Dysgenics

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Dysgenics (Engl. Dysgenics ), in the context of the theory of evolution , the science of the genome deteriorating (dysgenic) factors and deals with the doctrine of the accumulation and dissemination of defective genes and characteristics in a population , race or type . The term dysgenics is sometimes used as a contrast to eugenics . Dysgenics is understood as the failure to take eugenic measures.

origin

According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term dysgenic was first used in 1915 by David Starr Jordan to describe the dysgenic effects of the First World War . Jordan believed that the war spared the weak who stayed at home and that inferior genetic material would multiply. In 1940 Konrad Lorenz described these "biological consequences of civilization and domestication" as "human petition".

After eugenics had been discredited from the 1930s and especially as a result of National Socialist racial hygiene , the term dysgenics also fell out of use until the physicist and Nobel Prize winner from 1956, William B. Shockley , picked it up again in controversial speeches and publications from 1963 . Shockley considered intelligence to be hereditary and his racial theses were controversial in professional circles.

More than 30 years later, the Irish psychologist Richard Lynn took it up again . In Lynn's view, dysgenic processes decrease the intelligence of Western nations. In 2008, together with John Harvey, he forecast the decline in global IQ in the decades 2000 to 2050.

Pop Culture

The film Idiocracy goes back to the theme of the negative correlation between intelligence and the number of children and creates a dystopia in which the world is ruled by stupid people.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roche Lexicon Medicine: Dysgenics. In: Gesundheit.de. Alliance Healthcare Deutschland AG, accessed on February 2, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Dysgenics, Merriam-Webster.
  3. ↑ What does eugenics mean? | T4
  4. ↑ David Starr Jordan: War and the breed; the relation of war to the downfall of nations. BiblioBazaar, 2010, ISBN 1-117-96080-3 .
  5. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Disturbances of species-specific behavior caused by domestication. In: Journal for Applied Psychology and Character Studies. Volume 59, 1940, p. 71.
  6. ↑ Dysgenics. Retrieved February 2, 2019 .
  7. ^ William Shockley, Roger Pearson: Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems. Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1992, ISBN 1-878465-03-1 .
  8. ↑ Richard Lynn: Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations . ( archive.org [accessed February 2, 2019]).
  9. ↑ (PDF) The decline of the world's IQ. Retrieved on February 2, 2019 .