Friendly fire:
Once an august science organization ejected me from a meeting because they thought I was espousing eugenics, in contravention of the society’s policy. They refunded my fee, and when I also pointed out I was out of pocket for my hotel deposit and airline ticket they managed to get the hotel to refund me but could do nothing with the unused ticket.
The organizer had not read my abstract with care, and I thought if there was a problem he might have asked for a clarification. I was not angry. I put it down to friendly fire. The term came, I think, from the Vietnam war because of episodes such as one I heard tell of about a journalist in an American military camp who asked why the soldiers were going nonchalantly about their chores rather than joining a battle that was going on upon a nearby hillside. There was gunfire and there were mortar rounds. There were screams. But the officer said, “We don’t have any men up there. They’re fighting each other.”
Among the number of thoughts that come to mind is, “How nice of them. That’s downright friendly.” Sometimes we attack someone who is not the enemy.
I had no interest in eugenics before that, but I looked it up and thought about it. Eugenics was once accepted, without evidence, as common sense. It is now rejected, again with no evidence but my own, as common sense. In other words the world at large believes in it or not just as they please. But let me compare my own work.
There is something called the Hardy-Weinberg principle. This proves mathematically that the frequency of genes in a population will not change from generation to generation. There is an article in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle) that lists the conditions that must hold in order for the Hardy-Weinberg Principle to hold. They include mate choice, mutation, selection, genetic drift, gene flow and meiotic drive. Mutation, obviously, is always going on, and in real life it tends to be balanced by either selection or genetic drift (for any mutation a gene disappears simply because by chance it was always the discarded one) or a combination. “Gene flow, means that the population is not really isolated and “meiotic” drive is a kind of selection that occurs at the chromosome level during meiosis rather than occurring when the organism is interacting with the environment. The point that the article misses is that random mating is not necessary; maybe inbreeding will eliminate a few bad genes, but that’s selection again. Mix and match as you will, in the absence of selection any copy of a gene has a one in four chance of doubling, an even chance of breaking even and a one in four chance of vanishing. Even if intelligence were purely genetic and if highq genes added linearly with no law of diminishing returns, no mating choice strategy will change the average.
Another thing that eugenics says is that you must never, never marry across race lines. There may be a social argument to such an effect or not, but from a biologic perspective race is unimportant. You can see that from my UN numbers in the summary last New Years a year ago and in my historical data. We’re all in the same boat, biologically; this is the only place where you will find evidence to support that.
And finally, and most depressingly, eugenics says you must never, never marry a cousin. To the contrary I have shown time and again that for normal fertility you MUST marry a cousin. Only by judicious marrying in will be ever get a stable population. Anything else is madness.
So it was a bum rap. Eugenics and I are diametrically opposed. Someday people will understand.
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