Both characters in the dialogue seem, like the author, to implicitly believe in the basic concept of eugenics improving IQ and that making the world a radically better place.
I'd like to see the author's working for getting to that result, as this feels a bit like the pro-nuclear people who focus on safety concerns for an easy win to distract from the cost and timing and other awkward questions they don't have answers for.
For example, most of the people in Africa are already born but are young and have their lives ahead of them, so even if the eugenic interventions worked perfectly, how quick a change would you actually see? The genetically engineered children wouldn't get a vote till they were 18 at which point they'd be a minority, might not even get a job until they are mid 20s after university.
(Very similar critiques apply to many ill thought rants on limiting population growth, it's mostly already happened and the growth in people being alive is mostly in people living longer so any intervention implies mass murder, even if the people proposing them don't realise that is what they are proposing because they've not looked at basic relevant facts before spouting off).
Seems like feeding and innoculting and educating and not poisoning with environmental toxins the existing children would be a far faster route to a higher IQ population. But the kind of person who obsesses about IQ and sperm banks for nobel prize winners seems uninterested in the these basic fixes for already existing people.
Is this just an attempt to reframe eugenics as not racist, by coming up with a totally implausible plan to fix Africa with it that wouldn't even start for decades and not have an impact for decades further? If so it feels like it's backfired as this just seems like a ill thought out fig leaf for whatever their real interests are.
Both characters in the dialogue seem, like the author, to implicitly believe in the basic concept of eugenics improving IQ and that making the world a radically better place.
I'd like to see the author's working for getting to that result, as this feels a bit like the pro-nuclear people who focus on safety concerns for an easy win to distract from the cost and timing and other awkward questions they don't have answers for.
For example, most of the people in Africa are already born but are young and have their lives ahead of them, so even if the eugenic interventions worked perfectly, how quick a change would you actually see? The genetically engineered children wouldn't get a vote till they were 18 at which point they'd be a minority, might not even get a job until they are mid 20s after university.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa
(Very similar critiques apply to many ill thought rants on limiting population growth, it's mostly already happened and the growth in people being alive is mostly in people living longer so any intervention implies mass murder, even if the people proposing them don't realise that is what they are proposing because they've not looked at basic relevant facts before spouting off).
Seems like feeding and innoculting and educating and not poisoning with environmental toxins the existing children would be a far faster route to a higher IQ population. But the kind of person who obsesses about IQ and sperm banks for nobel prize winners seems uninterested in the these basic fixes for already existing people.
Is this just an attempt to reframe eugenics as not racist, by coming up with a totally implausible plan to fix Africa with it that wouldn't even start for decades and not have an impact for decades further? If so it feels like it's backfired as this just seems like a ill thought out fig leaf for whatever their real interests are.