So UCBearcats, after trying to alarm us into support of forced sterilization with tales of horrifically abused and developmentally sabotaged “feral children”, you give us a bunch of examples of conscientious, caring, articulate mothers of two to four children—not six or seven or eight—who struggled to take care of their kids on very limited welfare benefits.
Why exactly am I supposed to believe that it would be better to forcibly sterilize these women than to help them and their children work up to a better life? I really think it’s way past time in this thread for you to either put up or shut up about exactly what circumstances you consider render a person liable to forced sterilization.
Whom exactly are you proposing to sterilize? Only incestuous child abusers? They’re in jail for decades on end now anyway, so they’re not having any more children. All mothers on welfare? Even the ones who are loving parents and care about their kids’ wellbeing and success? All the welfare mothers with more than three children? More than two? More than one?
Tell us exactly what conditions you advocate attaching to your forced sterilization policy, and stop making us try to guess them from your inconsistent spiteful grumbling.
No, as long as there’s some genetic component (and most personality, cognitive and behavioural traits have a very large genetic component), then eugenic selection (or eugenic genetic engineering) will have an effect. Heritability doesn’t have to be 100% for selection/engineering to have an effect, it very rarely is. In the case of IQ, heritability is about 50% (some estimates run somewhat higher).
You could really select for almost any trait you wanted, given that most psychological traits are highly heritable. For example, if you really wanted, you could select for obedience for authority, or for tolerance towards ethnic minorities, or for religiosity, or atheism, or low aggression, or just about anything else. See, for example:
I mean, 1, that sort of selection against sick and weaker individuals is the very way we ever got to existing as a functional species. Countless rounds of selection resulted in homo sapiens in the first place.
And, 2, there’s in reality a finite amount of space for people at a given time in a given country at a given level of conditions.
So if you could say, make sure that every fetus with cystic fibrosis were aborted in the first month, the parents could try again and in practice the same number of people would be born, there just wouldn’t be any with cystic fibrosis. That would be a better world.
Now, the methods the eugenics people (a movement that was practice in the USA decades after the Nazis were defeated) were using was inefficient. A better way would be to perform positive genetic edits.
Instead of aborting every fetus with a major flaw and allowing dozens of known minor flaws, why not patch the embryo when it’s in the single cell stage? Recently, about 11 alleles have been found that seem to be associated with higher IQ. Patch all 11 genes so they have the best known version of those alleles. No doubt there are specific genes correlated with better beauty, athletic performance, etc. Patch them all. Fix any known deviations, where the embryo has alleles that are rarely found, most likely from mutations.
It would work. We live in an objective reality. Doing this is going to result in human beings who are on average far more capable than the average person.
My basic premise in that entire subthread was that modern hostility towards Jews in the middle east today is largely the result of Zionism. I posited the notion that if Jews had created a Jewish state in Germany (or Africa, or South America) then the Jews that were in the middle east would not have experienced the sort of anti-Semitism that they experienced over the last century.
People were acting like I was saying anti-Semitism didn’t start until Zionism. I asked for a cite about pogroms (in the middle east) before Zionism. This was responded to with claims that people have been killing Jews or a long time, well before zionism. Well shit son, that’s not what I asked for.
I don’t want to argue Israel/Palestine, I believe what I believe based on the facts as I understand them. I am neither Jewish nor Muslim. I have no family or other connection to the area. I’ve got no conflict of interest in this argument and no dog in the fight. I have browsed through a few book on Israel now and I can’t see how anyone can se this as one-sidedly as some of the posters here on SDMB see things on the Israel issue. But I try not to get involved in Israel conversations anymore.