simply "horse breeding", but rather that "eugenics" is defined to mean a specific type of manipulation of reproduction within the population? I'm not going to argue about the definition of "eugenics" -- I expect neither of us are very invested in that. But maybe you could clarify again what it is you're saying wouldn't work or "doesn't make sense" for humans, and also clarify whether it would work for horses/cows etc? I.e. is there something about the human species which makes it not make sense, or does it not make sense due to general population genetic considerations that would apply to any mammal (or indeed sexual organism)?
That is not what eugenics is. Dawkins might just have misunderstood what eugenics was as an applied science, but it would be egregious in itself if so.
Eugenics is the idea that we can "improve" the human stock through selective breeding, especially by excluding "undesirables". Any attempt to do this (unless you are omniscient) actually has the opposite effect -- variety is the fuel of evolution, not selection. Attempts to limit variability do things like create monocultures and other very dangerous and fragile systems. Acceptable risk for agriculture because our use cases are narrow (dangerous but mitigated by the fact that different strains are kept active for different purposes for most food stock), but for humans it would be a disaster.
It's a mistake to think that ethics is the only thing that prevents us from engaging in large-scale eugenics -- it's just an application of a misunderstanding of the underlying science; like trying to create a Maxwell's Daemon for your perpetual motion machine.
You are concluding that an accomplished scientist in evolutionary biology has a shallow understanding of evolution on the basis of a tiny linguistic sample, with an argument that hinges on the definition of one word which you each may just be using with different emphases.
It seems pretty obvious you have other reasons for wanting to discredit him than your estimate of his competence as a scientist. (On the remote chance this isn't the case: you would benefit immensely by re-considering the practicalities and limitations of informal natural language communication.)
I mean, what is more likely here: you have incorrectly deduced his incompetence from the basis of a single remark he made on twitter, or that his colleagues at top universities for decades have been continually imagining his competence?
The site linked to in this article is an older example of his thought process, seen through the lens of interpretation, and is a very shallow view of some purported mechanics of evolution. Maybe just useful for illustrating some concepts without attempting to showcase the entirety of evolutionary theory, but worrying, because he never addresses the fundamental ideas of complexity and statistical dispersion of a population, at least in anything that I've seen.
I don't think he's incompetent, just that his understanding (or maybe, just his explanations, to be generous) of evolution are very shallow. Maybe he's just stopped thinking; relying more on his own beliefs and less on the path he took to arrive at them. Collecting rent on his position as a popularizer of evolutionary theory.
In terms of "other reasons", I'll try to address that. I align strongly with almost all of his publicly held beliefs -- I am an atheist, though less anti-religion[2], I am pro-evolution, though less mechanism-oriented. My conclusions have no motivation beyond a desire to assign some prior believe in his future statements.
[1] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/531154466255667200, https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/111203295062165913... (this one is the worst), https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/313323444299251713
[2] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/110833954764401049...
They are all extremely politically charged except one, and completely insufficient for the purposes of judging his thinking as a scientist (no way to definitively tie his brief informal statements to some particular line of thought—there's enough ambiguity for a reader to read what they'd like into them).
So if a reader comes along and looks at the sources you've cited, all they walk away with is an impression of Dawkins' (implied) political alignment (in reality his comments probably have nothing to do with political thinking).
Maybe that's your intention, maybe not, but at the end of the day you have unambiguously:
1. Brought his competence into question (or "depth of understanding" if you prefer—though it's the same thing insofar as the effective execution of his work depends on having depth of understanding)
2. Cited as evidence for this: small, ambiguous, politically charged linguistic samples.
We have enough places in life and on the internet where arguments are made on that basis. Hacker News is a nice reprieve from it for the most part—which is my only reason for calling this out. I have no interest in Dawkins and haven't personally followed his work since Selfish Gene times, and I disagree with his anti-religion stuff too. But I also highly value having some place on the internet where the conversation doesn't have to center around who to dislike because they're on the wrong side of the discourse.
Lest this seem like merely a theoretical point, read https://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/100-year... to see how this has played out in dog breeds.
Eugenics would clearly accomplish something. It is unlikely that that something would be desirable.
Doesn't seem to have had the opposite effect in all the farm animals and plants we've been artificially selecting for millennia now...
Like I do understand what you are saying, but it seems weird to me to take this one tweet you disagree with and conclude that Dawkins has only a shallow understanding of evolution, especially when it seems like you only disagree on the nuances of a definition.
On the other point, I don’t even understand what it means to breed for the trait of “variety”. It’s a collective, not an individual trait. If you allow individuals to practice eugenics by selecting their mates through mutual assent then that works, but that’s not eugenics.
I was thinking of a hypothetical eugenic society, where they could let (force?) everyone to breed every X years. Then they could try to optimize that entire batch of mates to optimize whatever traits they chose plus some measure of variety in the gene pool. Would that satisfy your definition of eugenics?
I don't know shit about genetics, so I don't have anything to contribute here specifically, just to bear in mind that the universe may pose challenges where good people have to actively swim against the current of efficiency.
But eugenics is not only unethical, it is also incorrect, and reflects a very reductionist view of evolution. Breeding (or genetically engineering) for IQ, for example, which Dawkins has explicitly mentioned as a "positive" version of eugenics[1], is incorrect for achieving the end of increasing intelligence as a species. Regardless of moral/ethical whatevers, it just won't work. In this particular case, IQ is a fair measure of general intelligence, but not comprehensive; even its most rabid proponents admit it rarely explains more than 20% of the variance of "success", so the idea that increasing IQ over the population would have a useful effect is laughably naive.
[1] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/111203295062165913...
Your other points about selective breeding being fragile and most likely a long term disaster are true, but I think they’re second order points.
It’s also a big jump to assume that Dawkins is unaware of the downsides of selective breeding, so your interpretation of his tweet seems somewhat uncharitable.
On the other hand, if evolution is successful because it is guided by a supreme mind, then our physical properties are only a small facet of what makes us who we are. Thus, a eugenics breeding program is unlikely to make a big difference. And, if we do selectively breed a bunch of attractive, athletic, high IQ individuals, then that could lead to a moral disaster.
See my reply to the sibling comment -- briefly, variety is the driver of evolution, not selection. The more you constrain variety, the worse off the population is from an evolutionary perspective. Any attempt is net negative, a large-scale attempt would be disastrous, regardless of the moral or ethical implications.
This seems to be exceptionally hard to grasp for a lot of people.
Here is a little theory/ observation (sorry for the very broad strokes, just an idea): right-wing ideologies tend to justify ethical positions with contingent realities (for example "natural family" vs "marriage against nature"). Left-wing ideologies tend to deny reality when it goes against some perceived value (for example, the natural tendency to work for personal gain, when collective ownership for the common good is the value to be promoted).
Now back to Dawkins, but he is often wrong on both ethical and fundimental grounds. This tweet is an example of that (there is a sibling comment explaining the scientific reason for why he is wrong), as is almost always the case when Dawkins attacks religion. Furthermore, quite often the moral argument can’t simply be detached from a statement. As an example look at the climate disaster again. It is morally wrong to pollute, but also stuff brakes badly if you pollute too much. You can’t put the moral argument out side of the bracket and say: “I’m only arguing that increased carbon emission are good for the economy”, then you are guilty of stacking the rules of the debate into your favor, and Dawkins does this all the time.
If you're referring to andrewla's comments, I don't agree, his 'scientific' argument is that 'variety is the fuel of evolution'. Which is a pretty vague statement. Any selective pressure is acting on existing variety to squeeze it. Evolution needs variety precisely to select traits- that is, kill off parts of that variety. Dawkins' consideration still holds true: we practiced eugenics on dogs for millennia, and they did evolve in a direction that was desirable to us. Technically, it works.
> The right wing political spectrum is just as guilty (or even more so) of being "out of touch with reality" as the left.
Regarding climate change, I do think that (while the right is certainly in denial) the left is projecting on the issue of climate change a vast series of ethical issues that it conflates with the reality of climate change. The issues of poverty and inequality, of capitalism vs collective good, etc. And I think that the right's denial might be in part a reaction to this confusion between a scientific fact and the way it was framed by the left. Why I don't see climate rallies asking for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear plants? That would help in solving climate change much more than everything we did so far.
The "killing off parts of that variety" is a mechanic that is not universally accepted; genetic drift has been documented to happen for non-red-in-tooth-and-claw situations. That's not to say it's discredited or anything, but it's just one mechanism. The thing shared by all mechanics of evolution is that they need a population with enough internal variation to be able to move the needle at all. A population that needs to evolve itself out of a corner (say a dramatic change in environment) needs time in proportion to variety, not in proportion to mutation rate. And no population survives without producing almost entirely viable offspring.
We did not practice eugenics on dogs for millenia -- we selectively bred dogs. We bred different breeds for different purposes, and the more narrow the breed is, the less robust it is (I don't think anyone would question this if they had ever read anything about pedigreed breeds). The reason why dogs are robust as a species is largely because we didn't focus on one particular trait across the entire species, so with cross-breeding (and even breeding with wild dog-like animals) we can retain some level of robustness.
True. In a sense, your metaphor of variation as the fuel of evolution is very apt. Variation is indeed the fuel of evolution, in the sense that evolution consumes it. In order to make your car move, you need the fuel and you need to consume it. When "a population evolves itself out of a corner" it does so by consuming part of its variation. The population survives, the single individuals might be selected out (or single traits, through differential reproduction rates).
> We did not practice eugenics on dogs for millenia -- we selectively bred dogs.
It seems to me that any form of selective breeding when applied to human beings falls entirely into the definition of eugenics. The Merriam Webster defines eugenics as: "the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition".
> the more narrow the breed is, the less robust it is
Absolutely true, but dog breeds are (especially in recent times) are really extreme and cruel forms of selection. Commercial breeders (and their customers) are following absurdly strict appearance canons. On the other hand, the slightest form of imposed human breeding, however transversal to the bulk of human variation (say, for example, discouraging from reproducing people who are more than 2 standard deviations taller than the rest of their country average or reference ethnicity) is already an ethically unacceptable form of eugenics, independently from its practical impact on the genetic variation of humanity.
The climate crisis disproportionately affects people in poorer areas, while a handful of rich people are doing all the polluting. It is both morally wrong and criminally ludicrous to allow these rich folks to continue with their polluting without being punished. See separating polluters from their means of pollution is both effective and the right thing to do.
Regarding the nuclear plants: You claim that the left is out of touch with reality while you think that we can somehow build a few hundred new nuclear plants over the course of next ten years (which is probably an overextended estimate of how long we have), and that alone will fix the climate crisis. No that won’t happen in the world we live in. The climate disaster will have to mitigated by stopping polluters from polluting—which we can do by laws and enforcement; and has been proven to work effectively in the past—everything else is wishful thinking.
No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if I want to support my theory that a political side has appropriated a real scientific and technical issue to promote a worldview that had long pre-existed the issue itself, what I need to find is at least some cases in which technical solutions are ignored because they don't fit in that worldview. And I think nuclear energy is one such example.
> The climate disaster will have to mitigated by stopping polluters from polluting
Well, first of all it's not "polluters", it's emissions of CO2. Pollution is a wider issue than climate change which is what we are supposedly talking about. Also, you seem to divide the world in "a handful of rich people" and "people in poorer areas", in a way that resembles a lot the traditional division between "capitalists" and "workers", the ones profiting and the others suffering. But these rich people is us: we use cars, we eat food grown with fertilizers, we use tons of energy for all our daily lives. Separating us from our means of pollution means separating us from most of what we use and need in our daily lives. And you think that this is more realistic than building nuclear plants?
I tried googling "climate crisis disproportionally affects" to find some scholarly articles about the third world impacts of climate change (but I was lazy so I didn't add the final 'poorest countries'). This is what I got, a bit surprisingly, as first results:
- Why Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Women
- Climate change disproportionately impacts those with disabilities
- Climate change will hurt poor people the most
So I got curious and added 'LGBTQ' to the search string, and there it goes:
- Women, LGBT people 'invisible' victims of disasters – experts
- Why Climate Change is an LGBTQ+ Issue
This stuff makes me extremely suspicious. I'm used to think that reality is entirely indifferent to our justice issues, to our sense of fairness and opportunity: cancer develops in the body of the good and the evil ones; earthquakes don't care if the city above is rich or poor. And yet here we have an example of a physical phenomenon that perfectly confirms and adapts to a range of social and political issues that pre-exist it and that are the domain of a specific political side.
But to be more specific, and to take upon the most serious claim, the one that climate change disproportionally affects the poorest countries:
1) it is trivially true that natural disasters affect most the poorest and those who are least organised and prepared to cope with them. It used to happen to us as well. What changed is that we got rich and organised: we made enormous modifications to our environments and societies; we deviated rivers, builts dams, drained swamps, built roads, removed most of the people from the country to highly infrastructured cities and provided them jobs in factories and offices; built schools and hospitals. Mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and genetic research brought us food security. Buildings follow expensive regulations to withstand fires and eartquakes. And on and on and on. What I want to stress here is that we didn't find safety thanks to a gentler climate. We actually consumed enormous amounts of resources to build it. If climate change were to be stopped and reversed now, disappearing as if it had never happened, the people in the poorest countries would only be slightly better off, but they would remain as poor and exposed to natural disasters as they are now. We are fixating on a detail and missing the bulk of the issue.
2) The idea that the poorest countries are paying the price of the development of the richest ones is also pre-existing the climate change issue and it's a very old political stance of the left. Again, it is suprising how a scientific issue exactly confirms a political side in their traditional views.
3) The fact that the "climate crisis" is always happening is some faraway place we have little or no understanding of makes me even more suspicious.
Aside: Now Lets talk about the word “polluters”. I’m using the word “polluters” in the context of climate change. You know fair well which pollution I’m talking about, there is no need to spin the debate. I use the word polluters because it has a just strong negative connotation. “Greenhouse gas emitters” doesn’t cut it the same way. Polluters deserve to be called on what kind of people they are and the harm they are doing.
Aside 2: When I say “polluters” and “means of pollution” I’m specifically talking about major polluters and industrial level means of pollution respectively (that one is on me, I wasn’t clear enough). Unless you are a CEO of a major fossil fuel company you are not the problem. You might even drive those giant pickup trucks on city streets, take 15 air trips a year and eat a meal of meat 14 times a week. You are still not the problem, the people who sold you the truck, persuaded you to take these air trips, and subsidized you meat are.
Now to the problem of climate justice being out of touch with reality—which is now the main point of this debate–you can’t just point to silly clickbaity articles to prove your point. First of all, their point may be valid even though their headlines look silly, just because a rhetoric is cliché, it doesn’t make it wrong. Secondly, even if all or most of them are wrong, that still doesn’t disprove the point that ethical issues are closely tight to the climate disaster. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The reality is that the climate disaster is being caused by a handful of criminally negligent people, and the harm they are causing affects people other then them self. Mentioning this fact does in no way shy away from the reality of the situation, hiding it does.
My point is that while it's trivially true that poors are more exposed to natural disasters, it's also true that the increased risk due to climate change is only a very marginal increase in their baseline misery. Their misery is not caused by climate change, climate change is only slightly aggravating a situation that is already terrible. When you insist on the fact that "the poors are paying the price" you give the impression that our pollution (let's use the term) and their misery balance- but this is false- most of their misery is indipendent from our polluting.
Now, the idea that we should be fine with marginally increasing the misery of third world countries is morally wrong. But at the same time it is absurd that we insist on that as a reason to reduce or stop climate change in a timeframe of decades, when much smaller efforts could be made to cancel that baseline misery, with much higher improvement in the life conditions than that we'd obtain by tackling climate change. Even more so when the interventions that would cancel that baseline misery are major infrastructural works (building of dams, canals, roads, hospitals) improvement in agriculture (mechanisation, chemical fertilisers) and societal changes (industrialisation) that would imply an increase in emissions of co2 in the environment.
> Unless you are a CEO of a major fossil fuel company you are not the problem.
I totally disagree with this. Fossil fuel companies just provide us with what we need to live as we do. At the moment we don't really have a choice if we want to keep our standards of living. You might be thinking of a parallel with tobacco companies, but that case is quite different as tobacco doesn't bring any additional benefits to smokers. While everything around you, including everything that makes your life safe and comfortable- from the giant infrastructural work that shielded you from natural disasters, to the hospitals, machines and medicines that save your life if you're ill, to the food you eat and the cultural and entertainment products you buy, has been built and maintained by burning fossil fuels. You cannot keep all this for granted and blame the CEOs of the companies that extract that fuel for all the damage it causes.
> you can’t just point to silly clickbaity articles to prove your point. First of all, their point may be valid...
My point is that there is an uncanny overlapping with traditional, pre-climate change narratives of the left, and many of our major concerns with the consequences of climate change. There is also a curious blind spot in the proposed solutions, that again matches the pre-existing aversions of the left: no nuclear energy, no major infrastructural works, no mechanisation or industrialisation. The only proposed solutions seem to be proposals that long pre-existed the climate change issue: our own rejection of capitalism and our de-industrialisation. Have a look at the lede of this Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics
and check how the description of the ideology of a political party born in Germany in the late 70s perfectly fits all our current concerns and solutions to the scientific and technical issue of an increase in global average temperatures due to CO2 emissions.
It’s funny, I totally agree with you there, and the following paragraph. The poor should not be paying the price of the climate crisis. Many on the left—including me—are of the believe that economic disparity of the poor is part of the same problem that is causing the climate crisis. We want the rich to pay the price. I am very much for poorer areas of the world getting the infrastructure they so desperately need to make all of our lives better (and the rich should pay for it).
Note though that I don’t say that poorer countries are paying the price, but the poor in general are affected to a greater degree. I consider my self very much a victim of the climate crisis even though I live in one of the wealthiest city in the world, but I acknowledge that the effects of the climate disaster will affect the homeless population in my city to a greater degree.
Let’s talk about the scale of the climate crisis. I think you realize how dire the situation is, it is not a matter of saving the economy any more and keeping our lifestyles, we literally can’t afford it. There is already so much carbon in the atmosphere that our climate is changing into a more inhospitable one. We are already loosing massive amount of species to extinction. We can’t afford to wait for a technical solution, we must act now. And the only solution that we know of—which has been proven to work before (apart from nuclear energy which we are too late to convert to)—is laws and regulation. And who do we regulate? We regulate the producers. It is on the polluters to stop producing stuff that does so much harm to our shared lives.
In this link the problem I see is that he is too focused on the mechanic of change. The trick of evolution is not random mutations, etc., but has to do with statistical properties of large population groups. A population that is of sufficient size will have variation within the constraints of the fitness function. How those variations are achieved is not really even that important except as regards the rate of evolution, rather than the effect of it.
But the fitness function is extremely complex; it's not just changing a few parameters. A population of land-dwellers is largely indifferent to the ability to float; so some creatures can float better, others float worse, but it doesn't matter. But at some point the floaters get good enough at floating that they can actually swim, and now there's a whole new fitness landscape to explore. And the fitness function can change over time.
The most important thing is variation -- that's the "anti-fragile" hook that makes life so tenacious.
[1] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/122894368695366451... -- "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."