There are no marching morons

For some random reason, this post from the Scienceblogs era Pharyngula, “There are no marching morons“, is getting some sudden attention, so I thought I’d bring it here. Most people have probably never heard of Kornbluth, or read The Marching Morons, but now you can! It’s on scribd, or you can just read the summary on wikipedia. The modern reference is of course, Idiocracy, and I suspect a lot of you have seen it.

I detest Idiocracy, too, and cringe when people bring it up. It’s nonsense. It’s the same failure to recognize that reality is not a possession of the elite that you find in eugenics. Idiocracy and Marching Morons is what you get when smart people are unable to recognize their common humanity with others — when you sneer at whole classes and regard them as inferior breeders.

But onward: here’s the original post. Surprisingly, since NatGeo hosed most of the comments when they transfered the site to WordPress, it looks like a lot of the comments on this article survived, too.


I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he’s arguing that it’s worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me.

The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is “The Marching Morons,” by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth.

The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In “The Marching Morons” he carries that idea to its extreme, but logical, conclusion.

Kornbluth tells of a future world that is overrun with dummies: men and women who don’t know anything beyond their own shallow personal interests. They don’t know how their society works, or who is running it. All they care about is their personal — and immediate — gratification.

I detest “The Marching Morons.”

Bova gives an accurate summary; it’s also the primary plot point of the movie Idiocracy. It’s also the premise behind eugenics and behind a lot of right-wing phony elitism. It’s wrong. It was a very popular story, but the reason isn’t complimentary: it fed into a strain of self-serving smugness in science-fiction fandom, the idea that people who read SF are special and brilliant and superior, we are the technological geniuses and far-seeing futurists, while the mundanes leech off our vision. The eugenics movement built on the same us-vs.-them mentality, that there are superiors and inferiors, and the inferiors breed like cockroaches.

The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it’s intrinsic. “They” are lesser beings than “us” because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It’s the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like “three generations of imbeciles are enough“—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.

People, they are us.

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won’t have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it’s hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn’t despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they’re breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.

That’s where the Kornbluth story fails. It assumes the morons are unchangeably moronic, and treats the elite as unchangeably special. The only solution to their problem is to get rid of the morons, launching them into space to die. Bova’s editorial, while not as cynically eliminationist, still pretends that the only answer is perpetuation of a distinction that doesn’t exist biologically.

Here’s the real solution to the “marching moron” problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren’t willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won’t if we assume the mob is hopeless.

I have to confess to taking these kinds of stories personally. My family was probably what would be called the working poor nowadays, when I was growing up I was called white trash more than a few times, and yes, I come from a large family. My parents did not have the educational opportunities I did, but they were smart and self-taught and made sensible, practical choices in their life, and they cared to give all of their kids a chance. I can testify from personal experience that if there’s a problem, it’s not in ability — it’s in a culture that dismisses broad swathes of the population because of who their families are, or how much money they make, and perpetuates inequities of opportunity on the basis of bigotry and classism.


I knew this article would bring out the pseudoscientific advocates of facile genetics, and there they are, already babbling away in the comments.

I know there are constraints on intelligence; there is individual variation in capacity, and there are almost certainly some biological bases for that, and also for differences in the kind of intelligence individuals express. This isn’t about that. It’s about whether there are significant differences in the distribution of the genetic constraints on human intelligence between subpopulations, and whether we are justified in writing off segments of our population as incurable morons whose progeny are similarly tainted. I say no to both.

You’d be hard-pressed to argue that the diverse groups marked by ethnic and class distinctions in the U.S. even count as distinct populations in any biological sense. There are social barriers to breeding, but they are sufficiently porous that over the course of time needed to set up genetic differences that matter, they’re negligible.

The other premise of the marching morons scenario, that the underclass would sink deeper and deeper into stupidity, is completely absurd. There aren’t any human subcultures that don’t value problem-solving and cleverness, where apathy and dull-wittedness are desirable traits in a mate (again, there are individuals who are contrary, but we’re talking about populations here.) Growing up, I experienced that social pressure that makes getting good grades in school a problem for fitting in with a certain peer group — but that isn’t about despising intelligence, it’s about conforming to the trappings of your group and not adopting the markers of another class, especially when that class has a habit of treating you like dirt and talking abstractly about how to expunge you, your family, and your friends from the gene pool.

And no, eating brie, going to Harvard, and reading the Wall Street Journal are not indicators of ability — they are properties of class. Drinking beer, learning a trade, and reading Sports Illustrated doesn’t mean you’re dumber, or that there are genes driving your choices — it means you are the product of a particular environment. Yet we all practice this fallacy of judging someone’s intelligence by how they dress or their entertainment preferences, and society as a whole indulges in the self-fulfilling prophecy of doling out educational opportunities on the basis of economic status.

There are mobs of stupid people out there. Sterilizing them or shipping them off to Venus won’t change a thing, though, no matter how effective your elimination procedures are, because you’ll just breed more from the remaining elite stock. Similarly, lining up the elites against the wall won’t change the overall potential of the population — new elites will arise from the common stock. The answer is always going to be education and opportunity and mobility. That’s what’s galling about Kornbluth’s story, that it is so one-dimensional, and the proposed solution is a non-solution.

Happy Eliminating All References To Him Day!

earthday

It’s Earth Day today, and I had no idea this was an atheist holiday. Ken Ham sets me straight, though, explaining that Earth Day is actually an anti-christian plot.

You see, God made humans stewards of the earth, which basically means that we’re supposed to turn it into farms and gardens. There are also bad things that were brought about by the Curse of the Fall, and icky things that don’t help people be fruitful and multiply are supposed to be removed.

Meanwhile, Earth Day is just a bunch of pagans elevating the universe over the imaginary being he claims created the universe, so it’s bad. Furthermore, it’s…evolutionary.

But we must be cautious of putting the creation over the Creator. Romans 1 warns against worshiping the creation rather than the Creator—and many Earth Day celebrations are founded on evolutionary ideas, where man’s opinions are lifted above God’s Word. And we must remember that “nature” is not perfect. In fact, we read that God cursed the ground in Genesis 3:17. That will dramatically affect how we understand farming and gardening. Also, in Genesis 3:18, thorns and thistles came into existence as part of the Curse. Thus, man can help improve things by working against the Curse.

So, see, the tallgrass prairie that once dominated where I live, and was home to bison and prairie dogs and prairie chickens and passenger pigeons and numerous small lizards etc. etc. etc. better serves God’s purpose when we plow it down and replace all that diversity with endless fields of corn and soybeans. That’s Earth Day to an evangelical Christian: chop down that copse of trees, rip out that inhuman habitat, replace it all with a fecal lake for the nearby pig farm. That lake glorifies God!

There’s also the inevitable denial of scientific facts. Global warming is a myth, his “Christian perspective” says so.

As a biblical creationist, let me illustrate how I would deal with a specific issue like climate change, which can serve as a useful example of how we should use biblical principles when we approach any issues associated with Earth Day.

I argue that the earth’s climate has gone through a few major periods of change, but in every case, humans did not produce the change. Ever since the Flood of Noah’s time, about 4,400 years ago, people have seen an unsettled earth in its sin-cursed state. Many smaller climate changes have occurred and continue to occur (perhaps in cycles). Whether humans have contributed significantly in a detrimental way is just not suggested by the evidence we have at hand.

What a nice, succinct explanation for why we shouldn’t want Christian dogmatists in charge of anything to do with maintaining the planet’s life support system. They’re all just slacking, simultaneously declaring that nothing can go wrong because of God’s will and everything is screwed up anyway because God cursed it. Christians and Libertarians: a hellish combination of oblivious destructiveness.


By the way, I promised yesterday that I’d try another Google+ Hangout tonight, at 9pm Central time. I’m hoping I’ve got the bugs worked out this time, so we’ll give it another shot. This time around, though, in keeping with the day, let’s focus on a theme — “Earth Day: Atheism+Environmentalism”. Be prepared to explain why you think the environment is an appropriate topic to have on atheism’s agenda, and why you think the godless (or at least, the non-libertarian atheists) ought to be better than anyone else at being stewards of the planet. Keep in mind, though, that not all religious people are as batty as Ken Ham and his ilk. Maybe it would work if all the bureacrats in the US Department of the Interior were required to be druids? Let’s discuss the intersection of religion and the environment!

The Discovery Institute’s mask just slipped a bit more

That ghastly collection of homophobes and right-wing zombies, Focus on the Patriarchy, is starting a new initiative to take on the happily growing army of student atheists. They’re launching a series of ‘edgy’ videos called True U which feature grim Christians staring glumly at the camera while statistics scroll by (“Increasing numbers of college students are losing their faith!” “60% of all biology & psychology professors are atheist or agnostic!” Cheer up kids, it’s good news all the way!). Then to inspire them, they cut to a Christian fake college professor ranting away.

The ‘professor’ is…Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute! And the great thing is that he’s openly using the arguements of Intelligent Design creationism to counter atheism with assertions that science supports the existence of a god.

“The new atheism is the old atheism repackaged to make best sellers,” says Dr. Stephen Meyer, a presenter in the video, “but is completely out of touch with the most current developments in science.” Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the History and Philosophy of Science, is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. The Discovery Institute is behind the “Teach the Controversy campaign” that aims to teach creationist anti-evolution beliefs in United States public high school science courses alongside accepted scientific theories, claiming that a scientific controversy exists over these subjects.

It’s been settled for a long time, but this is one more nail in the coffin: Intelligent Design is simply a front for religious pitchmen. And not just any religion, but far right Christianity.

Also, his arguments are awful.

“When we find information in DNA molecules encoded in digital form, the best explanation is that that information also had an intelligent source.”

That’s what he babbled about endlessly in his dreary text, Signature in the Cell: nothing but rank assertions that genetic information is digital (really, it’s not), that it’s just like computer programs (nope), that computer programmers write computer code (OK, I’ll accept that), and therefore, there had to have been a Great Intelligent Space Programmer at the beginning of everything (can you say logic error, boys and girls? I knew you could). So now you know the next step, the part he wasn’t brave enough to say in his book…and that Super Programmer is Jesus.

At least I suspect that classroom is as fake as the one Ben Stein was yelling at in Expelled, since Meyer is no longer affiliated with any real university and spends all of his time flogging lies to his creakily fanatical colleagues and church audiences any more.

Some people are born for Twitter

trumptoons

Twitter is a horrible medium for making any kind of lengthy or subtle argument, but it’s great for the casual bon mot—and sometimes it’s a good way to reveal the idiocy of bubble-headed celebrities. Case in point: Donald Trump. Behold, Trump revealed in just 3 consecutive tweets:

Amazing, isn’t it? Torture! Denial of Due Process! Watch My Show!

And this man thought he should be president. I never thought I’d see someone hunting for that office who was dumber and more evil than George W. Bush, and there he is…which probably means he’ll get elected sometime in my lifetime, given my track record on these things.

François Jacob has died

Jacob and Jacques Monod, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on the lac operon, were the fellows who really put gene regulation on the map, working out the mechanisms behind switching genes off and on in response to environmental cues. I always talk about their work on day one of my developmental biology courses; everything else in molecular genetics and development are built on the foundation they laid down.

And now Le prix Nobel et résistant François Jacob est mort (Monod died in 1976).

By the way, in addition to being a great scientist, Jacob was also a great atheist. This is a loss to all of us.


Carl Zimmer has written a lovely tribute to Jacob’s work.

A patriotic way to spend the 4th of July this year

convergence2013logo

Battle the British invasion! Come to Bloomington, Minnesota for CONvergence on 4-7 July!

Both Freethoughtblogs and Skepchick have an official presence at this con — we’re not only promoting and attending a science and skepticism track in the programming, but we also host party rooms for wild conversations after hours.

Take a look at the panel schedule for this year (you can also see what I’m doing — I’m slacking off and only sitting on 9 panels this time around).

You really don’t want to miss it. As always, we’re going to have a great time.

I have a sudden craving to visit Grandad’s Bar

It was the scene of an unpleasant event recently — a patron shouting anti-gay slurs at another patron. So Grandad’s Bar in Oklahoma City put up a sign.

barsign
Come on, OKC. We’re all in this together. Gay, straight, black, white, plumber, politician, whatever…let’s just all have a drink and be cool. Deal?

Maybe next time we’re in Oklahoma City we ought to meet there. It sounds like we’d all get along.

They’re also recommended highly on Yelp.

Our joyous Libertarian future

The last inspection by federal regulators of Adair Grain Inc.’s West Fertilizer Co. was in 1985. It was inspected by Texas regulators 7 times in the last ten years, and it has received a string of piddling fines — a few thousand dollars here and there. It was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate.

Lobbyists for the chemical industry are already complaining that there is too much regulation.

Lobbying groups for these plants say the risks are limited and they now face a panoply of regulations and oversight.

“It’s extraordinarily out of the ordinary to have this kind of experience,” Kathy Mathers, vice president of the Fertilizer Institute in Washington, said in an interview. “Both the producer and retailer side are heavily regulated.”

Oh, look at it’s prime location:

West-texas-map

A good chunk of that town was flattened, and many people killed and injured, when the plant blew up. Are those costs factored into the chemical industry’s profit-and-loss measurements, or are they advocating a reduction in regulation because they know they’ll never have to pay that price?

Snappy one-liners

Ever been in that situation where you see an attractive woman walking down the street, and you’re trying to think of something to shout out, and your mind just goes blank? Here’s a helpful collection of things you could say.