The only useful thing I could ever imagine coming out of a eugenics program would be if ( and it’s a big “if”) we could definitively find something like a criminal gene (or genes) and breed it out. I realize it’s doubtful but it’s the only program I could find acceptable.
One more thing.
This is why fantasies of a eugenicly superior master race don’t make sense. The selectively bred humans by definition can’t control their own breeding, otherwise they’d mate with whoever they liked and the breed would disappear, just like when dogs are allowed to mate however they like.
And so the people in the breeding experiment would have to be slaves. They won’t be a master race, they’ll have to be a slave race.
The current politically correct thought believes in the Religion of Equality.
Eugenics is antithetical to this, and there is a natural tendency for R of E adherents to be anxious about, to criticize, and to come up with all the possible shortcomings for eugenics.
It’s all irrelevant. As we learn how genes create what we are–intelligence, personality, creativity, athleticism–on and on, we’ll figure out how to control those genes and pass them to our progeny. Eugenics–in the sense of deliberate reproduction of specific traits–will be the default approach for those with opportunity to apply it and the capacity to understand why it’s an advantage.
That day is already upon us, of course, and what’s left is simply refinement. When your honey trucks off to a sperm bank to get the right donor, among the traits she is going to want to look for is intelligence, for example. Right now she won’t be given a guarantee that she’s gonna get the gene, but she sure as heck is gonna be looking for its proxy: What did dad do educationally, or what did dad achieve that requires smarts? Ditto w/ the athletic gene; music gene—on an on; whatever she’s looking for.
On a liberal board like this, heavily skewed toward R of E adherents, and heavily skewed toward posters who want to make all the arguments about how it’s Nurture and not Nature that defines us, I don’t think you’ll get a big “Hurrah for Eugenics.” No matter. As science advances, procreators will vote with their sperm choices (and, eventually, their gene modification choices). And because many who post here are intelligent enough to look past what’s politically correct and do what’s pragmatic, they’ll be closetly practicing eugenecists too, regardless of whatever reservations they express publicly.
No one wants a dumb kid if they can have a Nobel Laureate in Physics; an ugly one if she can be gorgeous; a deaf ear if he could be Yo-Yo Ma, or a hacker if he could be Tiger Woods.
Well, it’s one thing for a woman to go to a sperm bank and load herself up some premium spunk from Tiger Woods or Yo-Yo Ma.
But are men going to happily send their wives off to get impregnated by Tiger Woods? Not going to happen. Very few men are going to voluntarily castrate themselves so their wives can have a superior baby.
Of course, women have practiced “sperm choices” since before the existance of the human species. Every time a woman has chosen to mate with the smart charming handsome athletic healthy successful guy over the stupid irritating ugly weak sick loser guy, she was practicing a form of eugenics.
But the reason we still have stupid ugly losers is that stupid ugly losers don’t voluntarily kill themselves to improve the breed.
There are three scientific flaws with eugenics.
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It’s essentially inbreeding. Genes come in packages. You may be trying to concentrate together some good genes but you’re also going to concentrate together some bad genes. You’ll end up with a group of people that all have immunity to the common cold and perfect hearing and eyesight - but that same group will all have bad teeth and ulcers and be having heart attacks when they’re in their thirties.
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You’re narrowing your range of possibilities. Sexual genetics is all based on combining new varieties of genes. In economic terms, regular breeding is the free market and eugenic programs are central planning. Regular breeding will give you the lowest lows but it will also give you the highest highs because it’s getting a wider variety of possible results. Eugenic programs will end up clustered somewhere in the statistical middle.
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There’s a genetic war going on. While organisms like humans are constantly breeding new ways to stay healthy, other organisms like bacteria are breeding new ways to make us sick. If you practice eugenics you’re going to narrow down your genetic pattern and give the bacteria an easy target to focus in on. This is the banana situation Cerowyn mentioned.
There is at least some truth in all of these points. Today.
Tomorrow those points will be solved. The choice will become one which is between those who prefer a crapshoot and those who prefer to have as genetically-directed progeny as possible. You may choose to believe (hope?) that “eugenic programs will end up clustered somewhere in the statistical middle.” I’d be happy to take a bet that my eugenics kid is going to kick your random kid’s a$$ on the basketball court, the IQ curve and the baseline health profile.
It’s such a simple core concept: better genes = better outcomes.
It’s likely the slow-learners will be equally slow to learn how advantageous it is to have better genes, so the epsilon pool is not likely to be emptied very rapidly.
To the OP’s question: the science which says genes produce most of what we are is correct. As to what’s Right or Wrong, perhaps that belongs in GD.
Say you limit the scope of this plan not to creating supermen, but just to eradicate some diseases. I have no idea what diseases are there that are purely genetic and with no positive secondary effects (such as sickle cell). Could you eradicate them by preventing carriers from breeding?
Yes you could eradicate many genetic diseases by preventing carriers from breeding. However most people are carriers for one or more genetic diseases, so you’d have to cull a majority of the breeding population.
Genetic counseling is a much better idea. You don’t have to eliminate the deleterious recessive from the population, if carriers are dissuaded from mating with other carriers you could eliminate expression of the gene without eliminating the gene.
Of course, genetic engineering is also a possibility. But eliminating all deleterious recessives would require genetic engineering of the entire population. You could get the same effect by genetic screening and only doing genetic engineering when two carriers for the same disease mate. That decreases the need for genetic engineering from close to 100% to something like 1%.
Yes (with the caveat a new mutation might occur to contaminate the population again). However the hurdles are:
- You have to identify carriers.
- You have to prevent them from breeding.
The first can be expensive.
The second is difficult to get broad acceptance around and even more difficult to enforce. Some people want to have their own children even if there is a strong chance the child will inherit a known genetic defect. Enforcement would almost certainly entail sterilization.
And once you are on the slippery “identify and stamp out” slope of eugenics (rather than some sort of voluntary participation) where do you stop? When everyone has an IQ equivalent to today’s 150, the new norm (today’s 150) is 100 and today’s 100 would then belong to a retarded person. Does the carrier for a low IQ get sterilized too? (Or substitute Bad Dentition or whatever for the problem phenotypic expresssions of the gene deficiencies you are trying to ameliorate)
If we limit the term “Eugenics” so that it refers to involuntary improvement of the population through enforced genetic control it’s socially unsound, probably unworkable, and in my opinion Wrong–even though the scientific principle that genetic pools can be improved is correct.
People seem to be answering here as if the only way to practice selection on a couple of carriers who want to mate is to prevent them from mating.
Suppose the couple could choose to voluntarily filter out the “carrier” eggs and the “carrier” sperm. Then they could mate at will with the “healthier” eggs/sperms and be guaranteed not to product a baby with the relevant genetic illness.
This seems as though it could be a more practical and acceptable form of selective breeding.
Would this idea be better if we followed the dog model and produced multiple human breeds for various traits?
We could breed one pool to be ideal policemen, another one to be ideal firemen, cowboys, construction workers, bikers and soldiers, and whatnot.
Yeah, like Planet of the Apes. Utopia!
Really?
Was selective per-job breeding an element of that movie?
I watched it twice, but I was a bit younger and must have missed that element.
Well, they can’t exactly mate “at will”. But sure, if you have widespread genetic testing of everyone, any time two people decide to have a child together they can do a genetic match and see if they share any deleterious recessives. If they do and they still want to concieve a child they could in theory screen eggs and sperm and do in vitro fertillization with clean gametes.
But lots of babies are going to be concieved the old fashioned way…by two drunk teenagers in the back seat of a Toyota.
Still, widespread genetic screening and counselling could achieve almost everything that traditional eugenics can. And remember that when two carriers mate normally the offspring have only a 1 in 4 chance of expressing the gene.
Brave New World was NOT supposed to be a blueprint for the ideal society :-P.
Eugenics is scientifically fine…depending on what exactly you want and what risks you’re willing to accept (see arguments above). Morality aside*, I think that preventing some very small fraction of the population from reproducing if they have a condition or mandating abortion if such and such trait is present in a fetus would be an eminently workable way of eliminating various genetic diseases (most easily low frequency conditions like huntington’s). One could, over a century or so, weed out most of the heritable genetic disorders without even impacting most of the population. Breeding superior humans is much less scientifically plausible; we’d need a far better understanding of the genetic factors and we’d almost certainly find ourselves facing tradeoffs.
*beautiful words, they allow so much.
Again, the trouble with this scenario is that the selectively bred humans would have to be slaves for the concept to work. Otherwise, they’d mate at random like dogs that jump over the fence. And it would take generations to see any appreciable results.
And even then this wouldn’t be much different than the age old practice of hereditary occupations? If your parents were farmers, you’d be a farmer and your spouse would be a farmer and your kids would be farmers. If you were a cobbler your parents would be cobblers and your spouse would be a cobbler and your kids would be cobblers. Successful cobblers would be able to afford more kids, and hey, selective breeding for cobbling.
But this probably can’t go on for hundreds of years.
And what exactly makes someone an ideal fireman? And why can’t you just allow random breeding, and select out of the pool of 6 billion those people who happen to be good firemen?
Was the model Huxley showed in Brave New World job-specific?
It seemed to me like it was divided into more-competent and less-competent.
A highly-competent creative sculptor isn’t going to be bred for traits that fit for a high-level business executive, nor a fireman.
But simply aborting fetuses that express deleterious traits, or sterilizing adults that express the trait, doesn’t do much because the pool of carriers is so much larger than the number of people who express the trait.
If we assume random mating, the frequency of carriers is the square root of four times the frequency of affected. If one person in 40,000 is affected, that means that one person in 100 is a carrier. And that means that by culling the affected individual you’ve reduced the frequency of that allele by 1/4000th. You’ve barely touched the frequency of the allele. To eliminate it you have to cull the carriers. And as I said above, since most people are carriers of one or more genetic diseases you’d have to cull most of the population. Because of that square root factor the rarer the expression of the gene is, the larger the ratio between carriers and expressers and the weaker the selective force from eliminating expressers.
There are plenty of workable ways of eliminating the expression of deleterious genes, but ruthlessly culling individuals that express the gene doesn’t help. People don’t understand just how common it is to carry deleterious recessives.
Again, that sculptor would have to be a slave. What happens when he grows up and wants to become a lumberjack? Leaping from tree to tree! As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia! With his best girl by his side!
And what if his best girl isn’t a scuptor, but is a nurse? You’d have to be able to force the sculptor to mate with another sculptor to produce purebred babies. And your breeding program would have to keep these people as slaves for generations.
In the amount of time it would take us to breed up a generation of super-firemen, we’ll probably have developed mechanical devices that can make anyone into a super-fireman. Right now there are “mecha-suits” being developed that will enable the wearer to lift hundreds of pounds without breaking a sweat. Add heat shielding and infrared imaging and you’ve got your super-fireman right there.
The science of genetics is advancing fast, but I doubt it will outpace the science of making genetics irrelevant.