Eugenics, can we have a serious conversation, in this day, in this age?

[Krokodil Overdose]

I'd say the clock on eugenics is stopped at least until MovieBob croaks.

 

[Emperor Julian]

Pretty much the only society I can think of which tried anything like eugenics en masse for an extended period was Sparta and it ultimatly concluded in failure as population levels dropped and they became incredably stagnent.
It was not only immoral but doesnt even really seem to provide any benifit.


I mean anyone who knows much about animal breeding knows how fucked up pure breeds often are, which is unsuprising since it's just a slow boil version on incest.

 

[Forgetful Gynn]

Pretty much the only society I can think of which tried anything like eugenics en masse for an extended period was Sparta and it ultimatly concluded in failure as population levels dropped and they became incredably stagnent.
It was not only immoral but doesnt even really seem to provide any benifit.


I mean anyone who knows much about animal breeding knows how fucked up pure breeds often are, which is unsuprising since it's just a slow boil version on incest.

And anyone who knows anything about breeding knows how many different traits you can express without significant damage or inbreeding. Is every dog breed utterly ruined?

 

[Rafal Gan Ganowicz]

OP is a neo-vagina'ed faggot who should KHS

 

[Emperor Julian]

And anyone who knows anything about breeding knows how many different traits you can express without significant damage or inbreeding. Is every dog breed utterly ruined?

'Everyone' sounds like someone trying to sell you dalmatian whose gonna go nuts and eat a toddler. I think if your arguement to defend applying dog breeding logic to humans is "well they're not all re-tarded, have avoidable health issues or are dying from inbreeding." you might want to call it a day.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

'Everyone' sounds like someone trying to sell you dalmatian whose gonna go nuts and eat a toddler. I think if your arguement to defend eugenics is "well they're not all re-tarded, have avoidable health issues or are dying from inbreeding." you might want to call it a day.

Your argument against Eugenics is by giving an example of the most successful actions of eugenics undertaken by humans since we 'domesticated' crops. You might want to call it a day.

The reason that we have 'fucked up' purebreeds is not an accident; we didn't intend to produce a line of Master Race Dogs(TM); kennel clubs set out to over-exaggerate certain traits within certain breeds by engaging in matches within that specific breed where both the male and female had those traits. It wasn't because of inbreeding within certain breeds; German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Poodles and other dogs bred for work are robust, healthy and by and large valued when they are purebred not just for their looks but for the fact that they are a known quantity.

If a hypothetical eugenicist set out to create a human version of the Shih Tzu, they wouldn't engage in inbreeding on a random scale; they would find a pair of humans with (for example) Downs, and then try to have them breed until a child was born, and then repeatedly cross them with other downs syndrome. They wouldn't even have to actually have them fuck sisters, or cousins, or even multiple removed cousins; because they wouldn't (and kennel clubs did not) breed to maintain a mystical trait, or something non measurable, they bred to exaggerate traits. There have been various looks into how many humans would be needed to maintain a healthy breeding population and prevent 'inbreeding' out to first cousins before and it's anywhere between 98 to 14'000. There are 40'000 people with downs in the UK alone (har har).

Creating a human Shih Tzu from that would be pretty easy; and you wouldn't do it by inbreeding the population, you can do it by simply crossing the traits back into the population multiple times. The same holds true of all traits that are heritable; pointing to dogs bred by kennel clubs as an argument as to why it wouldn't work on humans shows a fundamental lack of understanding as to why those dogs came to be so ruined. The humans breeding them selected for the traits that would ruin them, no different from humans domesticating plants by selecting for traits that were beneficial to us; but would harm wild types.

@Forgetful Gynn will have to forgive me for putting words in his mouth; but his argument is not 'they are not all retarded' it's 'Not all of the breeds are retarded' which is something completely different. Not all the breeds are retarded because not all the breeds were bred for the same traits.

 

[Emperor Julian]

The reason that we have 'fucked up' purebreeds is not an accident; we didn't intend to produce a line of Master Race Dogs(TM); kennel clubs set out to over-exaggerate certain traits within certain breeds by engaging in matches within that specific breed where both the male and female had those traits. It wasn't because of inbreeding within certain breeds; German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Poodles and other dogs bred for work are robust, healthy and by and large valued when they are purebred not just for their looks but for the fact that they are a known quantity.

That damns with faint praise Pretty much all of these not only have to constantly artificially maintained against the animals nature but also all have a series of distinctive chronic medical issues inherated by pure breeding.

If a hypothetical eugenicist set out to create a human version of the Shih Tzu, they wouldn't engage in inbreeding on a random scale; they would find a pair of humans with (for example) Downs, and then try to have them breed until a child was born, and then repeatedly cross them with other downs syndrome. They wouldn't even have to actually have them fuck sisters, or cousins, or even multiple removed cousins; because they wouldn't (and kennel clubs did not) breed to maintain a mystical trait, or something non measurable, they bred to exaggerate traits. There have been various looks into how many humans would be needed to maintain a healthy breeding population and prevent 'inbreeding' out to first cousins before and it's anywhere between 98 to 14'000. There are 40'000 people with downs in the UK alone (har har).

....which would be horrific, useless, would probably build up of load of hereditry issues and a massive waste of time and resoarces. This doesnt really seem like positive arguement . It seems unlikely trying to breed altruistic traits would go any better.

, no different from humans domesticating plants by selecting for traits that were beneficial to us; but would harm wild types.

The plant types are ultimatly reliant on artificial enviroments, we breed them for cultivation rather than the instrinsic merit or survival traits. Big yellow bannas are fine as long as humans are around to eat them but not really a valid arguement for doing the same for humans since it's primary talent is being eaten and it's a plant.

@Forgetful Gynn will have to forgive me for putting words in his mouth; but his argument is not 'they are not all retarded' it's 'Not all of the breeds are retarded' which is something completely different. Not all the breeds are retarded because not all the breeds were bred for the same traits.

His arguement relied on ignoring the primary observation that selective breeding is ultimatly a dead end for a number of reasons so the observation stands. it's hyperbolic yes ,but he really does have to ignore the massive shortcomings of pure breeds and the ramifications if we tried this with people.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Only on the kiwifarms does a discussion about eugenics turn into thinking how one can breed the perfect tard to tard all tards, and here's why that is beautiful.

 

[Getting tard comed]

Pretty much the only society I can think of which tried anything like eugenics en masse for an extended period was Sparta and it ultimatly concluded in failure as population levels dropped and they became incredably stagnent.
It was not only immoral but doesnt even really seem to provide any benifit.

Um... how are you defining failure and what makes you think their population levels stagnated?

I don't think them losing a war to Rome and the Achaean League while outnumbered 30k to 50k can be blamed on eugenics. To be fair that's me assuming you equate failure with loss of autonomy but idk how else you define it.

To be clear: any allotment of land has a cap on the population it can support. That cap increases with technology bit seeing as we are talking about BC times... I'm not sure if any stagnation(if it happened) can be blamed on spartan eugenics(they damn sure worked see Helen and the 300) as opposed to Sparta reaching the population number they could support.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

"How can we treat humanity like nothing more than a puzzle, to be shuffled, re-shuffled, discard undesirable traits, and everything else that entails? What? Am I tragically autistic?? Why do you ask? What business is it of yours?!"

- this thread.

 

[Forgetful Gynn]

@Forgetful Gynn will have to forgive me for putting words in his mouth; but his argument is not 'they are not all retarded' it's 'Not all of the breeds are retarded' which is something completely different. Not all the breeds are retarded because not all the breeds were bred for the same traits.

That about sums it up.

That damns with faint praise Pretty much all of these not only have to constantly artificially maintained against the animals nature but also all have a series of distinctive chronic medical issues inherated by pure breeding.

Pure breeding, yes. Because they use line breeding aka inbreeding for when they're going for very specific appearances and less on function. It's also not a good comparison since breeders put the appearance of the dog over its health. We obviously would not do this with humans. Artificial selection alone will not result in chronic issues inherently, since artificial selection is not fundamentally different from natural selection.

As for "constantly artificially maintaining against the animal's nature" we already have that. We call them Laws.

....which would be horrific, useless, would probably build up of load of hereditry issues and a massive waste of time and resoarces. This doesnt really seem like positive arguement . It seems unlikely trying to breed altruistic traits would go any better.

The Shi Tzu can suffer from some conditions very similar to downs syndrome. He's not saying that it would be a good thing, just an example of breeding for a specific trait that appeared naturally. We have smart people. Do smart people produce smart offspring most of the time? Do tall people produce tall people most of the time?

The plant types are ultimatly reliant on artificial enviroments

Hah, no. Most of the shit you'd want to eat at the produce section is artificially engineered and doesn't require special environments. Have you ever heard of a plant called brassica oleracea? From that one plant we made Cabbage, Kale, Collards, Cauliflower, Romanesco Broccoli, Kohlrabi, and Brussels Sprouts. The most artificial environment you need for that is a backyard garden. What about Teosinte? You think it took artificial environments to make that into Maize? Genetically modified maize made up 85% of the maize planted in the United States in 2009.

His arguement relied on ignoring the primary observation that selective breeding is ultimatly a dead end for a number of reasons so the observation stands. it's hyperbolic yes ,but he really does have to ignore the massive shortcomings of pure breeds and the ramifications if we tried this with people.

Please tell me what the specific difference is between natural selection and artificial selection of traits? Nature "encourages" smart people to breed by killing off the stupid people in a myriad of ways. Fundamentally speaking how is that any different from encouraging the smart people to breed with each other? Hell, humans have done that for eons now. You don't just get to have kids with any woman you want, they (or their fathers) artificially select the best mates for them usually based on several fitness factors. Has that resulted in a race of degenerated mutants?

Finally, you're entirely skipping the fact that we have genetic engineering and we will soon be able to make and fix any genetic sequences we desire. The races that don't exploit that tool will be fucked over by the races that do.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

That damns with faint praise Pretty much all of these not only have to constantly artificially maintained against the animals nature

It does not. The only thing that's artificially maintained is preventing them from breeding with other breeds as that would 'pollute' the purebreeds lineage, this is done with a very simple process of maintaining a pedigree and stud book.

but have a series of chronic medical issues inherated by pure breeding.

Which could also be bred out of them. We choose not to do this. It is an active decision on the part of kennel clubs, owners and stud books to maintain those traits as they are considered part of the breed.

....which would be horrific, useless and a massive waste of time and resoarces. This doesnt really seem like positive arguement . It seems unlikely trying to breed altruistic traits would go any better.

Yes it would be literally one of the most unethical things I could ever think of doing, but I was using it as an example where a negative trait could be bred into a population group without needing to resort to inbreeding them. A positive trait would be the exact same except that it's positive.

Specifically that we don't need to understand what genes exactly we are dealing with when we deal with traits. A less absolutely fucking heinous example would be height; which is a polygenetic trait that we can still track as being typically gained from the fathers side rather than the mothers. Meaning you would be able to 'breed' taller humans by tracking the fathers side as pedigree easier than you would the mother without directly tracking the specific genes, merely by going off of the expressed trait.

The plant types are ultimatly reliant on artificial enviroments, we breed them for cultivation rather than the instrinsic merit or survival traits. Big yellow bannas are fine as long as humans are around to eat them but not really a valid arguement for doing the same for humans since it's primary talent is being eaten and it's a plant.

I am not implying we eat humans. Nor am I implying we turn humans into bananas. My point was that humans artificially selected for certain traits within the plants that were then carried through to their descendants, and that the process of artificial selection has remained largely the same for literally everything we have used it on, and will remain the same for us.

We're not special. We're animals just like everything else, and how we turn out is determined by trillions of little bits of acid, just like everything else.

The danger of eugenics is not one of 'we do nae understand!' or of science reaching into things it doesn't comprehend. It's an ethical one.

To avoid race because it's a hot button issue; do you think all people with Downs should be killed? I'm going to go ahead and assume you don't, and that most people are not in favour of machine gunning those with Downs. But, the Netherlands has engaged in just that same process where it is standard to simply abort a child with Downs. In the UK women routinely have pregnancies terminated over statistical risk factors that say the child will be severely malformed, or ill, or a threat to the life of the mother. That is, in of itself eugenics, but a form that simply targets those with certain conditions as they appear rather than aiming to preserve/add traits to the wider population.

You engage in it when you find women of a certain hair colour, or body shape, or height attractive. Intelligence by all accounts is highly (80%) heritable and tracks highly with life outcome. If you are highly educated with a good career and choose to have children with a woman who is the same then you are engaging in individual eugenics.

His arguement relied on ignoring the primary observation that selective breeding is ultimatly a dead end for a number of reasons so the observation stand, it's hyperbolic yes but he really does have to ignore the massive shortcomings of pure breeds and the ramifications if we tried this with people.

I hate to sound like a dickhead here; but it seems like you don't actually understand how it works.
All that eugenics is, is attempting to select for certain traits within a population. Ignoring the issue of heritability of certain traits for a moment; at it's simplest form it's a mendelian cross of AA X aa where you will almost always result in the child being Aa with future children possibly having an 'aa' result. Human heritance is no different to plants, or fish, or any other living thing that can breed. You can expand the traits to multiple beyond just two as well and it still works.

Selective breeding is only a dead end if you select for traits that that lead it to be is what I am saying; if you breed traits that make you fit and healthy then you will (normally) be fit and healthy, if you breed traits that lead to the reverse then the reverse will occur. There is deviation from this of course, but we deviation is acceptable so long as the centre remains the same.

Only on the kiwifarms does a discussion about eugenics turn into thinking how one can breed the perfect tard to tard all tards, and here's why that is beautiful.

I mean, realistically most male downs cannot have children due to fertility issues; but the females could. The bigger issue is that most cases of Downs are not inherited but come from chromosomal nondisjunction (bitches be too old to be having kids!)

If you wanted to breed a 'supertard' (which I don't) Fragile X would be a better choice, since it's easier to predict when and where it would strike; and the symptoms of it are easily tracked by facial features, behavior and seizures. Since it affects men the most; but is passed normally via the mother (the bitch), you'd want to cover all your bases and ensure that no matter what, you were getting a 'tard then you could breed one with an SRY defect and give it tiny balls for a laugh. That's what we did with dogs. To stop simping for eugenics for a minute; it is a heavy fucking thing to contemplate and while I am kind of flippantly on the side of it; ethically it's more than understandable why people recoil away from the idea. A kiwi above me said it best actually.

"How can we treat humanity like nothing more than a puzzle, to be shuffled, re-shuffled, discard undesirable traits, and everything else that entails? What? Am I tragically autistic?? Why do you ask? What business is it of yours?!"

- this thread.

Minus the 'tragically autistic' part. (hopefully).

Theorising is one thing (this is simply a trolley problem writ large); but implementation never goes as you would theorise.

There was a paper we had to read for theoretical work and it covered the idea of human germline engineering (purely as a hypothetical) where you could create an artificial gene to be inserted with a 'safety tag' to make it reversible. You'd insert it flanked with Ioxp sites (a way of inducing a CRE recombination event) and if the gene isn't suitable you could simply 'snip' it out using the same method you used to insert it. If the gene merely added something that wasn't needed then it would have little effect on the person. But it could theoretically be used to remove a correction and render someone who would have been damaged into someone who is damaged over time.

Pretty interesting really (the paper didn't say to make people retarded, it was giving an example of how to increase HIV resistance using gene therapy.), it raised a very grim point that the technology to begin altering ourselves exists, as does the expertise in the dozens of IVF labs around the country. If the will was there and the legalities were sorted there's nothing stopping us from engaging in Germline engineering. Nor from standardizing the results even. Humans are not as special as we think we are; any random womans eggs can be taken to the 4 cell stage, harvested and then engineered and replaced.

Once again though. Don't actually make the a super tard. That's evil.

Sorry for the winding sperg post; but it's an interesting topic and it's actually pretty relevant to the near future.

 

[Forgetful Gynn]

(bitches be too old to be having kids!)

Aka Hitting The Wall. What wall? This wall:

 

[Puff]

@troon patrol So you're gonna talk eugenics without even mentioning race? FOH. Come back when you've read The Bell Curve.

Just take care of the low IQ's and that works itself out.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Pretty much the only society I can think of which tried anything like eugenics en masse for an extended period was Sparta and it ultimatly concluded in failure as population levels dropped and they became incredably stagnent.

You say there is only one example, so I've gone and looked what I could gather. I've omitted some of the things I found in favour of some of the more evocative examples.


The ancient Cretan Minoans practiced female infanticide. They also forbade celibacy to encourage population growth. Romans too had various eugenic policies, including killing deformed children, until it was outlawed by christian rule in 313AD.

For that matter, so did the recent Chinese engage in female infanticide, quite possibly the largest and most recent of eugenic experiments. Another large experiment is Pakistan, that has had for a long time had consanguinity of over 50%. In other words, more than half of people get married to a first or second cousin to produce children with. In rural areas it is 80%. The result is in the UK, Pakistan children have about 10x larger chance of having serious birth defects/complications, which is costing the UK millions (not a huge amount for a rich country, but still).

---

There are of course also plenty of things that affect the stock of a population that may not be intended to be eugenics but have a eugenic effect anyways. For example sometimes you'll hear the claim that the courageous and strong of western europe all died in the two great wars (I don't think anywhere near enough people died for that to be the case). More convincing is the specific eugenic quality of sending english convicts to australia, where 20% of modern australians are descended from convict settlers. Also there is the australian eugenics policy of taking forced racemixing for aboriginals. They were trying to prevent the aboriginal race from dying out, a real threat at the time. Children were taken from parents, there was surveillance and a system of punishments and rewards to accomplish this.

These are some of the better documented cases. Of course diseases have always had a strong effect on what genetics will be left behind to procreate, as without the australian eugenics policy, aboriginals might simply have gone extinct from the diseases brought by europeans.

The black plague in europe might have had a similarly large effect, killing one third of the population in many places and may have been the reason for the European more proinflammatory immune system compared to populations that never experienced the black death.

Then there are the instances that one can speculate about. I already mentioned the effect of the world wars. Japan has for centuries had penalty of death for even the slightest criminal infraction, prior to opening itself up to the west. Is that part of the reason why petty crime is so low (while organized crime that manages to seem legal is very significant)? Because only those that managed to get away with it procreated?

---

In short: there are plenty of historic examples of intentional eugenics and even more if we include the unintentional ones. How one can claim that there aren't is a complete mystery to me.


I don't know much about the eugenics practiced in Sparta. It sounds like you are more studied on the subject, @Emperor Julian . On what basis do you claim there was no benefit? Because their state eventually declined? Do we judge the success or failure of a state on a single metric? I'm sure I'm missing things here, I have only a superficial knowledge of Sparta.

what makes you think their population levels stagnated

I don't know much about Sparta, but enough to know that their lack of population growth is well documented. Conversely, the helots over who they ruled had significant population growth, creating further instability.

Pure breeding, yes. Because they use line breeding aka inbreeding for when they're going for very specific appearances and less on function. It's also not a good comparison since breeders put the appearance of the dog over its health. We obviously would not do this with humans.

ha ha ha, we would ESPECIALLY do this for humans. We already do this especially for humans as physical attractiveness remains one of the premier features for what mates we seek out to have children with.

 

[Emperor Julian]

Um... how are you defining failure and what makes you think their population levels stagnated?

I don't think them losing a war to Rome and the Achaean League while outnumbered 30k to 50k can be blamed on eugenics. To be fair that's me assuming you equate failure with loss of autonomy but idk how else you define it.

Sparta's population is noted to have been slowly dropping for decades prior to the final collapse, they're increasingly having bolster their numbers with Heliots building up to leucretra. Consider this comes after winning the Peloponnesian War
it's not perfect but It's the only real example of anything approaching eugenics for a protracted period. Nazi germany is such a failure you can't even use that as a yardstick.

Pure breeding, yes. Because they use line breeding aka inbreeding for when they're going for very specific appearances and less on function. It's also not a good comparison since breeders put the appearance of the dog over its health. We obviously would not do this with humans. Artificial selection alone will not result in chronic issues inherently, since artificial selection is not fundamentally different from natural selection.

That sounds far more difficult and unworkable and it historically has resulted in chronic issues.

As for "constantly artificially maintaining against the animal's nature" we already have that. We call them Laws.

We don't have laws saying you specifically have to copulate with specific people, that's unworkable. We couldnt even stop people having gay sex with the threat of damnation so I really don't fancy your odds.

The Shi Tzu can suffer from some conditions very similar to downs syndrome. He's not saying that it would be a good thing, just an example of breeding for a specific trait that appeared naturally. We have smart people. Do smart people produce smart offspring most of the time? Do tall people produce tall people most of the time?

They'd eventually produce very sick tall people and eventually bottlenecked sick people

Hah, no. Most of the shit you'd want to eat at the produce section is artificially engineered and doesn't require special environments. Have you ever heard of a plant called brassica oleracea? From that one plant we made Cabbage, Kale, Collards, Cauliflower, Romanesco Broccoli, Kohlrabi, and Brussels Sprouts. The most artificial environment you need for that is a backyard garden.

That's a really artificial enviroment

Please tell me what the specific difference is between natural selection and artificial selection of traits? Nature "encourages" smart people to breed by killing off the stupid people in a myriad of ways.

That's a complete failure to grasp biology, evolution simply favours certain traits propersing in certain niches. It isnt that some traits are 'better' it's more that some traits are in certain contexts more useful in our ecological niche. For example a big brain is only useful if you can aqquire the food to keep it alive. Nature didnt make us smart, we became smart because that was a useful trait and we had enough food to feed that greedy brain.

Fundamentally speaking how is that any different from encouraging the smart people to breed with each other?

Well it's re-tarded and unworkable for one and evolution isnt just a big brain contest.

You don't just get to have kids with any woman you want, they (or their fathers) artificially select the best mates for them usually based on several fitness factors. Has that resulted in a race of degenerated mutants?

Yes you do, people tend to couple with who they find most attractve based on a complex social variables not on a eugenic criteria of 'best mate', your statement is so far from reality that I'm wondering if you're trolling.

Finally, you're entirely skipping the fact that we have genetic engineering and we will soon be able to make and fix any genetic sequences we desire. The races that don't exploit that tool will be fucked over by the races that do.

That's a little more workable but isnt really eugenics, I frankly can't wait to see what nightmares this will produce however on the bright side it'll be very difficult to genetic bottleneck as with eugenics so hopefully the damage won't be too awful.

I hate to get personal here but l Gynn have ever been with a woman? Because you're description of relationships is totally at odds with modern 20th century living

It does not. The only thing that's artificially maintained is preventing them from breeding with other breeds as that would 'pollute' the purebreeds lineage, this is done with a very simple process of maintaining a pedigree and stud book.

Which relies on total control of the subjects and dogs being totally subserbant to man

Which could also be bred out of them. We choose not to do this. It is an active decision on the part of kennel clubs, owners and stud books to maintain those traits as they are considered part of the breed.

So we can't breed it out of them without disbanding the breed?

Yes it would be literally one of the most unethical things I could ever think of doing, but I was using it as an example where a negative trait could be bred into a population group without needing to resort to inbreeding them. A positive trait would be the exact same except that it's positive.

A positive trait if anything, is just as difficult and potentially harmful as what you suggest here.

Specifically that we don't need to understand what genes exactly we are dealing with when we deal with traits. A less absolutely fucking heinous example would be height; which is a polygenetic trait that we can still track as being typically gained from the fathers side rather than the mothers. Meaning you would be able to 'breed' taller humans by tracking the fathers side as pedigree easier than you would the mother without directly tracking the specific genes, merely by going off of the expressed trait.

Yes and eventually you'd have a load of very tall very sickly people.

I am not implying we eat humans. Nor am I implying we turn humans into bananas. My point was that humans artificially selected for certain traits within the plants that were then carried through to their descendants, and that the process of artificial selection has remained largely the same for literally everything we have used it on, and will remain the same for us.

Me neither I'm implying if you're succesful criteria for breeding so low that a fruit deliberatly breed to be crap at survival is a bad model.

The danger of eugenics is not one of 'we do nae understand!' or of science reaching into things it doesn't comprehend. It's an ethical one.

The danger is it's a crap unworkable idea which would result in more harm than good. Deliberate Genetic diversity is infinatly superior to niche bottleneck breeding habits for a independent sapient species.

do you think all people with Downs should be killed? I'm going to go ahead and assume you don't, and that most people are not in favour of machine gunning those with Downs. But, the Netherlands has engaged in just that same process where it is standard to simply abort a child with Downs. In the UK women routinely have pregnancies terminated over statistical risk factors that say the child will be severely malformed, or ill, or a threat to the life of the mother. That is, in of itself eugenics, but a form that simply targets those with certain conditions as they appear rather than aiming to preserve/add traits to the wider population.

I think that's the only idea I've even seen wheeled out by eugenics which is quite interesting, you could make an reasonable arguement that this is soft eugenics but I think this pushes your case a bit far, if you're going to set the criteria that low then you're bassiclly saying selling condoms is eugenics. As I recall the cause of downs is dumb luck rather than genetics.

[qoute]You engage in it when you find women of a certain hair colour, or body shape, or height attractive. Intelligence by all accounts is highly (80%) heritable and tracks highly with life outcome. If you are highly educated with a good career and choose to have children with a woman who is the same then you are engaging in individual eugenics.[/quote]

My reluctance to talk about my sexual preferances to debunk a bad arguement aside. I think once again you're setting the bar for what qualifies as eugenics as incredably low here, by these standards me not handing out change to a homeless persona qualifies since it reduces his survival rate. Your criteria is so vague and simplistic it's hard to know where to begin with explaining how you're wrong.

I hate to sound like a dickhead here; but it seems like you don't actually understand how it works.
All that eugenics is, is attempting to select for certain traits within a population. Ignoring the issue of heritability of certain traits for a moment; at it's simplest form it's a mendelian cross of AA X aa where you will almost always result in the child being Aa with future children possibly having an 'aa' result. Human heritance is no different to plants, or fish, or any other living thing that can breed. You can expand the traits to multiple beyond just two as well and it still works.

But it rapidly snowsballs into an unworkble shitshow due to closed genetic breeding and the social ramifications of such an act.

Selective breeding is only a dead end if you select for traits that that lead it to be is what I am saying; if you breed traits that make you fit and healthy then you will (normally) be fit and healthy, if you breed traits that lead to the reverse then the reverse will occur. There is deviation from this of course, but we deviation is acceptable so long as the centre remains the same.

We have never succesfully pulled this off en masse and it would almost certainlly lead to accumulation of negative traits. See dog breeding for details, it's easy to see a positive trait embellished but how long before other problems emerge as you accidently cultivate say....depression?

There was a paper we had to read for theoretical work and it covered the idea of human germline engineering (purely as a hypothetical) where you could create an artificial gene to be inserted with a 'safety tag' to make it reversible. You'd insert it flanked with Ioxp sites (a way of inducing a CRE recombination event) and if the gene isn't suitable you could simply 'snip' it out using the same method you used to insert it. If the gene merely added something that wasn't needed then it would have little effect on the person. But it could theoretically be used to remove a correction and render someone who would have been damaged into someone who is damaged over time.

Pretty interesting really (the paper didn't say to make people retarded, it was giving an example of how to increase HIV resistance using gene therapy.), it raised a very grim point that the technology to begin altering ourselves exists, as does the expertise in the dozens of IVF labs around the country. If the will was there and the legalities were sorted there's nothing stopping us from engaging in Germline engineering. Nor from standardizing the results even. Humans are not as special as we think we are; any random womans eggs can be taken to the 4 cell stage, harvested and then engineered and replaced.

That's pretty interesting, I can't wait to see the utter shit show when all this really kicks off

In short: there are plenty of historic examples of intentional eugenics and even more if we include the unintentional ones. How one can claim that there aren't is a complete mystery to me.

Well external enviromental pressure such as the plague isnt eugenics it's a complete mystery to me why you used them

The rest of these examples are pretty piecemeal, byproduct, subjective or cultural rather than state mandated, I was trying to think of the closest equivelant in a prominant society so dismissed a couple out of hand the Romans one I'll grant you but even then it was far from universal.
Sparta is probably the closest to conventional eugenics since it's consistantly implemented in a coherant manner, so it's the only one I considered close enough-and even then it's a stretch due to the limitations of medical diagnosis I'd genuinly like to see another one for frame of referance.

I don't know much about the eugenics practiced in Sparta. It sounds like you are more studied on the subject, @Emperor Julian . On what basis do you claim there was no benefit? Because their state eventually declined? Do we judge the success or failure of a state on a single metric? I'm sure I'm missing things here, I have only a superficial knowledge of Sparta

The Spartans killed any newborns with deformities and engaged in deliberate attempts to filter out the 'weak' from the breeding pool from early childhood on a insitutional level. Personally I think even this is a stretch but it's the closest I could find.
I can claim there was no benifit because their soldiers wernt that much better than everyone else and eventually-worse and their population dwindled under it. Spartans despite their historical prominance and snazzy armour arnt all they're cracked up to be
-they didnt product any great philosophers or writters
-They failed to hold much territory or econonic clout in the grander scheme of things
-their military track record is suprisingly mixed.
-No great works
-their entire empire was founded on hypocrisy and the work of others.

I may be being a bit harsh they had some superb moments historically, their idea of legal checks on power was smart and a talent for bants but ultimatly their way of life was a failure. The hedonistic Athenians really did have the last laugh.

If their is an arguement to be made in defence of Eugenics here it's that the Spartans where bad at it, because they wernt really doing it.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Yes and eventually you'd have a load of very tall very sickly people

Hi, we're called the Dutch.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

Which relies on total control of the subjects and dogs being totally subserbant to man

Yes...and? We don't need total control of human populations and total subservience. People want healthy partners; there's no incentive to go with bad partners. The issue raised by eugenicists was the inverse relationship between success within post industrial populations and fertility; this leads to a dysgenic population. The solution is to reverse the trend. That doesn't require total control of the population and actively encourages social mobility.

So we can't breed it out of them without disbanding the breed?

No? We cannot breed it out of them without disbanding the pedigree, the pedigree is a largely made up system that kennel clubs use to track both good and bad traits indirectly through stud books.

Think of it like this. There are two Poodles, one is considered to be a 'purebreed' from pedigree and one is not. We'll call them Poodle A for the first and B for the second.
Poodle A has two traits we would be interested in;
Soft fur: Positive
Hip deformity: Negative.

Poodle B has
Soft Fur: Positive
Healthy Hips: Positive.

If we crossed A x B we would end up with a poodle in breeding, but not one that would be 'purebreed' in terms of pedigree; the positive trait (if dominant) would be inherited, and the breed would be made healthier.
EDIT: Pedigree is a made up thing that they use to make dogs expensive; don't get pedigree'd dogs, they're basically being abused with how people breed them.

A positive trait if anything, is just as difficult and potentially harmful as what you suggest here.

Why? Please explain this to me step by step so I can figure out exactly how you think traits are inherited.

Yes and eventually you'd have a load of very tall very sickly people.

Please explain to me how, without using the word 'inbreeding', the trait for tall will always lead to a population of tall ill people, rather than a population of taller than the previous average people with varied traits besides.

Me neither I'm implying if you're succesful criteria for breeding so low that a fruit deliberatly breed to be crap at survival is a bad model.

Then you haven't understood what anyone has been talking about. No one has as of yet mentioned what would be considered a successful trait. It has simply been talking about the practicality of selecting traits and if it would work with humans. It would be, and it would respectively. This is owed to our understanding of how traits are passed on. We already know it would work, and how it would work. The issue is if it would be ethical.

The danger is it's a crap unworkable idea which would result in more harm than good. Deliberate Genetic diversity is infinatly superior to niche bottleneck breeding habits for a independent sapient species.

Did you read the rest of this thread? I keep seeing this pop science bullshit spring up. Eugenics is a specific concept, with a specific meaning; and entails a specific strategy when it comes to humans. Galton (the man who coined the term and the theory) proposed that it was the middle classes. I have previously provided the quotes for this from his work on a previous sperg post I did. They're in Italics, go read them if you don't wanna take my word here for it.

'Deliberate genetic diversity' is not something humans have, we have a small gene pool, we mutate slowly; what we have are the overepresentation in our breeding population of the least successful within society due to the inverse relationship between fertility and success.

I think that's the only idea I've even seen wheeled out by eugenics which is quite interesting, you could make an reasonable arguement that this is soft eugenics but I think this pushes your case a bit far, if you're going to set the criteria that low then you're bassiclly saying selling condoms is eugenics.

Contraception can be a form of eugenics yes. Contraception was something that Galton also mentions. Is your conception of a eugenic policy solely from the Nazis? I feel like it is.

As I recall the cause of downs is dumb luck rather than genetics.

It would depend on the type of Downs, but yes. I explained what caused Downs in the post you quoted.

My reluctance to talk about my sexual preferances to debunk a bad arguement aside. I think once again you're setting the bar for what qualifies as eugenics as incredably low here, by these standards me not handing out change to a homeless persona qualifies since it reduces his survival rate. Your criteria is so vague and simplistic it's hard to know where to begin with explaining how you're wrong.

Your 'debunking' of my argument has so far been to display a staggering ignorance of the topic. I wasn't discussing you specifically when I say 'you'. It was an allusion to what we as individuals do. A policy of not allowing the homeless to breed would be eugenics as well. In terms of genetics 'survival' doesn't mean if he lives, it means if he has children, so the money wouldn't matter.

But it rapidly snowsballs into an unworkble shitshow due to closed genetic breeding and the social ramifications of such an act.

The UK and USA middle classes are the larger proportion of the population.

We have never succesfully pulled this off en masse and it would almost certainlly lead to accumulation of negative traits. See dog breeding for details, it's easy to see a positive trait embellished but how long before other problems emerge as you accidently cultivate say....depression?

We have successfully pulled off breeding programs the world over, go eat an orange carrot, wear a cotton shirt; enjoy some potato without fucking dying, have some popcorn or go see a cute dog somewhere.

As for cultivating depression; the accidental introduction of negative traits would be bad yes; but that can be controlled with the large population group you'd be working with, as well as the criteria in a hypothetical eugenics society be success rather than aiming for a specific trait. So if the trait leads to you dying and not passing it on because you deepthroated a revolver then it wouldn't be cultivated.

We know what traits a eugenics society would cultivate, it's social ability, intelligence, height, physical robustness and mental health. Because eugenics changes the artificially selective pressures to focus on the traits that succeed in human social hierarchy; and those are the ones that typically do (evidence on previous sperg posts like a page back.).

That's pretty interesting, I can't wait to see the utter shit show when all this really kicks off

It'll be literally life changing. Humans directly reaching in and interfering with ourselves like that is something that I think is really rather hard to actually put into words how much of a change it would be. It'd be like the first human born on another world, or the first time we see another solar system up close. Literally a 'never be same again' moments. And once the genies out the bottle there's no getting him back in.

 

[Forgetful Gynn]

That sounds far more difficult and unworkable and it historically has resulted in chronic issues.

No, it's what women do every time they look at you.

We don't have laws saying you specifically have to copulate with specific people, that's unworkable.

We have laws against fucking kids. But the point was that laws are what we use to control specific behaviors we deem unwanted.

They'd eventually produce very sick tall people and eventually bottlenecked sick people

Why?

That's a really artificial enviroment

It's really not you don't even have to till the soil.

It isnt that some traits are 'better' it's more that some traits are in certain contexts more useful in our ecological niche.

They're better from the perspective of "More likely to result in the individual living long enough to reproduce" aka "Fitness"

For example a big brain is only useful if you can aqquire the food to keep it alive. Nature didnt make us smart, we became smart because that was a useful trait and we had enough food to feed that greedy brain.

We became smart because we had adapted to a certain jungle environment without large teeth or claws or muscles and when that environment collapsed due to climate change we were forced out into a completely different plains environment and literally the only thing nature had to work with was our brains. Basically, nature picked only the smart people to breed. Yet somehow, miraculously, selecting for a specific trait didn't make all of us drooling retards.

Well it's re-tarded and unworkable for one

Just pointed out how it happened by chance. Doing it on purpose would have even better results.

Yes you do, people tend to couple with who they find most attractve based on a complex social variables not on a eugenic criteria of 'best mate', your statement is so far from reality that I'm wondering if you're trolling.

>eugenic criteria of 'best mate',
>people tend to couple with who they find most attractive based on a complex social variables
They're the same thing.

I hate to get personal here but l Gynn have ever been with a woman? Because you're description of relationships is totally at odds with modern 20th century living

Hate to break it to you but humanity didn't evolve a century ago. What our culture pretends we are and what we actually are are two completely different things. And yes I have been with several women, ask your mom.

 

[Merried Senior Comic]

If we practiced eugenics this website would not exist.

If you want milk to flow, say no to eugenics.