Checking in with Fred Reed.................

......................and reaching for the dictionary.   Fred, herein, offers his insights into "behavioral genetics."   A wee excerpt:

(7) I do not understand the concept of the “dysgenic” and the “eugenic.”  Both seem to imply value judgments–that evolution is going in a good or a bad direction. This smacks of teleology, entelechy. I thought evolution had no direction and that it could be neither good nor bad.  It is the mindless, undirected adjustment of a system to its circumstances.

For example, the anthropologist Peter Frost argues, perhaps correctly, that North Europeans have become less violent because the hanging over centuries of violent criminals has reduced the genetic tendency to violence. He regards this as an improvement—as do I, if it has happened. But how is it an improvement in the sense of evolution, which has no such conception of betterment?