Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs

Saying “there’s no objective way to define good” is not an argument against one definition or for another. We could just as easily say “there’s no objective way to define ‘chair’”. It’s just tactical nihilism.

Good genetics is intersubjective, not subjective. Most people can agree that we want smart, healthy, responsible, and productive humans who will make positive contributions to society. That is great criteria for laissez-faire eugenics. From an ideal society’s perspective, majority rules when determining what would be “best” for the society.

Making people better doesn’t sound like such a horrible thing, but it does imply that people aren’t born equal, and so it conflicts with the humanist belief in the intrinsic value and equality of human beings. The racial aspect of dysgenics makes it even more taboo. Not only are individuals unequal, races are also unequal. Eugenics doesn’t require racial genocide, but any race-blind eugenics program would affect racial demographics.

Instead of dealing with the moral and social issues involved, our culture just pretends that evolution doesn’t apply to humans. This is not rational. It is willful ignorance. – Blithering Genius, Dysgenics, Overpopulation and Conventional Ignorance

Main Article: You’re Probably A Eugenicist - Diana Fleischman.

There is already popular support for several widely practiced and commonly accepted forms of Eugenics in modern society. Those instances just aren’t called Eugenics when they occur. Some examples include:

• Outlawing incestual reproduction between close relatives.
• Aborting fetuses that have severe birth defects.
• Replacing defective mitochondrial DNA in children conceived via IVF.
• GMOs and the selective breeding of plants and animals.
• The prohibition of sperm and egg donations from people who have ADHD, ASD, or do not meet certain height requirements from some donor banks.

We support all those instances of eugenics, except for the last one.

Historically, Eugenics used to have a lot of public support in the early 1900s. So much so, that many Western countries had eugenics laws in the past. If the Nazis never rose power, it’s quite possible that most of the world never would’ve developed such negative (and irrational) attitudes towards Eugenics.

Of course it does:

• US Senator Rand Paul has compared abortion to eugenics.
• Abortion is a Tool of the Eugenics Movement - Matt Walsh.
• The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist.
• The Link Between Abortion and Eugenics Makes Its Way to the Federal Appeals Courts.
• Footnote buried in leaked abortion opinion invokes ’modern-day eugenics’.
• I was pressured for wanting my at-risk baby. Abortion and eugenics can’t be separated.

Just as there are no rational arguments against eugenics, there are also no rational arguments against abortion.

Related: Four Beneficial Evolutionary Mutations That Humans Are Undergoing Right Now.

Related: Wikipedia: Familial Natural Short Sleep.

That claim was marginally true for the early-to-mid 20th century. There were major improvements in environmental circumstances up until 1969, but the Flynn Effect has already come to an end in the Modern era. It’s also possible that the Flynn effect mainly reflects that the population became more accustomed to standardized written tests, rather than showing actual increases in intelligence.

To clarify, the Flynn Effect is based on improved environmental conditions, whereas the Reverse Flynn Effect is based rising dysgenics. Although environmental factors may have temporarily increased IQ scores, increasing dysgenics is lowering IQ scores by a larger and faster rate. A Reverse Flynn Effect has been occurring ever since the 1990s.

Read More:

• The Flynn Effect - Metapedia.
• IQ Scores Are Falling in “Worrying” Reversal of 20th Century Intelligence Boom - Science Alert (2018).
• The Black-White IQ Gap is no longer narrowing.
• IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity - NBC News.

Nobody is denying that intelligence and personality traits are affected by environmental factors, nor is anybody denying that improving environmental conditions for everyone is a good thing. The point is that they’re determined by genetics more strongly than by environmental factors. Intelligence is estimated to be ~80% determined by genetics.

Moreover, genetics and environments go hand-in-hand. In a sense, we can think of every trait as being both 100% genetic and 100% environmental. We could improve the environment, but past a certain point, we’re not going to see any improvements in society without genetic improvements.

Lastly, improving environmental conditions doesn’t solve the problem of overpopulation. Humanity must enforce population control if we wish to have a sustainable future.

Overview: Dysgenics - Brittonic Memetics

Dysgenics is increasing faster than ever, due to: 1. evolutionary mismatch created by the Industrial Revolution (humans are not well-adapted to high-tech environments), 2. the removal of selectionary pressures on the human genome (medical technologies enable all infants to live to adulthood regardless of self-sufficiency, disabilities and birth defects, etc); and 3. the proliferation of welfare state policies:

• There is a strong negative correlation between how educated someone is and how many children they have. Less educated people consistently tend to have more children. Source
• Humanity has been undergoing a strong decline in IQ over the past few decades.
• Single-Parent Households are rising. In 2020, 40.5% of all newborns in the US were born to unmarried women, the vast majority of whom will grow up in single-parent households, according to the CDC. Decades ago, single-parent households only made up a few percentage points of the population. This indicates that less responsible children are having more children, which is not a good thing. Raising children should ideally be a two-person job.
  • To clarify, this phenomena is caused by a mix of dysgenic and social factors. It’s still evidence of rising dysgenics though, since less responsible people have higher fertility rates.
  • We also don’t believe it matters whether people get married or not as long as there are guarantees that people will take care of their own children without relying on government welfare.
  • Furthermore, although marriage has decayed to only 60% among newborns, many of those marriages are likely to divorce eventually, so the problem is even worse that this statistic suggests.
• The Nature of Dysgenics in Modern Society - The Untangler.
• The Internet and other technologies have made it easier than ever for neurodivergent people to meet each other. Since neurodivergent people are more likely to date, marry, and have kids with each other, neurodivergent conditions and disorders are becoming more common among the general population.
• “The Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population in Geagua County in Ohio, but they’re half of the special needs cases” Source. These special needs cases are caused by the Founder Effect. The Amish are one of the fastest growing demographics in the world, so this problem will only get worse.
• Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion, and Islam increases the rate of incest in a country’s culture, which promotes dysgenics. See: Wikipedia: Consanguine Marriages.
• Sound Reasoning. The genome is not stable without positive selection. Even without dysgenic fertility or selection, the genome would gradually degrade by mutation. Random noise is always being added to the genome by mutation, and it must be removed to maintain the quality of the genome. What removes mutations? Selection, or in other words, differential reproduction. That selection can come from differential fertility or differential survival to adulthood.

It is a serious problem that the global IQ is falling because of dysgenic fertility. IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. It is just a measure of one’s ability to take IQ tests, and it can be improved with practice. However, it is a good proxy for a certain type of intelligence (abstract reasoning), and it is predictive of social and economic outcomes, such as income and criminality. With other factors taken into account (such as economic system and natural resources), IQ also predicts the outcomes of societies. Higher IQ people create societies that are better by a lot of standard metrics. Lower IQ people create societies that are worse by a lot of standard metrics.

Modern medicine and abundance bear dysgenic effects because on average, everyone of us is born with 60 or so new, random mutations. Most are situated in non-coding DNA and are neutral. Of the ones that are not, the vast majority are a net negative because they introduce random change in a very ordered, highly functional structure: the human body. In a world with high newborn and child mortality, this “genetic load” is kept at a low level by repeated trimming. In the modern world, however, with very little selective pressure, genetic load simply accumulates and progressively messes up every organ, including our brains. There is still trimming occurring because we can’t save the desperate cases, but the better we are at salvaging dysfunctional bodies, the higher the threshold at which genetic load will stabilize.

Taken as groups, Europeans, East Asians and some others are well adapted to complex, modern societies and have, in that sense, a very high genetic capital. However, the dysgenic effects apply to them too. In the absence of immigration it would simply take longer for them to degrade to the point of being unable to maintain modern civilization, because they have more “capital” to burn through.

To be clear, when I say that some groups are adapted to complex, modern societies, I mean that they are able to establish one and keep it running. Of course, in an evolutionary sense, their current birthrates indicate that they are (if anything) less adapted to the conditions of modern society than overall parasitic populations. “Parasitic” here means free-riding, in the sense that welfare props up their birthrates. – Felix, “Laissez-Faire Eugenics”

Read More:

• The Collapse Of Western IQ - Thuletide.
• Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 1.
• Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 2.

Read: Overpopulation FAQs: How is overpopulation a threat to humanity?

We have to distinguish between different proposals for population control. If population control is administered such that every couple can only have a fixed number of children (e.g. the One Child Policy in China), then it would have some eugenic effects since it would limit the proliferation of dysgenic genes, but it would also have dysgenic effects since it would limit the proliferation of eugenic genes.

The laissez-faire approach to eugenics proliferates eugenic genes while limiting the proliferation of dysgenics similarly to how it’s done in nature. When a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment (overpopulation), only the fittest organisms will be able to survive since they will outcompete the less fit organisms when obtaining resources. This is no longer happening in the modern world because modern medicine and technology have removed the historical selectionary pressures on the human genome, thus causing ecological overshoot and eventual overpopulation.

Our proposal for eugenic population control (EPC) has two components: 1. legal maximum population limit to give buffer room for avoid hitting the carrying capacity, and 2. reproduction licenses that place new selectionary pressures for increasing the eugenic quality of the human population. The reproduction licenses are necessary for enforcing the maximum population limit, and the licenses are enforced in such a way that the population control helps maintain the human genome. Hence why population control laissez-faire eugenics are compatible and complementary to each other.

Technology-based eugenics and reproduction licenses aren’t mutually exclusive. Artificial selection can potentially result in some untested outcomes.

Genetic engineering could affect human evolution to an extent. But even if it does, genetic engineering is still more expensive than natural reproduction, so it would be limited mostly to the educated middle/upper classes of society, who have lower fertility rates. Designer babies might never become the most common way of having kids, especially not among the poorer, less intelligent factions of society, who tend to have higher fertility rates. Genetic engineering won’t eliminate the need for some form of laissez-faire eugenics, because we cannot transcend evolution.

Some people believe that we can transcend evolution with genetic engineering. Instead of relying on natural selection to eliminate the disorder created by mutation, we can use engineering to remove mutations. This is a more sophisticated view. It does not take the order of the genome for granted. However, it is also naive. Genetic engineering does not transcend evolution.

First, genetic engineering does not eliminate selection. It just replaces natural with artificial selection. And artificial selection is always constrained by natural selection. Life forms have to extract potential energy from the environment to maintain their order. To maintain a functional population, artificial selection would have to mimic natural selection to some extent.

Second, it is impractical to identify and fix all mutations that occur in a population. Would we create all offspring in test-tubes from approved genes? Who would approve them? How would we know what variations might be adaptive without testing them?

Third, genetic engineering does not necessarily select for traits that are beneficial to society. If parents are selecting designer children, they would probably select for traits that we find attractive, such as beauty and intelligence. Those traits are not necessarily what society needs. A society needs people with different abilities, including different levels of intelligence. It doesn’t need every man to be tall and handsome, and every woman to be stunningly beautiful. Parental selection could become a zero-sum competition for social status, with no benefit to society.

Currently, genetic engineering is used to create new variants, not to maintain the order of an existing genome. Typically, it involves adding a new gene to create a new variant of an existing type. The new type is then tested extensively. If it has the desired properties, it is grown as a monoculture in a controlled environment. This is far removed from the ability to remove harmful mutations from an existing diverse population.

People often appeal to hypothetical technological solutions when a problem seems intractable within their moral framework. This is a way of ignoring the problem, not solving it. Technology is not a deus ex machina that can solve any problem.

– Blithering Genius, “We Cannot Transcend Evolution”

Genetic engineering could potentially reduce ongoing declines in intelligence, mutational load, and their negative effects.

NOTE: This section and all subsections are a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Having kids in the next 5 years might be a tragic mistake. Imagine having two kids a couple years apart. One is a super human and the other isn’t. “Sorry Jim, little Timmy won’t get cancer, only needs 4 hours of sleep, and you’re normal you were just born in the wrong order.”

While it may seem unfortunate for all the children who weren’t conceived via embryo editing, we also have to recall that they wouldn’t exist if their parents waited to have children until they were able to afford/do embryo editing.

Despite the potential downsides to genetic engineering, the positive potential benefits make GE likely to become a fairly widespread technology in the future.

It’s possible that genetic engineering may be able to reduce dysgenics and future declines in intelligence.

My main takeaway from the study is probably going to surprise most readers: future reductions in intelligence due to differential fertility for IQ are not going to be a major issue in the developed world. This is because the process is happening too slowly for it to have a significant effect; by 2123, the most concerning drop in the developing world is the US falling from an IQ of 97.5 to 93.7. Most European countries will have hardly budged by 2123, besides a few in the Balkans: Romania, Macedonia, and Albania are projected to drop from 87 to 80.5, 80 to 73.4, and 82.1 to 77.5 respectively. All of this of course assumes that whatever rates of differential fertility by IQ exist now will continue into future generations, which will be true to a greater or lesser extent depending on the country.

Besides the fact that the effect is weak within most developed nations, embryo selection for intelligence, and potentially other technologies, can attenuate secular decreases in intelligence, though I doubt the practice will be adopted by most of the general population. The average member of the public estimates their likelihood of using embryo selection to boost intelligence at 35%, with 30% morally opposed to the practice.16 Data from Pew Research (2018) suggests that favorability among the public may be even lower, with only 19% of Americans saying that selecting embryos for intelligence is an appropriate use of medical technology, while 80% think that it takes science too far. Embryo selection is also very expensive at the moment, with clinics requesting between $4,000 to $20,000 for the service, so some of the population will be priced out.17 Nonetheless, it is historically common for a practice to be rejected by the public at first and then have opinion towards it shift as its availability increases and its benefits become clear. Therefore, polls should be seen as reflecting a lower bound estimate for how many people might use a technology.

Assuming that 20% of Westerners in the future select their embryos for intelligence, half of those 20% only select for intelligence, and 20% of the causal variance in cognitive ability can be estimated with genes, then embryo selection will boost the average IQ of the population by approximately 0.73 points per generation (math done with gwern’s help). This is roughly equivalent to an increase of 0.24 IQ points per decade, which is enough for most developed countries to maintain their current levels of intelligence, assuming that the relationship between intelligence and fertility remains the same. Theoretically, genetic predictors should be able to explain up to 50% of the variance in intelligence, so this may be an underestimate of the impact of embryo selection.

Some commentators like Anatoly Karlin argue that concerns about national IQ will not be as relevant once strong artificial intelligence has been developed, as lots of white collar work will then be automatable. This is true, but there are other reasons why national IQ would continue to be useful in the future; barring rapid technological breakthroughs, manual labor will still need to be done by humans, and job performance and IQ correlate at about 0.4, even within categories like rifleman (r = .59) and military policeman (r = .46).18

– Sebastian Jensen, “Are We Getting Dumber?”

… If at some point even 20% of the population uses embryo selection, it would be more than enough to reverse the current trends that we are seeing. – Sebastian Jensen, “Are We Getting Dumber?”

This could be true, but there’s a few things that need to be said:

1. This will still depend on all the factors that were mentioned before this conclusion: the number of embryo selection users, what percentage of them decide to select for intelligence, causal variance in intelligence, etc.
2. The intelligence and IQ scores in the West will depend on the immigration, citizenship, deportation, and geopolitical policies of Western countries. If non-selective mass immigration from less intelligent populations continues at current rates, then I predict that polygenic embryo selection probably may be sufficient enough to reverse the decline in intelligence. Sebastian Jensen doesn’t mention anything about how immigration could affect intelligence and IQ scores in the West in his article.
3. Eugenics policies would or could probably have a much larger effect on a population’s average intelligence than embryo selection. We could even say that there is a societal obligation to mandate reproduction licenses.

The assumption that intelligence enhancement will be limited to embryo selection and other technologies is generally naive and ideological. There are many other ways to increase intelligence. “Just use embryo selection” and “Just use gene-editing” are the default humanist/transhumanist/futurist/tech bro reactions to the dysgenics and low-intelligence problem.

The problem with these naive reactions is that they abuse potential technological advancements as an excuse to dismiss ongoing fertility trends and patterns. Even if technological advances for increasing intelligence are likely to occur in the future, the positive effects of such technologies can still be greatly undermined by mass immigration, the higher fertility rates of low-IQ people, and the subsidization of irresponsible low-IQ people at the expense of responsible high-IQ people. Fertility rates will still always matter regarding the population’s intelligence. This is especially true, if embryo selection and gene-editing become accessible and affordable to most of the population.

Genetic engineering doesn’t offer the benefits of reproduction licenses. GE won’t prevent single parent households. GE won’t ensure that parents will take care of their children. GE won’t stabilize the dating market. GE may never be cheap enough to prevent dysgenics from accumulating on a wide scale.

Genetic engineering also won’t solve overpopulation, whereas reproduction licenses could. Instead of trying to circumvent the moral stigmas associated with eugenics and introducing an innumerous list of unforeseen consequences, it would just be better to institute the this proposed list of requirements for having children.

It is technically sustainable to just let people die if they can’t take care of themselves or their children, and this has been the condition that most humans have faced throughout humanity’s history. But this conflicts with most people’s modern moral intuitions. For that reason, this option will probably never be collectively chosen by the majority of people in society, unless Modernity collapses and Humanity reverts to pre-Industrial conditions.

While that might be true to an extent, it is inevitable that some parents are not going to take care of their kids, regardless of whether there is a welfare state or not.

Charity is not a long-term replacement for the welfare state either because life is selected to be intrinsically selfish, so charitable memes and genes will eventually die out since altruism is not self-sustaining.

The only long-term solution for getting rid of the welfare state will be to enforce EPC to select for productive and responsible genes and select against irresponsible genes, lest irresponsible people will die from being unable to support themselves and their children. If EPC were enforced today and the welfare state was eliminated overnight, there would probably be enough charity to support most former welfare-dependent people for a while for however long they live, before natural selection wipes out charitable behaviors.

That is true (for the United States at least), but we still stand by our position that giving welfare and especially child support to people of reproductive age is both biologically and financially unsustainable because it contributes to dysgenics.

Even then, welfare for elderly people should still be opposed because it is financially unsustainable and is not conducive towards a functioning long-term society. The current welfare system is a Ponzi Scheme. Some examples:

• The US Social Security Fund is predicted to be depleted in 2033.
• When Americans pay the social security tax, it doesn’t actually get invested towards social security. Instead, the government spends it right away to pay for other expenditures since the federal government’s deficit is so high.
• Raising the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 years old caused massive riots and protests in 2023.
• The Instability of the Russian Pension Fund makes the country likely to experience political instability in the future, especially given Russia’s declining birth rate and shrinking working class.

Additionally, privatizing the US’s Social Security program and other welfare programs for elderly people and retirees could offer much higher returns for elderly people.

That’s a foolish objection, and an Appeal to Nature Fallacy. What is the natural order of things? Until recently, most children died young. Now, with modern civilization (based on fossil fuels) we allow most children to live to adulthood. If eugenics violates the natural order, then so does modern civilization.

We could use eugenic population control to create a new “natural order” of sustainable prosperity. And why shouldn’t we? Nature will not strike us down for using eugenics. In fact, the opposite is true. Nature will eventually destroy our civilization if we don’t regulate our population eugenically. – Blithering Genius, Eugenostate versus Ethnostate

No. It’s no more authoritarian, totalitarian, or tyrannical than limiting the freedom to drive, limiting the freedom to kill other people, or forcing people to pay their taxes. Reproduction has serious consequences that can be harmful to others, so the imposition of social constraints on reproduction is justified for the same reason that social constraints on other behaviors are justified.

You could make the same argument about anything that a government does:

• Nobody can be trusted to control the police.
• Nobody can be trusted to run the military.
• Nobody can be trusted to collect taxes.
• Et Cetera.

Anybody who oppose eugenics on the belief that “nobody can be trusted” might as well embrace anarchism, which is doomed to fail. It’s clearly not a rational argument against eugenics.

Also, licenses are already required to adopt children because the public wants to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it’s logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).

Moreover, higher population densities necessarily lead to more constraints on individual freedom, so population control could make a society less authoritarian by causing fewer conflicts.

There are plenty of reasons why eugenic population control would protect human rights, not violate them. To clarify, we’re not proposing that it should be impossible for some people to have children based on predetermined factors. We’re just proposing that there should be reasonable limits on how many children people should be allowed to have. Nowadays, most children live to adulthood, so it’s not as necessary as it was historically to have as large families anyway. Voluntarily low fertility is not a feasible solution for preventing overpopulation.

1. Population control would prevent billions of deaths that would otherwise be caused by the consequences of overpopulation.
2. A child that cannot be supported by its parents is either a burden on the rest of society (which harms other members of society), or it will be harmed by neglect. Uncontrolled reproduction inflicts harm on others, so there is a clear ethical basis for socially controlling reproduction.
   Instead of asking why parents should be required to have a license to have children, we should be asking why it should be legal for biological parents to have children if it’s not guaranteed that they will take care of them, especially when single-parent households have been rising at unprecedented levels. Such behavior is extremely irresponsible, and it’s equally irresponsible for society to just let that happen without consequences.
3. Licenses are already required to adopt children in order to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it is logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).
4. EPC would select against any genetic causes of criminal behavior, thus offering further protection of human rights by significantly reducing crimes against innocent people.
5. It’s often harmful and distressing for people who were born with debilitating genetic disorders to have to live with them. Many would say that it is a grave injustice to be born with such disorders. Eugenics would discourage or prevent such misfortunes.
6. Rights are whatever people decide they are, and circumstances can cause peoples’ opinions to change on what rights should be, so the only legitimate rights are legal rights, whereas moral rights are nonsense since morality depends on perspective. Any proposed set of rights should be designed so that rights don’t contradict each other, and ideally all the rights proposed would protect and reinforce each other. People may argue that population control violates people’s autonomy, but since the benefit is that it will confer more protection to all other rights via all the ways we’ve just explained, the benefits outweigh the costs and it’s thus a reasonable change to make.

Lastly, it’s important to emphasize that what’s at stake here is whether modern technological society thrives or permanently collapses forever. When a population reaches its carrying capacity, widespread death become inevitable. For anybody who a thriving prosperous future for humanity, what could be more important than maintaining that for humanity’s future? If Industrial Society does collapse, there’s a strong possibility that it will never recover and that the world will be eternally stuck living an 18th-century lifestyle.

This a Guilt by Association Fallacy. Just because eugenics was used to partially justify killing, segregation, and genocide in the past, that doesn’t mean that it has to be associated with any of those things in the future.

Moreover, most of those things that you mentioned were motivated by racism, not eugenics. Those are two completely different things.

In the 2004 democratic transhumanist book Citizen Cyborg, bioethicist James Hughes criticized the premise and influence of the film Gattaca as fear-mongering, arguing:

1. Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons.
2. In the United States, people are already screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes.
3. Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should develop genetic information privacy laws such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act signed into law on May 21, 2008 that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Citizens should then be able to make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have been discriminated against because of their genotype.

The text above was copied from the Gattaca Wikipedia Article, under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

More to the point, most people underestimate how much social status is determined by genetics. Humans have essentially lived under social caste-based societies with low, stable social mobility for nearly all of human history. We already live in a world where intelligence, fitness, social status, socio-economic mobility, etc are all mainly determined by inheritance. Hence, there is no reason to fear or believe that accepting eugenics and race realism would lead to a Gattaca-like world that’s much different from the one that we currently live in.

Read More:

• Gregory Clark’s Body of Research.
• Manifold Podcast Episode: Genetics and Social Mobility - Gregory Clark.
• Social Mobility Hasn’t Really Changed In 400 Years - Gregory Clark.
• The Grandchildren Of China’s Pre-Revolutionary Elite Are Unusually Rich - The Economist.
• The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago - The Wallstreet Journal.

The association with Nazism is the main reason why the Eugenics movement declined in popularity during the 20th century. Pointing out the support for eugenics among Nazis as an argument against Eugenics is an Association Fallacy. Nevertheless, Eugenics ≠ Nazism. To the contrary, the Nazis failed to implement eugenics on a rational, scientific basis. In some cases they even promoted dysgenics:

1. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, and other “Aryan” characteristics cause higher intelligence. Intelligence is affected by mental characteristics, not physical ones.
2. The Nazis murdered millions of people from one of the most influential and productive ethnic groups in history relative to its size: the Jews. Given the Ashkenazi Jews’ strong historical record of making scientific accomplishments and contributing to human progress, killing millions of them is the opposite of eugenics. Positive eugenics is supposed to increase the reproduction of people who are more intelligent, physically-fit, etc than the average human, but that’s the opposite of what the Nazis did.
3. The Nazis’ conception of “eugenics” was dirigiste, not laissez-faire. Top-down eugenics causes just as many problems as it solves, so it’s actually as dysgenic as it is eugenic. Our approach to eugenics would not prevent physically disabled, mentally disabled, diseased, etc from reproducing as long as they satisfy the list of requirements. Not only is our approach guaranteed to work better, but it’s also more liberal.

The Nazis used racism, propaganda, and pseudo-science as a justification for mass murder during the Holocaust. What we are advocating for is real eugenics under a laissez-faire approach, i.e. policies that are backed by reasoning, scientific evidence, and non-partisanship. We would like to strongly emphasize to the fullest extent possible that racism is not eugenics.

As an aside, the Nazis frankly weren’t any more “evil” than the Allied Powers were. Both sides committed crimes against humanity.

See: What are Ethnostates, and how practical are they? - Philosophy of Race FAQs.

In theory, an ethnostate can also be a eugenostate, as long as it enforces eugenic policies. There are multiple definitions for “ethnostate”. If the ethnostate promotes racial homogeneity, then it will be harder to achieve the requisites of a eugenostate since it would have to accomplish two potentially conflicting goals at once. But if the ethnostate only promotes the interests of its most dominant ethnic group, this likely wouldn’t harm its objectives for enforcing eugenics. In order for an ethnostate to qualify as a eugenostate, it must enforce eugenic reproductive control.

An advantage to ethnostates is that they are more likely to have cultural traditions that are unlikely to change over time due to adaptive coherence, since it would exclude ethnicities that have different genes that could affect the memetic and cultural traditions of the society. This could increase the society’s stability. By contrast, if an ethnically homogenous state like Japan was no longer an ethnostate and it has mass foreign immigration, then the culture would change. This would make the country’s future less stable and more unpredictable.

Ethnostates could pass laws prohibiting race-mixing. Race-mixing isn’t necessarily dysgenic, and whether it is considered eugenic or dysgenic can only be compared with an existing population genepool. For example, in a country where whites tend to have average IQ scores of ~100, if the Europeans were to race-mix with any other race besides Ashkenazi Jews or East Asians (which have average IQs estimated to be ~108 and ~106 respectively), the average IQ of the resulting children would be lower than 100. If the country desires to maintain a high IQ, it would do them well to prevent the population from race-mixing with races that have lower IQs, except in the case of statistical outliers. Eternal Anglo has an interactive map and post that arguably shows where countries should source their immigrants, based on IQ.

Depending on the goals, it could be reasonable to oppose race-mixing when it lowers intelligence (and other associated, well-correlated factors like delayed gratification, personal responsibility, lower crime rates, etc) and biological fitness. Since IQ (a proxy for measuring intelligence) tends to be approximately normally distributed in populations, and since the greatest intellectual and technological ideas tend to be produced by the far right side of the distributions, race mixing two populations with different intelligence will have a strong negative impact on what geniuses or great people can be produced by the population. For example, the race-mixing between Europeans and American Indians in the New World, which resulted in the ethnogenesis of mestizos. The average IQ of the mestizos is between the Amerindians and Europeans. Latin America’s average IQ is lower than Europe’s average IQ, and this helps explain why those societies failed to create many inventions or notable ideas.

However, if the races being mixed have similar intelligence and won’t result in much decreased biological fitness, then it’s not worth prohibiting it. In a multiracial society, there may not be much benefit to preserving distinctive races as long as the population has eugenic qualities, and since race mixing is inevitable to some extent.

In conclusion, ethnostates could help improve eugenics, prevent dysgenics, and increase societal stability, provided that they prioritize eugenic reproductive control and aren’t obsessed with maintaining racial homogeneity to the detriment of their populations’ eugenic quality. Whether it’s feasible to create them or not is a different question that depends on the circumstances.

Nevertheless, ethnostates are not necessary for implementing eugenics. They are completely optional. There are also good arguments that ethnostates could interfere with implementing eugenics. Since it’s not always possible to create ethnostates, some eugenostates will never have ethnostate policies. Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for implementing eugenics.

See: Why would underperforming demographics benefit from accepting biological realism? - Race FAQs.

First, we do not advocate that some race(s) be given greater legal privileges than other races. We believe that all people from any race should be entitled to the same legal rights as anyone else. We advocate for a eugenostate that would treat all races equally under the law, but there would be competition regarding who is authorized to reproduce who is forbidden. It is likely that some races (i.e. Europeans and East Asians) would be more reproductively successful than others under a eugenostate since some races have higher intelligence and greater economic productivity (on average), and are thus better adapted to modernity than others. However, this does not mean that Asians and Europeans would always be better than all the other races in all situations. If the eugenostate that we support did exist, it could not forbid anybody who meets all of the listed requirements from having children, regardless of what their race is. Eugenostates value equal opportunities, not equality of outcomes.

If anything, acknowledging this is actually a good argument for eugenics. If some races aren’t as intelligent or successful as other races, then eugenics could put the less intelligent races on (more) equal footing as other races. The most intelligent races became intelligent in the first place due to natural selection, and the same would have to happen to less intelligent races in order for their intelligence to increase. Eugenics is the best (and only) way to truly eliminate the achievement gaps and discrimination between races within merit-based social systems, once and for all.

Our theory of how intelligence evolved differently in different human races is that intelligence depended mainly on the level of civilizational complexity. That is, higher intelligence tends to be selected by higher levels of civilization (and vice versa, except for modernity). 2000 years ago, Germanic people were barbarian iron age farmers. Nowadays, they have some of the most intelligent and technologically advanced countries today. Many societies in precolonial Africa had similar levels of civilization as well as noticeably lower intelligence, most likely because their civilization hadn’t advanced enough to select for comparably high intelligence. We see no reason to believe that intelligence can’t be selected for in Sub-Saharan Africans (or any race), similarly to how it was done for Jews, Europeans, and East Asians over a couple of millennia. It should be theoretically possible to create high populations of Sub-Saharan Africans with comparable intelligence to Europeans, if the selectionary pressure for intelligence and population growth are both strong enough after 10 generations or so (give or take).

It would raise the average fertility rates of white people (and also Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians), and other people with productive and child-bearing genes.

Immigration policies are equally important for creating eugenostates, so tightening immigration into Western Countries would help prevent the Great Replacement. We already have limited resources, so there is no reason to allow more than a trickle of useful immigrants into the West.

We also propose these ideas for raising Western fertility rates as well.

Read More: Philosophy of Race FAQs.

Like many things, it is impossible to directly measure intelligence, so indirect measurements of intelligence (like IQ) are the next best information that we can collect and analyze. Nevertheless, there are multiple problems with using IQ as a standard for eugenics:

• IQ is not a stable metric. It can vary across lifetimes and across historical periods.
• IQ can be affected by environmental factors, such as the causes of the Flynn Effect.
• IQ is susceptible to Regression to the Mean.
• IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence.
• IQ is susceptible to Goodhart’s Law.
• IQ doesn’t measure other mental characteristics, like emotionally stability.
• IQ doesn’t measure physical fitness.
• Selecting for IQ might make the population more intelligent, but it wouldn’t select for the ability to rear children, especially since smarter people tend to have fewer kids. There are many tradeoffs between IQ and other factors that improve fitness.
• A society needs people with different abilities, including different levels of intelligence.

Additionally, all the general problems with dirigiste eugenics apply here as well. Auctioning off the right to reproduction licenses would indirectly select for intelligence, but also many other traits.

Read More: Understanding g-Factors.

It’s not reasonable to directly select for aesthetics. Eugenics is about pro-social selection, not about selecting for certain traits, such as beauty or intelligence. Since beauty is an idealistic concept, it’s partially defined by what’s not beautiful. Hence, beauty is a zero-sum game because it mostly devolves into a competition between individuals, rather than pro-social cooperation. Beauty also isn’t a quality that society needs to function.

It’s also difficult to measure aesthetics. Not everyone can agree on the best aesthetics, although it is intersubjective to a great extent. Since bad aesthetics tend to positively correlate with undesirable traits, eugenics would indirectly select for better aesthetics that most (or nearly everybody) would favor.

As the reproduction tax gets higher and higher, the competition to have healthy biologically fit children will increase in the population. This would increase the selectionary pressure for people to be productive, because more productive people would have be more able to pay the reproduction tax.

The psychological need to go through the Power Process strongly incentivizes many people (myself included) to not steal things that we desire or cheat/slack off on the job in life. The eugenic selection of people who have this strong psychological need would naturally reduce crime rates and improve the progress society is capable of.

A merit-based society is the best way to separate genetic factors from environmental ones. Societies won’t always be as meritocratic as we’d like them to be, but we should strive for them nonetheless. Some good first steps would be to enact economic reform, eliminate all forms of rent-seeking, reduce corruption and enact political reform.

Read More: Meritocracy, Genetics, and Social Mobility - Brittonic Memetics.

It depends on what kind of genetic diversity we’re talking about. Laissez-faire eugenics would decrease the frequency of genes that cause people to be dumber, more violent, less productive, etc, but that’s exactly what we want. There’s no downsides to removing those genes from the gene pool.

The goal of (laissez-faire) eugenics isn’t to increase or decrease genetic diversity, generally speaking. But it could potentially increase genetic diversity of some rare, desirable genes. For instance, a eugenics policy could alter the proportions to which certain genes and alleles exist within the population, not to completely eliminate one gene in favor of another. If two hypothetical genes A and B exist in a population at percentages 80% and 20% respectively, eugenics could be to cause those genes to exist at 50% each, since we’re proposing a policy that isn’t biased towards against any useful traits.

As a more specific example, most humans have trichromatic vision, whereas tetrachromatic vision exists in very few humans, perhaps only women exclusively. If a eugenics policy directly or indirectly increased the percentage of people with tetrachromatic vision in the population (without necessarily depleting the population of genes for trichromatic vision), then this would be another example of eugenics leading to an increase in genetic diversity, perhaps even a favorable one.

Alternatively, a eugenics policy might aim to modify the genetic composition to be more uneven, like modifying genes A and B to exist from 50% each to be percentage ratios like 70/30, 80/20, or even 90/10, but not to 100/0% where one of the genes would be completely eliminated from the population.

Then they shouldn’t have children, but there should be no controversy on this. These requirements are very easy for people to meet. Any responsible person who is serious about having children could meet the requirements if they put in the effort to meet them. Anybody who’s going to have children ought to prove that they will be able to take care of them. If we want humanity to have a sustainable, comfortable, and humane future, then we have to enforce these requirements.

Reproduction license requirements have to be enforced on everyone because overpopulation is a free-rider problem. The only way to resolve a free-rider problem is to exert force on everyone.

Furthermore, it’s already socially acceptable for everybody to meet a similar set of requirements for adopting children, so it’s illogical for society to not have similar requirements for people who want to have biological children.

Eugenics requires selection by definition, so if a society has no way of guaranteeing selection in favor of desirable traits, it’s not a eugenostate. The requirements proposed here are already as minimal as possible, so it’s unlikely that a eugenostate could arise by proposing anything less than that. Top-down eugenics would fail.

Sorting people into different groups in a single generation isn’t enough to maintain modern civilization. Selection must occur in every generation. To exist in the long run, a society must select for the genes that make that society possible. In other words, those who make a positive contribution to society should have more surviving offspring than those who make a negative contribution.

There are both good and bad consequences for requiring prospective parents to get DNA testings. Some may argue that anything that gets measured is also bound to be controlled by the government.

On the other hand, it’s anti-knowledge and anti-truth to not collect any statistics at all. Refusing to collect statistics about X is equivalent to choosing to be deliberately ignorant about X. We would never have the statistical evidence for deciding the truth about race realism (one way or the other) if it was forbidden to collect statistics on how different races and immigrants perform regarding education, crime rates, income levels, etc. Deliberately not collecting statistics deliberately limits our knowledge of reality. Ergo, there are many benefits to DNA testing.

Fortunately, most prohibitions on people breeding due to genetic reasons will be largely unnecessary, except for trivial things like preventing incest.

Side Note For Generations In The Distant Future
Modern medicine and technology enable genetic diseases to accumulate and persist in the population without being selected out (e.g. cystic fibrosis). After many generations of breeding (hundreds of years at least), these genetic diseases could eventually become a problem since the requirements don’t apply any selectionary pressures for removing those genetic diseases. If the dysgenics grows so much to the point where it becomes a huge cost to society, the requirements could be amended to take this into account. But if it’s cheap to fix the disease, then it’s not really a problem. It’s all about whether amending the requirement would make a positive net contribution to society or not.

If such an amendment ever had to be made to the reproduction license requirements, everybody who’s alive today would probably be dead by then. Once again, it would take at least hundred of years before something like this could ever become a problem, so this is not a restriction that would concern anybody who lives during the first several generations of the eugenostate’s existence. A few generations after the first implementation, the pricing of reproduction licenses could eventually take predicted health, lifespan, and longevity into account as well. A human being is an expensive machine to create, and the longer it lasts, the more those costs are amortized over a productive lifespan.

If a meteor was heading towards Earth, would you argue that we shouldn’t destroy or redirect it, merely because it would be “too difficult” to try that? If it is absolutely necessary to enforce population control in order to prevent unprecedented apocalyptic scenarios, then any argument that population control will be too difficult or morally objectionable to enforce does not constitute a valid refutation against population control. The proposed methods for implementing population control on this FAQs page may be undesirable for many people, but we have proposed them nonetheless because we strongly believe that they are less undesirable than the alternative.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation. If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

But to answer the question: No. Population control would be easier than enforcing many current laws, including traffic regulations and the law against murder. Laws against murder can be difficult to enforce because it is difficult to identify the murderers, so some murders go unsolved. No one uses this as an argument that murder should be legal. By contrast, it’s much easier to identify people who have unlicensed children than it is to identify murderers. It’s very difficult to conceal a living, breathing child. They will be found eventually. It’s pretty pointless for parents to have children if they’re just going to hide their children in a dark room away from the outside world for their entire lives.

Furthermore, there’s already historical evidence that it’s perfectly possible to enforce population control. China managed to enforce population control from 1979 to 2021, except that it was unnecessarily authoritarian and it had a combination of eugenic and dysgenic effects, rather than purely eugenic effects. If China was able to enforce population control, there’s no reason why eugenic population control can’t be enforced around the world in general, especially if it’s done with comparatively far less authoritarian measures and a worldview that is better informed of population dynamics and evolutionary biology.

Additionally, the eugenics system doesn’t need to work in every single case, just on average (although we would do everything possible to increase its efficiency). It doesn’t matter that some hypothetical person finds a way to abuse a given system, as long as it isn’t a systematic problem. For instance, you can have a few or even most murderers who get away with it without making “being a murderer” into a viable strategy, as long as it is less adaptive than the alternative it will not be selected for.

The known consequences of not enforcing population control are global civilizational collapse, billions of deaths, and a permanent Dark Age. Unless anyone is actually insane enough to be in favor of this apocalyptic scenario, then the ends do justify the means.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation (and dysgenics). If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

Life is intrinsically violent. Force is built into the nature of life, and the only way to escape violence within a society is to impose the threat of violence if the laws are not followed. In this case, we can either choose between violence in the form of famine and war caused by unregulated overpopulation, or the more peaceful and sustainable option of enforcing population control laws. We might as well apply force on society in a controlled way that eventually leads to less violence over time, as genes that cause higher crime rates are removed from the gene pool via this proposed selectionary process.

There are also plenty of reasons why population control protects more human rights than it violates.

The proposed requirements require couples to sign a child-bearing agreement together with one of them being employed in a full-time job. This would likely have the following effects:

• Marriage rates would increase and happen at earlier ages, which would reverse the current trend where more and more children have been born to parents out of wedlock in recent decades. This would instantly eliminate single-parent households, thus resulting in a society with much more desirable family structure and greater social stability.
• While we favor monogamous marriages, we don’t necessarily want to require this because we value individual freedom, and our primary concern is that legal responsibilities are imposed on the parents. This would leave it entirely up to individuals to decide how to arrange their love lives, and it would only regulate reproduction.
• Population control would redefine the role of women in society, compared to what it has been traditionally (raising children and housekeeping). Since women would raise fewer children on average, they would spend more time doing other things, like working paid jobs in the economy.
• Having children would become higher status among both men and women, since population control would make it harder to have children. In modern society, having children has become lower status since it’s become more socially acceptable for people to not have children. Enforcing population control would reverse that trend since people, especially men, are socially driven to pursue higher status.
  • When people see other people with lots of children, people will learn to associate having lots of children with higher social status, as things should be. This is a good thing because this reduces the alienation from our natural biological instincts that has been caused by modern technology and it also keeps us more in sync with our biological purpose.
• The sexual market would balance out. Since it would be illegal to have children without another parent who is legally contracted to help raise the child, there would be no more single mothers, who are undesirable for men to date for a number of reasons. This would increase the number of women for men to date.
• Women wouldn’t be liberated from men anymore. By contrast, the modern welfare state and culture of modernity have liberated women from men (i.e. women no longer need men to help them raise their children when they can depend on welfare instead).

The parents don’t have to be married necessarily, but they do have to sign a contractual child-bearing agreement together with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves. As long as they satisfy the contract, they can do whatever they want with romantic / sex lives.

Of course, if someone wants to raise someone else’s child, there would certainly be a legal procedure for arranging that and assigning them the responsibilities for the child’s care instead.

The Historical Functions and Benefits of Marriage
This is a list of the historical functions of marriage in human societies.

• It protected women and children from being abandoned.
• It protected men from being cucked.
• It protected society from having to care for fatherless children.
• It promoted male investment in family and society.
• It reduced violent competition over women.
• It promoted male productivity.
• It reduced sexually transmitted diseases.
• It created a balanced sexual market.
• It solved the problem of consent.

– Blithering Genius, The End of Marriage

If the would-be parents want to have kids, then they just need to sign the child-bearing contract, submit it to the government, and they’ll be granted a license if they meet the requirements. None of the ceremonial traditions of marriage are necessary as long as the legal contracts guarantee that the parents will raise the child together.

Main Article: Georgism And Population Control

• It’s necessary to enforce population control. The reproduction tax rates are determined by supply and demand, with the supply being fixed. This ensures that only a finite number of people will have children.
• It is the fairest and least authoritarian way to determine who can have children and who cannot.
• It has positive eugenic effects on the population, since the most productive members of society would be able to afford the most reproduction licenses, assuming that the society completely eliminates rent-seeking.
• It eliminates the need to directly prohibit people from breeding due to genetic reasons, and it would essentially be a modern-day replacement to the pre-industrial competition in nature that selected for fitness in organisms (humans in this case).

Side Note: If people only have to pay the reproduction tax just once, then it’d be better to call it a reproduction license fee (like a driver’s license fee), instead of a reproduction tax. Taxing only once per child is probably the best way to go about that, but it’s probably also not the only way that it could be done. “Tax” is more general than “fee”, so I think that’s why it was chosen for these FAQs, since there’s multiple options for creating a reproduction tax.

Requiring a level of income for applying for reproduction licenses is a secondary way to limit the number of people who have children, gradually increasing the eugenic quality of the next generations of humans (assuming that people with higher-incomes are more likely to have good genes). The main benefit to requiring a certain level of income for each child is that it would ensure every pair of parents has a sufficient amount of wealth to raise their children in comfort. However, we theorize that this may face more complications, compared to what we’ve proposed:

• Since it’s possible for people to have more than one child, it would be necessary for the government to set different income brackets regarding how many reproduction licenses each parent could have. I suspect that this would be more prone to corruption, analogous to price-fixing.
• It would require calculating cut-offs based on who’s applied for reproduction licenses, the current available supply of licenses, the incomes of the people who have applied, and how many reproduction licenses each parent already has. By contrast, it’s much simpler to set a fixed price for each license according to its supply and demand.
• Pricing reproduction licenses according to supply and demand probably makes it easier to adjust for preventing population booms and population collapses since it requires simpler calculations.
• Setting the price of licenses according to supply and demand utilizes free-market principles, which tend to work more effectively.
• It seems less “unfair” to control the cost of licenses according to supply and demand, compared to saying “only these people with X income” may be granted a license this year.

Georgism and Population Control both aim to conserve natural resources that exist in fixed supply. As a result, the two both compliment each other extremely well, and not by coincidence if we expand the notion of “natural resources” to also include the finite supply of organisms that can theoretically exist within a finite environment. Since life is a zero-sum competition game for energy when a population reaches its carrying capacity, anybody who has children in such an environment would be doing so at the cost of preventing other people to have children as well. This is similar to how anybody who occupies a parcel of land prevents other people from using that parcel.

TL;DR: Georgism implies Population Control, which implies Eugenics.

If EPC is enforced in a country, and the supply of reproduction licenses (the number of babies that can be born that year) is higher than the number of applicants for reproduction licenses, then there would be no tax on reproduction. In this case, the society and government want to raise the birth rates of the country, so it makes sense to not tax reproduction licenses. This is akin to how there’s no need to tax land or natural resources if there’s enough resources for everybody. There’s no tragedy of the commons if there’s plenty of resources and reproduction licenses for everyone.

If the developed world transitioned to Georgism this proposed EPC scheme, Georgism would increase the carrying capacity and the supply of reproduction licenses of the West. The West currently has below replacement fertility and a declining population, and since the supply of reproduction licenses would be higher than the demand, there would be no taxes on reproduction. Reproduction probably wouldn’t be taxed for at least a few decades, until there are more people applying for reproduction licenses than the legal supply of reproduction licenses, whatever year that starts to happen.

If there is no reproduction tax, then there is only negative eugenics. Positive eugenics doesn’t occur until the reproduction tax is applied, and it starts to increase.

Related Reading: Ideas For Boosting Western Fertility

This depends on the child’s cause of death. If the criteria are met, the parents can get a refund on the Reproduction Tax that they paid for the year that the child was conceived. If the parents are still eligible, they may have another child using the reproduction license that authorized the deceased child’s birth.

This depends on the parent’s cause of death. If a parent(s) dies while their children are still minors, then it’s debatable whether the government should provide welfare and/or orphanage support to help raise their children. If the parent(s) died due to environmental causes or causes that are unrelated to their lifestyle choices, then there’s a better (eugenic) case for the government providing welfare to their children.

For accidental or unintentional causes of death, anybody who kills a parent will be legally liable to pay child support for all of that parent’s child’s expenses until the children become legal adults or 18 years old. This includes drunk drivers and people who text while driving, if they accidentally kill a parent.