[andrewla]

The trick of it is that you can certainly practice selective breeding on humans. If you want taller humans, you can breed taller humans. Unethical, etc., but would work.

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.

[westoncb]

> That is not what eugenics is

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?

[andrewla]

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that this tweet alone is how I concluded anything about Dawkins. This tweet was just the most egregious example that I could find, and really made me reconsider whether my admiration of him as a scientist and spokesperson for evolutionary theory was well-placed. There are others [1], not to mention his various appearances on podcasts etc., and more long-form blog posts on his site where he reiterates these things (those are harder to dig up, and I'm too lazy to do so at the moment).

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...

[westoncb]

Maybe all the information you're actually basing this stance on is through hours of listening to podcasts and reading long-form blog posts—but the only things you're citing as evidence are tweets, and the group of them suffers from the same problem I was initially pointing out:

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.

[btilly]

Making this concrete, eugenics is based on the idea that breeding for the characteristics that we think are desirable will lead to better humans. However the characteristics that we think are desirable are often more connected with prejudice than anything desirable. And in the process of breeding for any one characteristic we often accidentally pull in others we don't like so much.

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.

[bobcostas55]

>Any attempt to do this (unless you are omniscient) actually has the opposite effect

Doesn't seem to have had the opposite effect in all the farm animals and plants we've been artificially selecting for millennia now...

[sgillen]

Couldn’t you bake in variety as one of the desirable characteristics to pass on to the next generation? And also from that tweet it’s not even clear that Dawkins would disagree with you.. it seems like you are disagreeing with the common criteria for good that people will come up with rather than if eugenics itself would work. You even say yourself that if you were omniscient that eugenics could work...

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.

[andrewla]

I gave the tweet as an example of a more general trend. The linked demonstration shows a similar shallowness (the focus on mechanism) which is what brought it to mind.

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.

[sgillen]

Fair enough..

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?

[rictic]

There's a natural human impulse to assert that something which is evil must also be ineffective. Often this is true, and it's great when it is, it's like getting something for free – you can improve both the moral situation of the universe and improve efficiency – but one must be prepared for the eventuality that reality doesn't cooperate.

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.

[andrewla]

Oh, for sure. Environmentalists, for example, do not advocate (generally) for the direct murder of large numbers of people, which would certainly qualify as a solution to any number of environmental problems. Ethics are important.

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...

[czzr]

So you agree that selective breeding is possible for humans? I think that’s all he is saying, in response to people who might incorrectly recoil from the idea that practices that work on animals also work on humans.

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.

[andrewla]

He uses the word “eugenics”.