Reviewer’s Forward
This is a review of Woke Eugenics by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles. Dutton is a prolific author who works with numerous co-authors, whom I suspect do the bulk of the writing. As a shorthand, rather than repeat the triple barreled English name of his co-author, I will simply refer to “Dutton” throughout. He took me to task years ago for failing to credit one of his previous co-authors, a fellow named Charlton, but I do not think he reads my reviews any more. In any case, Mr. Rayner-Hilles, the style leads me to suspect that your hand is behind most of the words in this book. Duly noted.
This book is published by Imperium Press, in both hardcover and e-book format. I recommend the electronic format. At $11 it is cheap. It is much more convenient for taking notes and for searching. Furthermore, buying the e-book directly from the publisher avoids giving money to the very Woke Jeff Bezos, who doesn’t need it and would use it against us.
This review more or less tracks the Table Of Contents
Chapter 1. Asking a Woke girl out for a drink.
Chapter 2: Defining our key terms: intelligence, personality, and life history strategy.
Chapter 3: Should conservatives despise Wokeness?
Chapter 4: The evolution of Wokeness and conservativism.
Chapter 5: Wokeness and negative eugenics.
Chapter 6: Making it difficult for people to have children.
Chapter 7: Wokeness and the creation of chaos.
Chapter 8: Wokeness, evolution, and the forging of a new people.
Chapter 9: Altruistic and non-altruistic mutants.
Chapter 10: Harmony between the far left in the far right.
Chapter 11: Will AI artificial intelligence save civilization or destroy it?
Chapter 12: Enjoying that drink with the Woke girl at last.
This review includes a number of quoted passages from the book. They are either indented (identified with the purple stripe in Substack) or set off with quotation marks.
Introduction
The most common take on the world’s many problems is Manichaean – good versus evil. The major disagreement is in defining the sides.
Evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton is among a small group who attribute our problems to evolution. He follows in the tradition of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West a century ago, Dimitri Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse, and Charles Hugh Smith’s many books on the theme that society must “run to failure” and start over.
The world is in turmoil with the American election, widespread suppression of free speech, the loss of individual freedom, especially medical freedom, and the forced imposition of doubtful propositions such as global warming and gender fluidity. These tend to be cast as good versus evil, issues to be resolved at the ballot box.
I think otherwise. I feel that we as a society are attempting to use political tools to solve evolutionary problems. It won’t work. Dutton’s thesis is that Woke is an effect of the changing frequency of the above-named genetically-modulated characteristics.
The personalities that drive political agendas are the product of evolution, and it will take evolution to reverse them. Evolution is a matter of generations. We have to take a long view, trusting our progeny, distant progeny, to carry on our ethny and culture.
What is Woke?
Questions of character – good and evil – enter into the discussion of what is Woke. Personality is heritable, and the prevalence of the controlling alleles changes over time. One element on which Dutton focuses is the Dark Triad – psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Another is Johathan Haidt’s five moral foundations: Care, Equality, Sanctity, Authority and Loyalty. A third is the OCEAN characterization of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. He shows that the prevalence of these traits has evolved fairly rapidly. We tend to interpret their manifestations as good vs. evil.
What is Woke? Much in the way the lexicon frequently adopts new names for homosexuality, African-Americans and other favored groups, the notion of “Woke” has evolved. Cultural Marxism, political correctness, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) have now given way to Woke. Dutton’s etymology traces the term back to, among others, blues singer Leadbelly, who died in 1949.
By “Wokeness” we refer, in essence, to a philosophy which aims to achieve not socioeconomic equality but equality for various identity-based groups whom its proponents consider to be in some way marginalised, hence it used to be referred to as “Cultural Marxism” or “Political Correctness,” this being a shorthand for what Marxists termed “Revolutionary Consciousness.” With both Marxism and Cultural Marxism, it might be argued that, though its proponents may speak of “equality,” what they are actually talking about is “revolution”: the emancipation of the oppressed group from the oppressed; the overthrow of the oppressor by the oppressed. In that they are focused on empowerment above all else, we would not expect their worldview to be consistent in its finer details and we will see examples of this later.
Dutton makes the point that Marxism makes a point of constantly changing the lexicon as a device whereby true believers must constantly re-identify themselves. There is a constant pressure to avoid appearing to be a retrograde troglodyte through the use of superseded terms such as “colored” or “fairy” for “person of color” or “gay”.
Effect of mutations
Dutton’s primary point is that since the Industrial Revolution people with deleterious mutations have been able to reproduce much more successfully, perpetuating the mutations. In prior ages mutants would have died in childhood or been unable to attract mates.
Another of Dutton's useful observations is that visible mutations account for only about 16% our genome. The remaining 84% are dedicated to the brain, in which mutations would not be visible in a photograph. However, they are of generally observable in behavior. They result in the proliferation of antisocial behavior, which in previous eras rendered people less likely to successfully marry and raise children. In the rich democracies, supported by welfare, people with the who otherwise would not have been able to leave progeny are doing so.
Diversity and outbreeding
Dutton approaches his subjects as an analyst, a scientist. He does not attempt to moralize, although his point of view is usually quite clear. His findings and statistics are presented as objective. One such finding is that people who live in diverse neighborhoods tend to be less fertile than those who live in homogeneous neighborhoods, even when married to spouses of their own ethny. This he attributes to stress which may not be expressed but is measurable among people living in diverse neighborhoods.
Another observation is on outbreeding depression. Just as marrying a, sibling, cousin or second cousin leads to inbreeding depression, there such a thing is outbreeding depression. Per Dutton, the optimal level of genetic similarity between parents is that of fourth cousins. Dutton reports that couples of different races have more trouble conceiving babies than closely related couples.
If you mate with someone too genetically dissimilar from you then you are forcing alleles that aren’t used to working together in polygenic traits—traits where lots of genes cooperate to produce the effect—to cooperate, as we discussed earlier. This can mess up the trait; it can break up the gene complexes that keep you adapted to any given environment and which, therefore, keep you healthy.
There is also the question of how genetically fit the children of outbreeding are. My observation from my own marriage is that Eurasian children do not enjoy hybrid vigor. They excel in neither the diligence and intellect of the Oriental nor the drive and the extraversion of the Caucasian. A widespread study would be hard to do, but these so-called mixers do not seem to be as successful, by and large, as children of well matched, homogeneous couples.
Dutton observes that the offspring of mixed pairings usually identify with the nonwhite ethny, contributing to the white population decrease. For a variety of reasons they tend to be more politically liberal.
Liberalism and fertility
The major predictor of not having children, according to our analysis of America's general social survey (GSS) is being liberal and being nonreligious, in the traditional sense of the word "religious" whereby people collectively worship a moral God.
Dutton contends that among native European populations, liberals and conservatives are both becoming less intelligent. However, the decline among liberals is much more than among conservatives. Conservativism has been found to have a genetic component, or heritability of up to 0.66. In statistical jargon, that would mean that the religious persuasion of one’s parents was the strongest influence of a child’s, even absent the environmental influence of growing up with them. In addition, these religious people are, to a significant degree, immune from the effects of mutational load because they tend to marry and have children relatively young.
Eugenics
The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century was championed by both liberals and conservatives. There was a general feeling that the lesser classes of people were more fertile and were bringing down the average ability throughout civilized nations. Most measurements today would conclude that this turns out to have been the case. However, doing something about it was considered immoral, especially after Hitler.
The Woke Personality
Dutton writes that Woke activists are obsessed with power and control over others, and virtue signal about inequality as a means of obtaining social status and wealth for themselves, possibly because there is, for them, nothing beyond the material world simply because they are selfish. They are, in other words, truly dreadful people.
In chapter 3, Dutton works into his point. He sets it up: "from a conservative perspective, one might even argue that there is nothing positive about those who are Woke." But then he asks "what does what this really actually achieve?”
Dutton writes about the association between liberalism and ugliness throughout society: in art, architecture, music, couture, manners and everything else. He writes:
"This is why liberalism (used here to mean the opposite of conservativism; leftism) involves not merely virtue signaling, but also constant change, critiquing, and undermining traditional norms – that which is sacred – and replacing them with that which evokes discussed and thus a sense of disorientation and dysphoria in which nothing makes sense. In this context, the liberal can attain power.”
“This can be observed in the ugliness of contemporary architecture, the vileness of much contemporary art and so on. The traditional purpose of both was, in part, to create beauty, despite there being a subjective element to beauty, such as regard to the details that are found most attractive, there exists a strong cross-cultural agreement on what constitutes beauty.
“Beauty involves substrates the symmetry. It is about water. It aims to inspire a group with a sense the sacred and eternal.”
Genetic Interest
Some of what Dutton writes requires explanation, such as:
"If 100,000 Danes migrated to England, this would be the equivalent of every English person losing 140 children, due to the extent, for example, to which the English and Danes would integrate and fewer English genes would be passed on. If this were 10,000 Bantu, who were far more genetically different from the English than are Danes, then each English person would lose the genetic equivalent of approximately 11,000 children.”
Dutton is building on a concept presented by Frank Salter in his book “On Genetic Interests.” A person’s genetic interest is the extent to which his genome is present throughout the gene pool to which he belongs. 50% of my genome is present in each of my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and each of my children. 25% of my genome is present in my grandchildren; 12.5% and my cousins. Extending out, the collection of genes that define me exists extensively throughout the gene pool to which I belong. When Dutton writes of every English person losing 140 children, he means 140 copies of his genome. See my video review of Salter’s book for a more complete explanation.
My genetic interest is in people like me in the population. When people unlike me move in, they occupy carrying capacity in the land, denying it to my progeny. That negatively impacts my genetic interest. The more dissimilar they are, the more prejudicial it is to my genetic interest.
If I marry a woman from my own ethnicity, although our genomes are dissimilar, they overlap to a great extent. The number of SNPs – single nuclear nucleotide polymorphisms –separating us is relatively small. In other words, most of our DNA is the same.
If all human beings share 99% of their genome, but a wife from within my population shares 99.9%, obviously our children will share about 99.95% with each of their parents. On the other hand, if I pair with somebody whose genome is only 99% of mine, my children would be only 99.5% me, implying a genetic distance of 10 times as great as if I had married somebody of my own ethny. My children would be more unlike me than my unrelated neighbors.
Personality traits and mutation
Dutton writes that “Rising mutation leads to increased individualism, mental instability, and also increased feminism (masculinized females) and effeminate males; all that was selected against under harsh conditions. Rising individualism also leads to increasing female influence, while increasing female influence leads to growing concerns with individual oriented moral foundations.
“In addition, due to mutation, we become less group oriented and less gender distinct, with one development leading to individualism and the other to feminism. Feminism leads to more individualism, this leads to more egalitarianism and this leads to more and more females in positions of power. This causes yet more individualism and greater neuroticism and narcissism due to the "safe space" society which females create, which does not teach children to deal with adversity. This forges yet more individualism, so we have a downward spiral.”
Note that the artificial hormones being ingested by women and environmental factors may be resulting may be reducing male hormone levels. Sperm counts have fallen by 50% over the past few decades. There are likely to be both environmental and genetic factors,
Dutton is certainly right to say that rising individualism leads to increasing female influence, while increasing female influence leads to growing concerns about individually oriented moral foundations. In addition, due to mutation, we become less group oriented and less gender distinct, with one development leading to individualism and the other to feminism.
Making it difficult for people to have children.
Dutton says that opening the floodgates for immigration creates more demand for housing, making it increasingly difficult for the nativeborn to afford a place to live and raise children. It also keeps the nativeborn from having access to unskilled jobs.
The school system, increasingly dominated by females, must be heavily focused on the two of Haidt’s moral foundations they are concerned with: harm avoidance and equality. Accordingly, schooling must protect everybody, including males, from adaptively developing, such that they learn coping mechanisms that permit them to deal with psychological stress and disappointment. They become increasingly risk-averse, expecting to be looked after by their parents and society more broadly.
The female run society.
Many of the changes that characterize the Woke mindset are associated with the increasing dominance of women in society.
Generation Z has been raised in a much more female oriented society where nothing is more important than "not hurting people's feelings," not even the truth. Teaching is essentially a female space. It is the longhouse, the community hall in the village where "community," everyone getting along, is more important than any other consideration; it is the matriarchal society. Females who were adapted to be running a nursery school are now running professions and even countries and all the consequences are predictable: feelings trump all.
In terms of moral foundations, cross culturally, women score higher on harm avoidance, equality, and purity than do men, and lower on authority and in group loyalty. They are also more likely to be highly empathetic and blind to systematizing; more likely to put feelings above truth.
There is evidence that conservatives with the same resources are more generous than are liberals and their area of moral concern is closer to self, such as family and ethnic group, whereas the liberal area of moral concern is more distant, such as different ethnic groups.
The liberal ideal is that marriage is centered around love and happiness and should continue only as long as both partners love each other and are happy; what has been termed "confluent love." The conservative view is that marriage is for life and is vital for family and social stability.
Wokeness and the creation of chaos.
Sex became dangerous in the 19th century, with the spread of social and other diseases. The resulting sexual conservativism favored chastity and monogamy, which in turn led to social stability.
Accordingly, in their sexual behavior, the Victorians became more conservative, leading to a shift toward conservativism and a kind of runaway conservativism which culminated, for example, and illegitimacy being so unacceptable that children who would've been born to single mothers were routinely put up for adoption. In 1950, 80% of adoptions in Britain were of illegitimate children.
Wokeness, by preventing mating between left and right, helps to prevent mating between unhealthy and healthy people. At least among the more intelligent, the unhealthy will breed with each other, having a small number of children or one partner may discourage both from breeding at all.
On the other hand, the healthy will be compelled, via social exclusion, to breed with each other in the form of openness induced positive eugenics. And, of course, white ethnocentrism will also be increased by a feeling among whites that they are excluded.
Wokeness, evolution and the forging of a new people.
The fact that you are socially excluded for even noticing. [the great replacement] makes it a lot easier for you to disconnect with mainstream society, enjoying a growing, ethnocentric societal subgroup, further evidencing the way in which Wokeness is creating this group.
A second possibility is that Woke people, being ultimately individualists, are evolved to flourish in a situation of chaos. Following this, we can argue that individualists are fast Life History Strategists who should be expected to create chaos because this is the ecology in which they are evolved to flourish.
The Spiteful Mutant model would posit that Wokeness really is the self-destructive behaviour of a maladaptive mind. The term “spiteful mutant” was coined by the British biologist William Hamilton (1936–2000) in 1970 to refer to behaviour by group members that damages the group, though it may be useful to the individual in some way or to those who are genetically similar to him. For example, it might create a situation of chaos in which people like him can thrive even if he does not pass on his genes. It has been mathematically shown that this is plausible when organisms are bunched together and cannot escape each other—this being the modern condition to a great extent.
Fast and Slow Life History is a theory advanced by J. Philippe Rushton. Peoples with a slow life history are characterized by later maturation, fewer children, more investment in educating children, more marital stability, higher intelligence and higher achievement. Dutton himself has written a great deal about spiteful mutants.
It has been shown that the moral circle of leftists – those with whom they identify – is more genetically distant from oneself than is the case with conservatives. In other words, they might identify with a different ethnic group over their own, whereas conservatives will identify with their own ethnic group.
In this book Dutton includes a lot of material associating the increase in the mutation load, decrease in intelligence, increase in aberrational personalities, and decline in civilization with the rising status of women in society. He quotes a number of authors, obscure probably for reasons other than the fact that they might be wrong. The footnote for this bit is J.B. Glubb, The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1976).
These same phenomena—decline in traditional religiosity which upheld adaptive behaviour as divinely mandated, sterility (especially among the higher classes), feminism, multiculturalism and acceptance of immigrants, acceptance of homosexuality and so forth—were observed during the decline of Athens, Rome and Baghdad, with senators asking Emperor Augustus what could be done about upper class females refusing to obey the traditional patriarchal rules or female imams being appointed.
Citing a 90-year-old text (J. D. Unwin, Sex and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 380), Dutton found that in each case when civilizations were at their peak there was what Unwin called “absolute monogamy.” In each case, the fall of the civilisation was associated with the dissolution of absolute monogamy and the rise of female sexual selection—women becoming empowered and having more of a say in their own marriages—and a concomitant reduction in fertility. According to Unwin:
In its full rigour this institution has never been tolerated for very long … [in all civilizations] reforms were introduced into the legal position of married women. From a position of complete subjection and legal nonentity they succeeded to the status of free and equal citizens, being able to hold property, to trade, and to contract. They were granted the power of testamentary disposition, and finally took their place in society on a complete equality with men.
In each instance, where women became sufficiently powerful that they were permitted consensual marriage, rather than marriage arranged by their male relatives, there was a collapse in population:
“The same changes were made successively by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Athenians, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Protestant English. These societies lived in different geographical environments; they belonged to different racial stocks; but the history of their marriage customs is the same. In the beginning each society had the same ideas in regard to sexual regulations. Then the same struggles took place; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made, the same results ensued … its energy decreased, and [it] faded away. The one outstanding feature of the whole story is its unrelieved monotony.”
My take on this is that raising children is hard work. A major incentive for either sex to undertake that hard work is the simple desire to have children. However, a secondary incentive for women is that they have no alternatives for making their way in the world. The value that women bring within a patriarchal society is their fertility – their ability to bear and raise children. It is their bargaining chip, their bread-and-butter. They use it to strike the best deal they can with a man who is in a position to provide for them and their children.
A man’s incentive for having children is easier to explain. If he thinks highly of himself, he believes that his seed is worth propagating. He will beget warriors who will defend his family and his property. If he is successful, he has the wherewithal to support women who will do the bulk of the work in raising his progeny.
Fecundity increased both men’s and women’s status in traditional societies. A tribe needs warriors to defend itself. The work of raising children thus bore social rewards.
Dutton concludes the chapter with the following twist:
But returning to our central point, if this model of Wokeness is correct, then the most extreme Woke activists are not “spiteful mutants” at all. They are, in a sense, “eugenic mutants,” “group-selected mutants” or “altruistic mutants” whose evolutionary purpose is to help purge the group of those who would be maladaptive under harsh conditions, including themselves, and even to return the group to those conditions, such that the group remains genetically healthy across time and, ultimately, survives. To misquote English biologist Richard Dawkins, they exemplify “The Selfless Gene.” If this model is correct, then the purpose of Wokeness is to ensure that the group is, to a great extent, returned to the remnant pre-Industrial Revolution normal population: People who are genetically, healthy, intelligent, group-oriented, conservative and religious in the traditional sense. If this model is correct, the Woke are, surely, not to be condemned, at least if those are the kinds of people you wish your society to be dominated by.
To repeat, Dutton’s thesis is that the Woke are among us to purge our gene pool of mutants – people like themselves! It is an attractive notion, but Dutton does not go into the question of how long it will take. He cites Russian historian Peter Turchin (P. Turchin, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) as saying that civilizations take between 10 and 40 generations to weaken.
This seems reasonable. Our slide down from the Industrial Revolution has been about ten generations. Our rise from the depths of the Dark Ages had taken about forty. Presumably it will take that many to toughen us up again. If “us” remains us.
Altruistic and non-altruistic mutants
Dutton expands on the theme of mutants. Feminist Andrea Dworkin he categorizes as an altruistic mutant, improving the human genome by discouraging mutants who are less obviously Woke from having anything to do with sex or reproduction. Justin Trudeau he calls a non-altruistic mutant. Handsome, well born, with a cool demeanor and a slick appearance
He has so evidently gotten to be the "leader of the Woke world" by Machiavellian political maneuvering that it hardly requires analysis. A true altruistic mutant is practically the exact opposite profile of Justin Trudeau: a shrill and shrieking unattractive neurotic, single and childless, who lives and breathes anger in a fanatical service to a divine will that says everything must be overturned and disrupted.
Are you an Ethno-nationalist?
Dutton asks the question at the heart of his analysis. Do you believe in your own people and want to see them prosper? Even if it involves some sacrifice on your part?
If you are ethno-nationalist, in light of our analysis, this idea may not seem so eccentric after all. If what you value, above everything, is the survival of your ethny as a relatively distinct genetic cluster which can compete and thrive against others, then, it seems, you have little choice but to contribute to our reversion to pre-industrial conditions; to support everything that the Woke are doing, to be Woke; to “take the knee.” Surely, you should do everything you can to bring about third world conditions in your own country.
Or better yet, per this reviewer, move to a European country where Third World conditions prevail. A few still remain, such as Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
Dutton quotes Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, whom he says
…terms this the “power process”; our goals must be primal: sex, the obtaining of food, the obtaining of status and so on. As a consequence of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, people are left trying to create a sense of meaning by pursuing ultimately unfulfilling pursuits or “surrogate activities” where they strive towards essentially artificial goals: entertainment, watching sport, political activism and even academic research, with only extreme status-seekers needing to compete for status, something people only did historically to obtain sex and food, which they can now obtain without significant status. This situation creates widespread ennui, as the surrogate activities can never be profoundly fulfilling.
Dutton advocates that people learn to do useful things, such as build houses. I note that even homebuilding may die out. As the population diminishes and we can no longer afford to support the Third World spongers among us, we will find that the housing stock is more than adequate. However, there will be work enough for men to do keeping families fed without industrial agriculture, keeping things fixed, and defending the family, and for women to raise children without a government school to babysit them and fast food to feed them.
Dutton predicts that a general economic collapse may be forestalled by the widespread application of artificial intelligence. I think in that he's optimistic. In the European countries, he writes, it is momentarily the case that the provision of free healthcare, free higher education and free social housing is looking altogether untenable. Western governments can no longer afford these things. Dutton should take note of the strong push back against computerized medicine with “standards of care,” “evidence-based medicine,” and such, and against homogenized curricular materials such as Bill Gates’ common core curriculum. In this reviewer’s opinion it is a case of garbage in, garbage out. Artificial intelligence is not much better than whatever intelligence it uses as input. At the moment AI is mostly “Woke in, Woke out.” The public isn’t buying it. AI semiconductor manufacturers such as Nvidia, which had a wild ride in early 2024, are cooling off quickly.
Enjoying that drink with the Woke girl at last.
Under the heading The Conservative Problem, Dutton writes:
The implication of our analysis is stark: if you are a genuine ethno-nationalist then accelerationism makes a great deal of sense. There are many ways in which this term seems to be defined, but, as noted above we mean by it: acceleration towards the social and economic collapse which is ultimately wrought by Wokeness.
This is Dutton’s dour conclusion, with which I agree. I don’t think we need to ask the Woke girl for a drink. Things are swirling down the drain with no help from us.
To wrap up, this reviewer offers first a few quibbles with Dutton, most of which only strengthen his argument, followed by his own conclusion about what to do. Simply put: keep your eyes open, stay on the sidelines, and raise your children to carry on.
Flaws in the Analysis
There are several areas in which Dutton’s analysis seems incomplete. He attributes the changes we observe solely to genetics – dysgenics due to the collapse of natural selection. Though I am sure that is a major factor, I would add as well several other considerations:
Pharmaceuticals.
Just about every American woman alive today would have had the opportunity to use birth control pills employing synthetic hormones. A whole generation of children has been medicated for ADHD. That same generation has been plied with antidepressants. As adults they have been subjected to NSAID’s, cholesterol lowering medicines, acid reflux medicines and so on. We have all been subjected to increasing levels of radiofrequency emissions. We know that all of these environmental factors have an impact. How much is the only question.
Everybody has been vaccinated. Not coincidentally, the rate of autism his surged from one in 10,000 to one in approximately 40. The causal mechanisms, though vehemently denied, have been convincingly presented. Over the past four years most of the population has been subjected to the mRNA Covid vaccinations. Dutton mentions vaccinations only infrequently, and in a positive note, as if they had been responsible for the significant reductions in disease during the 20th century. Opinion is swaying away from that point of view, most notably since the publication of Dissolving Illusions 10 years ago. The major improvements in public health generally predate the availability of vaccines. They are more attributable to clean water, improved sanitation, and antibiotics.
Dutton wrote that as the population becomes denser and less healthy, a massive disease outbreak becomes more likely. In this Dutton subscribes to the pandemic theory. It has been the subject of a lot of thought since Covid, and pandemics now seem not to be so much a natural occurrence. The things we have recently thought were pandemics, such as polio, Covid, AIDS, and the Spanish flu, seem to have been all attributable to environmental factors. This is certainly true of the diseases that were common in the 18th and 19th centuries such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera and so on. They disappeared with the appearance of modern sewage systems and clean water.
Epigenetics - gene environment interactions.
The word epigenetics does not appear in the book. I am sure that Dutton means epigenetics when he writes about the way genes are expressed in our society. Gene expression is quite variable depending on the environment in which an organism lives. Humankind has been changing its environment rapidly. We get less exercise, eat more highly processed foods, subject ourselves to chemicals such as glyphosate, micro plastics, and now whatever the they are spraying in the air via contrails.
The phenomena that Dutton describes are real. The causes are certainly a combination of mutations, which are purely genetic, purely environmental, and gene-environment interactions – epigenetics.
Mutation Load –
Dutton argues that absent purifying natural selection – leaving behind disadvantageous mutations through natural selection – our mutation load is increasing. While this makes intuitive sense, the concept begs the support of a mathematical model showing how deleterious genes will come to predominate.
A theme that has appeared in almost all of his books is the notion that older parents, especially older fathers, will tend to have more de novo mutations than the younger father. This idea is best expressed in Kondrashov’s Crumbling Genome and by Joseph Bronski.
The first caveat that I offer here is that Bronski appears to be a refugee from academia. By his photo he is in his 50s, but an Internet search reveals no academic work prior to 2023. He is a very bright guy who appears to be operating without the benefit of the academic apparatus of peer reviewed scholarly publications. Fully granting that those things have falling into disrepute, it nonetheless means that scholars are on their own in deciding whom to believe.
It is true that we are constantly being bombarded by cosmic rays, which affect the DNA in our germ cells. The older we are the more we are affected. On the other hand, never argued, is the fact that if these things are cumulative across generations. The grandchildren of a young father should be affected to the same extent as the children of an older father. Also never argued is the fact that a man who succeeds in becoming a father in his later decades probably has considerably more of “the right stuff” than a younger father. Dutton’s continual jihad against us older dads (68, 74 and 77 in my case) is ill advised. There are few enough of us willing to perpetuate our ethny in the first place. Let us just do it!
There is no doubt that mutations accumulate. On the other hand, people with the debilitating mutations are not able to reproduce, and therefore those mutations are left behind over time. Just as there is a mechanism for deleterious mutations entering the gene pool, there is an exit mechanism for leaving the gene pool by simply not being reproduced.
On this topic, Bronski writes:
I can amend my statement: Every 7 years of paternal age beyond 14 knocks about 0.05 SD off of expected value of child IQ due to exome mutations. So if you are 49, that's -0.25 SD from your gene scores. If you are 2 SD, you average kid could still be 1.75 SD, so it could still improve the gene pool to breed. This may not account for mutations to the non-coding region, but those almost certainly drop less than another 0.05 SD off per 7 years of paternal age, and not more.
I cannot find where he wrote the statement being amended, but this is good enough. The argument is straightforward. The male germline experiences two de novo mutations for each year of life past eight. Older fathers pass on more de novo (occurring in his generation) mutations than younger fathers.
The substance of Bronski’s quoted argument is that if you have an IQ of 130 – that's the 2SD he's talking about – your kid would have an expected IQ of 1.75 SD, or 126. A 70-year-old man with an IQ of 150 should expect his average kid to have an IQ of 143.
I find this argument unconvincing for several reasons. First of all, there are the omitted factors. It doesn't take the mother's intelligence into consideration. It also ignores regression to the mean. Per James Flynn and Stephen Hsu, and confirmed by models developed by this reviewer, children’s intelligence reverts from the average of their parents 40% of the way to the mean of the population. This must be so if IQ is to remain at 100 and the standard deviation at 15 from generation to generation. Follow the above link for the argument. This is a bigger effect than Bronski and Dutton attribute to older parentage.
Dutton/Bronski’s thesis further ignores what people have found about genes affecting intelligence. Researchers have concluded that intelligence is affected by at least hundreds, probably thousands of genes, each of which make a small contribution.
The human genome consists of perhaps 20,000 genes. Per Kondrashov there are about 100 de novo mutations per generation, of which perhaps 10 are deleterious. A person inherits thousands of mutations from prior generations, less deleterious on average because the bad ones did not reproduce.
Simple arithmetic suggests that there are too many genes involved, with too few of them experiencing de novo mutations in each generation, for them to have such a profound effect on the genomics of intelligence. If Bronski's measurements are right - and the fact that he overlooks regression to the mean makes me suspect even that - they may be more attributable to epigenetics, the expression of the genes, rather than the genes themselves.
In other words, the child's intelligence may have been influenced by environmental factors interacting with the genes. The implication would be that the genes themselves are not deficient. If that is true, whatever the effect on the child, there would not be a mutation to pass along to reduce intelligence in subsequent generations.
Good that Dutton raises the question, which few others do. However, in my opinion the matter requires further research.
Conclusion
In this reviewer’s opinion there is no need to follow Dutton’s advice to throw accelerants on the fire. A collapse is coming even as we write. It appears there is an incipient civil war in the United States, where there have been two assassination attempts on the unWoke presidential candidate. The world economy is running on fumes. Global debt is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, vastly exceeding global ability to pay. The common people everywhere are up in arms about unwanted immigration and the loss of freedoms in association, medical decision-making, speech, travel, employment and just about everything else. They are apprehensive about pervasive surveillance, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies and other looming forms of government control of the citizenry.
A demographic collapse has been underway for decades throughout the entire developed world. Woke has done its job. People are not having children.
Dutton fails to offer the most obvious solution. People should simply marry, have children, and raise those children to have a belief in their own ethny, supported by religion if possible. The husband should assume the role of the head of the household, and his wife should support him, anticipating times that will demand physical strength, courage, and mutual support at a level that is not common today. Dutton’s book describes exactly who the people are who are likely to do this in every particular except one. Some of us are a bit older.