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Eugenics is the concept of improving the qualities of the human population by selectively breeding those with desired heritable traits, and discouraging breeding among those with defective and less desired heritable traits.
Although controversial because breeding is a basic human instinct and right that cannot be ethically denied anyone, eugenics tends to occur naturally anyway when those with less desired traits simply don't attract others sexually, aside from instances in which those with less-desired traits are attracted to their own kind.
Your thoughts on eugenics?
And...
Along the same vein as eugenics, there is another, yet darker and even less humane concept of selectively eliminating any humans who are troublesome, ill, damaged, non-contributors, drains on society. Someone please tell me what the word for this disturbing concept is?
And your thoughts on the matter?
In the first place, breeding is what owners of animals do, to improve animal bloodlines. Ever since the debacle of the Nazis in WWII, the term is not applied to the reproduction of people. The denial of human potentiality, the thwarting of free election by the concerned parties, is at heart a denial of humanity.
Tinkering with the germ plasm of plants and animals is allowed, or at least has already happened and will likely continue into the future (see domestication of dogs, horses, corn, potato, tobacco, etc.) There are simply too many imponderables - for now - to even consider gene-engineering - the logical extension of eugenics - on human subjects.
For instance, Jewish belief, Christianity (until recently, and the exceptions are only in some places) and Islam have all warred against homosexuality. Homosexuals risk death in Africa and much of Islam directly - by court or Islamic decree. And yet homosexuality continues to crop up, generation after generation. Its persistence over time and in mortal opposition suggests that homosexuality serves a purpose in the greater scheme of things. What is that purpose? Before we take up pitchforks and torches and storm the castle and put an end to the monster, we need to be able to answer that question. And the follow-on: If homosexuality plays an important role in human culture and in the gene pool and we eliminate homosexuality - What will replace it in that niche?
Sickle cell anemia is another disease that - a subject having two alelles - confers a measure of protection against malaria. There are simply too many physical and - call it cultural - situations that we don't understand well enough to attempt to fix. That being the case, the wise decision would be to maintain hands off, and study the cases until we do understand them well enough. And even then, the better decision may very well still be to let nature run its course.
Last edited by southwest88; 05-05-2014 at 08:40 PM..
Reason: add
Master plan or not, the numbers are there to indicate that women who are poor, more often minority, more often single take advantage of abortions more then the affluent, predominantly White population. Regardless of why, those are the stats.
No one disputes the stats, but I will be happy to dispute ridiculous claims for what the a stats mean or indicate. The conditions that cause individual affluent, married, white women to choose not to reproduce are more prevalent among poorer, single, non-white women. It should not come as a surprise to learn that abortions are more common among individual women in these already more numerous latter groups. Cartoon-level attempts to then make such data the basis for claims of some sinister "master plan" are meanwhile classic examples of utter tin-foil hat nuttery.
The problem with eugenics is that it quickly goes from finding a way to possibly improve the species to finding a way to exterminate "those people" or anyone deemed "unworthy" by the ruling sociopaths. That's why it'll never work in a practical scenario even if it could work theoretically.
I want to point out that I vehemently oppose negative eugenics and am well-aware that it caused atrocious and morally unjustifiable things to occur.
However, I disagree that determining which genes are good and bad is purely subjective. After all, don't we know that certain genes are more likely to cause harm and/or et cetera?
The problem is humans have no ability to predict the future or to understand how over the long term many "bad" genes can be beneficial to the species. Look at sickle cell anemia, a trait caused by "bad" genes but was likely very helpful in protecting the species survival against malaria.
Evolution has been selecting things for a few hundred million years. People have been talking about it for a hundred. Let's leave this to evolution, it's been doing it longer.
People have alluded to dysgenics, where bad genes are artificially or accidentally favored in reproduction (sometimes indirectly, re prolonged seeming health). In a way, not-so-invasive scientific progress promotes dysgenics, as via oral birth control (likely used properly more by smart people than dumb folks). I don't think science is close to directly 'fixing' genes, such that a dumb, unattractive couple could expect to produce good-looking, intelligent children. That probably is why we seem on our way to a have/have-nots society. Therefore, due to scientific limitations, we arguably need eugenics to frankly keep the baser genes from dragging down society. However, there's no practical implementation of eugenics that doesn't at least step on the toes of human rights.
Today more single women opt to have children. Many of them are using Sperm Banks where they can receive counseling and be matched to a healthy intelligent donor. This is not fool proof, but improvement is inevitable. Those who do not go with the flow will be left behind. When the new improved human becomes the majority how much tolerance do you think he will have for the sicklings?
I highly question the true ability of humans to accurately measure a quantity that they fail to properly define. To build an entire "scientific"philosophy supposedly based upon inaccurate data would appear to be a colossal mistake and just another human tragedy in my opinion.
For now, let's just focus upon cleaning up all the known mistakes that we've already made and take care that we don't make anymore significant ones in the future.
We could start by cleaning up the oceans and improving upon the world's ability to deliver clean water to all of its human inhabitants.
There has been a lot of confusion in this thread regarding what eugenics actually is. Natural selection, which includes choosing a mate based on traits to which you are attracted, is not eugenics. Minorities being more likely to get an abortion is not eugenics. Eugenics is the intentional breeding of individuals or, more likely, the prohibition on breeding for certain individuals, with the express desire to achieve some resultant change in the future human population. "Breeding" is the correct term here because we are not discussing the natural process of two people deciding to mate.
Regarding IQ: Yes, IQ is almost certainly mostly genetic. Most intelligence psychologists agree that between 40% and 80% of variation in IQ is explainable by genetics. That does not, however, mean that smart people wanting to marry smart people is eugenics. That is part of natural selection.
I do not know if I entirely agree with the idea that reproduction is a right of every individual. It seems like I can think of several cases in which I do not think a person has a right to reproduce. One example would be if we knew they had some genetic disorder that would certainly produce an offspring with a terrible disease and zero quality of life. Another would be if that person is incapable of providing care for his or her offspring, such as in the case of a person with a severe mental disability. For most people, however, it is true -- society should not get to dictate who has children and who does not.
One day soon, we will not need eugenics to make a better human populace. We will be able to select the "best" version of sperm from the male and the best egg from the female, and possibly even correct any predisposition to diseases that exist in their genetic material. This will all be done in a lab.
I am strongly in favour of eugenics to breed out certain forms of disability (both of the physical and intellectual varieties). I think that on the balance, that's just being humane. Nobody should have to come into this world with the certainty that they will face nothing other than pain and struggle, with no quality of life.
I don't believe that the right of individuals to reproduce should be without limitations that take into consideration the welfare of any offspring produced, as well as the best interests of society.
Do you think that people today with Type 1 (heritable) diabetes have trouble attracting mates? Look what happened in the 20th Century. Before 1921 when insulin came into use, heritable diabetes was a fairly rare diagnosis, because sufferers simply didn't live long enough to mate. Now its incidence is widespread.
So a medication changed the "natural" pattern; it improved the lives of people who had it, and their contributions to the whole fabric of society is incalculable. So is that a form of unintentional eugenics?
I don't think that diabetes has spread due to people living longer; it has spread because people are eating foods that cause it.
I have always liked the idea of positive eugenics, making all the human race better by getting rid of diseases. I am not sure that IQ can be increased by eugenics, but it would be nice if it could.
Last edited by Oldhag1; 04-12-2015 at 07:18 AM..
Reason: Merge
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