Eugenics: Comic-book science or mankind's worst threat?

Great Debates
21

In fact, Norm, it’s common.

http://www.advancedfertility.com/cryotank.htm+
http://www.midsouthfertility.com/cryopreservation_of_embryos.htm
http://www.ein.org/freezing.htm

Once you’ve gone to the trouble of creating all those embryos, you have to keep 'em somewhere. For example, if they successfully generate 12 embryo’s, they may try to implant 6 now, and 6 later.

Some are deserted and/or discarded

http://www.catholic-internet.org/issue/textonly/2newt3.htm

Some are fought over.

There was a custody battle over 8 frozen embryos a few years ago IIRC, it was in the midwest. The couple was divorcing and previous attempts to impregnate the woman with their embryos had been unsuccessful. They still had 8 of the little buggars in frozen storage. She wanted “custody”. He didn’t want to have future children by his soon to be ex-wife. Ultimately, he won the case and (again IIRC) they were “donated” to an infertility clinic much to her horror and chagrin. A sticky can of worms.

I will try to dig up a cite on the custody thing if anyone would like to see one.

22

error in the first link, which was a photo of a cryo-storage tank.

try this:

http://www.advancedfertility.com/cryotank.htm

23

http://detroitnews.com/1998/metro/9806/25/06250317.htm

Re: The “custody” of the 5 embryos.

24

I stand corrected.

S. Norman

25

Don’t we still practice eugenics when women carrying a baby with down syndrome are encouraged to abort? Or when a person with a mental disability is sterilized? Seems to me I remember a mother going to court to get permission to sterilize her adolescent daughter who had a mental disability. I’m sure this goes on without court permission or intervention in some cases.

26

Sterilizing the retarded is eugenics, but look at the alternatives: Even more non-productive people. Plenty of subaverage people can work at ‘breakeven’ trade-skills type jobs, the high subaverage finding positions in sales (joke). Making knickknacks and baskets and such. With severe Down’s Syndrome, no such luck. The victims of DS are so bad off they’ll never be productive. Which means they’re a drag on someone, either their family (rare in this country) or all of us (Welfare, SSI, disability). They never put in, they just take out. It’s better all around if they are never born. Distinctions must be made between retardation caused by genetics (and therefore can be passed on) and retardation caused by disease or accident (and therefore cannot be passed on). Allowing the subnormal to raise families is another thread altogether.

27

Daniel, I thought that I was quite literate about which area of eugenics I was talking. Eugenics was explicitly meant to improve the European stock. That was the goal of the one who coined the word, the Scot Francis Galton. Later from the eugenicists came the corollary, that those of lesser stock must be as few as possible, or eliminated altogether. It was this aspect that was behind ovents in several countries.
Agriculturalists later thought that they can apply the genetic tweaking that was already used in their field for thousands of years, and apply those techniques to the field of eugenics. It was thought to be a logical, evolutionary step. The biggest conventions related to agricutural-human eugenicists were held in the Nazi stronghold Cold Spring Harbor, New York. I was not proud when I learned that, coming from New York myself.

We have the science to repair the genes of embryos that is diagnosed with certain diseases, something which I favor, and eugenecists don't. After all the embryo is coming from 'lesser stock'.
28

Sadly, we don’t yet. There is no cure for most genetic diseases. We don’t even know which genes they’re carried on. And even if we did, there is currently no way to fix a person’s genes. Gene therapy is still in the future.
But you are right on one point: Eugenics does not favor fixing, it favors ‘purity’. Genetics has promise. Eugenics does not.

29

Actually, Capacitor, Spider-Man isn’t a product of eugenics/evolution, as his superpowers are the result of radiation applied after his birth (by a bite from a radioactive spider), not from mutation. The X-Men, however, are though, being mutants and all. I can’t comment on the Powerpuff Girls.

Fine, fine, back to your serious discussion, sorry I spoke :slight_smile:

30

In Robert Heinlein’s classic SF story (“Methusaleh’s Children”) he relates the problems of a group of superhumans-people (through selective mating) who are unbelievably long-lived. This group finds that they must keep their “gift” secret-the other humans are hateful when they learn how much these people will outlive them.
So what’s the deal on this-could we have children who have 160 IQ’s, be Olympic athletes, and also be incredibly good-looking? I’m all for that!
Why would anybody NOT want their children to be better off than themslves?

31

I picked these up here. capacitor, Note the ref to Galton’s own words. If you went by these sources, you might think you got the whole picture about him:

Encyclopedia.com, on the other hand, has this to say, which is pretty close to what capacitor said:

32

Eugenics is much, much older than what has been discussed here. The ancient Greeks were probably the first organized followers of eugenics. Plato even advocated infanticide and abortion to strengthen the Greek “stock”. See:Eugenics.

“Social Darwinism” is merely the modern interpretation of this twisted concept.

33

OK, I read an article a while back in Scientific American about natural “immunity” to HIV. (Actually I believe they may have tested positive for the virus but never got sick). I’m gonna dig up a cite, but meantime, to advance the discussion:

The point of the article (if I remember it clearly) was that there was a certain genetic “defect” whcih caused a relatively benign malfunction in the immune system of certain populations. The defect had a role in the mechanism that HIV exploits to hijack the body’s immune system to reproduce. Because of the defect, the immune system worked slightly differently (not enough to cause a noticeable effect, apparently) but still worked. However, it interfered with HIV’s success.

What moved me most about the article, and what is relevant to this debate, is that what appeared to be, prior to the advent of HIV, a genetic “defect”, is now being reconsidered.

As I see it, the problem with eugenics, or with any genetic engineering, is that it involves judgments about what is good or bad or useful or not in the genetic structure, when such judgements are by nature restricted to current conditions and beliefs about what is good, which may change later.

So, we end up reducing genetic variation, which may cost us big time later.

I can already here the first rebuttal, which is that in may ways evolution itself is a way of reducing genetic variation. I would like to distinguish, however, between the relatively slow pressures of evolution, and the rapid changes that things like genetically engineered food crops cause.

While the history of evolution is littered with species that died out, some rather rapidly, it also seems to balance itself out by allowing room for genetic variation.

If we rapidly replace all the wheat crops in the world with three or four genetically engineered strains, within one or two generations, that’s a winnowing of the gene pool on a whole new scale.

Genetic engineering in general scares me for this reason. Eugenics is just an extreme case.

One more thing: I am not trying to suggest that in no case is genetic engineering useful. But I sure as hell don’t expect the Monsanto corporation et al to be looking at the big picture when deciding how to engineer crops, or for that matter, medical specialists who are focused on specific diseases to see how their solutions may affect human biodiversity as a whole.

34

Found the Scientific American article. Thank God for online archives…

35

Thanks for the source, ren. I do submit though that without geneticists being eagle-eyed over the ‘defective’ gene and its effects on AIDS, it would have just been another defect tweaked out when it was its turn.

Can it be said withing reason that many so-called ‘defective’ genes might have some role in eliminating the onslaught of another pathology or infection in an organism, and these genes must be studied further?

36

I meant within reason.

37

That’s exactly what concerns me.

See, but how do we know that in advance? A year before AIDS hit it just looked like a defect, you can’t decide to study the defect to see if it has some application for HIV because there is no HIV yet. There’s an arrogance involved in presuming to know what constitutes a “defect”. From an evolutionary perspective, there are neutral, advantageous, and disadvantageous mutations. And which are which depends on conditions which might change on any given day.

Mutations are just mutations. We assign a value to them ourselves based on our ideas of what is good or not. (OK, within reason: mutations that make the embryo non-viable, etc, are clearly always disadvantageous. But I think you get my point.)