From the Mail Pile: Will the DNA Revolution Upend Our Politics?

A reader asks but I'm not so sure.

A friend of mine likes to talk about Isaac Newton and how Newton was an op. Was Newton an op? I’m not sure but it sure was convenient how his physics helped support a kind of Anglicanism that the state preferred. I do wonder the degree to which autistics are used by the state to promote certain zeitgeists or scientific discoveries which serve its end. Perhaps that could well be a post on its own.

I do think that Ben Franklin was an op and have written as much. Certainly Darwinism had a lot to do with the rise of the British Empire. You might say the British Empire governed over the world through evolution not revolution.

In the last few years I’ve found that the Chinese, Russians, and Likud tend to be very nervous around genetics. Could it be because they worry about being exposed? Every nation has a noble lie which animates it and those lies can be tested with technology.

A reader notes why the Soviet Union might have been afraid.

People forget why Lynsenko triumphed in the Soviet scientific establishment, or try to attribute it purely to his own political cunning. The reality was Stalin understood the necessity of denouncing Mendelism rigorously (even hysterically) because of the danger it posed to the universalist aspect of Marxist-Leninism. Which is also why even the great Stalin denouncer himself, Comrade Khruschev, protected Lysenko as long as he possibly could. It wasn't out of love or loyalty, but necessity.

A similar dynamic plays out less openly and dramatically now with the slow steady death of Blank Slateism, which is as integral to modern liberalism as Lynsenkoism was to early Soviet communism. You can see it easily in all the passive-aggressive smacks at no less a lukewarm figure as Stephen Pinker as well as the knee jerk denunciations of Kathryn Harden's attempt to split (splice?) the determined baby. Not to mention the eerily familiar hysterical demonization of Wade and Murray - they should avoid Mexico at all costs.

It's not misplaced animus by their attackers. If the tabula rasa falls like the Berlin Wall, progressive liberalism might fall with it.

Candidly I don’t have a lot of patience for a lot of this politicking around genetics and efforts to make it safe for liberalism. Who cares? Most ideologies ultimately figure out a way to accommodate the insights.

And what’s more I think a lot of this stuff is much ado about nothing anyway. Nobody really cares. They care about what products you build from these insights.

Charles Johnson's Thoughts & Adventures @JohnsonThought1

.@Keir_Starmer is getting the revolution we are helping to build in genetics. @traitwell partnership with Britain?

There have been several efforts to beat up on those of us advancing this science. Professor Harden saw fit to smear me a few years ago as some sort of racist when I pointed the science of genetic diversity. I replied and you can read that post here.

Genetics, Left-Wing Libel, and The New Yorker

I asked my friend and colleague Gavan Tredoux, who is something of an amateur historian on these topics for his comments:

There is definitely a deep-seated tension between the "perfectibility of man" and hard heredity, which corresponds to the old idea of original (ineradicable) sin and the crooked timber of humanity. Your correspondent exaggerates for effect, but is correct that coexistence between "society makes you bad (and I can fix that)" and "heredity makes people fundamentally different" is inherently unstable.

I get the feeling that many left-wingers enthuse about Darwin to use it as a club against trad religion, while never reconciling themselves to its deeper implications about their own quasi-religious worldview. Technically, mankind is still perfectible to some extent in the presence of hard heredity, but only through the slow breeding program of eugenics and (now) gene editing etc. Far too slow for Stalin. That doesn't mean he had to have his geneticists shot and ground into camp dust. Maybe he could just have cancelled them.

I suspect we will see a lot of quasi-Marxist countries focus a lot on the meme of gene editing but I’m not so convinced it can be done anyway and that’s assuming that all the medical research on which its based is legitimate.

Science Is Strategic @scienceisstrat1

There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research (1/3)

More likely eugenics will find its way into our politics through “enhanced reproductive health” — or IVF.

After all, China is already making IVF available free to all. Will this happen in the United States and if so, what will it mean?