American high school graduates today rate on a lower level than even less-advanced countries like Korea, although their education seems enormously more expensive. Much of these results are certainly due to external factors, such as a permissive lifestyle and poor upbringing, but some can clearly be attributed to the dysgenic processes now taking place. For our experts active in futures studies, these questions should be some of the most important, most challenging ones to address. Before we try to find answers to this problem, it may be helpful to look more closely at the basic concepts and basic rules of genetics. Genes determine the physical and mental characteristics of an individual.
Genes are immutable.
The average lifetime of a gene is 3 million years. Few experts today will fully agree with these two statements, so let us take a closer look. First, we have to strictly distinguish between the phenotype and the genotype of a living thing. As an example, lets visualize an automobile on one hand, and the set of blueprints and instructions to build it on the other hand. The car is the phenotype, the tangible object.