This is doing the rounds again so let me reiterate that it is...
Sasha Gusev@SashaGusevPosts
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Jan 15, 2026
~2 min read
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This is doing the rounds again so let me reiterate that it is practically impossible to "breed out" or eliminate a polygenic trait from the population -- a concept that has broken hereditarian brains for months. Here's an example with two highly heritable mono/polygenic traits:
Wilfred Reilly@wil_da_beast630
It seems pretty obvious to me that you could breed the most aggressive human warriors and get a strain of aggressive human warriors.
Specific ancient Kings tried this. Common sense indicates it. I like both sides of this debate, but anyone flatly denying this has reasons for doing so. #pitbulls #Chihuahuas
Specific ancient Kings tried this. Common sense indicates it. I like both sides of this debate, but anyone flatly denying this has reasons for doing so. #pitbulls #Chihuahuas
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This is true even in agriculture, where corn that was selectively bred down to low protein for 50 generations (red) could immediately be reversed and bred back up because the relevant genetic variation was not eliminated. This is important for two reasons ...
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First, Nazi eugenicists hypothesized that psychiatric traits like schizophrenia were driven by a single gene and could therefore be easily eliminated (). The assumption was that a few generations of aggressive eugenics would dramatically "improve" society.
Sasha Gusev@SashaGusevPosts
@kalle_leppala @ekernf01 @alamjay78 @AnonGlobe79158 The thinking of the time was definitely that SCZ is likely to be Mendelian. Here's how Franz Kallmann described it and his work was focused on characterizing single-locus transmission.
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This view persists still: you will regularly find arguments on here that the "easy button" to eliminate crime is to simply lock up and sterilize all perpetrators for a generation or two, thus "breeding out" the CRIME GENE.
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Second, clueless environmentalists ironically make the same mistake in the opposite direction: seeing the historic failure of selection as evidence that common traits are not heritable AT ALL and then going on to argue for various crackpot environmental causes.
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BTW, a funny aspect of the prior discussion was the fixation on the word "threshold traits", as if I was playing some kind of statistical trick by focusing on just these traits. In fact this is the steel man argument!
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It should be obvious that you can't "eliminate" a continuous trait like height or lung volume. Where people get confused is specifically in thinking about threshold/case-control traits, which feel like a light switch that eugenics can permanently set to off.
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The twitter hereditarian braintrust is so used to memorized rebuttals that any new concept feels to them like a sneaky trick, even when it would actually be their strongest argument. Overfitting to ideology instead of actually forming a coherent world model. /x