This is pretty much my stance. I think a lot of the detractors are a bit over the top when it comes to their arguments against it and comes across as hand wringing and pearl clutching. It could have some serious benefits to humanity if properly regulated. Eliminating genetic disease and disorders and mental illnesses. And if we can make ourselves a little stronger and smarter i don't see the downsides. As long as there are safeguards to ensure we still have individually and not we all come out as carbon copies of each other and is used to ensure we're the best version of ourselves i don't see why not
Is eugenics really all that bad? (On an individual level)
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This is pretty much my stance. I think a lot of the detractors are a bit over the top when it comes to their arguments against it and comes across as hand wringing and pearl clutching. It could have some serious benefits to humanity if properly regulated. Eliminating genetic disease and disorders and mental illnesses. And if we can make ourselves a little stronger and smarter i don't see the downsides. As long as there are safeguards to ensure we still have individually and not we all come out as carbon copies of each other and is used to ensure we're the best version of ourselves i don't see why not
I don't know, there were rumours of him and Marlyn Monroe having a fling!
Soldato
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For wiping out diseases i think its good. But wouldn’t the world be a but dull if it was full of chads and staceys?
Soldato
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yep, and it hasn't been pretty to witness any of the previous times a given group has got a notion of superiority in their minds.
Soldato
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Given what humans tend to find desirable...
This would be my concern with trait selection
To be fair in your example dogs were mostly selectively bred for the working traits, not for aesthetics. IIRC pugs/french bulldogs were meant for catching rats.Given what humans tend to find desirable...
This would be my concern with trait selection
Modern medicine and industrial farming has meant people who would have dropped dead are actually passing on their weak genes. I think some form of gene manipulation is inevitable, just to keep the gene pool clean
Soldato
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Yes, and until 1890 they might have, since then the selection of their 'trait' has left them incapable of such activities, some dog have now become so 'chic' that they are worthless, and I fear the same would happen with human trait selection, just look at what girls are injecting their faces with currently.
In concept I am not against it, I just fear humanity would **** it up, often.
Soldato
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and this is why genetic manipulation is of concern.
regardless of intentions who gets to decide what "unclean" genetics is?
Me. I'll shoulder that burden.
I was thinking the same thing.Given what humans tend to find desirable...
This would be my concern with trait selection
Also, talking of "working dogs", what's to stop that happening with human eugenics?
Some people bred for manual labour, selecting strength and compliance, perhaps reduced intelligence. Those people would not have voting rights.
Then a distinct caste bred for maximal intelligence, leadership, etc.
I mean take what already happens with trait selection in the workforce, and then breed people for specific suitability to a given role. Except rather than the parents being in control, the government/your sponsoring corporation is.
All you have to do is start the ball rolling, get people used to the idea (of eugenics) then have a bit of mission creep coupled with changes in society, harder times, etc. Who knows where you could end up. Properly genetically engineered people, could be the future. Who knows. Future society may look absolutely nothing like society today, and our ethics may well be nothing like their ethics.
I don't have to. She's called Janet. She's delightful.
Interesting, both of those involve IVF and both arguably involve selecting something among the available embryos; gender in the first case and blue eyes in the second case. I'm not sure I understand your reasoning re: "its a fertility treatment", it's that in both cases no?
Yeah, you'd obviously have more variance but it's still selecting for some traits, tall guys who are smarter than average.
It isn't all a fluke whether you end up tall, if you have tall parents then you're more likely to be tall than someone with short parents, likewise intelligence is likely, in part, genetic, though environment, nutrition etc.. play a part too.
Essentially we already select for traits when looking for partners, as monty points out:
There is a bit more randomness, variance there... + you have to actually match with the desired partner which you might not be able to optimise, might be tradeoffs. Stepping up from there a woman using a sperm bank might have a wider selection available.
And step up from there could be, I guess, when screening half a dozen embryos you, know some of the things you're passing on perhaps but you still only have access to (some of) what you had to work with to begin with and whatever combinations that resulted in in those finite number of embyos.
If you then introduce gene-editing then...
but also, re: natural selection - there is this point:
The correct observation that most people likely can't be that fussy. There will likely be more tradeoffs for the average person. But... for someone who is fortunate enough to be incredibly attractive to the opposite sex they've got a broad range of optionality on potential partners... if female perhaps they can afford to only date wealthy, smart 6ft+ guys and then select among them.
Does the ability to use sperm banks or indeed the ability to select embryos or even edit genes then "democratise" that to some extent? Especially if the cost of gene editing has dropped so much recently?
I don't think they do IMO, they're individuals. It is no more a concern for them that some other mother terminates some other baby with autism than regula free choice abortion for general lifestyle reasons is for someone who was, say, the result of a surprise pregnancy and whose mother had a religious objection to abortion - the mother being pro-life in general being the reason they're alive today...
I mean if you were a mistake/surprise but you know you're alive today because your mother was pro-life should that motivate you to become a pro-life campaigner?
I don't think it would be as high a % as Down's tbh... especially if there were a way to determine if some embryo or foetus is likely to be severely autistic vs high functioning - in the latter case plenty would keep it.
On the other hand, sure, in most cases a mother to be will terminate a Down's foetus, I think that's fair enough, if we allow for abortion when simply having a baby is bad timing for career, study reasons etc.. then surely having a kid with Down's is an even bigger commitment. Fair play to the parents who can lovingly raise a kid, it isn't necessarily for everyone though, just as having a kid, at the start of your career, aged 21 isn't for everyone. Both are valid reasons for terminating an otherwise viable foetus.
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After reading this thread I just want to watch Gattaca again.
For those that haven't seen it the setting is the near future where eugenics leads to a class divide with your genetics being the key factor that effects your life.
For those that haven't seen it the setting is the near future where eugenics leads to a class divide with your genetics being the key factor that effects your life.
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the subjugation of another race for the purpose of manual labor sounds exactly like the kind of ethics humans, and especially what we now call first world countries would do.
great film, covering what i'd consider the best case scenario for natural humans living in a world of genetic thoroughbreds.
The choice exists at the point of conception in most cases, the problem is we live in a responsibility averse culture where a termination is seen as nothing serious, just a slight inconvenience to get rid of a much bigger inconvenience created by avoiding being slightly inconvenienced by taking precautions in the first place. It would be much better to teach personal responsibility.
Pro-abortionists have been proven to be hypocritical anyway as most of them will currently be demanding mandatory COVID jabs. I guess you could say the same about Conservatives but the difference one side wants the choice to terminate what would be a life and the other to choose whether to be injected with a foreign substance. Leftists seem to be in a war against nature.
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I say fo for it. How do you think I was born 
I'd disagree there, we already have a situation today where we've got rich countries full of genetic thoroughbreds and poor populations within those countries or elsewhere in the world, we don't generally discriminate based on genes.
We do discriminate in some circumstances based on the combination of the realisation of those genes and the result of someone's upbringing... both of which factor into how you end up.
For example poor nutrition as a baby/kid, exposure to lead, not being breastfed etc.. can all have an impact on your physical and mental development, it's not just your genes. We have poor communities where people aren't so well looked after, have a poor environment, perhaps inherit less desirable genes too, we have immigrants from poor countries (in some cases they represent the best, in other cases, they could be a random mix of people seeking asylum then getting to stay etc..).
We certainly don't end up discriminating, in general, based on genes, in fact we pass laws to ensure that doesn't happen. We do however discriminate on ability, part of which is the result of genes but plenty of which is the result of other factors too - it makes no sense that genes alone would be a selection criteria.
Of course there are extremes, a midget probably can't serve in the Armed forces or as a police officer for example. At one point you needed to be of a certain height to be a police officer (or to serve in a guard's regiment) - not sure what the rules are now.
We're obviously very selective when it comes to astronauts or fighter pilots and even train drivers - things like your reaction times, coordination, the dimensions of your limbs/ability to reach controls etc.. and absences of certain health conditions will all factor into your ability to be selected - that's the reality today, it's not some dystopian future sci-fi scenario, it doesn't require checking for genes though clearly if you did end up with genes that made it highly likely you'd have the wrong attributes then by nature of the selection processes you'd not qualify.
Likewise, unless you're a relatively small, light person you're probably not going to be able to find work as a jockey in horse racing, unless you have a high portion of fast-twitch muscle fibers (for example from having some West African ancestry) then you're not likely to make it as a sprinter - that doesn't mean we explicitly exclude others from sprinting, selection of top sprinters is based on the realisation of their abilities which is partly genetic but also involves their upbringing/nutrition, training etc..