> On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Martz wrote:
>
> > Perhaps you'd like to support my new campaign.
> >
> > Free to forward, free to copy, free to mutate.
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> [CLIP]
> > The people with the most kids are the people with the least
> > brains. This propogation of stupid genes carries the seed
> > of mankinds destruction, yet it is dangerous to advocate the slaughter
> > of the senseless. They outnumber us by a huge margin, after all, and
> > are prone to using violence as a debating tool of first resort.
> >
> > I have a solution.
> >
> > NEUTER THE STUPID!
>
> I have a problem with the direction this argument is taking. Not that
> the stupid shouldn't be neutered (a fine idea), but it overlooks the data.
> Statisticly two idiots are as likely to have genius offspring as two
> geniuses are of having idiot children. The outcome will tend toward the
> mean and therefore idiots are much more likely to have children whose
> intellect is an improvement than the geniuses.
*LAUGH*. Look on a smaller scale, please?
The biases are much more obvious when working on scales of 1 standard
deviation than 6 standard deviations!
> Both you and Dave Pape assume that intelligence is a wholely genetic
> trait. I see no statistical evidence for this.
1) Intelligence is *not* purely genetic. [I'm equating it with
"processing power", not the knowledge base. I'm siding with David Pape
here.] I can enumerate many physical methods of permanently lowering
this trait. I know several methods of generically exploiting whatever
intelligence is there, more effectively--but these methods don't actually
boost intelligence.
2) There *are* rather severe genetic influences. The major psychoses are
not found among those with normal or lower IQ, and a genetic basis for
some of these *is* statistically measurable.
[This ties into a possible claim that conventional human intelligence is
contra-selective to one's genes.]
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
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