What did Ayn Rand think of eugenics?

[the new hedonist]

I know she'd be against coercion but surely the only way to realise her idealised Spencerian (Herbert) society would be if the most intelligent procreate together on a voluntary basis. Was Ayn Rand a nature or nurture person? Did she hold to genetic determinism?

 

[Reidy]

As far as I know she never uttered (or wrote) a word on the topic.

Somewhere I saw a report (from Peikoff, I think) that Rand was uncomfortable with the whole notion of IQ (i.e. of innate intellectual capacity). She was more at home with the belief that it was all a matter of developing the right cognitive habits. She never went public with her belief (if indeed it was her belief), so this line of inquiry is not likely to lead anywhere interesting. If IQ is not innate like eye color, eugenics is not going to do any good.

Not sure what you mean by "Spencerian". The Objectivist literature has very little to say about him, and that unfavorable. I don't know much about him myself, but people I respect (the late George Smith in particular) say that the popular understanding of Spencer is a gross misrepresentation. His "survival of the fittest" applies to practices and business ventures, not to people, and is in any case a tautology: fitness is the ability to survive; what survives is thereby fit. The Objectivists seem to have believed the popular and putatively inaccurate account.