Tuesday, May 14, 2013

How I interpret Raymond Cattell's eugenics (yes the dreaded word)


Human evolution proceeds ultimately by natural selection among groups, which determines the natural selection among the individuals, genetically and culturally. The ethics of the group are fixed by aiming to survive in reaction to the environment. We have loyalties in a hierarchy of values from fellow group members to mankind in general.

New cultural creations tend to be the work of genetically/culturally superior intelligences and are developed in two main ways: cultural creations as outlets for frustrations, such as poetry, music, drama (p-culture), and cultural creations that are more adaptive to fit us to the environment, engineering, medicine, science (r-culture), not “merely” an “outlet.”

These cultural inventions from superior intelligences tend to require more complex adjustments for the general population than the general population tend to be genetically suited for---Cattell calls this “genetic lag.” It's like the old instinctual brain having to adjust to the newer cortex.

Cattell suggests that we deal with these frustrating discrepancies due to adjusting to the new cultural inventions (mutations), and the subsequent genetic lags, with eugenic measures ( improving the genetic composition of a population) to help reduce the frustrations, which can spill over into many social problems, including revolutions. It's like having foresight for groups akin to a medical watch on individuals, which can lesson the morbidity rate of the group.

Adventurous societies will always be looking for new helpful (not antisocial) inventions from superior people, which then need adjustment to the general population. The goal is to always be evolving, which Cattell believes is the prime process of the universe. He calls this scientific religious philosophy “Beyondism."

Sounds more humane to me than constant violent revolutions.

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