In fact the key prejudice that drives eugenics is something now Juan to be definitively false (that all "positive" traits are correlated, that physically healthy and beautiful people are also competent, virtuous and wise)https://twitter.com/Simon_Whitten/status/1228991252106039302 …
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This is the thing that's easy to make fun of about Nazi "race science" but is deadly serious when people in power really believe Getting all upset about people being short, not just because they think being short is objectively bad but it's *correlated with other bad traits*
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They think short people must be more likely to be stupid or crazy or evil Because they believe that there's some ideal, correct genetic template for how humans should be and if you deviate from it you must have been damaged by mutation
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This is at its most absurd and obviously evil in the form of Nazi race science (humans are supposed to be pale and blonde and blue eyed and melanin is a sign of bad genes creeping in) but in broad terms all eugenicists believe in something like this It's what the "eu-" means
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And this is absolutely not how evolution works It is the *opposite* of how evolution works The whole *point* of evolution is there is no single definition of "fitness" "Fitness" literally means *how well you fit* the world around you, which is always changing
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This is why the traits eugenicists want to breed for *don't exist* There is no such thing as "intelligence", singular That is a word we use for being competent at solving problems, but the kinds of problems that exist in the real world are diverse and ever shifting
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What it means to be "intelligent" depends entirely on the world you happen to live in, and people live in a lot of different worlds, both across the population and over time
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If you try to make the human species "more intelligent" by selecting only for neurological traits you think of as positive and killing everyone with traits you think of as negative, you will ALWAYS be making humans "less intelligent" Throwing out most of the tools in the box
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And that's even assuming you halfway know what you're doing, which Nazis usually don't The absurdity of trying to make "better" humans by breeding for tallness or blondeness or whatever traits the architect of genocide thought were sexy, and thinking "intelligence" comes with it
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The same logic by which we tried to create "better" dogs based on aesthetically pleasing muzzles and just created a breed that spends most of its life struggling to breathe
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