Ok, provocative title, but it's hard to distil this situation into a few words. Yes it's about Toby Young.
News has come out about a secret conference held for the last few years at UCL. Invite-only, secret and small, it has apparently been attended by a neo-nazi and a paedophilia supporter. The conference is apparently about the inheritability of intelligence but has also looked at race and intelligence and eugenics.
The Telegraph details the conference here: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/01/10/ucl-launches-eugenics-probe-emerges-academic-held-controversial/
It appears that Toby Young was one of the invitees to this secret invite-only conference. Aside from writing misogynistic tweets, he has also written an article supporting 'progressive eugenics'. The Guardian talks about Toby Young's involvement here:
www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/10/ucl-to-investigate-secret-eugenics-conference-held-on-campus
Given that the attendees were aware of the unacceptable nature of their discussions so held them in secret and that the fact that the conferences are now banned and are being investigated, it's clear that something pretty unsavoury has been going on.
Toby Young has resigned from his position on the board of the Office for Students, and it appears his resignation may be linked to these revelations. Toby Young also pulls in a fat salary as Director of the New Schools Network. The New Schools Network is a charity, but it receives the majority of its funding from the DfE. Surely his position there is also untenable?
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Should people who attend Nazi conferences get government funding?
noblegiraffe · 10/01/2018 23:57
This is from Toby Young's article "The Fall of the Meritocracy":
"Progressive eugenics
[...] the solution I want to explore here. I’m more interested in the potential of a technology that hasn’t been invented yet: genetically engineered intelligence. [...] I’m thinking in particular of the work being done by Stephen Hsu [...] Hsu believes that within ten years machine learning applied to large genomic datasets will make it possible for parents to screen embryos in vitro and select the most intelligent one to implant. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at New York University, describes how the process would work:
Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.
It’s worth repeating this last point, because it deals with one of the main reservations people will have about this procedure: these couples wouldn’t be creating a super-human in a laboratory, but choosing the smartest child from the range of all the possible children they could have. Nevertheless, this could have a decisive impact. “This might mean the difference between a child who struggles in school, and one who is able to complete a good university degree,” says Hsu.
My proposal is this: once this technology becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.
[...] If people from all classes used it in exactly the same proportions, all you’d succeed in doing would be to increase the average IQ of each class, thereby preserving the gap between them. Wouldn’t it be better to limit its use to disadvantaged parents with low IQs? That way, it could be used as a tool to reduce inequality.[27]
This technology might actually be more effective than anything else we’ve tried when it comes to tackling the issue of entrenched poverty, with the same old problems—teenage pregnancy, criminality, drug abuse, ill health—being passed down from one generation to the next like so many poisonous heirlooms.
END OF QUOTE
So, basically, screen the poor embryos so they´re born less dumb. I'm specially interested in his linking criminality and drug abuse in the lower classes to low IQ. Fascinated, really. I'd like to know how he explains ill health, mental illness, drug abuse, corruption, tax evasion, pederasty, etc amongst the very rich (which according to him have higher IQs). 
Full article here: quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/
So that's Toby himself done away with before implantation then!
He's actually too thick to realise he's thick, isn't he?
"If people from all classes used it in exactly the same proportions, all you’d succeed in doing would be to increase the average IQ of each class, thereby preserving the gap between them. Wouldn’t it be better to limit its use to disadvantaged parents with low IQs? That way, it could be used as a tool to reduce inequality."
Would these super smart poor people then get scholarships to the top private and public schools? Because in the UK it's not how smart you are but what school your parents were able to afford to send you to. Why not do away with private and public schools and fund early years, primary and secondary education to close the gap between rich and poor? Toby's musings are those of a not terribly bright mind, maybe he wishes his parents had screened their embryos? 
On a separate note, of course intelligence is in part inherited as are looks, and some talents, but research in the field of epigenetics suggests that a person's environment and upbringing shapes their abilities, it's not purely innate and it is a life long process.
What a tosser!
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