new start

orionaut wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "victoriatangoman"
> wrote:
> > The fact that they are becoming rarer, for instance Tays Sachs
> > diesease in the Jewish community, is a result of eugenic practices.
> > You'll note that the Jews are NOT killing or sterilizing each other.
>
> Au contraire: The Jews stand as a shining example of THE most
> successful long-term eugenics program in the history of the planet.
> They have bred for intelligence very successfully indeed!

Yes. Only a few problems with the Jews as an example of successful eugenics:

a) rather a large number of millions of them were wiped out under the
auspices of eugenics
b) the population of Jews apparently seems to be decreasing over time

> One of my favorite examples of their historical methods in this is
> encouraging their smartest and most personable male children to
> become rabbis; rabbis are in turn encouraged to have as many children
> as they can possibly support. Smart father match-made to a smart
> mother; lots of kids; brought up with a high emphasis on shcolarship;
> chhez Louise, how could they NOT produce generations upon generation
> sof a population with the higest mean IQ on the planet?!

I love a pretty theory, and it is a pretty theory. Still, if the theory
doesn't actually work very well in the real world I throw it out.
Various kinds of eugenics have been tried over the centuries, inbreeding
and population collapse seems to be the result.

> Catholic Europe, OTOH, set itself back CENTURIES in this regard via
> one critical modification to this model: they encouraged their
> brightest and most personable male children to become PRIESTS...and
> by so doing, _de facto_ deleted excpetionally "smart genes" from
> their breeding pool. (Silly, SILLY European Catholics! :P)

Yeah and european culture has done very badly hasn't it.