TIL that Nobel Prize laureate William Shockley, who invented a transistor, also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization

I think you're confounding 2 questions: is it racist? and is it wrong?

Is it racist? -- yes, it's racist. Racism is when you have race-based social theories and notions.

Is it wrong? -- yes, it's still wrong, even if he had data to back it up, and even if IQ tests were genuinely objective tests for intelligence (they aren't).

Assume (1) IQ tests objectively measure intelligence (they don't, they're calibrated to return normal values for what people think represent certain analytical and reasoning traits in certain populations) and assume (2) data is available that backs up some racial inferiority in those traits, it would still be wrong.

Human inferiority/superiority cannot be reduced to ability to make computations or reason. Everything from creativity to the ability to make in-the-moment strategic decisions and take risk, is part of human intelligence, not just the analytic/scientific reasoning.

Northern European societies that people like him hold up as the epitome of human evolution, how do they represent the best of human evolution? Sure they are orderly, but they are much more genetically homogeneous as well -- kind of like everyone in a state being related to each other and having similar genetic profiles and family traits. Of course a more genetically homogenous society is going to be more efficient and orderly. African DNA is much more varied than Northern European, which also implies a greater ability to adapt and survive should climate, civilization and geological conditions change. Neanderthals, the original Europeans, were well adapted to ice age conditions but couldn't compete when the ice age passed and modern humans emerged from Africa. If an asteroid hits the earth, human communities that survive and adapt to wildly changing conditions will almost surely be those with the most genetic diversity.

But for all their efficient homogeneity, are Northern Europeans really better? Look at how Africans thrived in small, low environmental foot print villages in Africa (before we created Third World overpopulation with our medical and food aid, and then helpfully made the continent a market for our small arms exporters). Look at the enormous, unsustainable amount of resource that has to go into supporting a Northern European/Western Civilization style city. We have to scramble for enough energy in our resource wars because human labor has to have that hundreds/thousands multiplier that energy provides, in order for enough work to become possible to support these communities. We won't even know yet whether that model of community is sustainable until we reach energy independence on renewable energy alone, if that's possible. And people aren't really happy, or healthy flowers of human evolution in these hive communities. 3/4 of the women my age are obese or overweight.

How are these Northern European societies with their homogeneity, efficiency, enormous resource requirements and ill health (lifestyle disease epidemics), the best of human evolution? The small villages of people who hunt, farm and support themselves are healthier, less environmentally devastating and their people live in balance with their world, doing what humans evolved to do as a problem-solving, intelligent species, which is solve problems to adapt, survive and to understand how be in an uncertain world.

If you think the end all and be all of human evolution is to produce a creature that lives in an efficient, genetically homogenous hive community who can do a lot of computations and analytic reasoning while sitting at a desk, then maybe he's right. But some might say that this is probably not the ideal summit to which human evolution brings us.

Not to mention, one asteroid can hit, and change everything in an instant. Then, the best of human evolution can come down to something crazy like: whose bodies can produce higher ratios of brown fat cells to white fat cells.

Probably the one thing you can say is that the best way to hinder human evolution is exactly what he advocates: to make it less genetically diverse and more homogenous.

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - en.wikipedia.org