What seems at first sight to be a thoroughly nasty proposal has been made by a Danish academic, Helmuth Nyborg, that parents of low intellectual ability should be dissuaded from having children and that high IQ parents should be paid by the state to have more children. It has attracted an avalanche of protest because it seems to hark back to Hitler's Aryan race programme, and also the former practices of various nation-states such as Germany, Sweden and America in sterilising so-called mental defectives in state nursing homes.

But, of course, eugenics is already being practised by parents in a voluntary way. Orthodox Jewry in several countries already advises its young people to be genetically tested in case they carry the the terrible Tay-Sachs gene and thus to avoid any possible deepening romantic association with another carrier of the gene. This appears to be welcomed by their young people and helps their choices of future partners. Also, many of the possible carriers of the equally terrible Huntington's Disease can be tested if they wish it and can therefore decide whether or not to have children. Gradually, the disease, is being extinguished by this method. Then again, foetuses with severe deficiencies, such as Down's Syndrome, are aborted on a large scale in developed countries -- with the mother's consent, of course.

Helmuth Nyborg's proposal is defective enough, it would seem, in conflating 'problem children' with children of low intellectual ability. This is insupportable. Problem children can almost as much be the consequence of bad parenting -- or even of state children's homes and socio-economicl policies -- than any innate deficiency that has anything to do with genes. There are, it is true, some males with a double ration of the Y-chromosome which inclines them to easily-provoked violence and some might wish to make the case for their enforced sterilisation, but these cases are so rare that they're not important in the present context.

In practical terms, Nyborg's proposal to pay high-IQ parents state benefits has been found wanting in France. This country has had a general pronatalist policy for years, paying parents who have more than three children. This only has the most marginal effect even among poor and usually less intelligent parents, who might be expected to take advantage of benefits. Quite besides the nastiness of deciding whether a particular pair of parents have an IQ score above or below a certain level, it is most unlikely that high IQ parents will do as Nyborg wishes and respond with large numbers of children. Besides, even parents with low intelligence can occasionally produce children of very high IQ, even geniuses. This is less likely than the production of bright children from parents of high ability, but the fact is that by far the most of the very brightest children are produced from the general mass of the population. How many geniuses would Nyborg deny to Denmark by drawing what can only be described as an arbitrary line?

None of this is to say that intelligence is not important, nor that an IQ score does not mean something of importance to universities or employers when choosing applicants. It is a fact that we are becoming a technological society requiring an increasing proportion of highly intelligent workers. It is also a fact that fertility rates in developed countries are now heading towards non-replacement levels -- that is, below 2.2 children per family. It also appears to be a fact in America that, at the present time, high IQ parents tend to produce smaller numbers of children than the less intelligent (based on income levels as surrogates for IQ scores in the US Current Population Survey, 2000 ).

So something will have to be done if populations in both developed or developing countries are to survive in a century or two from now, never mind whether they'll be able to cope with advancing technologies. Italy's population, for example, with a fertility rate of 1.1 children per family is heading for total extinction within four or five generations. All this will require a great deal of study. My only contribution at this stage is to suggest that any country which wishes to survive beyond, say, the year 2100, should start to lay on the best possible child-care facilities it can afford for all its population, whatever the IQ of the parents. This by itself ought to favour larger families by the more intelligent parents because the latter usually have to work longer hours and are more harrassed than the norm. According to the American evidence, the average-to-high intelligence parents need only to increase their family size by 30% in order to stabilise the national IQ -- and perhaps increase it.

Keith Hudson

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Low IQ people "shouldn't have children"

Agence France-Presse correspondents

Copenhagen -- A Danish academic has sparked an uproar by calling for state measures to encourage childbearing among intelligent people but to dissuade those with low intellectual ability, to create what he called a better Danish society.

Helmuth Nyborg, a well-known psychology professor at the University of Aarhus who specialises in intelligence research, said it was time to "abandon the politically correct" and to practice selection in order to "improve the coming generations and avoid degenerates in the population", in comments this weekend that have been widely reported on national television and the country's main newspapers.

"I'm aware that my proposal breaks a taboo that dates back more than half a century, since Hitler's Aryan race program, and it is very controversial," he said. "But the debate has to be raised now because the trend is cause for concern in Denmark, where we have an increasing number of problem kids," he said.

His proposals triggered outrage among many politicians and experts, including Integration Minister Bertel Haarder, who said Nyborg's suggestions were "against all moral principles".

But he said statistics show that women with lower educations have more children than highly educated women, who tend to spend more time studying and working before starting a family.

Nyborg suggested that highly educated women could have their workloads reduced while less intelligent parents could be paid to not have children.

"It's easy to make associations to Hitler and Nazism, as my critics do. But this has nothing to do with Nazism. Hitler was not a eugenicist, but an ideologue who abused the program of procreation," he said.

"He didn't want to improve the human race, he wanted to eliminate certain groups such as Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, and he massacred the most intelligent among them," Nyborg said.

Nyborg claimed intelligence was hereditary, and said it was "unfortunate and worrying if parents of lower intelligence bring more children into the world, as is the case today in Denmark, than highly intelligent parents".

"We can already choose to have children or not by doing practical tests in fertility clinics which show whether the fetus has hereditary genetic malformations," he said.

"It's possible to choose the eggs. So why not keep the best ones, in terms of intelligence," he said.

"Between 10 and 20 per cent of the population, who are at the lower echelon of society and who cannot fill in a time sheet at work or who cannot hold down a job or take care of their children, should not have children," he said.

"We are all aware of this problem, but we don't dare talk about it. But we should, for the sake of society and the future, so that we can have productive citizens and not people who need help," he said.

Agence France-Presse - September 30, 2003

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