This is somewhat true. (It gets even stranger when you find out that they were also trying to similar things with animals, trying to somehow breed dogs back to the first dog ancestor.) However, it’s worth noting that Nazis directly tapped into the common “eugenics” mode of thought in our society, and eugenicists in general were trying to “breed better humans” (by doing things like encouraging the forced sterilization of the insane and the physically disabled, ect).
Of course, it’s still a fundamental fail of an idea all the way around. Sure, you could do artificial selection on humans even without understanding genetics, the same way we did with dogs, but for that to work you’d have to have absolute and total control over the reproduction of entire large human sub-populations for dozens of generations, nothing short of that would work. And there’s no way a tyrannical govenrment that absurd manages to stay in power for that long. On the scale of the kinds of stuff eugenicists were actually doing, it simply couldn’t have a significant effect on the human gene pool in any plausible time-frame.
If you really wanted to try to breed better humans, and you weren’t all powerful, probably your best best would be to try to ingrain a powerful and ubiquitous “sexy people are smart” meme into the culture and then keep it alive. If you were able to do that and maintain the meme for 1000 years or so, then sexual selection might start to have an effect to increase the average intelligence of the human race.
Actually, looking at the last couple of decades, I would say that he “smart people are sexy” meme really started to take off around the time that a number of computers science geeks suddenly became some of the richest people in the world.
This is somewhat true. (It gets even stranger when you find out that they were also trying to similar things with animals, trying to somehow breed dogs back to the first dog ancestor.) However, it’s worth noting that Nazis directly tapped into the common “eugenics” mode of thought in our society, and eugenicists in general were trying to “breed better humans” (by doing things like encouraging the forced sterilization of the insane and the physically disabled, ect).
Of course, it’s still a fundamental fail of an idea all the way around. Sure, you could do artificial selection on humans even without understanding genetics, the same way we did with dogs, but for that to work you’d have to have absolute and total control over the reproduction of entire large human sub-populations for dozens of generations, nothing short of that would work. And there’s no way a tyrannical govenrment that absurd manages to stay in power for that long. On the scale of the kinds of stuff eugenicists were actually doing, it simply couldn’t have a significant effect on the human gene pool in any plausible time-frame.
If you really wanted to try to breed better humans, and you weren’t all powerful, probably your best best would be to try to ingrain a powerful and ubiquitous “sexy people are smart” meme into the culture and then keep it alive. If you were able to do that and maintain the meme for 1000 years or so, then sexual selection might start to have an effect to increase the average intelligence of the human race.
I’ve been trying to do that for years. It doesn’t seem to be working, as I can’t even get laid myself, let alone smart people in general. ;-)
Actually, looking at the last couple of decades, I would say that he “smart people are sexy” meme really started to take off around the time that a number of computers science geeks suddenly became some of the richest people in the world.