No, i am not racist. No race is superior to any other and I am in no way saying we should practice eugenics
What I am asking is, is the idea of breeding humans to express certain traits actually impossible or did we just say it was because it will inevitably lead to genocide if accepted on a scientific basis.
We breed animals to express certain traits all the time, things like intelligence, speed, strength, calmness or aggressiveness. It would make sense that we could do the same thing to people. It would just be a horrific turn of events to make it happen and it would not be practical.
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it is impossible to breed for non-physical attributes such as intelligence or disposition because of how complex the human brain is and how it changes based on a person’s life experiences. but even then, two people with identical lives will still be different.
natural variations in speed/strength are minimal. what makes a difference for those things is training and diet. even michael phelps and usain bolt would be avaerage without the intense training they do, despite any biological benefits they may have.
We can certainly breed humans to have certain characteristics, like blond hair or blue eyes. It’s not perfect but possible.
The problem with eugenics is that people think certain things are related to race when they aren’t. They think black people are aggressive or stupid but white people are smart and controlled. They think certain races have certain features because of their race, which is untrue.
Like yes, you could have two humans with C5 hair breed to make a C5 haired child, but you aren’t getting a smart child by breeding two white people necessarily.
I think it comes down more to the long term problems vs short term benefits. You may be able to “breed” for certain traits however you run many different risks.
Genetic diversity is important. Such as some people are more “immune” than others when it comes to viruses/diseases. If a virus that has a high death rate hits a specific type of people, and there’s no genetic diversity there’s a recipe for a no-recovery option.
Eugenics as a word has become persona non grata (for understandable reasons), but selective breeding is very much possible and is very commonly practiced in several ways whether consciously or unconsciously (e.g. I want my partner/kids to be intelligent, tall, athletic, not carriers of genetic diseases, etc, or the screening of donated sperm or embryos for disease)
No race is superior because we all belong to one race, the human race. All that race stuff was made up by white people to make them feel better about themselves.
There is definitely some basis to it in the sense that more intelligent parents are more likely to have more intelligent kids, and other physical factors are more likely to be passed on than others. But so much of what makes people who they are is not just their genes, but their upbringing. A kid with the potential to be a genius won’t reach that without raising them in a good environment for that, and it’s a lot more complex for a lot of human traits, especially ones related to the brain, than for what we do with animals.
It’s not so much that it’s unscientific as a whole as much as it is more complicated than most eugenicists believe to the point that it isn’t feasible to do, even if one were completely amoral about the horrific consequences of trying to put it in place.
In theory, you could breed humans for tasks like we did for dogs and cattle. The issue is that it takes over a decade for a human to mature sexually and even longer to safely carry a child to term, and when you do get offspring you’ll most likely only get the one. This is opposed to dogs, who are sexually mature after a year or two and give birth to multiple young at a time.
It would literally take several lifetimes before we’d see any productive results of breeding humans. Regardless of the moral and ethical ramifications of deciding what traits are desirable, and which traits aren’t, in the human race, it’s just impractical
I wouldn’t say it is. We can breed humans to express certain traits. It can happen. We are already kinda touching on it with IVF.
Nevertheless it’s not ethical and diversity is a strength. Also it’s got nothing to do with race as race is a social construct.
The way that selective breeding works in non human species is not actually that direct. It is faster and more direct than survival of the fittest as a force for evolution. But it’s not so direct as it is in the movie GATTACA. You still have to breed a large number of individuals who do not have the preferred traits. Plus recessive traits can show up generations down the line. And it naturally leads to inbreeding.
So in practice it would create new, exciting kinds of cruelty along with all the racist ones you’re thinking of.
All eugenics, no. The way many have used it in the past, yes. Whether it’s unscientific or not depends on how it is being used.
Many people don’t like the word due to the connotations associated with it due to past use. Some don’t oppose it inherently, but see too many practical issues with its application to advance it. Some actually oppose it as a concept. Of course, there are also those that support it for good and bad reasons.
The thing about humans is that we are a highly adaptable species, that’s why we progressed past the Stone Age. We don’t need to breed some sort of master race because A) we already are the most powerful and intelligent specie in the solar system as is, and B) we all can grow and learn together, we don’t really have to compete with one another. We can produce enough food, education, and medicine to provide for everyone if we truly desired. It discounts the fact that humans are a product of nurture just as much as nature, if not more.
You cannot meaningfully erase the racist history of eugenics because it is inherently built on racism and ableism. It avoids a productive conversation and employment of our intelligence about what we can do to provide for everyone, by merely ignoring that and assuming we can’t.
This ignoring the fact that core premise of eugenics is built off of unscientific understandings of how genetics and evolution work. It was built off the idea that race isn’t just a social construct but an innate quality that categorizes people into different groups specifically to say who is on top and who is at the bottom.
It was built off the idea that evolution is a product of survival of the fittest, and not that evolution is more or less a product of random mutations and who can have the most offspring.
Eugenics merely dresses up racism in a coat of scientific jargon, so it can pretend it isn’t what it actually is: a system to divide people.
Ethics and biological practicality aside, one major problem about eugenics that one should consider is that it’s effectively impossible to implement in practice.
A politician, including authoritarian ones, needs to have a broad support base. Screwing with your base’s reproductive rights is a great way to erode that base in a hurry. This means real-life eugenics has – to my knowledge – always effectively been little more than a fairly transparent attempt to validate a group supporting the implementing politician while suppressing the opposition.
It is scientific, but because of the massive baggage that comes with the term and its history.
We practice it even now, just not forced. You and your can be screened for harmful genes you may pass onto your child and the percentage risk involved.
One day what if we can look at your genes and tell if your child will be autistic. Do you then not have a kid because of that? Are we “erasing” people at that point?
It is unscientific. The smaller the gene pool for offspring the weaker those offspring become. This happens due to the more likely case of inbreeding and decreased resilience to infectious disease or environmental changes. It’s also seen as “evil” because a) it’s been brought up by people with “evil” intention like Hitler (and Churchill, the VP of the British Eugenics Society) wanting a master race and b) it would take away the will of those involved through forced breeding. Given all of human history, how much care and concern do you think eugenic systems would give to the women birthing these children?
There are disorders that can be detected before being like sickle cell anemia, Down syndrome etc Problem is whether it’s right to abort babies with that. That’s right or not. That’s up to opinion but it’s controversial
Alot of eugenics movements in the past was based on racist ideals and unscientific methods like discrimination against blacks or Jewish people like the nazis.
Eugenics /= Selective breeding. We do selective breeding all the time, whether consciously or not. There are people who don’t know they have the ginger genes who produce ginger babies, and people who do know they could pass on certain hereditary diseases, such as Downs Syndrome, who choose not to reproduce.
Eugenics has a long and rather bloody history of scientific racism and as an umbrella term, is typically state- or government-endorsed in some way. The term as currently defined covers the elimination of “undesirable” traits by preventing people from procreating against their will, typically through forced infertility, isolation, murder and removal of basic human rights from those who had said traits. In the overwhelming majority of historical eugenics, these traits were always conflated with the colour of one’s skin, country of birth, gender identity, sexuality or religious beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, white, cis-het, Christian or secular Eurasian people are generally considered the prime specimen of human within this particular context.
While human beings as a species operate in much the same biological way as any other, in that we can in theory selectively breed certain characteristics in and out of the population, it is not practical or ethical to do so in the same manner as we do with the sorts of animals that we do selectively breed.
This is because human beings have a much more complex social system which advocates for individual rights and liberties. You have never seen a dog chain itself to the railings in Westminster demanding the vote for all dogs, because it simply isn’t something a dog could understand.
Simply put, in order to successfully “breed out” a trait, even one of legitimate concern (which is an entirely separate kettle of fish), reproduction must be controlled. Control reproduction, and you’re limiting or breaching the basic human rights of the individuals within your control. That’s what eugenics is, when you boil it right down; it’s a system of control that seeks to eliminate people based upon traits we don’t like, rather than eliminating the traits themselves.
Honestly, I think at some point in the future (probably reasonably distant future) either eugenics or gene manipulation will actually become a nessesity.
We don’t really have natural selection anymore, and we know what happens with species that don’t naturally select for certain traits on a long enough timeline. Those traits deteriorate and disappear. I suspect vision may be amongst the first we will start selecting for for example. However, not to make a slippery slope argument, but I believe once we start selecting for some traits it will likely open the flood gates to selecting for other traits.
I do think there is a high likelihood we will turn to genetic manipulation rather than eugenics at that point though, because tell people who can and who can’t breed kind of compromises a basic human freedom. However if population control ever becomes a nessesity, this might be something that comes with it.
Obviously though there is also the “Gatica” option where we don’t nessesarily need to manipulate genes or control who can reproduce, we could in theory just select which sperms and embryos are used in reproduction. To my knowledge though, even though this sounds more simple than gene manipulation, it’s actually not. Trying to determine the genome of individual sperm without killing them is not to my knowledge within our current capabilities.
I think eugenics is fascinating, personally. I think people are scared of it because of the whole Nazi thing. Which is legit, but doesn’t make it any less of a science. But then also, it’s kind of silly to do because like look at half the things we humans have bred into existence – for whatever trait was sought after there’s always at least one “problem” or debuff. Like German Shepherd Dogs and their hips. Or any dog with no snout and the breathing problems they now have. It’s absolutely science, just… not one that takes so much care we might as well just not
We already practice it with our crops, and have for thousands of years. You think tomatoes look and taste the same now as they did 200 years ago? What about corn? Carrots? Watermelons? All are products of selective breeding throughout the ages. We got lemons by interbreeding oranges with citrons, and grapefruits from oranges and lemons. The issue arises when we apply it to humans, because “who are we to decide what the ‘ideal’ human is?” Steven Hawking is a shining example of what a disabled person is still capable of accomplishing, so if we were to eliminate genetic disabilities, imagine what we might be missing out on.
It’s obviously scientific. We practice eugenics with animals… It’s the morality of it that’s an issue.
It’s kinda both in the name of eugenics they also started “cleaning” the gene pool castrating epileptic people putting them or and undesirables in asylum or sorry sanitariums lots of horrible things occurred as well as no scientific evidence that any of the popular beliefs were true
Also eugenics was very popular with mustache and his cronies at the same time as in other places in the world us was definitely a huge part of that
It’s more the horror it leads to than the science been untrue, tho the science they were working off was deeply flawed. It’s perfectly possible to breed humans to promote or lessen traits and to some extent we always have, physically attractive people generally have better genes and find it easier to attract others with positive genes. Gene editing is now a thing and tho it’s used to prevent illness it could be used to create super humans.
On the issue of race you’d actually need to take a little from each group to create the ” best ” human because each race group has positive traits that they evolved over millennia. I don’t know alot about the subject so couldn’t give a list but things like black people having resistance to some illnesses and dark skin lowering risk of skin cancer are well known.
The Wikipedia page on eugenics provides a pretty good review of the scientific controversy. I can summarize some of it, but it will be filtered through my own perspective.
The main reason people argue eugenics is flawed is that human traits are very complex. Things like intelligence and behavior are affected by both genes and the environment (like how you’re raised or your education). So, it’s not possible to predict or control these traits just by choosing who has children.
On the other hand, some physical and mental characteristics are genetic. An easy example for me is I have a minor genetic neuromuscular disorder physical. This disorder could probably be decreased in the human population since it is autosomal dominant (you can’t have the gene without it expressing). Counter argument is mutation still has the potential to create this or other new neuromuscular disorders, so even prevent people with the disorder from breeding doesn’t entirely reduce it happening.
For me, where eugenics scientifically falls apart is that due to the complexity of human genetics and the time scale of human growth and development it is impossible to design a scientifically rigorous eugenics experiment. Even ignoring how quickly they become horrifyingly immoral. Isolating specific variable and creating repeatable experiments is key to the scientific process. They are not repeatable experiments, due to how long people take to grow and develop and the huge variability.
Also human bias pollutes eugenics discussions very quickly. Many early 20th century scientists took the position that everything was heritable. This also blended with the racism of the day to create conclusions that were horrifically biased.
This is a quote from Henry F. Osborn, 1923 president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
“In the US we are slowly waking to the consciousness that education and environment do not fundamentally alter racial values. We are engaged in a serious struggle to maintain our historic republican institutions through barring the entrance of those unfit to share in the duties and responsibilities of our well-founded government. … In the matter of racial virtues, my opinion is that from biological principles there is little promise in the melting-pot theory. Put three races together (Caucasian, Mongolian, and the Negroid) you are likely to unite the vices of all three as the virtues. … For the worlds work give me a pure-blooded … ascertain through observation and experiment what each race is best fitted to accomplish. … If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturist or a fine mechanic. … The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its peoples.”
It’s important to remember this was not a fringe opinion. A respected academic is saying education cannot alter the qualities determined by your race, and the government has the duty to keep races separate.
It also cannot be understated how horrific some eugenics experiments have been. The Nazis and Japanese are well known. Between 1920 and 1936 doctors in the US performed over 60,000 forced sterilizations on people in mental hospitals. Forced sterilization of Native American, African American, and Central American women also occurred on a large scale. It’s hard to know exact numbers because the culture of American medicine considered it an appropriate and reasonable action, and doctors would just do it.
Not to say there aren’t still eugenics experiments. Yao Ming’s parents are both Chinese basketball stars that were influenced by the government to have a child. In some ways he’s a successful eugenics experiment.
An interesting pseudo-eugenics effort that is happening now is tech companies are developing technologies to screen embryos for genetic traits. Rich people are now evaluating the genetic makeup of their potential offspring prior to getting pregnant through IVF. I’ve wondered if over time presence of hereditary genetic disorders becomes a marker of wealth in the way straight teeth is now.
Genetic diversity
Relevant SMBC:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/eugenics-is-a-great-idea
I have autism, and we tend to be a focus of the eugenics crowd in terms of preventing us from existing in the future. I know plenty of autistic people who choose not to have kids because they don’t want to subject a child to growing up with autism and the potential gamut of comorbid conditions. Still, there’s a difference between choosing not to have children because of your genetics, and being told you shouldn’t, or in the past, aren’t allowed to have children because of your genetics. Doctors used to forcibly sterilize women of color as a form of eugenics while they were undergoing surgery for other issues.
To answer your question, yes, and no. If you want to create a population free from disadvantageous genetic conditions, preventing people who have them or carry the genes that would pass them on from reproducing will reduce the frequency of disadvantageous genetic conditions occurring. If you want to create a society of smart people by having a bunch of phds reproduce with each other, you may inadvertently create on average smarter children from having them be raised by phds, but I doubt genetics would play much of, if any, part in the equation. If you try to create a society of smart people by having members of a “master race” reproduce with each other, you’ll end up with more children who exhibit the physical traits of said “master race”, and possibly some inbreeding.
Oof… The truth is kinda ugly. Three very prominent men (Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher) were both serious scientists and eugenics’ activists.
Inspired by work of Charles Darwin, Galton tried to prove heritability of traits, especially intelligence. Galton coined terms like “eugenics” and “nature versus nurture”. They founded a couple of scientific fields including statistics to prove this heritability.
Unfourtunately they had an agenda as well, not just curiosity. Galton was confident that breeding of more intelligent people is possible and would be for the better. Pearson made it more concrete by taking the stance and advocating that the individual rights are less important than the state and such breeding should be state-run.
Once it took off to America, it got really wild with actual forced sterilizations on those seen as unfit for reproduction. Subsequently Nazi Germany got inspired by the eugenics in California and took it to such extremes that it became obvious that this was not a good thing to do. In fact it was so obvious that even Sweden and the US mostly stopped it by late 1970s. Apart from prisons and immigration detention centers.
On a technical level Eugenics IS using the methods of selective breeding on humans.
Selective breeding is used normally on Pets, Livestock, Crops and ornamental plants.
Technically THE SAME methods would undeniably work on human populations. It is absolutely possible to breed humans to be stronger, Faster, more intelligent or any other goal the breeding program would set.
But applied to humans that process is called eugenics instead of selective breeding.
We as a society have decided to not use eugenics because of several ethical problems with the practice:
Narrowing a breeding pool is never a good thing. All those things we breed animals for come with all sorts of problems because of that inbreeding. Dogs bred for hunting who die at before they reach the age of 8 in massive pain from as their hips dislocate. Dogs bred to catch bulls that can’t breath properly. Friesian horses that look beautiful when young, but suffer terrible pain in middle age from genetic conditions of their feet that mean they can barely walk and have to be put down.
Fucking around with one lot of traits throws up a lot of problems as all DNA is connected. Say this sequence of DNA here might control hair color, but it also controls if you’re going to be prone to cancer or not when mixed with another snippet of DNA in another location that seems unrelated. There are too many unknown unknowns, in that we don’t even know what we don’t know to go mucking around breeding for traits in people, we still can’t get it right in animals.
It’s not impossible and rich people do stuff like that all the time with their children.
Eugenics is a deal with the devil. Lots of potential for really amazingly good things. Lots of potential for really terrible, horrible, awful, inhuman, demonic things. Not a good deal to make really.
The current historical pursuits of it have been unscientific. A scientific version wouldn’t serve the political/cultural agendas they’ve historically been championed by as races wouldn’t matter it would be purely picking the best humans from any ethnicity and selectively breeding them. Debate is the morality of fate-deciding of “undesirables”.
The governments can’t be trusted on this.
The people who run things can barely think ahead of the next quarterly report.
In the countries that tried five year plans, their economies and governments mostly crashed and were replaced.
How are they going to plan ahead for the centuries it would take to make something like eugenics work?
Even if they could, could they be trusted to make something like human breeding work?
It’s pretty sobering what Temple Grandin wrote about the issues we’ve had breeding chickens and think about how that would play out if done to teenage boys https://grandin.com/inc/animals.make.us.human.ch7.html
Eugenics is twisting science to justify racism.
Edit: The Nazis had a horrifying breeding program to create the Übermenschen (super people) called Lebensborn. Humanity is much better off never repeating those mistakes. Any livestock farmer can tell you diversity in the blood makes for a healthier flock, better able to cope with different challenges.
Here’s the thing, I think it is scientific in that we understand animal husbandry and humans are also animals. If we could breed a Pug into existence, because we find it’s nose cute even though it sucks at breathing, and we can breed chickens to yield exponentially more meat, and we can breed horses to run faster, or pull heavier carts, it’s kind of silly to say we can’t do that with humans within reason.
The issue is the word Eugenics brings to mind very racist ideology, and when you talk about breeding desirable humans you invariably run the risk of bias. Who is to say which human is better, and even then if we all agree we’d prefer a healthy son rather than a terminally ill one, people find it a hard pill to swallow to essentially say “Forget love and affection. You’ve tested highly for these beneficial traits, and she has been selected as your mate, you two must breed now.” And eugenics only works if mating is selectively controlled. That causes some ick when people consider that’s basically sexual slavery and eats into alot of human rights, simply to get a more desirable baby.
But yeah, think about Genetic diseases. If a disease has a 51% chance if being inherited, you start with 100 humans who have it in 1900, then 151 with it in 1925 as the next generation is born, by 1975 the next egenrarion brings the total to 228, but maybe we lose 25 due to old age, so 203 people suffering. It grows, if in 1900, you stopped those 100 people from breeding, that genetic issue is erased, and in 1925 you have only the original survivors of fhat first generation with it. By 1950, those original 100 have decreased, so maybe 75 sufferers. By 1975 those initial ones are all dead and the rate of that disease is now 0. Maybe at some point that genetic deficiency arises again due to a mutation or something, but would you say it’s better or worse to eradicate a disease in 75 years, or to now have 203 people suffering and incurable disease?
Now some people mat be aghast, because all life is precious, even the genetically deficient, but I’d ask how many of them wish and pray their children are born with deformities. It’s not so monstrous now, is it?
So is it bad? Not necessarily, is it impossible? Not at all. Is it scientific, absolutely, is it ethical, that’s a question for philosophers.
No one has done good science involving eugenics so far, because eugenics so far has been based on bad philosophy.
If you’re going to re-do the philosophy behind eugenics, you might as well call it something else, because there’s already bad association with that name.
Determining which traits are desirable is often subjective.
Also selective breeding tends to work more like an attribute slider: you can add strength and intelligence at the expensive of arthritis and early onset dementia.
Like many things it depends on how you define it. In the way it’s thought of and used, it’s absolutely abhorrently unethical and should not be put into practice.
At its core we’re intentionally affecting the breeding/artificial selection of humans. Like, there’s no problem affecting human genetics as long as it’s just to remove disease and it can be done in a safe way. There’s a lot of issues with that statement alone though. And when you open the can-o-worms so many more problems are going to arise.
It often assumes that certain traits aren’t polygenic
The issue is the doors that open with eugenics. If it’s outlawed entirely, no issues. If you allow it for something then what’s the limit? Who sets that limit? What is the measurement or decision making criteria?
No one should be born with horrible illnesses or other health issues, but then who decides what “horrible” or “an issue” is? I’m autistic, we use to be forcibly sterilized because eugenics said autism was a bad thing to spread. But I’m happy, I have a job, no reason I shouldn’t be allowed to have kids. I’m also gay and trans, both things that use to mean forced sterilization. Being trans in some countries it still does, Japan last I checked requires a sterilization procedure and no preexisting children to be able to legally change gender. That’s eugenics too.
So pretty much all the stuff eugenicists want to “improve” (especially intelligence, but even stuff like strength and propensity to be a soldier and others) are not really the result of genetics in any clearly controllable way.
So you can’t really breed a group of decisively smarter people because intelligence isn’t linked to any particular sets of genes — it is a vague, unscientific term we use to describe all kinds of unrelated and often contradictory things. People casually describe both Albert Einstein and Elon Musk as “smart”, but Elon Musk didn’t develop any theories and Albert Einstein didn’t end up with a bunch of stocks in a hyped up and overvalued car company…so the fact that people are using this same word for both is inherently unscientific.
People often jump to IQ as a more “objective” measure of intelligence, but it’s really not. It’s unclear what IQ measures other than performance on an IQ test. It can be used to diagnose certain types of intellectual deficiencies, and it seems to correlate with success in a variety of fields and tasks, but there are many exceptions.
Also, those fields are themselves a pretty small range of things we need people to be able to do, and the fields that happen to be valuable at any particular point of history vary quite a bit (for instance, being a computer programmer used to be one of the most valuable skills you could have, but it’s gotten a lot less valuable recently and could very well become pretty obsolete if tech companies decide they’d rather try to force consumers to accept AI generated slop rather than develop well functioning tech). So what seems “intelligent” now might become useless tomorrow, the way we tend to undervalue people who have talent with animals today, or who are really good at navigating by the stars.
Even if you try to expand your measure to include things like EQ and other attempts to measure intelligence, the fact remains that we don’t really know what “intelligence” is. We can’t actually define it in any precise, consistent way, and we often don’t recognize it in many people until after they’ve died (consider how many people we consider geniuses today died in obscurity…and then consider how many geniuses died in obscurity that we don’t even know about today because they just never got famous enough for us to learn about them).
And the same is true of other things eugenecists want to improve — generally speaking, we can only reliably recognize capable people after they’ve already accomplished something good. Some attempts to test for this in advance may be better than absolute chance (some attempts are no better than chance), but even the best tests are pretty bad (and many of the best ones just involve doing the thing as part of the test).
So the desire to practice eugenics is kind of based on a faulty premise in the first place. It’s kind of like imagining you can sculpt clouds the way you can shape clay, because from a distance they look like distinct objects that should be shapeable — it’s based on a faulty understanding of what we’re looking at.
Unscientific? No, not in the least. The uncomfortable truth is that there is absolutely nothing inherently special about humans, were animals just like the rest. If you were to take a generation of humans, execute the shortest 10%, and force the tallest 25% to breed, after a few generations the average height would start increasing. Genetics, much like Lego pieces, do not care what the final assembly is, the mechanics of building remain the same
That said, it is generally immoral and ill-advised to engage in eugenic practices. Morality is complex and thus I’ll be ignoring it entirely, that’s someone else’s row to hoe. Selective being is ill-advised for more reasons than just morality though, there are always tradeoffs when you start breeding for a select result. Look at the health issues dalmatians have, for example. On the humanity side, of we take my previous example of force-bred NBA centers, while you could doubtlessly increase the average height of the sample size, you have an equally increased risk of magnifying negative aspects, such as potentially making the population more prone to disorders like Marfans
Eugenics isn’t a suppressed topic because it’s impossible, it’s supposed because it’s impossible for humans to suppress their own bias. It’s a very short slope from “let’s make people taller” to “let’s eradicate short people”
Hi. I hope I can help a little. I’m currently pursuing a degree in health science and I’ve studied genetics. There is a lot to it, but one thing is that you really just cannot engineer a species like humans. Not in any reasonable time frame.
It takes a long time to make people. We have a gestation that’s the better part of a year and we take almost two decades to get up and running as adults.
Mini genetic traits can take decades to express themselves. Yes, we’ve mapped the genome but we don’t know what most of our genes actually do at this point. Or their interactions with each other.
You might be familiar with the standard allele model of dominant and recessive traits. If you aren’t, here’s a quick breakdown. Traits can be either dominant or recessive. You have two copies of the gene, Each of which may be dominant or recessive. Having one or two dominant genes makes your trait the dominant version of it and having both recessive crates makes it the recessive version of The trait instead.
Having two of the same trait is called homozygous, and having one copy of the dominant and one copy of the recessive trait is called heterozygous. Someone who expresses the recessive trait is obviously homozygous for the recessive gene. Being homozygous for the dominant trait or heterozygous at all means that you get the dominant trait. Two homozygous dominant parents will only ever pass on the dominant trait to their children and their children children will be guaranteed to have dominant traits as well, although they could be heterozygous. Two parents who both expressed the same recessive trait can only ever have children who Express that same recessive trait. But if a recessive person marries a homozygous dominant person they can never pass along that recessive trait.
Because of how tricky it is to get all these traits that you want you would have to search through the populace to find certain mixes of traits and then test those people for whether they are homozygous or heterozygous. Then you would have to wait at least 20 years for your next generation.
No one is going to do this in their lifetimes. Selective breeding on a large scale would almost certainly require some sort of weird mask consent or much more likely it would require forced breeding.
Also, some traits are very desirable to keep around in a very weird way. For instance, sickle cell anemia is a recessive trait that creates a horrible, horrible disease for people to have. It makes their hemoglobin sickle shaped and needs to all sorts of pain and suffering. But the interesting thing about sickle cell anemia is that if you have sickle cell you are highly resistant to getting malaria. Malaria is one of, if not the most, potent killers of humans in history. But and this is the weird thing, only a single recessive gene for sickle cell anemia is needed to get the malaria resistance. And if you have just a single Gene you will be both resistant to malaria and not have sickle cell anemia.
So with that in mind, who is making the moral decision? Is it right to eliminate a terrible trait such as sickle cell? What if that trait gives resistance to malaria, which would save many more lives than sickle cell ever ruins?
Eugenics is inherently a value assessment. In fact, it’s right there in the name: “eu” means “good”.
As a rule, science isn’t concerned with subjectives. What constitutes “good” or what traits should be passed down is a matter of perspective. There doesn’t exist an objectively “good” trait or set of traits the universe favours.
It gets especially tricky- and dangerous- when a group of people begins to decide and legislate what is and isn’t a “good” human trait.
It’s hard to account for things like intelligence. Just because someone’s a complete idiot doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent and will have an unintelligent kid.
I’ve met parents with a really smart kid where they themselves had a subpar education and their kid is getting the best of the best. Kid seems a lot smarter than their parents but really they’re just learning more.
Yes.
The vast majority of the people who talk about it use as a fig leaf to hide the racism and classics, which is why people generally don’t talk about it period.