Or they may have some resistance to something we’ll need in the future. More genes in the gene pool = better. “Bad” genes don’t crowd out “good” genes.
We had this discussion recently in a GQ thread where someone claimed that genes for blue eyes were going to disappear in the US. The genes aren’t going anywhere unless the people move. A larger % of Americans have brown eyes now than in the past, and that will continue in the future. But the blue eyed genes are still there, they’re just not expressed in the same % of people.
Not to mention the occasional gene-deficient guy with an automatic weapon who might reduce your imput into the gene pool, on account of your Eugenic Ass needs to be dealt with.
Exactly. Even if you grant the theory that modern medicine and such are increasing the prevalence of “bad genes” it makes far more sense to wait a while until we have good enough genetic engineering to simply eliminate them and leave the desirable genes intact. No sterilizations, no shooting “inferior” people; just fix the broken genes and leave the person they are a part of intact. Given how slow evolution operates, we have the time to wait until we can do the job right.
The decimation of our entire species as they inherit the planet… yet… A critical and box-office success!
Hrmm. Are you just not familiar with the scientific method? By “justifying a social policy”, are you thinking of some broad movement of propaganda, forced mutilation, or even genocide like Eugenics? I’m not saying that certain trends and movements in scientific thinking might never have an agenda attached to it, but asking honest questions, or speculating loosely on our origins and how it still affects our behaviors today is the nature of science. If we threw the baby out with the bath water, we’d still largely be in the dark ages.
Most all the sciences require logical, physical and rational rigor, as much as it requires abstraction and imagination to connect the vast gaps in our understanding on anything in which it’s either practically or literally impossible to test. A hypothesis begins with speculation, and just because it sounds ridiculous to you, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, so long as what’s proposed doesn’t contradict the scientific method, empirical evidence, factual objective observation, or well established physical laws.
Perhaps there is a connection between round, sweet cereal and an emotional response to is that stems from when we foraged? If you’re a scientist, and you work out a hypothesis as such, that’s where it remains until you find a way to gather evidence to support your ideas. And so on, until you have enough to establish a clearer theory. In that vein, you can’t dismiss any speculation out of hand just because it smacks of inanity or you think it’s impossible to ever know with any certainty? It certainly hasn’t stopped anthropologists, paleontologists, archaeologists and the like.
When looking back on human history, “justification for some sort of social policy” seems to stem far more from non-scientific institutions and groups. Evolution is still largely challenged by groups with a closed philosophy or religious stance, despite the enormous amount of evidence, research, corroboration and most importantly humans employing the scientific method to piece it all together.
So that’s a GOOD gene(s), then? I know my grandfather had to do such things during his service in the army during WWII.
As the sole person in this thread who has suggested active attempts at elimination of certain conditions through voluntary sterilization, I want to re-state that I do NOT support any of the methods above. Any such program should be entirely voluntary, reversible as technology allows, and beneficial to the participants with no negative repercussions.
One problem here is identifying which are the good and bad genes. That can depend on environment, and our environment is in no way guaranteed to always be the same as it is now.
Let’s say there’s a gene that causes people to eat too much when food is plentiful, resulting in the person’s being overweight. In our current environment, where food is plentiful, that’s a bad gene. But say an asteroid like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs hits the Earth, or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, and food is not plentiful for a while. The people who put on too much weight back when food was plentiful are more likely to survive than the people who didn’t. If we had genetically engineered everybody to not overeat and gain weight before the catastrophe happened, the human species could be in real trouble.
The sickle cell anemia gene is another example. You have some protection against malaria if you have one copy of that gene, but people with two copies have problems. Whether that gene is good or bad depends on how common, how treatable, and how deadly malaria is. Remember, malaria parasites are evolving, too. There’s no guarantee that our techniques for keeping malaria in check are going to keep pace with the evolution of the parasites.