kraftiekortie wrote:
Like I said...just because both parents are smart doesn't mean the kid will come out smart. Two mechanical geniuses who are socially adept could conceivably conceive a clumsy, asocial Asperger's-type kid.
Eugenics is bad for a similar reason that having babies by your own father is bad. It contracts the gene pool. This sort of thing has led to extinction of species in the past.
The Broader Phenotype Theory of Autism says so. But it also says that those parents have some autistic traits themselves. In fact that is what makes them the fiercest advocates for eugenics in the first place. See Barron Trump and his father, and I would say that Barron is not the only child of Donald on the autism spectrum, Donald has often claimed his genetic superiority to others. See Thilo Sarrazin, Berlin s ex-minister of Finance, Gemany s most prominent racist and eugenitist, author of "Deutschland schafft sich ab" ("Germany is getting rid of itself") , the best sold serious German book between 2005 and 2015: Without any doubt he and his wife (a school teacher suspended for her harsh teaching methods, and a bit also for her husband s theories that she fully supports) consider themselves as the bearers of the "highgiftedness gene". As an incentive they want parents like them (with a university degree) to get 50.000 Euro per child, so that people with a university degree get more kids (so the money that other parents would get monthly and in small portions over their child s childhood). They have only two sons, one of them has been living from social benefits for years now, and is anything but well adjusted (he blames his parents for their bad education), and the other one seems to have some mental health issues, too.
People like the Sarrazins dont understand psychosocial causality very well, and exaggerate by far with "genes" (dont forget that Darwin and Francis Galton have both most probably been on the spectrum). Genes is only a contruct of something which LOOKS LIKE as if it were RELATIVELY stable, based on a sometimes not even that high PROBABILITIES that the kids are like their parents (see the pulitzer-prize winning Siddharta Mukherjee, "The Gene"). Now the DNA is not as fixed as we were told at school, not by far, have you ever heard of epigenetics? Then most DNA genes, if they are "switched on", work through the metabolism, so there are plenty of possibilites to influence this, also in non-medical ways. I would say that stress in pregnancy and on parents during the early childhood of their kids, and bad nutrition of the mother and the baby has a far bigger effect on the organism of a child than anything else. I guess if you are a woman and have grown a baby in your body, you belly is growing and very quickly in the last weeks of pregnany, and if you have breastfed it so that it has put on 200 grams and more a week in the first weeks and tripled its weight in the first year, you get that better. And then it makes a big difference whether there is a person around the child that is able to really take care of the child s developmental needs or not. (See Michael Rutter, "Genes and Behavior", this is something that NTs understand much better than ASD people do.) If nutrition, stress level and education would be close to optimal, it would, I bet, not take more than two generations to get rid of most if not any bad "genes". Unfortunately most of the time, kids often get the triple package: bad nutrition, high stress, non-optimal education. And so it might LOOK LIKE as if things are "genetic" /that is relatively fiexd from one generation to the next) that are actually not. So relative stability is something very relative, too.
The big fallacy of scientists is that they think everything before birth is genetic, and everything after birth environment (see Allan Schore, JOY & FUN. Gene, Neurobiology. Child Brain Development). In fact biology IS 100% environment, too.
Then what you say about teenage mothers over several generations. Sure one factor is that it appears much more normal to them to have children when young, because they know it from their family. (In a certain sense you have to de-normalize it for them, to make them get more in options). But there is a also a lack of opportunity in the education system (in Germany we have a good vocational trainign system for people without a highschool degree, and teenage pregnancy is rare), and a yearning for a child to take care of, better than your own mother did with you, or she managed to do only when you were little and she got attention for the baby and less when the girl was getting older, and to be loved better. Again: NTs understand such psychosocial causalities more inutitively and usually better than ASD people do.
I would say that the human brain is very complex, and so there is a relatively high probablity that something is going wrong. And it is particularly likely to go wrong, if people overdo it, are too good at multitasking, too much worrying about too many things, too intensely thinking of all possibilties, putting too much stress on themselves (and others), overambitious. You shouldnt drain your brain too much. In that sense, slow people (like some on the spectrum) are beneficial for the specie as a whole. They remind us that things can be done slower, that not everything needs to be done, and that it can be damaging to do too many things too quickly.
06 Dec 2016, 6:14 am
