Are “Woke” Ideas Secretly Eugenic? with Ed Dutton

We discuss Professor Edward Dutton's new theory that "woke" ideas may be eugenic or serve as a selection pressure. By pushing society in a maladaptive direction, wokeism discourages those who can't survive harsh conditions from reproducing. It selects for the highly religious, conservative, traditionalist, and ethnocentric who can endure collapse. We also cover the decline of civilization tied to declining intelligence, the "spiteful mutant" hypothesis, as well as optimism around AI and automation potentially preventing another dark age.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] if you are able to think for yourself, and you look at the data, and you just say what that data says, you will be isolated from mainstream society, and then people like us, find each other because,

and so in that way, they are hopefully sowing the seeds of their own downfall. So long as they're not rounding up like Machiavelli would, everyone who dissents and who says the true thing in the room of liars so that they can then have them. I

Edward Dutton: think, I think, I think it may come to that point, but I think we will have, we will have escaped to our various neo Byzantiums by the time they simply go through the streets with a machine gun and kill people that express any logical or reasonable ideas.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. Today we are joined again, we're very excited, by the Jolly Heretic, a. k. a. Edward Dutton, a. k. a. Professor Dutton. You can find his podcast or YouTube channel, The Jolly Heretic. He also authored The Native Classroom, a, sort of the mathematician's lament of science education, which is available on Amazon.

But today we're gonna talk about something a [00:01:00] little different, some research that he recently did as well as an ancient theory, taken theory he

Malcolm Collins: has. So let's start with the, the research that I wanna start with is the Rome study. Mm-Hmm. Talk a bit about what was found in this study because I think it was really cool and that it seemed to confirm a theory that a lot of us had been throwing around and

Edward Dutton: sort then it, that's sort of confirm it.

Yeah. So basically, basically the I, the i, the theory is that what causes the rise and fall of civilizations and the theory that I. been working on for a long time. Loads of people have worked on it, but I've quite associated with it in a book I did called Adolf Witzend, Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future of Michael Woodley Venny, is its intelligence.

Intelligence is the central thing. If you're under harsh Darwinian conditions and the intelligence is not particularly high, there is strong selection pressure for intelligence because intelligence gives you the competitive edge and allows you to survive. And we showed that across time, based on proxy measures such as skull size, such as capital, major innovations, such as literacy, even though sounds like it didn't change much, such as numeracy such as interest rates, which are a marker of [00:02:00] time preference.

And a number of other measures that intelligence seemed to be going up. And indeed the richer 50 percent of the population in England had based on powers records, double the completed. population and the intelligence is associated robustly with wealth. And so this indicates intelligence is going up and then you get the breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, of course.

And then you, you start to get a situation where the direct inspection pressure is reduced. So whereas what's been happening is every generation, the bottom of society have been dying out. And the top of the society have been increasing in size and moving down to fill the places vacated by those at the bottom who have died off.

Then that process kind of stops because with the innovations of medicine and better housing and industrial revolution the Darwinian selection measure is weakened. And then you find this process where it, for some reason, we don't quite know why, but I've speculated on why in my book. It goes into reverse.

You start to see a negative correlation. between [00:03:00] intelligence and how many Children you have. And we showed we show evidence of this based on again for capital major innovation based on IQ scores based on reaction times getting longer based on color discrimination getting worse based on new and based on simply genes that are associated alleles that are essentially associated with high intelligence beginning becoming less and less and less within the population.

So, and what that eventually leads to, of course, is the society becomes stupider and stupider and stupider, and it can't sustain things it used to be able to sustain, but also it degenerates into war, it splits up, it becomes impulsive and whatever, and essentially the civilization collapses. At worst, or at best, it retreats.

You get a kind of Byzantium effect where clever people that are still there kind of club together and keep it going in some smaller form as it reduces in size and so on. So intelligence becomes the motor of the rise and fall of civilization. So what we The theory is that that could be the case with Rome and there was some evidence for that because [00:04:00] they talk about in the time of Augustus, they noticed that the upper class men are not having many children.

They talk about it and they note the population is going down and they know that Augustus brings in a tax on childlessness from the upper class men and they pay the tax and all this sort of thing is going on. And so we thought we'll work and test it with ancient genomes. So, what you have is these samples.

It's true that they are small samples, but the statistical significance was maintained and all that they were representative. And you show, we find that at the beginning of the period of Rome, you know, the, the, the prevalence of these alleles is not that high. goes up, it reaches a peak in the Republican period, so this is a highly intelligent period, and then Rome starts to generate into chaos.

Rome, of course, doesn't have an industrial revolution, but it does become very rich. It has the grain laws, the dole, or whatever, it reduces, it creates its own zoo, like we did. It reduces selection pressure. What do you see? The prevalence of the alleles associated with intelligence starts to go. down. And and this goes down in parallel basically [00:05:00] with the collapse of Rome.

So, it, it does, it does fit the data. Now, the theory, the counter argument, sorry, is that there is a change in the composition of the people living in Rome so that you have more genes, more bodies that are from outside Rome itself that are from other parts of Italy or of the Mediterranean. So that's a compound.

But, but, but otherwise it does kind of, it is what we would predict. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember in the study as a point of clarification. They're not looking at IQ, they're looking at the polygenic risk scores that today would be associated with educational attainment.

Yeah, that,

Edward Dutton: with high, polygenic risk scores associated with high, very high educational attainment, which is a very good proxy for IQ.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, no, it's a good proxy, but I think a lot of people might be like, well IQ, whatever, it's like, look, they're not even looking at that, they're looking at like, Functionally, like the types of people who, when our society would get PhDs, just started to disappear from the society.

And, and this is fascinating because this theory existed prior to, [00:06:00] you know, looking at these historic bodies. And it aligns w