GIGObuster, I realize you can’t ask people to register and pay to read your cite, but your quotation is longer than we generally allow. I’ve shortened it and tried to retain the most important points.
What definition are you using?
Eugenics is about controlled human mating. Now it’s just unpopular to use the term. Its evolved, but the basic principles are still the same.
“Assortative mating plus technology”? Come on. How is that so different from two blonde hair blue eyed kiddos being paid to do it by the Nazis?
GIGObuster did a great job of demonstrating the difference between eugenics and medical genetics. To give you practical examples:
- Genetic counselors do not advise people against having babies, they just help people to interpret the results of genetic testing.
- Going to basic research: gene therapy, if it is ever reliably successful, would not be used to change the germ line, but to treat somatic tissues to relieve suffering.
- The promise of human cloning is primarily to develop replacement tissue, not super humans.
- Research on the genetic contributions to various diseases, which is arguably the largest part of medical genetics, is data used to target treatments to specific nongenetic physiological processes underlying the disorder.
Looking at other aspects of genetics:
- Quantitative genetics seeks to either describe the genetic architecture of inherited traits, and this information can be used in selective animal breeding (eugenics I guess).
- Molecular genetics seeks to understand inheritance of traits at the molecular level. Techniques from it are used to improve crops, which I guess could be described as eugenics, but the term was already stretched with animal breeding.
- Population genetics seeks to examine changes in allele frequencies from one generation to the next.
- Epigenetics seeks to understand how some types of transcriptional regulation of genes are heritable.
I honestly do not see the relationship you are trying to make.
Also, I was only interested in your background because the connections you are making between Darwin and Nazis, eugenics and genetics, are ideas I have only recently been exposed to and they were expressed in a social sciences environment. This kind of stuff never came up while I got my degrees in various aspects of genetics.
It’s not the same at all. Eugenics was a movement to socially enforce standards on breeding. Two, I assume genetically, deaf people wanting to have a deaf child is nothing more than the kind of humping organisms have been doing since the first sexually reproductive act. Now the result is being aided by technology. The eugenic movement would be against their mating at all.
You actually showed the difference in your example:
- Assortative mating is what people do. We don’t mate randomly.
- It typically does not involve payment resulting from a stated goal of improving the race.
You come on
Right. Because at this point genetic counseling is self-identified as pseudoscience. From the National Society of Genetic Councilors site: “… genetic counselors strive to: Recognize the limits of their own knowledge, expertise, and therefore competence in any given situation.”
Unless it *is *used to change the germline. Just like nuclear fission will never be used to make a bomb.
Again, that’s an altruistic viewpoint. The UN has passed a resolution banning attempts at human cloning.
Can’t really comment on this point. Your research may be too cutting edge. I tried to look it up but Google says no results found for “non genetic physiological processes”
These are all theoretical concepts at this point aren’t they? If you can provide some links to proof of any of this stuff I’d appreciate being enlightened.
I’m not attempting to denigrate your education or field of study. The potential for genetics to disprove scientific racism will do as much if not more for the world as preventing hereditary disease. I’m suggesting that good science (Darwin) can be appropriated by politicos to further their own agendas to the detriment of humanity (Nazis).
We were talking up-thread about Margaret Sanger, whose championing for the acceptance and use of birth control for women has changed the world, I hope you will agree, for the better. She also thought that “… the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.” We know now that is preposterous. Bad science can be a dangerous weapon.
I am not sure how an ethical mandate to be honest to oneself and others makes genetic counseling a pseudoscience.
1st - this is nowhere near as easy as it simply sounds. 2nd - when people are finally able to do this predictably and safely (at roughly the same time we are able to warp space and travel to any star instantaneously) they will do it based on their choices for their offspring, not based on a government program to modify the genetics of the population.
It’s the viewpoint that is both a practical application of the science and the nature of a vast majority of the people and institutions engaging in the activities.
I was trying to come up with a general term that did not require gene therapy. People use associations between genes and various disorders to identify potentially misregulated proteins. These proteins are then used as drug targets.
Genetically modified crops are not theoretical at all. Quantitative genetics provides basic information for planned selective breeding. Population genetics is used regularly in studies of evolution and ecology. Epigenetics is far from theoretical and has been used to gain better understanding of everything from cancer to behavioral disorders. There are some examples of epigenetic modifications being maintained through the germline.
The common features to all these branches of genetics is little to no interest in eugenics. There are certainly modern scientific racists who attempt to pervert the genetic data and would love to use this misunderstanding to further eugenics but I think there are a vanishing few who might have influence over anything at all.
Thanks, I was just curious but the added information is welcome.
Yes, that’s known as ‘The Flynn effect’. However, Jim Flynn himself has pointed out:
Richard Lynn also referred to this in his book on dysgenics:
The trend up to a couple of hundred years ago was in the opposite direction:
Eugenics doesn’t have to be government-run. But hey, what do you make of Israel’s IVF program?
Consider the $$$ industry that was AG Bell. Think about how parents of deaf children are being told that ASL is ‘not a real language’ and children should be surgically implanted and/or ‘lip read’.
Think about doctors suggesting amniocentesis for mothers so they can weed out ‘undesirable’ children.
“Eugenics” has a bad rap – sure. But new eugenics is just a more ethical form of it. It is genetics.
*
Applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. Usually refers to human populations.*
…we don’t do that today?
The ethical term makes it look like you are attempting to draw some contiuum between eugeneic and modern genetics, but it’s the biosocial movement part that you are missing in every last one of your examples. The typical methodology was to prevent breeding.
To address your examples:
- Israel’s generous IVF program has nothing to do with eugenics. What are they specifically doing to improve the genetic composition of the population?
- Amniocentesis: it’s still the mother’s choice whether to carry the child.
- AG Bell was a eugenecist. Maybe you should look into what he advocated to see the difference.
The facts are that there is not a single medical practice where genetics is used to prevent people from breeding. These practices are simply not used to prevent the continued breeding of any specific class of the population.
On the other hand, people do make choices about who they want to breed with. Those choices are aided by technology.
Israel is the only country that pays for infertile couples to have two babies and it has the highest number of IVF procedures per capita in the world. Israel provides 3,400 fertility treatments per one million people, compared with 300 in England and 460 in USA. Nearly five per cent of babies born in Israel today are products of IVF, as opposed to one per cent in Britain.
As Israel is defined as a Jewish state in their constitution, I think it is correct to say that Israel is encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits, i.e. Jewish. That’s positive eugenics.
That’s a terrible analysis. The Israeli government is supportive of IVF. That’s it. Israel is a Jewish State. That’s it. Any connection you make between the two is spurious.
There are no special Jewish characteristics. I think Israelis would know that better than anyone with all the Jewish people of widly different ethnic backgrounds running around there. Also, I assume the IVF program is available to all the Israeli Arabs. So this positive eugenics program is pretty stupid.
Feel free to make all the assumptions about who the program is available to you wish. I’m not going to discuss Israel any further as it’s off topic and we would be entering dangerous territory.
If you can show that IVF support is provided only for the Jewish residents of Israel then you have a stronger case for eugenics. So it is perfectly okay to argue it.
In fact, modern government programs as advocates for eugenic policies is pretty much what this thread can only become because the original debate or question is well answered and uncontroversial.
The controversy that remains is your and CitizenPain’s opinion that the application of modern genetics is eugenics. I think the only relationship between the two is sharing the gene root in the terms.
It is available to everyone, but it was designed to answer the question of lower birthrates and rising hostilities.
All we’re saying is that eugenics preceded modern genetics. Not all eugenics is based on some weird perception of race.
It’s not genetics by means of specific genes; it’s the want of continuing a certain identity/ethnicity/religion/something.
Why make a mother choose? Why make her face such a decision? Why not just have the baby?
Amniocentesis allows for us to selectively weed out certain undesirable characteristics.
And his message in the Deaf community still rings on…
What?! How do you think Tay Sachs has been nearly weeded out from the Jewish population? Genetic testing! :smack:
Since when is this stuff limited to class?
Technology that also assumes what they know the consumer wants [which are largely subjective factors]. 
I did some research and it is available to all Israeli citizens.
Dr. Daniel Sperling of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has the following to say in his paper “Commanding the ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ Directive: Reproductive Ethics, Law and Policy in Israel”
Emphasis his. So the IVF policy applies to everyone, although he goes on to note,
Rhoda Kanaaneh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Washington DC, says (the facts of which are echoed in the previously linked PDF by Dr. Sperling),
Guess who else had an award for mothers who bore a lot of children?
Full article here.
I’m a supporter of scientific advancement and genetic studies and reiterate that politicians make policy and scientists do not.
The Spartans practiced eugenics according to Paul Cartledge in Spartan Reflections where he asserts that,
Was this the beginnings of eugenics?
This is the first I’ve heard of Tay-Sachs. Does it point to the inherent dangers of inbreeding in small populations since it is only know to occur in Ashkenazi Jews, French Canadian, and Cajun people?
What is ‘inbreeding’ to you is ‘homogenous’ to others. :dubious:
Anyway, Orthodox Jews are generally prohibited from marrying if their genes aren’t so, uh, compatible.
eta: but weeding out certain unwanted genetic traits can just give rise to others.
IMHO, Israel’s support for IVF has little to do with eugenics and demographiocs and everything to do with the country’s dominant culture and its priorities. In other words, we’re a nation of Jewish mothers. If enough voters have to deal with their moms asking “Why aren’t you bringing me a grandchild?”, sooner or later money will be earmarked.