Eugenics and the Myth of Racial Superiority

Internet commentary has certainly demolished some myths. One of them is that we're in a post-racial society, or anything like one. You can cite the millions of openly bigoted comments, especially those made after Barrack Obama's election in 2008. Besides the ARWP's, there's a whole host of commentators and trolls that don't even try to hedge or redefine their racism anymore.

This does have the pretense of being scientific, but there's no credibility to it. First of all, six cubic inches is huge. Asians would need a second head for that. Even if the poster used the wrong units, the average brain volume (according to Wikipedia, for a quick answer) is 1260 cubic centimeters. Six cubic  centimeters would be within the margin of error of that figure. In other words, insignificant.

Second, everything one talks about with genetics--with all of science really-- is a matter of probabilities. At best, discrimination judges someone not where their abilities fall, but where they're guessed likely fall.

Third, intelligence is not a well-defined term.

However, eugenics itself is flawed to its very core. It's not actually "Survival of the fittest." Evolution doesn't select for the best traits. It selects for ones that are best for survival and reproduction in the organism's environment. This seldom matches what a human being would consider an improvement. Such as, when human beings learned to cook, we began to get crooked teeth, because the genetics for well-meshed teeth were no longer needed, and the resource expenditure to make teeth straight and keep jaws strong was unnecessary. This is not something that eugenicists would consider superior. 

Therefore, a eugenic dictator is likely to choose "superior" traits that suck in the environment that his subjects actually have to live in--since life is inherently unpredictable. So, eugenics would reduce survival and reproductive success. 

I'm not sure if anybody else has this reaction, but whenever I hear of the eugenicists of the late 19th and and early 20th century (and during that time, almost every well-educated Caucasian who came of age then was a eugenicist) I'm struck by how naive they were. The whole reason the ideology was evil was that it would cause a lot of suffering, and for nothing, because it wouldn't work. Anybody who understands Darwinism now knows that. It's better to let the environment tell our genes what it wants. That's what genes exist for.

So, any claim of racial status based on so-called science is fraudulent. At best, it's a biology dropout who would make the claim.