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What has happened to this site? We have a topic on the front page of the site for 15 hours now, with almost 400 comments, and the top comment is a nakedly eugenicist screed about "the dumbest people" having too many babies.

I mean, even skipping the moral horror here, it's not even true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

But HN... wants it to be true? What the actual fuck, people?

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ive been here since 2014. i didnt bring up eugenics, but if you want to broach that topic then fine. intelligence, as well as all other traits or characteristics, of not just humans but all organisms, is subject to natural selection. if you deny this, you deny natural selection and this would make you a science denier. whether we should act on this fact, or the morality of doing so, is completely up to you. but you will not deny science on hackernews.

oh and you saw my comment at the top because the ranking algorithm takes the youthfulness of the comment into account. its rather embarrassing that you dont know this.

The established science is that at least half of our intelligence is a product of the environment.

Otherwise we wouldn't have so-called feral children - people who never acquired language and thus their intellectual growth was hindered.

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