Thread by @EricOrcadian

1. Director Stephanie Welch raised a $75,000 budget through a Kickstarter campaign to fund this film as a civil rights project – not a scientific inquiry. Despite the criticisms to follow, I recommend A Dangerous Idea to all as a cautionary example.. vimeo.com/290824412

2. of how social propaganda is used to cloud public understanding of inconvenient scientific realities. Many of the interviewees like Robert Reisch and Van Jones are short on scientific authority but long on moral proclamations with much of their commentary rolled into the film’s

3. narration to shepherd the audience away from undesirable thought patterns. These voices, among others, comprise a carefully selected group of persuaders pushing a central theme: The likelihood that inequality is dealt out by genetic differences is an unconscionable prospect.

4. One that fails to comport with sacred canons of egalitarianism which dominate today’s cultural and academic mindset. They further assert these socially objectionable “ideas” will encourage fatalistic behavior and a shirking of responsibility among the biological “have nots”.

5. To confront this problem they advocate an idealogical prescription intended to convince the public that such “ideas” are dangerous and contravened by legitimate science. So, the mysterious lack of hard scientific data presented to rebut contentions of genetic inequality

6. may come as a surprise. This omission was inartfully substituted for ad hominems targeting scientists and researchers like Watson, Dawkins, and Murray as well as exaggerating historical incidents of miscalculation, erroneous preconceptions, and invalidated

7. hypotheses advanced by geneticists. Welch and Co. are so consumed with the notion that it’s unhealthy for the public to think this way that one wonders if they even considered the ethical question of whether they were faithfully upholding the honesty test.

8. Geneticist Richard Lewinton, the godfather of “scientific” race denial argues that people who credit genes with biological predisposition towards physical/mental traits or characteristics are behaving religiously. This opinion may seem ironic and antithetical to conventional

9. wisdom which suggests that one who argues genes play no roll, or that environmental forces are the sole impetus that shape the traits, is biased by sociological dogma rather than an objective analysis of biology.

10. The second half of the film is spent bashing all things eugenics and characterizations of equivalent modern-day policy directives such as welfare repeals, immigration quotas, and border enforcement while heaping heavy praise on Johnson’s Great Society and poverty reforms as

11. the true demographic equalizer – not racist ideas about genetic determinism. Welch’s coverage of the social inequities and moral failures instituted by the early 20th-century eugenics movement, as applied to both racial and socioeconomic divides within the American

12. population, were further bemoaned by a reception of glowing reviews from Adolf Hitler. In his interview, Robert Pollack of CSSR
incorrectly credits Hitler with the statement “All politics is applied biology” which was actually quoted by eugenicist Ernst Haeckel.

13. Poor James Watson (who was relentlessly browbeaten throughout) laments a history of sensible research lost to the frequent objection “...we can’t do that because the Nazi’s would’ve done it” annunciated by many of his less imaginative colleagues.

14. The film’s credibility takes a fatal plunge when it strays beyond social advocacy into the realm of abject quackery by inferring that “the gene” –defined as the basic unit of life and heredity– doesn’t really exist at all and is merely a social construct that represents

15. a fixational unit of antiquated racist mentality needlessly held over from the 20th-century. A clumsy attempt is made to reinforce this fallacy via comments by respected geneticists like Carlos Bustamante who suggest the description of “the gene” is open to interpretation.

16. Conversely, I would argue physicists don’t reject the existence of the Higgs field despite the fact that they all suffer some difficulty elucidating a concise and consistent description of it. Welch attempts to quash our academic curiosity by suggesting the mechanisms

17. that make us different or unequal cannot be biologically defined due to the insufficiencies of our intellectual capacity and limits of our restricted empirical tools. We’re led to believe that understanding something of such monumental complexity as the variation scheme

18. imprinted by biology adds up to an insurmountable task. This ascetic message is meant to dissuade us from investigating the forbidden side of biological diversity by gaslighting the audience into believing it’s too difficult to understand

19. Ultimately, A Dangerous Idea is driven by impassioned adherence to Welch’s Orwellian maxim, thusly conveyed; “the gene” is not a biological reality – but rather a pseudo-subjective abstraction invented to justify ill-conceived and mean-spirited commitments to inequality.

20. Welch makes clear that she fully expects the “gene myth” to be added to the list of existing academic and media propaganda campaigns formulated to evangelize the public to the non-existence of social constructs like race, gender, and biological differences in IQ.

21. Film concludes with a thought-decree telling us the proper path for science should be one guided by equality codes where biological variation between different groups of people is so infinitesimal as to not be worthy of recognition ..because we’re really just “all the same”.