I just saw a reference to Kornbluth’s story, The Marching Morons, and I’m also working up a talk on the perils of excessive adaptationism, and together they motived me to repost this article from Scienceblogs. It’s always bugged me: it’s saturated with the unthinking assumption that human diversity is hardwired and fixed, and built on a racially invariant biological foundation. And it largely went unquestioned by science fiction fans.
I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he’s arguing that it’s worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me.
The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is “The Marching Morons,” by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth.
The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In “The Marching Morons” he carries that idea to its extreme, but logical, conclusion.
Kornbluth tells of a future world that is overrun with dummies: men and women who don’t know anything beyond their own shallow personal interests. They don’t know how their society works, or who is running it. All they care about is their personal — and immediate — gratification.
I detest “The Marching Morons.”
Bova gives an accurate summary; it’s also the primary plot point of the movie Idiocracy. It’s also the premise behind eugenics and behind a lot of right-wing phony elitism. It’s wrong. It was a very popular story, but the reason isn’t complimentary: it fed into a strain of self-serving smugness in science-fiction fandom, the idea that people who read SF are special and brilliant and superior, we are the technological geniuses and far-seeing futurists, while the mundanes leech off our vision. The eugenics movement built on the same us-vs.-them mentality, that there are superiors and inferiors, and the inferiors breed like cockroaches.
The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it’s intrinsic. “They” are lesser beings than “us” because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It’s the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like “three generations of imbeciles are enough“—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.
People, they are us.
There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won’t have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it’s hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn’t despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.
Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they’re breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.
Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.
That’s where the Kornbluth story fails. It assumes the morons are unchangeably moronic, and treats the elite as unchangeably special. The only solution to their problem is to get rid of the morons, launching them into space to die. Bova’s editorial, while not as cynically eliminationist, still pretends that the only answer is perpetuation of a distinction that doesn’t exist biologically.
Here’s the real solution to the “marching moron” problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren’t willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won’t if we assume the mob is hopeless.
I have to confess to taking these kinds of stories personally. My family was probably what would be called the working poor nowadays, when I was growing up I was called white trash more than a few times, and yes, I come from a large family. My parents did not have the educational opportunities I did, but they were smart and self-taught and made sensible, practical choices in their life, and they cared to give all of their kids a chance. I can testify from personal experience that if there’s a problem, it’s not in ability — it’s in a culture that dismisses broad swathes of the population because of who their families are, or how much money they make, and perpetuates inequities of opportunity on the basis of bigotry and classism.
I knew this article would bring out the pseudoscientific advocates of facile genetics, and there they are, already babbling away in the comments.
I know there are constraints on intelligence; there is individual variation in capacity, and there are almost certainly some biological bases for that, and also for differences in the kind of intelligence individuals express. This isn’t about that. It’s about whether there are significant differences in the distribution of the genetic constraints on human intelligence between subpopulations, and whether we are justified in writing off segments of our population as incurable morons whose progeny are similarly tainted. I say no to both.
You’d be hard-pressed to argue that the diverse groups marked by ethnic and class distinctions in the U.S. even count as distinct populations in any biological sense. There are social barriers to breeding, but they are sufficiently porous that over the course of time needed to set up genetic differences that matter, they’re negligible.
The other premise of the marching morons scenario, that the underclass would sink deeper and deeper into stupidity, is completely absurd. There aren’t any human subcultures that don’t value problem-solving and cleverness, where apathy and dull-wittedness are desirable traits in a mate (again, there are individuals who are contrary, but we’re talking about populations here.) Growing up, I experienced that social pressure that makes getting good grades in school a problem for fitting in with a certain peer group — but that isn’t about despising intelligence, it’s about conforming to the trappings of your group and not adopting the markers of another class, especially when that class has a habit of treating you like dirt and talking abstractly about how to expunge you, your family, and your friends from the gene pool.
And no, eating brie, going to Harvard, and reading the Wall Street Journal are not indicators of ability — they are properties of class. Drinking beer, learning a trade, and reading Sports Illustrated doesn’t mean you’re dumber, or that there are genes driving your choices — it means you are the product of a particular environment. Yet we all practice this fallacy of judging someone’s intelligence by how they dress or their entertainment preferences, and society as a whole indulges in the self-fulfilling prophecy of doling out educational opportunities on the basis of economic status.
There are mobs of stupid people out there. Sterilizing them or shipping them off to Venus won’t change a thing, though, no matter how effective your elimination procedures are, because you’ll just breed more from the remaining elite stock. Similarly, lining up the elites against the wall won’t change the overall potential of the population — new elites will arise from the common stock. The answer is always going to be education and opportunity and mobility. That’s what’s galling about Kornbluth’s story, that it is so one-dimensional, and the proposed solution is a non-solution.
By the way, I also despise the movie Idiocracy.
It’s also a story which seems to overstate the link between intellectual/academic ability and most other things of human value. The ‘dumb bells’ are made to appear inherently passive and morally and socially bankrupt, besides being, say, challenged when it comes to processing complex information quickly. It’s an idea you see reflected in a few crude meritocratic ideals but I don’t think it has any basis in reality. You might as well argue that being a fast runner makes someone a better human being in other respects.
Sort of related, maybe? I recently had a quarrel with someone who posted this imagetext to facebook. It’s a litany of “oh how much better things were years ago, people are so sensitive and regulations are out of control nowadays” that’s often deployed by the Right. Notice that in almost every case, the villain is some regulatory entity, sending the message that government has too much influence in our lives, a convenient and deliberate propaganda. The very first parable is basically saying we should have kids bringing fucking guns to school. Notice there are no in-between measures possible.
They said “you really think things are better now than they were then?” I said – “You bet your ass I do, and that’s not even a matter of opinion.” Take any measure of health, education, accidents, crime, and they’re all better than they were in 1970.
These people, in my experience, seem to be the same types who fall for the Kornbluth eliminationist crap. Not than I’m saying they should all be shipped to Venus, though…
Re @1 – I would actually go further and say that if the so-called intellectual elites have fewer children than other groups, it’s because they in a position of social and economic privilege which allows them to control their reproduction. And one of the reasons why they have those privileges is that we’ve managed to build a system which perfectly unselfconsciously justifies greater rewards and status for intellectual work versus other forms of labor – no matter how rare the ability to do that other labor well, or the necessity of getting it done. And this, we call a meritocracy…
A friend pointed out how much basic math and research you need to be able to do to survive on a tight budget. You need to know, for instance, which brand of milk is cheaper, and if it’s worth it to drive across town to get a discount from a different store, and can you afford to buy in bulk or not (and can you store it if you did, and can you eat it all before it goes bad). You need to know exactly what the food in your grocery cart is worth before you get to the checkstand, and that includes what items are taxed and what you can buy with foodstamps and what you can’t.
We want to believe that poor people somehow earned their fate by being stupid, and that genetically speaking, even the ones born into poverty couldn’t advance out of it. But that’s just not true: if anything, it’s easier to be less skilled when you know you can afford to make mistakes.
I think that this sort of thinking also is used to defend against having a strong social safety net. If we want ‘smarter’ (and I have issues with that term) humans, lets provide better everything! Not take it all away. I think the right wing, in a way, by corrupting the public school systems with creationism and removing access to reproductive health care/sex education is trying to create a class of people who are less able to ascend out of poverty and are more content to work shitty low wage jobs with no benefits. I think it is by design (heh. see what I did there?).
A few years ago I was a member of the local university gym which at the time was open to the public. After working out I would sweat in the sauna, sometimes with others of my (middle) age. We had marvellous conversations about science, literature, whatever was in the news. After a few weeks of this one of the men turned to me and said
“I haven’t seen you about the campus. What do you teach?”
“I’m not a professor, I’m a retired auto worker.”
He stared at me for a few seconds then turned away. From that moment on none of them would talk to me nor would they respond to anything I said. It’s really more of a tribal thing. Us against them.
A minor quibble. The premise of Idiocracy wasn’t so much that the idiots had more kids leading to an idiot nation, it was more that the culture deteriorated because of anti-intellectualism, reality tv, commercialism, etc. There was some brief comment in the beginning throwing a “disgenic” component in there, but that wasn’t the main thrust of the movie. The end effect shown is the same, passive idiot tv watchers that have no education or ambition, but the statement isn’t overtly genetic.
kevinalexander:
That is so shitty. I’m sorry you experienced that. I’ve found, more often than not, that if you approach a conversation with an open mind almost anyone will have something interesting to say, even if they are not an ‘interesting’ seeming person. In the US especially, Not Having A Degree does not equal Not Intelligent.
Man, that’s laughable. I especially like scenario 3, where we give an overactive kid aphetamines and they “become a zombie”. I’ve never managed to get an ADD-denier to explain why we give over-active kidsstimulants and expect them to become passive. (And, having known people with ADD, I could always tell when they hadn’t taken their meds because they couldn’t focus on a topic for more than a few minutes. When they were on their meds they were as active and capable as anyone else, and not at all zombie-like)
I’ll agree with them on #5, though. Zero-tolerance policies should die.
Fundamentalism.
Ben, the Kornbluth story is Science FICTION!!! You, who is an author of SF also, should understand that the works in SF are Stories, not treatises of Scientific Theories. Maybe Kornbluth was just postulating a fantasy scenario, etc. etc. [I know that answer is too short to be a valid rebuttal, but all I can think of right now. ;-( ] …uhhhh, I just thought of more but it’s all been said before …
–
re kevinalexander @6:
oh, I know that experience. In college, one summer, I was shipped to P.E.T.R.A. to assist the installation of a major, high energy, physics experiment, for Prof [redacted]. He talked to the undergrads paternalisticly, and would turn away as soon as he learned that some of us (myself included) were Engineering students and not Physics students [ironic since the college was MIT]. We even had a wages dispute; he told us he would increase our per diem, “those were ‘under the table’ while wages need taxes withheld”, he told us. We only had to work 16 hrs/day, while his (unpaid) grad students, he could work 24 hrs/day (and did. One collapsed once, from exhaustion). He was a Nobel lauriat and reminded us frequently. The elitism he displayed was ubiquitous and “mind bending”.
It’s willful ignorance that’s frightening. Here in the States, it’s not unusual to see exceptionalism, racism, and religious belief joined up to form a high wall of ignorance.
And something this self-serving postulate tend to ignore is the fact that many members of the elite breed fast, producing lots of bastard offsprings through their mistresses/sex-slaves/housemaids: If anything, I’m willing to bet my eyes and balls that every-single-plebeian in western societies are descended from roman patricians and feudal lords.
I have a deep feeling, I know it is just a “belief” , that there is a confusion between intelligence, stupidity and ignorance.
I have very seldom ever run in to truly stupid people but most are just ignorant. The basic understanding I have is my own ignorance about some things and whole areas I know little about. Some were or other I have been blessed to learn how to try to think rationally not always successfully but still.
Isn’t thinking a skill like say baseball if it can be learned early enough and practiced enough you can become proficient in . What it takes besides a normal body is a determined interest in it (baseball).
The morons are not stupid but are using their intelligence in the only they know to solve the problems they encounter while trying to live. It may not be using the calculus but it takes just as much mental activity to get through the competition and conflicts encountered in the pursuit of life liberty and happiness while being ignorant with fewer opportunities by design .
I too am offended by the thinking behind things like this article and “Idiocracy”.
uncle frogy
Close to accurate, but missing something very fundamental. In fact, the correlation is that more educated people have fewer children (on average) than less educated people. The same correlation goes with wealth. So, if we educate more people and make sure they’re less poor, fewer kids will result.
add “way” where needed
too bad there is not a proof-read along with spell-check
uncle frogy
I have no idea what it would even mean to have variations in “capacity of intelligence.” What sort of measurement would that be? I’m sure I don’t know about all of the biology, but what exactly do you think you know (in the first sentence) that I don’t?
The thing is, it seems like a really inappropriate metaphor, which we shouldn’t even consider using if we’re being serious. I would try not to picture a container which is somewhere between filled and empty, or people with bigger and more spacious containers compared to others, or whatever ridiculous fucking thing I’m supposed to imagine.
For instance, Einstein was not “intelligent” because there were a whole bunch of facts represented somehow in his brain — no matter how or whether any genes constrain such things. I understand that generally he was interested in certain sorts of important intellectual problems, as compared to other types of concerns or interests people have, and he did a lot of work to think about them and try to find solutions. When he didn’t have a piece of information filling some part of his brain which he thought he should have in order to do something or other, he often tried very hard to find what he needed. Indeed, it wasn’t just that he kinda-sorta figured he should get it but didn’t fret too much; he really cared (in some cases) about getting it right, meticulously checking that every step of the process was in good order. Those are the sorts of things people do when they’re behaving intelligently.
I put it that way for a reason: it doesn’t need to be a property of the person which would somehow stay with them, like having blue eyes. As some people like to say about consciousness, it’s not so much a thing as it is something you do. I’m a sentient being, sure (most of the time, I’m in that category, that is … whenever I’m me), but I’m certainly not conscious just before I wake up in the morning. Nor am I intelligent then, along with many other times when I do stupid shit. That’s not something you could coherently say about me then, if it’s not treated as some kind of award or honorific or in-group identifier that’s being granted to me…. Anyway, the point is that I don’t think we can even get started making some kind of progress, until we get rid of all of that garbage.
I admit to being a white middle class male (and by consequence privileged in a certain way), but my experience growing up in London is exactly the contrary of the idea that good education correlates with wealth. We used to have a grammar school system, which accepted kids based on aptitude from their primary schools. You could say they were elitist in the sense they only accepted kids with good school records, but we were all from working class families, my father worked in a brewery, my mother a housewife. The school had great teachers, we basically all blossomed and our parents were proud (and we became upwardly mobile, horrible term). And one thing (maybe a bit unrealistic) that I still turn over in my head since the day I was accepted into a grammar school, is why did they send us kids who were good at school to yet another good school, when the ones that really needed help were the other kids, who were sent to dead-end schools. It still doesn’t make sense to me.
@Yazikus #8
Absolutely. When I was a kid I had the goal for a while of wanting to “know everything”. It didn’t take long to realize how completely and thoroughly impossible that is. I am and will always be ignorant of almost everything there is to know. I still make a point of talking to random people about the things they find interesting and it amazes me how often I meet experts on topics I didn’t even know existed. I first learned the difference between parity and non-parity RAM from a ‘weirdo’ at a bus stop.
On a related note, the dismissal of the intelligence of low-level workers when I worked in high tech drove me frigging nuts. I never finished my degree so my jobs tended to straddle the boundary between the “thinkers” and the “grunts”. If you want to find out how to improve a process, the first person you should talk to is the person who does it 8 hours a day, regardless of their education.
At one workplace, I was the evening shift technician and the closest thing to a shift supervisor. I regularly took time to explain the technology and uses of what we were building and get people to try their hand at some of the troubleshooting I had to do. I also got the assemblers and testers to take turns teaching everybody how to do their job.
Over the course of a few months, we started to produce more, with few failures, and with about 2/3 the staff of day shift. Evening shift was also staffed by the newest employees. The only credit I claim is that I helped create an environment where people felt empowered and their accomplishments were recognized; virtually all of the process improvements were the ideas of the “grunts”.
I suggested to the higher-ups that we do occasional cross-shift training sessions so we could share the things we had figured out. Their response was to raise the quotas for day shift, telling them, “if evening shift can do it, you should be able to do it. Figure it out.” The end result was that the day shift workers cornered the evening shift staff at shift-change, pissed off for making them look bad. Fucking asshole company.
Then high tech collapsed… I wonder why.
The writers of The Marching Morons and Idiocracy confused biology with the effects of the widespread adoption of birth control and the entry of women into the workforce in the 70s.
I think the widespread adoption of birth control hurt the world in the sense that the people who plan ahead, who are less traditional, more feminist, and who care about being able to pay for all their kids to attend college, began having fewer children.
At roughly the same time, less traditional women began entering the workforce in higher numbers and those women began having fewer children as well.
The films The Marching Morons and Idiocracy got the biology wrong, but what contributed to their author’s confusion was the increase in the share of people who are culturally more traditional and less interested in feminism or education. In today’s world, traditional, anti-intellectual, old-fashioned conservatives have more children, and at an earlier age, and then they inculcate / indoctrinate their children with their beliefs (the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree). These children then repeat the pattern.
Uh, about those “rockets to Venus”: in the story, that’s just a cover. The emigrants actually get crushed to death by the acceleration (spoiler: this happens to the guy who thinks up the idea). Probably one of the least efficient ways to commit genocide/mass-murder/whatever ever.
I was shocked and repulsed when I read that. I’d heard about what a great story “The Marching Morons” was, part of the history of SF, yadayada, discovered it in an old collection in the eighties, settled down to read it…. I don’t understand how anyone could publish such a story just a few years after World War 2. Even assuming that you bought the balony biology, it’s just a repulsive conclusion. Maybe that’s what I was meant to feel about it, I don’t know.
I’m also reminded of Douglas Adams’ story of the Golgafrinchan solution. It didn’t occur to me until long after I first read it, but the fact that the Golgafrinchams who weren’t conned onto the “B ark” ended up dying of a plague that the B ark denizens would’ve prevented… could be seen as a parable about the so-called “useless” portion of society being not quite so useless after all.
Oops, did I say The Marching Morons was a film? It’s a short story.
Regression. To. The. Mean.
Justanotherguy,
I don’t buy it. I think there is something to be said for smaller family sizes, especially when you have intelligent, engaged parents. You are buying into the same fallacy as Kornbluth–that the desirable characteristics are genetic/intrinsic.
I have two smart kids. Older one is in second grade and just got a splendid half term report. Part of that is a verbal assessment. One sentence is almost verbatim a sentence from my first or second grade report: extremely well developed speech with a huge range in vocabulary and grammatical structures.
So, a woman who had fairly educated parents who always made sure that there was always quality material around to foster her mind grew up to be fairly educated and have a huge vocabulary and an appreciation for language. Then she had children and look and behold, they have a huge vocabulary!
Yep, probably genetic.
@24 MacKay:
It’s a nice short answer, but I wonder if it really applies. Regression to the mean is a statistical effect; it still applies in cases where there is a strong heritable component, even cases where selection pressure causes the mean to slowly change. There’s more mistake in all this than that.
It is amazing that well educated wealthy people tend to have more well educated and wealthy children while poorly educated people with less wealth tend to have children that aren’t as well nourished, well educated or advantaged as their more privileged peers. It must be genetic.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
My apologies if I wasn’t clear. I also think there is something to be said for smaller family sizes – more time per child, less financial stress on the family, more money for the children to go to college (the unemployment rate is always much lower for college grads), etc. But I wasn’t saying the desirable characteristics are genetic/intrinsic, I’m saying the desirable characteristics are cultural. I think that much of your success in life is determined by what you are raised to see as important and/or fun. Bottom line is, your tastes matter. That’s culture, not genetics.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
What I’m saying is that those whose culture is more traditional, more anti-intellecutal, less feminist, more conservative, have tended to have more children than the less traditional, less anti-intellectual, more feminist, less conservative since the widespread adoption of birth control in the 60s and the large scale entry of women into the workforce in the 70’s. It’s not that the culturally “bad” people started having more children, it’s that the culturally “good” people started having less children. That’s the unintended consequence of birth control, women’s equality, and women entering the workforce. I almost thing there’s some perverse force in the universe making all our attempts at improving the world go awry.
Giliell,
You bring up the nurture vs nature argument in #26. This is something that fascinates me.
I grew up on welfare with a very abusive disabled single mother. She had quit school after 8th grade, but I think that she read on a 3rd grade level. She did not consider education to be at all important, especially for girls, and when I was a teen, she wanted me to leave high school to learn a trade, such as beauty school, so that I could earn money to take care of her.
Luckily for me, I had that spark of curiosity and intelligence that my teachers recognized and encouraged. Thanks to them, I excelled in school, graduated at the age of 16 with a full college scholarship and never looked back.
Now here is the interesting part. My mother had always told me that my father was dead, but I found out otherwise and met him when I was in my mid thirties. When I met him, not only my looks, but my tastes and my curiosity and thirst for knowledge suddenly made sense. Where I was always very different from my mother’s working class side of the family, I fit right in with my father’s side. I wanted to be a teacher from the first day that I attended school, and I became one. I found that my father’s family was full of teachers and even one superintendent.
Even though I had not known my father as I was growing up, I found that I liked the foods that he liked (and my mother wouldn’t touch). I love to travel, and found that he had visited every continent but Antarctica.
This has made me very aware of the part that genetics can play in a child’s life.
I like this article and appreciate PZ’s visceral anti-elitism, but I am not sure how sanguine I am about the future of humanity. I agree it won’t go according to Kornbluth.
Part of what worries me is, quoting PZ:
Smart, sensible, and practical is all good, but I don’t see a lot of incentives to push people in that direction. If anything, many practical skills are less necessary because of technological advances (OK, using available technology is a practical skill in context, but I’m not totally convinced it’s a substitute for more direct survival skills). A big driver of the consumer economy is to sell people what they don’t need and to discourage them from developing the wherewithal to get by without it or even understand how it works.
Parents who want the best for their own kids might be able to change this on an individual level, but you cannot rely on that as an overall process. PZ’s family may not have been rich, but he still drew a winning ticket in the birth lottery. (I would say the same for myself, though the circumstances differ in a few details.)
It has nothing to do with eugenics or reproduction rates, but I still picture us headed towards a dystopian future–not marching morons, but more like the people in the spaceship in Wall-E. It may not be a serious worry. I think for the most part, things are still getting better, e.g. global literacy rates. In the long run, though, there is no compelling reason to assume continual progress by default for the average person. If we want that, we’ll have to work for it.
If more evidence is needed: See Upper Class Twit of the Year
Say NO to inbreeding.
justanotherguy #30:
And yet the things which were not just progressive when I was young, but seemed darn-near fantastical—like same-sex marriage anytime soon, for example—are very much supported by younger generations; even by many who don’t consider themselves particularly liberal.
Over how many generations are you observing this trend of ‘unintended consequences’? And what are they? The things you mention are improvements, in and of themselves.
Which isn’t to say we can’t make further improvements, of course. I just feel such ‘They’re out-breeding us!’ rhetoric to be little more than scaremongering.
naturalcynic @33, your link is borked. Doesn’t work.
justanotherguy:
Y’know, it’s right easy to point the finger at those darned women and that darned birth control when you are not a woman. You should take a day and think about that. Hard.
@17 – Consciousness razor ‘I have no idea what it would even mean to have variations in “capacity of intelligence.” ‘
Neither have I, but I’m pretty sure there are skills which seem partly innate and which can help you get good grades and pass IQ tests. And reap the rewards that go with that. I think people probably vary in how quickly they can process symbols, how many times they need to hear something to remember it, how long they remember it for, how easily they quantify and manipulate numbers, … Yes, all these certainly improve with practice and societal support gives them a head start. Most people who practice a lot are likely to get reasonably good, but that doesn’t alter the fact that some people don’t even have to start practicing until they’re working at quite an advanced level.
Now, I’m not sure I would necessarily call that ‘intelligence’ and if society tells me that’s how we’re using the word, I still wouldn’t regard it as some kind of pinnacle of human worth. But I do think the possibility that we vary on these measures as on others is only seeming problematic to us because of the high and I think unfair status that gets bestowed on those who happen to have these skills.
Daz, i haven’t made any direct observations over generations. I’m just putting forward a theory of what might be happening in our society to confuse the authors of The Marching Morons and the film Idiocracy. I’m not sure of anything I’ve said, it’s all just my guess as to what’s happening in the world.
I’m not saying that birth control, women’s equality, and women entering the workforce are not improvements. I’m saying that birth control, women’s equality, and women entering the workforce have had both good and bad effects. I am incredibly disappointed when I think that these 3 things, which I when I was younger I thought could never have any negative consequences, might actually have some.
Regarding you question as to what the negative consequences of these 3 things are, I think I already said that I think they are unintentionally causing a decrease in the proportion of culturally curious, thoughtful, insightful, feminist, nontraditional, intellectual people in our civilization.
I hope you aren’t thinking I’m advocating the outlawing of birth control or women’s equality or women entering the workforce.
Regarding your statement, “And yet the things which were not just progressive when I was young, but seemed darn-near fantastical—like same-sex marriage anytime soon, for example—are very much supported by younger generations; even by many who don’t consider themselves particularly liberal.”, that’s an excellent counter-example. I have no reply to it. I may very well be wrong. Do you have any guesses as to why same-sex marriage is gaining acceptance among young conservatives?
Regarding your statement about scaremongering, I am scared for our future because I do think “they” might have been out-breeding us in this country since the 70’s. Most of what I say comes from what i’ve seen in my daily life, which of course does not constitute hard evidence.
The op reminds me of the horrible arguments about religious people out breeding us clever secularists.
Cain, I see now that I unintentionally made myself sound like a sexist reactionary in my earlier comments. I am not saying that women’s equality, birth control, women entering the workforce are bad things. To me it’s a no-brainer that they are absolutely necessary and good things. It’s just that I’m concerned that because not everyone adopted them (which would have been my preference), that those who didn’t adopt them are having more children than those who did not.
justanotherguy: the differences between who is and is not breeding, and how much are DWARFED by environmental effects.
You know what’s had the biggest impact in intelligence in the United States over the second half of the 20th century? Phasing out leaded gasoline. The effects of environmental lead on intelligence just blow away everything else you could measure. Feminists having fewer children? Birth control? Fundamentalism? Statistical noise at best.
Lead paint, atmospheric lead in areas with high automobile congestion, lead in the drinking water? THAT’S a driver of the shape of society.
No wonder right-wing-kookism and guns-and-ammo-kookism seem to coincide so often.
………….do you have any evidence whatsoever that this is actually happening?
justanotherguy #38
If you’re not a concern troll, it sure sounds like you’ve been reading the concern troll style guide for writing tips.
Is it really tenable that you ever thought anything “could never have any negative consequences”? How young were you exactly? Civil rights questions are ultimately a matter of societal values, not a calculus of outcomes, though I obviously I do think the outcomes are better on balance or I might question the values.
Saying “I really sincerely want to be on your side, I’m just sayin…” is the hallmark of concern trolling. If you have some other point, I must have missed it.
justanotherguy #38:
If anything causes that, it’ll be drops in education standards and, if it gets bad enough, lack of access to birth control. Seriously: fewer kids means more resources per child in any given family. Even most conservative types practice some form of birth control in western countries.
Caveat: Amongst middle-ground conservative youngsters. If I had to guess I’d say lack of shock-factor. Awareness campaigns don’t just highlight the issues. They make people aware of the previously little-noticed group. And people who grow up with that group having always been noticeable are simply less shocked by their existence than earlier generations.
‘They’ might be outbreeding ‘us’ in a technical sense, but ‘their’ kids are growing up to accept more liberal values than their parents did, even if not the most progressive values.
(And for fuck’s sake, your answer had better not contain the word “Smartphone”)
justanotherguy:
No one contests the fact that atheists tend to have lots fewer children than religious people, but despite that, atheism has grown a lot over the past few decades. A great many people who didn’t grow up atheist have nonethless adopted the idea.
Similarly, the history of science is filled with people who weren’t raised by scientists.
Now if you read the life stories of feminists, you’ll learn that a great many of them were not raised by feminists; feminism too is quite capable of spreading through ways other than rearing a ton of children. You can’t leap to the conclusion that things are going awry just because people are having fewer children.
Or about Muslims outbreeding Christians/Jews, or about Arabs/Blacks outbreeding Whites.
Deep down, it all boil down to class tribalism and fears of its consequences: there’s a subset of the upper-middle-class-and-above whose members are terrified at the thought that the plebs may one day become strong enough to retaliate against them and make them pay for all the shit they endured, and sheer numbers being an obvious form of strength, cue the panicked variation of “The plebs are outbreeding Us! The plebs are outbreeding Us!“
kevinalexander:
I’m a (retired) professor. And I’d be feeling deep shame on behalf of my “tribe” if, in fact, I felt tribal about professordom (which I’m sure many do; and which I may be fooling myself to think that I don’t). What I’m feeling instead is rage.
I’m also feeling jealousy, since (until they turned into such assholes) that seems to have been a better collection of professors than most of my (ex-)colleagues: “marvellous conversations about science, literature, whatever was in the news” were in short supply, generally, though there were enough that I didn’t go entirely mad over the 25 years I spent at that place.
I also find kevinalexander’s story kind of surprising because even if the professors were such elitists, you’d think some of them would make a badge of honor to have a token blue-collar friend.
I have rarely had this experience, though maybe I’m just lucky. The closest I came (about 20 years ago) was being invited to a “barbecue” in Switzerland where it turned out that everyone else there was a sharply dressed Swiss banker and I was a monolingual American postdoc in a hooded sweatshirt. I can make conversation in a variety of social contexts, but I gotta admit in this case I was stumped. It wasn’t a sense of being looked down upon, just having absolutely no starting point for discussion.
Thank you for this lovely essay! This is my area of research and teaching, and you summed it up beautifully.
Just last night, I did my usual exercise with my first year grad students: Stand up. Now, sit down if you are African-American. Sit down if you are Latino. Sit down if you are Russian…Eastern European…Jewish…Asian…Italian…Irish. Usually at this point the whole class is sitting. “Congratulations! Your ancestors were considered intellectually deficient at one point in US history!”
I’m very glad someone’s taken the time to point out the evolutionary nonsense behind “The Marching Morons” and Idiocracy. I’ve been meaning to write an essay about this for the sf community for some time.
BUT, I’m going to defend “The Marching Morons” (not it’s science, which is wrong, but its moral message). People are completely misreading the story. It’s important to know that Kornbluth was a satirist — and the point of “The Marching Morons” isn’t “dumb people breed too fast”, it’s “don’t invent horrific tools without expecting horrific consequences”. The end of the story is that the man who came up with the plan is fed into his own mass death machinery.
Kornbluth was wrong about the genetics, but his purpose in writing the story was to undercut the rationale behind eugenics by arguing that it is impossible to create a eugenics policy that does not involve grotesque human rights violations, and once the machine is turned on, the more ruthless people in society will find new ways to feed all sorts of “undesirables” into its maw. This is an ANTI-eugenics story. It’s still based on flawed premises (i.e. it assumes that the *science* behind eugenics is correct), and deserves criticism for that, but the story is furiously against eugenics on moral principles.
I should add: Ben Bova has completely misread the story as well — unless he thinks the “chilling” part of the story is the low average IQ and not the mass murder.
PaulBC,
Yeah, I can see how I sounded like a concern troll. I think anyone who actually wants to roll back feminism, birth control, and women in the workforce is probably hopelessly indoctrinated by some nasty conservative or religious meme.
I first began thinking of myself as a feminist when I was around 14 (but it’s hard to remember so far back). Yes, I was very young.
Well said.
Things to complicate the picture of intelligence.
*Our brain sizes have been shrinking, as a species.
*It is defined by the ability to carry out a set of procedures that are extremely limited in comparison to the spectrum of what humans can do and have done.
*Childhood neglect and brain anatomy. Google at your own risk. Nurture matters.
*Inheritance is both genes, and now the experiences of your ancestors as well (though we don’t know how deep that rabbit hole goes yet). How does the last 300 of family history contribute to what we call intelligence between people from different countries and continents?
*How do the advantages they are discovering in things like ADHD, autism, and my own tourette’s syndrome relate to intelligence?
I come from a very long line of little else but soldiers and fundamentalist religious types. I even had the bad habit of chewing lots of stuff that I now know contained lots of BPA when I was little (though to be fair I don’t know if that is a problem after infancy). I may be having some issues now, but a masters in Cell and Molecular Biology and a bachelors in Microbiology aren’t bad.
@chrislawson
Bravo! I’d buy that for a quarter.
This story (and the similar “The Little Black Bag”) are not about science. Mostly, they are about greed. I found both of them (and Idiocracy) quite entertaining – but not educational.
In The Little Black Bag, that arsehole in the future who flipped the switch is culpable.
I am struck by the observation that societies have that have fallen are often controlled by the superstitious and ignorant both and exist both in the “teaming masses” and the elites.
uncle frogy
How about when someone dies after doing something stupid, and others say this is a good thing because they’ve taken their stupid genes out of the gene pool, a vague reference to the Darwin awards
PaulBC
<blockquote< you’d think some of them would make a badge of honor to have a token blue-collar friend.
The blue collar friend would have to act blue collar which I never did. I was, am, a working man and am proud to be but I never accepted the tribal aspect of it. It’s just an accident of evolution.
Next to misogyny I think that tribalism is one of the greatest tragedies of human history. I mean tragedy in the classic sense. You can see it coming, you can understand exactly how it happens but you can’t evade it. It’s just such an awful waste of human potential.
Goddamn vertebrates.
The first quote you have looks like it’s from some HBD blog, have a link to that?
MACKBOOK123456 . #62
Who are you talking to?
Cuttlefish
Yeah.
Spinal columns are waaaaay over-rated.
To P.Z.
MACKBOOK123456 . #65
Is this your first day on the Internets?
Maybe it’s yours, motherfucker.
oooh … potty word
You Win.
If it is indeed true that the “unintelligent” outbreed the intelligent and are fated to inevitably take over the population, and there is nothing whatsoever that the “intelligent” can do with their “intelligence” to either reverse or exploit that situation to their benefit, then the inevitable conclusion has to be that “intelligence” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, not the best survival strategy, and those no one need be concerned over it somehow “losing out”.
?
The murder of the protagonist’s partner (using one of the very few “unsafe” tools in the bag) which led to the signal being sent to the future took place before the switch was flipped. The switch-flipper had no way of knowing that the murderer was going to try to demonstrate that the tools of the bag were harmless by using one of those tools on his own neck, right after he flipped the off switch (and rendered the tool unsafe).
IIRC, anyway.
Sorry, I don’t remember any of the names.
Owlmirror
The switch-flipper really had no idea who was using the tools.
or what constituted a murder
Turning it off was irresponsible.
…
seriously
The reposted link to the editorial is dead, but the Internet Archive saved a copy of: The ‘Marching Morons’ show prescience of science fiction
@chigau:
One of us is misremembering, I think.
What I remember is that the monitor saw that the bag had been lost, but left it activated. When it was first found (by the alcoholic doctor), it was not being misused, but was rather being used for its purpose, to aid diagnosis and treatment, so it was left alone. So far, so good.
But when the doctor used the tool (I forget what it was) to kill, the bag itself knew that a murder had taken place (presumably, it was running some sort of medical expert system), and sent the signal.
So the monitor trusted that the bag was reporting its own misuse by a murderer correctly. What was he supposed to do, in that case?
Whoops, looks like I goofed.
It was the doctor who was murdered, not the murderer.
Might as well quote the source:
magistramarla
I don’t think anybody declared that genetics play no role. I think most parents sometimes recognise things in their children where nurture makes no sense, like the fact that ine of my kids is as grumpy in the morning while the other one is a bundle of cheerfulness that makes me wanna puke (guess which kid takes after me).
+++
justanotherguy
The sexism, it burns.
Where do I even start? The thing that more educated women tend to have less children than less educated women is not due to birth control and gender equality but due to fucking gender inequality.
Male college professors tend to mention their (ex)spouses, kids, cats and dogs. Female ones tend to mention their (ex) spouses, cats and dogs. Because women at some point still have to decide between kids and a career. Those who leave the pipeline to have a family are not “less” intelligent than those who go on.
Only if you don’t consider women to be people.
Your classism and elitism is duely noted. Just for your information, I’m the grandchild of a miner, a lorry driver, a nurse aid and a housewife. At least two of them were way more culturally curious, thoughtful, insightful, feminist, nontraditional and intellectual than you appear to me.
chrislawson
BUT, I’m going to defend “The Marching Morons” (not it’s science, which is wrong, but its moral message). People are completely misreading the story.
Misreading a story is so 1963. If you can substantiate your reading with the text, then your reading is a valid one. Since about 1967.
Robert Harison
Imagine your parents were assholes. Really assholes. Abusive assholes. Imagine somebody says something like that, indicating that it was their genes that made them bad and that their offspring would tehrefore be bad, too. How would you feel?
Owlmirror
Re: The Little Black Bag. I agree with chigau. Turning the kit off does nothing to stop it being used for murder. In fact by making the harmless parts harmful, Al makes its use in murder easier. It’s like he rendered a rifle ‘safe’ by attaching a bayonet.
@Daz:
He also notified the police (in ordinary circumstances, the location of the bag was known, and so the murderer could be tracked).
And, as a bit of handwaving, I note that the tools became rusty, so extrapolating further, one might reasonably suggest that they were self-destructing down to a (relatively) harmless iron oxide powder.
the statement isn’t overtly genetic.
Maybe you haven’t watched the movie lately. At 1:33 in there’s the whole “case study” of the nice upper middle class sciency parents (IQ 138, IQ 141) that can’t have any kids, compared to the Clevon and Trish in the trailer who can’t stop having kids, with the “family tree” overlay in the corner of the screen, showing their breeding-rate.
@giliell:
I think I’ve addressed all your accusations in my previous posts. Did you actually read all my posts before posting?
justanotherguy
Yes, I read them. They didn’t convince me.
I don’t know, PZ, if you keep talking smart like that they gonna make you fight Beef Supreme.
—-
I’ve watched Idiocracy several times, with a lot of different people….i’m always amazed at how many of them actually think it’s actually based on solid premises and that something similar is going to happen. It’s also very telling that when people describe this fantasy, often with a hint of fear in their voice, they always, always put themselves in the losing team, the non-morons.