Seconding Artician. The brain evolved by natural selection, just like the rest of the body. It has built in biases and modules that vary genetically. Look at the wide variety of personalities in dog breeds, for example. In humans, the big five personality traits are estimated to be about 50% heritable based on twin studies.

Gattaca is a good movie and Brave New World is a good book, but they should not be taken as the ends of some slippery slope that any eugenic policy inevitably leads to. I think it's unfortunate that so much fear of eugenics is propagated by dystopian fictions like those. Eugenics can be done in a humane way that respects all individual rights. For instance:

1. a system of incentives for highly successful people to have more children or donate to sperm banks.

2. Universal single-payer healthcare, providing among other things free condoms and birth control pills to all, so that the use of contraception will not be so much inversely correlated with income as it has been from 1850 to the present when the poor often couldn't afford it (and it's a demonstrable fact that on average the poor tend to have lower intelligence partly due to genetics)

Even such modest, individual rights respecting policies, if phrased in terms of benefiting the gene pool, are political suicide because people are still afraid of imaginary slippery slopes leading to Hitler. Most of the US is still in denial of the implications of biological science, for reasons that speak well of them, but it's time to grow up and get over that habit of Godwinizing any attempt to improve the gene pool regardless of whether it infringes individual rights.

Or maybe lots of people people don't actually believe that, but are reluctant to say otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0W9sSqeJnA

It's a clever rationalization of hypocrisy. If it's going to be taboo to observe patterns in groups of people demarcated by visible characteristics they were born with, be consistent about it. But I'd argue against that taboo.

What makes racism bad is treating people as specimens of a group rather than unique individuals. Group averages may differ slightly but there's tons of overlap. Common usage of the word "racism" unfortunately conflates a moral aspect (how to treat people) with an epistemological aspect (dogma that all groups are created exactly equal in every way). Epistemology shouldn't be moralized. I could give you lots of examples of sociological and psychological research getting muddled on account of an inflexible dogma that there couldn't be any heritable differences between groups other than the obvious superficial ones. I'd rather conceive of the word racism as a verb describing harmful actions towards people due to their group membership, not a noun denoting a thoughtcrime or speechcrime. Like church and state, or science and religion, epistemology and morality don't go together.

A priori based on generation times and mutation rates you should expect there could be 1/10 as much variation between historically isolated groups of humans as there is between breeds of dogs, since the most recent common ancestor of all domestic dogs is half as far back as humans' most recent common ancestor is (or rather was before 16th and 17th century explorers spread their sperm across the globe) but dogs breed a lot faster. Breeds of dogs demonstrably vary in many behavioral and psychological traits. It's not far fetched to suppose that a variety of environments over the past 100,000 years of humanity pushed population means of behavioral traits in various directions.

Don't like those cats that have no ears, selective breeding gone too far. I mean, regular cats usually look like a little bit on the douche side but still cute, they got that independent charm, a bit of wild animal.. This breed just looks like it's selfish pampered a-hole (note, looks like not that they actually are..). The kind that looks at you when it is walking on the shelf he knows perfectly well he should not be and slowly drops that vase..

Sagemind is right. The breed is not to be trusted for anything more than what it was originally bred for: An ornament at temples, and for it's meat and hide when it failed to perform as a suitable ornament. It's a crap breed for a domesticated companion. Overly protective of it's initial, imprinted-upon trainer and a wild-card to strangers.

Yep. What about if the cop had been Hispanic or black? It's no mystery that the inordinate amount of prisoners in the US are in the system due to profiling just as it's no mystery that by design, a socio-economic disparity and fear of incarceration has been institutionalized in our culture.

What, 50 years after Brown vs. BOE the violence and ignorance bred into our culture has neighborhoods, schools once again either 95% white, black, or Hispanic???

This is all by design....funny thing is you couldn't have said this about 25 years ago but it's glaringly obvious now isn't it??

America is so fucked and the goddamned media and public education is the mechanism of our downfall. We are breeding some of the most socially functionally retarded humans on the planet....

I feel bad for the kid and the dog because it's obviously neglected. However it made my day seeing a cat so defensive over its property. I would love to see an F1 Savanah go to town on an attacking dog. Seriously, I think modern breeding is going to create some awesome home defense cats.

Try one month. Rabbits breed quickly.

I don't do anything here without a reason dag, I think you know what the fuck it is this time-Like it has been in the past-Shutting bullshit down where it lives and is allowed to breed through denial or complicity.

The influence of religion has peaked hopefully. Along with that, as symptoms of overpopulation become more and more impossible to ignore, there will eventually be a huge negative stigma on anyone who has a large family.

Hell we already live in a world where religious baby-factory families are mocked and ridiculed, at least when we see them on TV, so I suspect the shaming of large families will only become more prevalent as time goes on, so one can hope that we won't need government to tell us to stop breeding so much, but given human arrogance, who knows?

Technology will help, but only so much. If anything, technology is contributing to the factors that say we don't need this many people on this planet as automation and computers reduce the amount of people we need in the workforce.

"Absorbed in it's world it's so hard to find us
It shapes our minds the most;
maybe the mother of our Nation
should remind us
that we're sitting to close to. . .

Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation." -Michael Franti

Smash one in a den or living room near you, today! It's cathartic, reduces energy consumption, and drastically mitigates malignant ignorance worldwide!

I just disagree on all counts with you here.

What we need to do in these instances is try to help these people understand that gay marriage is okay.

Instead we force them to accept it which just not only further cements their beliefs but it will turn people who are more Laissez-faire about the issue into part of the larger problem. In my opinion this will only breed further extremism and more home grown terrorism.

You win stuff like this by being better than the other side. With love and compassion. Not forcing them to step in line.

Holy crap, that is the worst cross-breed between "Her" and "The Beaver".

time for a super breed of anteater