Obviously very controversial but..... is any form of eugenics even a good idea?

The appealing idea of eugenics is that the gene pool of our species could be improved if certain people with undesirable characteristics didn't have kids. This would violate human rights to such an extreme degree that I don't think it would ever be implemented due to the backlash the idea would receive.

I would propose instead of eugenics we have an alternative solution using our constantly improving technology. There are less harmful ways to improve the growing population such as gene therapy and dna testing and we are constantly learning new methods to treat certain conditions.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032092-800-2019-preview-dna-testing-will-lead-to-a-decline-in-genetic-disorders/

Edited 6/6/2019 12:44:33

imho people with straight up bad genes who are suspectible to/have serious ilnesses and have a high likehood of passing them into their children should not procreate(neither should people with really bad living conditions but thats another topic). the problem is defining what is bad enough and what is not, i mean where "undesirable" starts and ends. things like cancer are pretty easy but what about visual defects? it becomes harder to draw a line.

Even if it does make a good difference, it won't make much of one. The stupidity and weakness and such of the human population this day and age isn't the result of "bad genes polluting good genes," but it is more the result of modern living conditions. We live in a society that supports laziness, and where you don't need to be smart, and such. If we are to have such things as strength and intelligence, these things need to become necessities, forcing us to adapt.

It's not pretty insane, eugenics is one of the most smeared movements ever.

Let me ask you this, is it wrong to offer (and only offer) money to someone to get castrated?

Of course. I do believe it's not wrong at all to make an offer, it's only wrong to force people to do certain things.

even without human hands the nature is already doing its natural selection, and is not like we haven't done anything like eugenics, prolonging a fragile life which should be eliminated by nature.

Edited 6/6/2019 15:33:57

Rumour is Tabby Juggenkraut supports it

rikku have you heard of hbd

It should be encouraged, but not forced.

It is totally inefficient. Gene therapy has far more advantages.

Of course Rikku has heard of huge black dicks.

Don't assume that because a society that practices authoritarian eugenics is a dystopian nightmare that that means the dialectical opposite DYSGENICS is not just as socially pathogenic. Genetic disorders don't affect a comparatively large % of the population. You know what causes societal collapse? Having most of your professional class fail to produce a single child.

Edited 6/10/2019 21:36:50

What really needs to happen is it needs to be easier for youngsters to get experience. I mean, if employers keep turning down people without much experience, then they'll run low on people with experience, and eventually be forced to hire noobs for jobs that actually require experience.

Btw, check out In the Museum of Man by Alice Conklin. It's mainly about French ethnography in the late 19th through mid 20th centuries, but it also traces the history of the affair between anthropology/ethnography and eugenics leading up to WW2.

Just sheds a lot of historical context on the roots of modern eugenics, and you might enjoy seeing how even modern eugenicist or racial essentialist arguments (e.g., the kind you see in OT every once in a while) have developed and kind of consistently failed when it comes to scientific scrutiny. Plus you'll realize that even some of your own essentialist assumptions about how people can be grouped or understood are just fragments of unfounded historical misconceptions.

TL;DR: You can actually trace back most of the discourse in this thread to the early 1900s discussions of science, race, humanity, and population "health." Nothing new under the sun, and people aren't really original or creative. (I know no one's brought up race in here, just disability/genetic illnesses- but the core discourse of concern about the "health" of populations isn't novel relative to prior racialized threads).

Edited 6/12/2019 04:42:50

There's an interesting math problem related to Eugenics. Suppose a genetic condition is caused by a recessive gene and someone born with this condition will die before the age of 5.

If you do nothing, the genetic condition should eventually die off.

But if you prevent two carriers from ever procreating together, you increase the percentage of carriers in the group.

Of course, the quickest way to get rid of the condition is to prevent all carriers from procreating.

All anthropology in 1900 was inaccurate compared to today, from the theories of racial supremacy to the theories of equality. The Boazian hypothesis that skull shape reflects one's home soil and not the skull shapes of one's ancestors was falsified. Just because Madison Grant thought the Nordic race was the superior one and the Spanish were basically Africans doesn't mean all theories that attach essential characteristics to race have been falsified.

We also need to talk about how a psuedoscience can evolve into a legitimate science. Alchemy -> chemistry

What is really insane is abortion. It's literally murder, and yet millions of people support it.

Alchemy -> chemistry

That's like saying modern cosmology is descended from Biblical cosmology, or that there's some connection between Gregor Mendel and a witch doctor who performs rituals to promise desired physical traits in a child. The line of descent isn't straightforward enough to be labeled an "evolution" (not even in the broad Darwinian sense of diverging populations). Outsiders- often moreso than insiders (and at least in the case of anthropology/ethnology)- drive this change, not some natural progression within a field. Even when insiders are involved, outside progress (e.g., application of the scientific method, new developments in epistemology) drives change.

The quoted representation of the development implies a progress of a field, when in reality it's often progress against a(n existing) field, a rejection of a field's core assumptions (as was the case with physical anthropology and the somewhat related interest in "population health" that was deeply rooted in colonialism and imperialism). Unlike in evolutionary descent, the "indelible mark" of the pseudoscience continues to exist only outside the field itself. Perhaps under the paradigm of modern science, you can draw a link between chemistry today and chemistry 50 years ago, but even there incorrect prevailing theories and ideologues often get driven out instead of built on top of. E.g., in biology, a shift toward the punctuated equilibrium model isn't at all a progression from the previous dominance of gradualism; instead, it's a development of new ideas that don't build on top of gradualists' work.

TL;DR: Modeling this as a continuity from pseudoscience to science mischaracterizes a replacement/rejection as a progression from within. Moreover, it suggests that a portion of the pseudoscience lives on in the modernized/professionalized science, when in reality the pseudoscience lives on instead in the lay public's misconceptions. And that's exactly what we're seeing when it comes to eugenics, trans-humanism, etc.

Pseudoscience fools the public, not (so much) the professional.

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What is really insane is abortion. It's literally murder, and yet millions [billions] of people support it.

That's pretty off-topic here; you're either going to not get a response or just drive the thread away from the core discussion of modern support for eugenics. Maybe create a new thread if you want to discuss abortion?

Also, why is murder wrong? Does your justification against murder make some assumptions about [human] life? Do those assumptions extend to embryos and fetuses? What about intelligent (but biologically distinct) aliens? What about the brain dead? Is it wrong to terminate a human-like automaton that's alive and intelligent but not capable of meaningful experience? Is it even wrong to terminate a human that's seemingly alive and intelligent but not capable of meaningful experience, not aware of its own existence, and perhaps not even capable of processing emotion?

The broader your definition of "murder" gets, the harder it gets to argue that murder is wrong.

[Don't reply to the above on this thread. Continue the discussion elsewhere.]

Edited 6/13/2019 02:42:39

a human that's seemingly alive and intelligent but not capable of meaningful experience, not aware of its own existence, and perhaps not even capable of processing emotion?

so you're saying a public hanging of Norman is justifiable?