A claim I have seen in discussions of eugenics is that modern institutions, in particular those of the welfare state, prevent evolution from working, make it easier for the unfit to survive and reproduce, and that humans should intervene. There is a legitimate point in that claim but putting it in terms of fitness is misleading; in the evolutionary context fitness is defined by the ability to get copies of your genes into future generations. The complaint is not that a welfare state lets the unfit survive and so makes the population less fit but that the characteristics that lead to fitness in a welfare state are by other criteria less desirable, lead to less economic growth, less scientific progress, a population less able to defend itself against aggression, less of something else the person making the argument views as more important than evolutionary fitness. Sometimes the implicit background to the argument is the worry that at some point in the future civilization will...
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