In this and his two previous articles on race differences in intelligence, Saletan is trying to oh-so-gently nudge mainstream liberals toward acceptance of the facts that the ground beneath our feet is shifting. Science is progressing, and a lot of things that we cherish are going to disappear.

I'm gay and the idea that parents will one day be able to minimize the chances of their children turning out gay fills me with great sadness. But it is coming, and there is nothing to stop it. You can't stop science, and you can't stop parents from making decisions based on what they believe to be in their child's best interests.

We are going to lose gays in the next two generations or so. Even those parents who don't have a preference one way or the other will opt to straighten out their kids if everyone else is doing it; it's hard enough being gay when you are one in twenty, it will be far harder when you are one in twenty thousand. What parent would do that to her child?

We are also going to have to give up our belief in absolute equality throughout the species. The evidence for differences in intelligence among the races has been piling up for a century now, and with the advance of genetics, soon we will be pinpointing alleles, plugging them into the hapmap, and noticing that they differ in frequency among different population groups.

It is going to be difficult for a great many people, but other generations have had to give up their beliefs, things they felt were sacred and desperately wanted to defend, when society moved on.

Sorry, but that huge pile of evidence for differences in intelligence among the races is mostly a huge pile of crap. The reason why the eugenics crowd (the pioneer fund et al) make such a fuss about the minnesota twins study is it's about the only one that's even close to clean, and it's not accepted by the fieldworkers who compiled it.

We take complex human patterns and try to "target" them irrespective of environment. As we do this, we compound past social crime with newly pseudoscientific claims of racial superiority.

The London-school fraud on whose work Murray based all his racial calculations in _The Bell Curve_ concluded that the mean African IQ is 65. I'm sorry, but if you think it's PROGRESS to go back to that kind of bullshit, then being queer in America has taught you absolutely nothing.

Yes, the ground is changing. But can I just put in a plea, before this gets out of hand, to deracialize the question of genes and intelligence. I approached the question using that data initially because that was the given context of the James Watson uproar. But on reflection, I think race confuses the relationship between genes and intelligence, and it plays into our (in this case very destructive) weakness for grouping and judging each other by appearance. See <link>.

Well, people can learn from their mistakes.

On the one hand, the huge shitfest engendered by Saletan's last venture into eugenics ("is there a correlation between intelligence and predisposition to Tay-Sachs?") taught us that race is a tar baby. If you're being paid for traffic, it's a blogster's dream, but it makes for dreary company.

So ummmKAY, let's talk about eugenics without getting into SOCIAL eugenics. Maybe we can avoid calling each other Nazis that way. It's a nice thought.

But I can't see how we can deracialize the question of genes and intelligence when groups like the Pioneer Fund are so intent on racializing it. I also can't see how we will manage to deal with the prospect (at this point a matter of science fiction) of medical science transforming deviance from imaginary sexual norms into something that's BOTH chosen AND genetic, without locating that shiny rocket-sled future in a world that also features Mullahs and Television Baptists.

So tell me, Bill, if you had a kid and were able to choose, how far do those choices go? If (let's just say...) I'm black, do i get to choose a white racial identity for my child, or is the poor thing cursed with my race and its baggage of non-athletic inferiorities?

Sorry to be so spiteful Bill, but you jumped into racism with both feet, and while wanting to get out now is a good thing, thinking you can somehow get back into eugenics WITHOUT the racism of the social eugenicists is nothing more dignified than wishful thinking.

I think I said as much in that follow-up piece: Deracializing the topic still leaves the problem of eugenics. I don't have an answer for that, at least not right now. But I still think it's important to separate the two problems. These conversations go on through and beyond individuals' lifetimes. You just take them one step at a time and try to move the topic forward.

As yet, custom-tailored children are more a matter of science fiction than science.

Considering the morally challenging world we live in now, I don't understand the NEED to go looking through science fiction for challenging moral dilemmas.

And I don't see "deracialized" eugenics as likely. Considering the long, ugly fight on _The Bell Curve_, and the recent repetition of that fight her on this board, I wonder how you can be so blithe about the ease of deracializing the topic. If you could work that miracle you'd still have the problems of eugenics AND of social eugenics (which,considering the explicit racism of many of its institutions, will be quite a job, so you'd best start now)... but what I find comic here is the assumption that separating the "two problems" (racism and eugenics? eugenics and social eugenics? what?) eitehr simplifies the situation ore makes it easier to manage.

it's all fiction anyway, so no biggie.