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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