people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential — the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. - Matt Ridley

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa.
That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but is is simply not true.

At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed.