Richard Lynn: Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 with his promise to stop it by building a wall along the border with Mexico. It is doubtful whether such a wall, if it is ever built, would be effective because Hispanics could continue to enter the United States by tunneling under it, by boat or by air, including flying to Canada and crossing into the US. Further dysgenic immigration into the United States is unstoppable. Europeans are already a minority of the school-age population and will become a minority of the adult population about the year 2044. In the second half of the 21st century, Europeans will become a dwindling minority through the continued immigration of Hispanics and their greater fertility.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In the near future, do you see a revival of eugenics, which could save the white man from genetic and cognitive deterioration?
Richard Lynn: The intelligence of white nations could be increased genetically by programs of positive and negative eugenics. This was proposed by Francis Galton in the mid-19th century. Galton read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species when it appeared in 1859, and he concluded that the process of natural selection, by which the genetic quality of the population is maintained and sometimes enhanced, had begun to weaken in England and other developed nations. He first discussed this problem in 1865, when he contended that natural selection had weakened against those with low intelligence and poor health and those lacking what he called “character,” by which he meant a well-developed moral sense, self-discipline, and strong work motivation.
Galton discussed genetic deterioration at greater length in 1869 in Hereditary Genius. He wrote that in the early stages of civilization “the more able and enterprising men” were the most likely to have children, but in older civilizations, like that of Britain, various factors operated to reduce the number of their children and to increase the number of children of the less able and the less enterprising. Galton’s view that people with high intelligence were having fewer children than those with low intelligence has been confirmed in many subsequent studies that have shown that this is true of women but generally not of men. I reviewed this work in in 2011 and it was confirmed by Woodley & Figueredo in 2013 for a number of economically developed countries and several economically developing countries including Dominica, Libya, and Sudan.
The effect of this has been a decline in the genotypic intelligence (the genetic components of intelligence) in many countries from the late 19th century. In 2013 this decline has been shown in a meta-analysis (by Woodley, Te Nijenhuis & Murphy) of the slowing of simple reaction times from 1889 to 2004 that reflects a decline of genotypic intelligence of 1.16 IQ points a decade or 13.35 IQ points over 115 years. During much of the 20th century, this genetic deterioration was masked by increases in phenotypic (measured) intelligence brought about by improvements in nutrition, health, and education. However, from the closing decades of the 20th century, declines in phenotypic intelligence have been reported (by Dutton, van der Linden & Lynn in 2016) in Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Norway.
Galton discussed the problem of genetic deterioration further in 1883 in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. In this he coined the word eugenics for policies to increase intelligence and other desirable qualities. Galton’s eugenic proposals fell into the two categories of positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics consists of policies to increase the numbers of those with high intelligence and other desirable qualities. Galton’s proposals for positive eugenics consisted of providing financial incentives to encourage those with the desirable qualities of high intelligence and strong moral character to have more children. In 1908 he wrote: “I look forward to local eugenic action in numerous directions, of which I will now specify one. It is the accumulation of considerable funds to start young couples of ‘worthy’ qualities in the married life, and to assist them and their families at critical times.”
Galton’s proposals for positive eugenics by providing financial incentives designed to encourage childbearing by those with the desirable qualities of high intelligence and strong moral character were repeated by several eugenicists such as Ronald Fisher later in the 20th century. Eugenic programs of this kind were introduced in Germany in 1934 and 1935, consisting of government loans to couples assessed as psychologically and biologically sound, and 25 percent of these loans was written off for each baby produced. Financial grants were given for third and fourth children born to families assessed as genetically desirable. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler set up special maternity hospitals for the wives and mistresses of members of the SS to provide the best medical care during their confinement. A eugenics measure was introduced in Britain in the 1930s, in which university lecturers and professors — supposedly the nation’s elite — were paid £50 per annum for every child. This incentive was ended in the 1960s as eugenics fell into disrepute.
The proposal to provide incentives for those with high intelligence to have more children has recently been revived by Rindermann. He follows Fisher and others by proposing that this could be achieved by reducing the taxation on couples with several children. This would provide those who pay taxes and generally have higher cognitive ability with an incentive to have more children, while avoiding giving an incentive to the poor, who pay little tax and generally have lower cognitive ability. He concludes that “successful value-orientated demographic policies are difficult to implement but are vital to support a positive long-term development of society.” Meanwhile the only country where positive eugenics was explicitly pursued in the second half of the 20th century was Singapore.
Galton’s negative eugenics consists of policies designed to reduce the number of those with low intelligence and other undesirable qualities. This would be achieved by measures to discourage and prevent those with undesirable qualities from having children. In 1907, the first law providing for the sterilization of the mentally retarded and habitual criminals was enacted in the American state of Indiana. This was followed in other American states, and by 1925 sterilization laws had been introduced in 25 states. In the 1920s and 1930s, similar sterilization laws were passed in Canada, Japan, and a number of European countries including Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The countries where the most sterilizations were carried out were Sweden, where they numbered about 60,000, and Germany, where they numbered about 300,000. Sterilization became less frequent from the 1960s and virtually ceased by 1980 as the tide of liberal opinion turned increasingly hostile to eugenic measures.
Galton proposed that eugenics could also be promoted by immigration through “the policy of attracting eminently desirable refugees, but no others.” This policy has been disregarded in Western countries that have admitted large numbers of migrants claiming to be refugees who have a lower intelligence than that of their indigenous peoples. For instance, in Britain a study of a representative sample on the CAT (Cognitive Abilities Test) in 2009 reported these non-verbal reasoning IQs: White British 101.4; Indians 100.2; Pakistani 94.5; Bangladeshi 97.3; Black-African 94.1; Black Caribbean 94.6. In Denmark, Nyborg in 2013 calculated that immigrants will become 67 percent of the population by 2072 and that their low intelligence will reduce the average intelligence of the country to 93. The lower average IQs of immigrants has also been shown in Sweden by Heller-Sahlgren in 2015.
In Cognitive Capitalism (2018), Rindermann discusses this problem and follows Galton in contending that refugees with low intelligence should not be admitted and concludes: “In Western countries, reforms are urgent and indispensable!” This proposal would require withdrawal from the undertaking given by Western nations in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention to admit as refugees those who have a well-founded fear of persecution. This undertaking has been widely honored by Western nations during the 20th and 21st centuries, notably by Greece, which accepted many thousands of migrants who made the crossing from Turkey; by Italy, which accepted approximately 650,000 migrants who made the crossing from Libya in the years 2014-2018; and by Germany where Angela Merkel accepted approximately 1.2 million migrants in 2015. These migrants claimed to be refugees but many are economic migrants. Their claims to be refugees are assessed, and if they are recognized as genuine, they are accepted for asylum while if they are rejected they are supposed to be deported, but this is frequently impossible and most of them remain in Europe.
This influx has generated widespread opposition in many European countries, which responded by attempting to reduce it. From 2015, Europe has paid Turkey to keep migrants in camps to prevent them crossing into Greece, and Austria and Hungary have built fences to stop migrants entering from the south. In June 2018, Italy and Malta refused to accept a boat of 629 African migrants from Libya who had been picked up in the Mediterranean by the charity ship Aquarius, and Italy declared she would no longer allow charity ships to land migrants in Italy. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized Italy but refused to allow the ship to dock at French ports but the Aquarius was accepted by Spain, which has continued to accept African migrants from Morocco and from West Africa landing in the Canary islands. https://www.amren.com/features/2019/06/a-conversation-with-richard-lynn/