He has a bad idea, but he’s not talking about the same thing tomndebb was. Geschke is talking about parents who neglect their children, not rapists and molesters. And he’s not saying there is a genetic component to any of it. He’s saying parents who neglect their kids shouldn’t be allowed to have more kids.
The problem with eugenics is that it doesn’t understand the science it’s supposedly based on. Social problems like crime and poverty are not caused by genetics.
As for actual genetic disorders, you have to remember that people are a bundle of genes not a carrier of a single gene. A person who has one bad gene may also have a dozen good ones - look at Stephen Hawking.
Eugenics is the equivalent of state planning - an assumption that one answer is right to every problem and we know what it is. Natural selection is like the free market - have a wide variety of genes out there, try as many combinations as possible, and allow circumstances to give advantages to the better ones.
And if we are that determined to improve the human race we should wait for genetic engineering to become good enough for the purpose. One of the major flaws of both natural selection and eugenics is as you say it treats genes as part of a package deal; weeding out Hawking’s ALS that way means weeding out Hawking himself too. Wait a while and we should just be able to snip out the offending genes.
I’m not really in favor of eugenics either (I’m one of the guys arguing that we shouldn’t be paying drug addicts to get vesectomies) but from the post we see in the other thread, i was wondering how receptive this board was to eugenics.
I’m not totally opposed either, if I thought my great great great grandkids would have laser beam eyes, i would be willing to deal with selective breeding to get that for them.
How about if people in 120 years can have laser beam eyes, but the way to reach this goal is for you not to breed?
( by CP: )
If everyone has an engineering PhD, who is going to change the diapers of the elderly in nursing homes?
There’s no guarantee that just because applied Eugenics solves the problem of genetic inequality all other problems are solved, although it’s true that those with brighter genes have been able to get rid of a lots of grunt work by inventing cool stuff. Still, one suspects there would be a hierarchy of job/role desirability in any society. It does not seem likely we’d get to a society where everyone (or no one) is the Queen Bee.
The notion expressed above that we’ll just equally distribute the crappy work is laughable liberal pollyanna pipedream pap. A few decades of communism pretty much proved that if you take from each according to his ability and give according to need, human nature just slacks off. (What, the Party Leaders are gonna dig potatoes?) Why work harder than the next guy over when there’s no personal gain?
What mother nature has done is to disseminate a wide variety of genes, and society is built upon that wide variety. Leona Helmsley and Nancy Pelosi need flunkies, and so do I.
Excuse me, but that’s exactly what you are saying we have now. You are claiming that the common people are in the social slot Nature has mandated for them and they should be good serfs and not aspire to anything better, that the limited rewards they get are what they deserve, nothing more
Ah, the good old argument that the poor are subhuman. Born slaves.
And if you think amoral nature is such a great thing, would you think it wrong if those “flunkies” did the natural, survival-of-the-fittest thing and banded together to kill you and take everything you have? Given that fairness is just a liberal pipe dream and all.
Somehow I doubt it. Like most people with such attitudes, I expect your fondness for ruthless exploitation only extends to situations where you are the one doing the exploiting, not the one being exploited.
This is getting unreasonably personal. Please dial it back.
No, because they wouldn’t have had the accountants to handle payments or the solderers to put the prototype together… The kind of work engineers do requires teams of people with different skills - which in turn means both different interests and different potentials.
Selective breeding is one thing but eugenics is quite another.
Anyway, humanity has practised selective breeding for many generations - it’s only recently (at least in Europe - I don’t know about elsewhere) that people have married for love. And love itself is a sort of selective breeding.
Bit touchy, are we?
My life and the way I’ve lived it is testimony to my personal philosophy that none of us is of greater worth than another. I don’t need to defend that to you and I trust most of the folks on this board are mature enough to recognize a rhetorical jibe about flunkies to make the point that there are layers in societal construct, however much our sense of fairness makes us think there should not be.
But the facts germane to the discussion here are that mother nature has disparately enabled individuals and whole groups, and that the structure of society is predicated upon that underlying fact. Whether it’s fair or not that one’s genetic gifts drive opportunity for greater success is completely beside the point. Someone gets to be the NBA player and someone else has to be the water boy.
Therefore, if one successfully drove a eugenics program to its logical extreme, the foundation upon which society is structured would fall apart. It’s for that reason that the society in Brave New World has a spectrum of genetic groups, and it’s for that reason that one answer to the OP’s question of “Should we bring back eugenics?” is, “Well, even if it were a total success, Eugenics would destroy society as we know it.”
Boo. I was hoping no one else would get to that. That’s the one type of eugenics that I don’t think is inherently evil. But only if it’s the parents deciding to fix their child’s problem before they are born.
I’m against eugenics but not for the reasons everyone else is
If we have some of these freaks running around, I look better in comparison. Let the bottom of the gene pool breed and breed often. Why should humanity be improved? I’m already born, that doesn’t help me any.
So no, never eugenics
Chemical castration is very effective with s8x offenders.
In terms of future offenders, behavioural traits generally are moderately heritable. There is a gene-environment intereaction though, for instance low level variants of MAO-A lead to anti-social behaviour in combination with childhood maltreatment.