Steve Sailer contemplates a potential problem in human progress:
In general, the 19th Century British were just more effectual at dog breeding than are moderns. I strongly doubt that they had better techniques. They just had better goals. For example, the reporter goes to visit a man who has been breeding a healthier English bulldog for 40 years, but nobody much cares.
That reminds me that you occasionally read, although less often now than a decade ago, of somebody claiming that genetic engineering of humans will, Real Soon Now, change everything. I pretty much asserted that back in the 1990s.
Well, maybe, but leaving aside all the technical questions and consider this: humans have near-complete control over dog breeding today, and yet we are lousier at it than a century ago.
What Sailer clearly fails to keep in mind here is that the decline of canine breeding results can be blamed upon the democratization of dog breeders and the insidious pressures of the free market. Naturally, the breeders have oriented themselves towards the lowest common denominator, which is not necessarily the most efficient, effective, or objectively desirable by any scientific standard.
The new eugenics will not be left in the hands of interested amateurs, but will instead be based upon a sound foundation of genetic science and guided by scientific technocrats making wise, science-based decisions. What could possibly go wrong?