Prevent me from becoming another Hitler
So, I’m looking at my shelf, and I see my copy of The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics and I’m thinking I should read it some more, because I’m about to engage in some of it. This stuff makes sense to me, and that is what scares me.
Earlier I observed that divisions between people groups promote group selection which promotes morality which decries division. This is another play off of divisions between people groups and how they both hurt/help humanity and why they both should be created/abolished.
Certainly, while there exists anecdotal evidence to suggest that race is a purely social construction, there also exists rather precise definitions for race. These notions have a dubious value but are easily taken to mean something significant.
The fact of the matter is, certain racial features cannot be denied, in my opinion. This does, indeed, appear to have some genetic understanding of these racial differences.
So, my point is, there’s differences in race, and the classifications of Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid make sense to me. I’m not about to talk about the superiority of one over the other or anything like that, at least not at present. Instead, I’m going to talk about race mixing.
Ok, as a simple fact, known in part from my experience with genetic programming that was my master’s project (comment if you want me to dig it out and put it up here, although what I’m going to say here isn’t actually touched upon in the project report), is that having different populations evolve separately, and then putting them together, allows a greater potential “improvement” by whatever measure one is measuring the “rate” of evolution. Why is this? When one population is stagnant for a while, it tends to adapt to its environment and reaches an almost plateau-like stage where little “progress” occurs. When two populations are allowed to combine, the offspring have the potential to have both the “best” and the “worst” of both parents. So, in environments where fitness plays a strong role (that is, for example, where 12 offspring might be produced and only 2 survive to the next generation), the combination of two populations will likely produce the “best of both worlds” and thus something that is, by whatever measure of fitness one is utilizing, “superior”.
What I just described is not random speculation. When it comes to breeding bits on a computer through genetic algorithms and such, it is easy to verify the veracity of what I say. It is true - and I encourage you to verify it for yourself.
Now, as to the applicability of this to humans - that is tricky. At least in the U. S., we are affluent enough that fitness does not play a strong role, and so offspring that get the “worst” of both are as likely to survive as those that get the “best” of both. Furthermore, even if this was applicable to humans, the advent of GeneticEngineering will render this sort of “let us choose our mate based on the genes we want in our child” sort of reasoning to be questionable at best, because the genes for the child could be selected irrespective of the genes of the parent.
So yeah, either we have a future in which we use technology such as genetic engineering to create better humans (from a genetic perspective), or we use “evolutionary ethics” to determine mate selection and we get this sort of advocacy of race-mixing that I offer above, or we start investigating transhumanism or post-humans.
I would postulate that to choose to do anything other than one of those four options is to hold the human race back from its full potential for advancement.
My God - I scare myself when I write this stuff.
Please convince me that I’m wrong, and that people should just love whom they love and have kids out of love for each other and their kids, and that people don’t really have an obligation to the species to ensure that each generation is an advancement over the previous.
Please.
Have you ever been in love? Do you need any more convincing? Maybe I am just a small-picture guy…