What, scientifically, is wrong with eugenics?

Factual Questions
1

I don’t mean to offend anyone or look like an advocate of eugenics (I’m certainly not, although I do think it’s a problem that there is very much reluctance to even mention the topic of different groups of people having different talents), but what was actually wrong with scientists’ theories about the passing down of traits in humans? Obviously, the nonsense about black people being stupid and Jews being evil is incorrect, but what about the more mundane things? For example, have mental diseases and retardation been found to be unrelated to predicable genetic factors? What about strength and agility? Are these just controlled by too many different genes to be predictable? But what about the demonstrable evidence that things like nearsightedness have grown since they have been treated or cured by medical science, and the dominance of different sports largely by different races and ethnicities (apart from cultural aspects such as Nordic overrepresentation in winter sports)? I understand the moral arguments against it quite well, but why wouldn’t eugenics eventually produce smarter, stronger, faster people in a ruthless society?

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

2

It might, but odds are there would be unintended consequences and unforeseen liabilities. I’m thinking about things like German Shepherds, bred to be strong in many ways, only to find out they’re plagued with hip problems. And sickle cell anemia, which is a weakness of the type that would likely be done away with, but which protects against malaria. The greatest long-term biological asset for any population is genetic diversity.

3

Well re near sightedness (so far as I understand it ) is primarily function of modern living requiring massive amounts of close vision attention for reading etc./ Primitive tribes generally have extremely small numbers of near sighted individuals. Near-sightedness in that context is not all that amenable to genetic selection unless you 're going to lock out over 1/2 to 2/3rds of the population from breeding, and a good chunk of this “bad eyesight” cohort would have fairly high IQs.

Re “wouldn’t eugenics eventually produce smarter, stronger, faster people in a ruthless society”.

Yeah… but most people don’t want to live in a “ruthless society”.

4

It almost certainly would work to breed humans for any (reasonable) specific trait you want. We started with basically wolves and bred everything from Elkhounds to Chihuahuas in a few thousand years. The principles of selective breeding are well known, and demonstrated.

From a scientific standpoint, nothing is “wrong” with it except that that it hasn’t really been subjected to rigorous experiment in humans, so it’s kind of a weak theory, scientifically speaking, until it’s been tested under controlled conditions and replicated. But I don’t think anyone except no-macro-change Creationists seriously doubts that it would work in humans.

Beyond that, what makes you believe that there’s anything scientifically incorrect about it? There are a number of ethical (and moral) issues, and ethical issues alone can be enough to prevent further study. There doesn’t need to be anything wrong with it as a scientific process.

5

From a socio-biological point of view there’s also the issue of how you arrive at your definition of a “better human” re the goal of breeding. Some traits are not all that convergent. I’m not sure that breeding for (say) emotional stability is going to give you gifted artists, actors, or writers, in fact I would bet that it would tend to do the opposite. Plus, just as a general concept, a race of “perfect people” sounds mind bendngly boring. Flaws often make us interesting,.

6

Obviously. I’m not *advocating *a ruthless society; I’m just trying to find a justification for rejecting it other than the moral arguments against it (since people can have really widely varying ideas about morality).

Well, I know that in the U.S. there used to be sterilization programs for violent criminals and mentally insane people, and I had assumed that there were other reasons for stopping these besides the fact that we fought the Nazis in WWII. The point about unforeseen liabilities that Gary T pointed out does seem like a good one, though. What if the Nazis had created the “master race” only to find that everyone died at 40 because of a sped-up metabolism?

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

7

That may just be a difference of definition: I equated “eugenics” with selective breeding, where you’d select for a trait or two over many generations, backtracking when you had problems, as has been successfully done with most domesticated and utility animals. As long as you don’t make rookie mistakes and breed too narrowly (as is happening with modern purebred dogs, where focussed inbreeding is rapidly destroying most breeds), this should methodically produce your supermen…eventually. Basically select for strength first, then when you’ve got a large population of strong folks, start selecting amongst them for eyesight, and so on.

You seem to be asking about trying to do it in one go, selecting for or otherwise generating a superman in a single generation, which I’ll freely admit does have a number of scientific limitations–the biggest one being you don’t have enough variation to start with. If you’re going to do it all at once, you’d basically have to start with supermen to have much chance of any of the babies being what you wanted. That’s partly why these attempts tend to get done by nutcases: if your definition of “superman” is “white, blond, and blue-eyed” it’s easy to get. If it’s “can bench press a building while reading the serial number off spy satellites,” then less so.

8

A good lesson for why eugenics are practically a Bad Idea can be found in examining bananas. The modern banana, such as we buy for eating in most grocery stores, is a product of hundreds or thousands of generations of genetic engineering. The process has resulted in varieties that cannot produce sexually, meaning that they have to be grown from cuttings, making each banana of each variety a clone of every other banana of the same type. Consequently, they have no ability to cope with innovative diseases, since there is no genetic diversity (as Gary T points out). Entire varieties of bananas have already been wiped out, and more will follow, all because the normal evolutionary process has been hijacked by humans. Of course, it follows also that entire varieties would have been wiped out naturally, but the ones that have been engineered for our usefulness do not have dozens of other varieties waiting to step into their niche.

9

Make that only a few hundred years…

10

It’s far easier to select out negative traits than to select for positive ones. I figure designer babies (in the sense that sperm and ova have been prescreened to greatly reduce pontential genetic problems) are inevitable in the western countries, as is a mass shortages of females in the eastern ones (where femaleness is likely to remain viewed as negative for quite some time).

11

Excellent question. I know I have read eugenics referred to as discredited or scientifically invalid, and yet it seems obvious that if deliberate breeding of other animals and plants can steer their evolution in directions we like, it can do it for humans too.

The banana example is not good evidence that breeding is practically a bad idea. It is only an example of a breeding program with a flaw in it. No doubt people were making conscious decisions during the process, and willingly gave away the ability to reproduce sexually for what seemed at the time like more valuable features. People may change their mind about priorities or newly recognize a trait they had ignored before. It is hard to imagine a technology that does not get used incorrectly or in a much less than optimal way.

The ethical problems of deliberate human breeding to guide evolution are real, especially I think the problem that future generations who have been tampered with in this way may resent the decisions that were made for them. Of course, we have the same problem with the accidental human breeding that we have always done, except that the target of our resentment is undocumented and obscure. If you have ever been told by a doctor that you picked the wrong parents, you will know what I mean. Maybe some day a doctor will tell people that somebody else picked the wrong parents for them.

12

Nobody really knows. Our experience with animal heredity shows that you can selectively breed individual traits, but that this often comes at the expense of other traits (medical problems and weaknesses in other areas). Until we can breed a dog that is perfect for herding, guarding, hunting, digging, fighting, racing, and fetching the newspaper, you can be sure it isn’t going to happen for humans.

Then there’s the whole monoculture problem… you breed a race of animals who are identically perfect in the same way, they all have the same types of defects too. This is why you have to wear sterilized overgarments when you enter factory pork farms. One animal gets a disease, you lose the whole lot of them.

13

I agree with the others in saying that the unintended consequences can leave us worse off. It is particularly bad in the way the Nazi’s did it. I know that’s not what you meant, but let’s face it, there is a part of the population (Ben Stein) that wants to believe this sort of thing results from a proper understanding of evolution. Actually I think when it comes to evolution, the largest gene set wins.

We don’t even know what intelligence is. If we bread for people that can calculate the square root of 21 in their head, we might lose people that can think abstractly about complex problems. If we bread for people that can memorize thousands of equations, we might lose the people that know how to derive them.

14

We’ve done this topic several times in the past.

Speaking strictly to the science …

A proper selective breeding program, as is used on domestic animals, requires that no more than a couple percent of your males breed, and no more than 10-15% of your females. From a genetic perspective, the rest of the less desirable population are just pollution.

It also requires a certain number of generations to accomplish anything. Dogs, pigs, sheep, etc. can reproduce at about age 1 year. Humans more like 12 years. Dogs & pigs can produce litters where 4-8 offspring survive in controlled conditions. Sheep & goats usually produce twins (at least teh good breeding stock do). Humans produce twins about 3% of the time. Finally, the gestation period of the domestic animals is shorter, with pigs being just under 4 months and sheep & goats are about 6 months

Said another way, the low lifetime fecundity of humans means you can’t cull as aggressively as you’d want to for genetic change without killing off your entire breeding stock. Which menas that the process of perfection will is even slower than you’d expect looking just at reproduction times & quantities.

The sum of all these factors is that any eugenics effort will take many years and will produce fairly few of the better examples for the next iteration.
Last of all, what features are we optimizing towards?

Humans are valued mostly for their versatility, not their excellence at narrow things such as height & weight. For farm animals, we try to maximize growth rate & growth amount per unit of food. Damn near nothing else matters. We kill & eat sheep & cows at the equivalent age to a 4-6-ish year old human. They are optimized for only that part of their lifespan.

Designing a human to be the ultimate toddler would be useless. So the problem we face is that we need to optimize across a much wider range of lifecycle traits to achieve super humanness.
Bottom line: After 5,000 years of work, you’ll have a few thousand “better” people. Who will then need to kill the 50 billion ordinary ones to fulfill their so-called destiny.

15

Oh, I don’t know, if we’re throwing morality out the window then I would like to see an ultimate toddler cage match :smiley:

16

The eugenics that was popular in the early 20th Century had a lot of bad science behind it. People didn’t actually know much about how inheritance really worked: the rediscovery of Mendel’s work and the understanding of the role of chromosomes didn’t come about until the 1880s and ‘90s. There were also serious flaws in biologists’ understanding of evolution. And of course there was the persistent influence of pseudoscientific racial theories. So while there’s nothing unworkable about the general idea of selectively breeding humans, eugenics as a movement was full of errors.

Besides the difficulties other posters have pointed out, the rise of psychoanalysis convinced many people that insanity and criminality were not inherited at all. Even today, with Freud’s ideas mostly abandoned, we are still not sure how heritable these behavioral problems are. On top of that, I and many others would argue that even criminals and crazy people have the right to reproduce.

17

LSLGuy: Great post. Another aspect you didn’t quite touch on is that humans would presumably be running the program, meaning that you’d need a multi-generation project because the experimenters are unlikely to long outlive the experimental seed group. Preserving the experiment across all that time would be difficult to say the least: Real-world experiments tend to live grant to grant and are very sensitive to local political changes. A scientifically valid eugenics experiment would need the support of a political entity longer-lived than any created by humans to date.

18

Scientifically, it doesn’t work in the short run. Look at Caroline Kennedy: you breed a fabulously PR-skilled killer-sharp politician with a world-class beauty, and what do you end up with? A meeskeit doofus who can’t have a meet-and-greet without putting her foot in her mouth.

You get a few of these perfectly normal results and people start questioning why they’re doing it. Which they should.

19

The real problem with eugenics is social.

It has been justified almost exclusively as a meansof denying rights to people. It has been used as part of the mechanism of discrimination, not just against blacks, but against jews, women and just about every tribal group that was not anglo saxon.

In other words eugenics is about the abuse of power.

Its dressed up in scientific terms, much like pseudoscince is used to justify faith in other areas, when faith is about something completely different.

When you look at the logistics of having a selective breeding program for humans, you run into other issues, who is to decide who will breed with whom?

What happens to those who do not want to follow those selcetive rules?

Does someone with selective breeding justify having more right, or rights of control over others?

The science bit is flimsy, and dangerous as we could lose our genetic diversity, or even select for less desirable traits by selecting out genes that protect against certain conditions and illnesses.

So when someone starts to put a scientific slant on eugenics, you should look at the speaker, are they just naive or do they have some other agenda.

Now if someone looks at selective breeding, well that could be odious too however there are some reasons why it has benefits.We already test for the propensity to certain genetic conditions such as Huntingdons Corea, and advice is already given to avoid relationships within a certain range of your own type, or family. That is not the same as eugenics though, its the social control that is the issue.

20

Even simple things like trying to breed out deleterious recessive genes are incredibly hard.

The problem is that there are lots and lots of these recessives, but each recessive is fairly rare. Say there is some really bad genetic disease that affects one in 40,000 people. If we decide that these people should be prevented from breeding so they can’t pass on their bad genes, what have we done? Not much. The problem is that if the gene is expressed with frequency 0.000025 and you need two copies of the gene to express the trait, the trait is expressed in only 1/4 of the offspring of two carriers. that means the frequency of the gene in the general population is the square root of (0.000025 *4), or one in 100. That means that one person in 100 is a carrier for the gene, but only one person in 40,000 expresses the trait.

That means that in order to completely eliminate the trait you’d have to prevent 1% of the population from breeding. If you only eliminate those who express the trait, you only make a tiny impact on the frequency, since carriers are 4000 times more common than those who express the trait.

And that leads us to the next problem. There are hundreds of such genes. If you want to eliminate genetic disease you’d have to prevent carriers of all these diseases from breeding. But almost everyone has several deleterious recessives. You’d have to prevent almost everyone from breeding.

So if the goal is to eliminate genetic disease in the general population, it’s nearly impossible because you’d have to eliminate most of the general population. If your goal is merely to create a new breed of humans it’s doable, because you can select your founder population and cull any carriers.

But the next problem in creating your breed is the criteria you use to establish your breed. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Create a race of supermen? OK, but you’d have to define what it means to be a superman. And all the selective breeding we’ve done on animals hasn’t created superanimals. There’s no breed of superdogs, unless you define “super” narrowly. There are breeds of dogs that can do things that no wolf could do, but none of these dogs are obviously superior to wolves. Greyhounds are faster than wolves, bloodhounds are superior smellers, dachshunds are better at hunting badgers, labradors are better swimmers, mastiffs are stronger, and so on, but no dogs are superwolves. Even breeds like labs that are very well rounded and very good dogs for all sorts of situations aren’t “super” unless you define “super” as “superior ability to get along with humans”.

And even if you establish a long term breeding program for humans, how do you keep this program going for multiple generations? What’s the benefit for the breeders? Livestock breeding programs continue across multiple generations of humans because new generations of farmers want improved livestock. But what is the goal of the human eugenics program? Once the masterminds of the program have died what’s the incentive for the next generation to continue the program? Of course, such a program is incompatible with a liberal democratic society, because the subjects of the breeding program wouldn’t be allowed to control their own breeding. You’d have to have an authoritarian government. And if the breeding program doesn’t meet the needs of successive generations of dictators, it’s going to be dropped.