What about the abortion theory? It seems likely someone must have looked at it internationally, but if so I don't know about it. It does nothing for the 60's surge of course, but it could have something to do with the synchronized 90's decline. Note that the theory can be read more expansively than just abortion -- it seems to me that it should also include improved access to contraceptives for problem populations (which don't have to be the same populations from country to country). In fact the theory could be expanded to include anything that might bring down the birthrate among women who for whatever reason were incapable of properly raising their children. 
 
As for the 60's, well, they were the 60's, and maybe that's sufficient....

TGGP -- I find it so tiresome that people keep on bringing up that bet with Ehrlich, as if it somehow validated everything Julian Simon ever said. Remember, this is the same loon who wrote "We now have in our hands -- really, in our libraries -- the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years." Try working that out on your pocket calculator! Really, I have very little respect for the cornucopians. As far as I can tell they have a single argument, which goes something like this: "Malthus has been wrong for 200 years; this proves he will be wrong forever." (Because 200 years is, like, forever!!!). Complicated systems can be fragile in ways that are very difficult to anticipate in advance, and our civilization has become extraordinarily complicated. I can't predict the future, but I think I have the right to be a little nervous about it. 
 
gene berman -- I've read your comment several times, but I'm having a hard time figuring out just what you are trying to say, and how it relates to what I had to say. The condescension comes through loud and clear, but the rest is such a tedious buzzword ridden mishmash (confiscation? truncheons? the super-productive? really???) that I'm not even going to try to tease it apart. 
 
jeecee -- I write computer code for a living, and one thing I have discovered, if I may paraphrase Sartre, is that hell is other people's code! It can be extremely difficult to understand what someone else is getting at when he writes something, and I wouldn't feel comfortable passing judgment on the code in question here without a lengthy review, which would have to involve, among other things, my getting up to speed on the climate science involved. Needless to say this isn't going to happen! I've seen excerpts in various places, and they do look kind of bad, but then I can think of things I've done and comments I've placed in my own code which might look bad taken out of context. So I'm kind of stuck. You may very well be right about this. There does seem to be a quasi-religious quality to environmentalism in general, and global warming in particular, which could distort the work even of people who believe themselves to be acting in good faith (I do believe most scientists, on both sides, are acting in good faith). But then, the opposition really does strike me as very ideological, and in any case I'm very reluctant to second guess the experts when most of them are coming down on a particular side of an issue. So I'll just have to watch from the sidelines and see how this plays out. 
 
I'm still not convinced though, that even if global warming is real, it's going to be one of the bigger problems of this century.

I have no real problem with the idea that global warming is happening, and that people are causing it. The basic science seems plausible, and I tend to respect and defer to the consensus of the scientific community in matters like this. Beyond that, much of the skepticism seems very obviously to be motivated by Julian Simon style cornucopian free market ideology. 
 
What I haven't been convinced of so far is that this is going to be anything near the biggest problem we are going to be facing over the next hundred years or so. I'm much more concerned, for example, about overpopulation (nine billion is still a lot, especially when it includes two billion starving Africans who are all going to want to come here) and resource shortages (not just oil -- what about all these rare metals that we need for all this fancy technology that is supposed to save our asses?). Compared to that, and a dozen other things I could come up with, a three foot rise in sea level, amortized over a hundred years, just doesn't look all that scary.

Just curious -- are there any good estimates of what the population of Ireland would most likely be today if there had been no emigration?

The idea makes a certain amount of sense, but it seems to me that the sample size (of continents) is rather low.

"in the same way we trust our car mechanic" 
 
Ah, youth. 
 
When I was a kid my mother, a high school teacher, always took our car to the friendly local gas station to be fixed. She did this a lot, because our car always seemed to need a lot of work. 
 
Then one time when it needed fixing she let the students in the high school auto shop class work on it (as part of their class). That car didn't need work again for a long time, and needless to say when it finally did it didn't go back to the friendly gas station!

I'm not aware of any Tay-Sachs equivalents that have beneficial side effects, but it would be worth checking into. 
 
Has it been confirmed yet that Tay-Sachs et. al. do in fact have beneficial side effects, or does this remain speculative?

Who was Microsoft competing with on the Apple platform? If the competition was not the same then the market share argument doesn't necessarily work.

I'm not going to bother signing up and debating it on the Atlantic web site, but I can already see where Shenk in going. To make the argument more clear, I'm replacing "intelligence" with "physical strength": 
 
1) Recent studies have made it clear that a person's physical strength as an adult is not a fixed, inate quality, but can change dramatically. 
 
2) Therefore, men aren't really stronger than women. 
 
Point 1 is clearly true -- about strength for sure, and maybe about intelligence as well. Personally it does seem plausible to me that the heritability of IQ has been overestimated based on twin studies. It has never really made sense to me that a person's intelligence should be entirely unresponsive to training, and what Flynn has to say about this does seem somewhat sensible. Nevertheless, point 2 simply does not follow from point 1, no matter how much social pressure there is to go in that direction.

There has got to be some advantage from being first! So isn't the real question how big that advantage is, and how it varies according to circumstances? Has anyone tried to address that?

Just FYI, I tried twice to post a follow-up with links to the NYT article and comments -- once typing the HTML by hand, and once using the little "Adds link..." button -- and neither seems to have gone through. Odd, since everything looked good in the Comment Preview, and I'm pretty sure I've used links in GNXP comments before.

I posted my question about eugenics here as a sort of follow-up to an exchange on one of the New York Times blogs. Since I had trouble before I won't post the links here (I'll try that in a follow-up), but the article was titled "Can We Increase Our Intelligence?", and it was by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt. My comments are numbered 2 and 102, and Sam Wang's replies are included in comments 60, 131, and 189. Sam eventually implied that there were indeed counterarguments, involving the Flynn effect, regression to the mean, and the large number of intelligence related genes, and he suggested he might follow up with "a mathematically-oriented yet accessible source on this topic", but he never did. 
 
I could imagine though a counterargument that might go something like this: "There are thousands of genes that affect intelligence, and even the smartest people have no more than (say) 52 percent of the "good" alleles, so culling those people out will have very little impact on overall gene frequency, except in the very long run". Seems unconvincing to me, given how easy it is to breed domestic animals, but maybe it works out mathematically, so what I wanted to know was whether anyone here was aware of arguments like this, which would render any reasonable eugenics program not just morally objectionable but ineffective as well. 
 
Some other points: 
 
I think what I meant by "eugenics" was perfectly clear in my original question: would there be "a non-trivial social benefit, within a reasonable period of time". I.e., would it work? The practicality and morality of it were deliberately left unspecified. 
 
Given the size of the human population, I don't see how decreased genetic diversity could ever be a problem, unless you are talking about drastically reducing world population and breeding those who remain like racehorses. Which I'm not. 
 
I'm also not thinking about any sort of coercion, state or otherwise. (And I have to point out that there are always plenty of really bad ways of go about promoting any worthwhile social goal, e.g., reducing poverty). What I have in mind is more along the lines of eugenic thinking once again becoming accepted common wisdom. Nobody would be forced to do anything, but instead of subtle social pressure at cocktail parties for people to protect the earth by limiting the size of their families, there would be subtle pressure on smart people to have kids. It would be commonly and openly acknowledged that, while there was nothing you could do about it, it was unfortunate when unintelligent people (or people with other genetic issues) had large families. It wouldn't necessarily be the top item on anybody's list, but it would be an issue that could be expected to come up and be given some weight whenever new laws and social policies were considered. In other words, people would deal with the issue reasonably, and as a result the playin
More....

Are there any serious scientific -- as opposed to moral, political, or emotional -- arguments against eugenics? What I am looking for are scientific counterarguments to the claim that there would be a non-trivial social benefit, within a reasonable period of time, if the number of children born to smart people were to significantly increase and the number born to dumb people were to significantly decrease. 
 
(I've tried posting a longer version of my question several times and it hasn't gone through. Was there something objectionable that was moderated out? Maybe the links were too long and that triggered something?)

I have met Tom Tancredo, I was impressed with him, and I very strongly support his position on immigration. On the other hand, I consider people who reject evolution to be sort of the intellectual walking dead. I'm still going to send some money to his campaign, because I want him to shake up the Republicans on the immigration issue. But I can no long longer tout him as a candidate deserving of respect, and that is dismaying.