I
apparently either read or was aware of John B. Calhoun's mice and rat
experiments
in the 1960's and '70's and have used the phrase "too many mice
(or rats) in a cage" frequently as a comment on the ever
increasing problems due to population growth. I had assumed that the
problems of Calhoun's mice, their extreme population growth followed
by their ultimate total demise, were due to overcrowding, as
apparently most people had. There is little doubt that overcrowding
played a part in their abrupt change in behavior, but ultimately
other factors may have contributed to the final result. A recent
VDARE.com post
by Lance Welton was an eye-opening re-appraisal of the reasons for
the disasters, and their application to human populations.
As
was discussed in the post, the affluence of the West made possible by
the Industrial Revolution and the attendant decrease in mortality
resulting from better nutrition, better medical care and an overall
rise in the standard of living has virtually erased natural selection
from the first world human population. Now most people think of
natural selection as improving a species, or allowing a species to
cope with changes in their environment, but there is also a very
necessary weeding out of negative attributes. In addition to the
occasional mutant resulting from environmental accidents, sexual
reproduction intentionally tries many variations of genetic
characteristics. In the natural state, defective combinations
usually fail to reproduce. But in the modern human Welfare
societies, we go to extreme efforts to salvage every fertilized human
egg. Thus defectives have a high likelihood of not only surviving,
but reproducing. As Welton noted, these defective genes are then
able to spread throughout the gene pool, thus debasing it. This does
not bode well for Western societies.
There
have always been some doubts as to whether 'helping' people is always
desirable. The old truth that giving a man a fish feeds him for a
day but teaching him how to fish feeds him for a lifetime emphasizes
the relative importance of education over welfare. In addition,
however, giving him a fish may feed him for the day, but it also
encourages him to resort to looking for another handout the next day
rather than trying to feed himself. This shows that charity can
produce cultural distortions that, if allowed to fester and
reproduce, are as detrimental to societal health as genetic defects.
One must conclude that charity or welfare for all but the most
disabled is not a good idea, and even sparing those that cannot
survive without help still poses a question of whether they should be
allowed to reproduce.
To
paraphrase an old wheeze, it's not nice to try to frustrate Mother
Nature. Our culture frowns on the subject of eugenics, where the
term is referring to attempts to intentionally improve the gene pool
(although animal breeders have been using it for ages). But in
effect we have, for the last couple of centuries, been practicing
what might be called inverse eugenics, where, by frustrating natural
selection, we are unintentionally debasing the human gene pool. What
seems to be a noble principle of taking care of the less fortunate
members of our society has a dark side. This creates what seems to be
a moral or ethical dilemma. We must take steps to counter the
reproduction of defective genes, or humans will suffer the same fate
as Calhoun's mice, at least in the Western welfare states,. As
Welton observes, this seems to be further along than we would like to
think.
The moral dilemma is
that any attempts to purge defective genes flies in the face of
religious and cultural taboos. Even current research trying to edit
genes before they can be passed to future generations is under
attack, and sterilization or worse is virtually unthinkable,
especially if it can be labeled genocide. Yet ignoring the problem
may well not be an option. Although termination of carriers of
defective genes would be a repugnant and unnecessary extreme,
rethinking Western Civilization's religious and cultural
proscriptions against abortion, testing of fetuses for genetic
abnormalities, and sterilizing obvious mutants might be necessary.
There
are some things that can be done to stop making the situation worse.
A first mandatory step in the U.S. would be to stop importing
defective genes from third world populations. Whether any
immigration is necessary or desirable, a minimum response to the
problem must be to set the bar for admission very high for genetic
traits such as intelligence and industriousness, and against
negatives such as criminality and genetic diseases. In their native
environments a significant number of third worlders would perish from
natural selection, but not only do we keep them alive if they get
here, but pay them to breed. This is insane.
The
second step of a sane response to the problem is to stop paying
welfarites to breed. Although not every welfarite has defective
genes that cause diseases, the likelihood that they have undesirable
genetic characteristics is sufficiently high that encouraging the
propagation of their genes is a poor policy. Trying to test for bad
vs. good genes in the welfare community smacks of eugenics, and
therefore it would be best to just not provide public reward or even
support for welfare breeding.
Forced
sterilization is a solution of last resort, although it might be
worth seriously considering in the case of those convicted of violent
criminal behavior. Short of refinement and acceptance of genetic
engineering to eliminate less blatant cases of defective genes,
voluntary contraception or sterilization would be commendable, but as
a compassionate society one hopes that such drastic measures could
ultimately be unnecessary with technology. Currently abortion or
sterilization of Downs Syndrome children is tolerated or even
encouraged, but ultimately gene editing or other high tech solutions
may be able to identify and remove such defective genes from the gene
pool.
The
problem of affluence frustrating natural selection is sufficiently
subtle that its magnitude has only recently come to light. As was
pointed out in Welton's post, we are already seeing increases in
genetic diseases such as autism, and a decrease in intelligence.
Western civilization is already mired in a morass of problems,
although many may be related to this one. In any case, as Welton
said, we're headed for a disaster, and time to reflect may not be on
our side. Some form of eugenics to offset the inverse eugenics of
Western civilization's incredible survival successes is necessary.
