On 12/17/11 08:55 , Kevin Alfred Strom wrote:


Genetic quality means something quite different. It's the difference
between those who can and do make cathedrals and Saturn V rockets
and microprocessors and _Tales of Mystery and Imagination_ -- and
those who could never do any more than trash and burn them, no
matter how many times they repeat the 8th grade.

With sufficient numbers of the former, we can rebuild anything,
probably better than before.

With sufficient numbers of latter, particularly if they can outvote
us, we are doomed.


With all good wishes,


Kevin Alfred Strom.



The only thing that bothers me about this thinking, is tendency
to delineate lines of class to determine who is and is not of the
former, against the latter.

Humans tend to see individual behaviour and broaden that
behaviour into classes based on anything but behaviour. And then
exclude the class.

Along socio-economic or even racial lines, this tendency can
exclude prime examples of the desirable behaviours, in an effort to
exclude the more generally classed undesirable behaviours.

Abilities, such as your examples of building cathedrals, Saturn V
rockets, or microprocessors, and creation of "Tales of Mystery and
Imagination" can be, and often are, learned. Genetics may account
for the blank slate, but what one writes on it is a matter of
development, and personal choice.

At the individual levels, anyone of any class may excel, pursuant
to one's values, instilled during rearing, and one's inate drive to
absorb, synthesize and create. And, while these individuals of
accomplishment may be rare to a class, it's these very individuals
who may be excluded by politically derived class divisions along
'genetic' lines. And these are precisely the individuals a society
needs to be productive, and broadly developed.

If we are to take stock along genetic lines, let us take stock by
evaluating individuals. Not the classes from which they rise.

And let's keep our standards of purity scientifically honest
enough to include the evaluation of the genes of all individuals of
accomplishment, no matter from which pool they arise.