Last Update: January 14, 2001
The Eugenics Simulator is an application that predicts(or tries to) the effects of artificial selection on one(and eventually -- many) measurable multifactorial traits such as height and IQ. The user inputs information about the population, information about the selective policies desired, and the program computes a hopefully satisfactory estimate of the real effects it would have on the population, generation by generation. The point is not to give exact results, but a general idea of the effects of eugenics applied in different ways.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports welcome -- e-mail me.
Works on Windows 98. It might well run on other Win32 platforms, I don't know.
-- needed to run the program(you may already have it), extract it to your C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM
The Eugenics Simulator - ALPHA release(14/01/2001)
.Now h is used instead of h-square. That is, I use the square root of the user-entered heritability value instead of plugging it directly into the formula(which is erroneous).
.Now narrow-sense heritability is used instead of broad-sense heritability. The default value is now 0.4 (which, I think, is a conservative estimate of IQ narrow-sense heritability). The caption of the input field is now "Narrow-sense heritability of the selected trait" instead of "Heritability of the selected trait".
.Corrected a potential "division by zero" bug.
.Added the help system !
.Added an icon.
History of changes:
The Eugenics Simulator -- BETA release (just to give you a general idea of what it is, and for debugging. If you think the basic formula is wrong, or the predictions don't make sense, please tell me)
.Very very basic calculation of one multi-factorial characteristic for the next generation, from population mean, SD, population size, degree of assortative mating(i.e. spousal correlation on trait), heritability of the trait, and how many children each of five user-selected segments(%s) of the population will have.
.No help yet ! You'll have to figure out by yourself how to use it...
Things to add/change:
- Ability to calculate segment means from minimal(more than x children) or maximal(less than x children) thresholds for the number of children, instead of exact figures, using trait-fertility correlation as additional input.
- Ability to calculate the in-breeding coefficient of the population.(and see if eugenics really is such a danger to genetic diversity)
- Ability to calculate several multi-factorial traits simultaneously being selected for.
- Add statistics that will show some predicted social effects of the modifications(in the case of IQ).
- Adapt it to most standard screen resolutions.
- Add a function to measure narrow-sense heritability from broad-sense heritability.
