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

[LaxerBRO]

I am not reading your autistic wall of text.

What eugenics mean to me:

 

[Jones McCann]

View attachment 1498925
That's the skull of a pug, a creature created by humans selectively breeding dogs. I am almost 100% certain that any aspiring eugenicists will, over a long-term timescale, create something equally or more fucked up.

Fuck that noise.

Wasn't that created by inbreeding specifically?

 

[Lemmingwise]

At it's base eugenics is simply: Is it preferable to have the most intelligent, most attractive and most beneficial members of society produce more children with each other than the least beneficial.

The values you mention are
* intelligent
* attractive
* beneficial to society

The first two are easily defined, the third is very broad and poorly defined.

What is the benefit of eugenics in favor of the most attractive? Isn't that a kind of nature virtue signalling, when there is no certainty that that beauty signifies healthier traits?

It seems very hard to define benificial to society well, since there are so many ways in which people can be beneficial to society in different roles.

 

[Crankenstein]

The values you mention are
* intelligent
* attractive
* beneficial to society

The first two are easily defined, the third is very broad and poorly defined.

What is the benefit of eugenics in favor of the most attractive? Isn't that a kind of nature virtue signalling, when there is no certainty that that beauty signifies healthier traits?

It seems very hard to define benificial to society well, since there are so many ways in which people can be beneficial to society in different roles.

The "beneficial to society" could be put into tangible terms by defining what is beneficial for society. Reactionary types are not, bleeding hearts are not, and short sighted folks are not. So whatever sequence contributes to stoicism, being a "deep-thunker", and logistical thinking would be best for society.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

I don't know much of genetic and biology.Just getting it out of the way in case my questions amateur and stupid but I'm really curious about somethings.
1) Aren't there multiple types of intelligence?How would you decide which is most important when making a eugenics program?

As far as we know the 'multiple intelligence' thing is bunk. IQ is a pretty hard predictor of life outcomes; and IQ is extremely heritable, much in the same way that height, or hair colour is. Unless we're speaking of disorders like Autism and the link to intelligence you generally see a trend of high IQ individuals succeeding; and not just in the sense of raw problem solving like maths but in social situations as well. High IQ tracks with agreeableness to the ingroup, sensitivity, problem solving, spatial awareness and other things that Gardners theory puts into separate boxes.

Gardners theory has also never actually been tested and so far has only really be used to advocate that certain underperforming members of classrooms aren't actually dumb; they're just not learning the correct way. This has lead to an abject failure in identifying how these children are supposed to 'truly' learn and the result has been these kids simply still being dumb under a different label.

2) when talking about attractiveness there are multiple forms of attraction so what do you mean most attractive? Also isn't attractiveness both social and biological meaning you would have to find out which are attractive because of biologically not social conditioning?

Attractiveness is also pretty universal. We mean people that are sexually attractive. A 400LB landwhale with two lazy eyes and Huntington's is unnattractive. Sure there are outliers, but outliers are there to be ignored once you use them to help qualify the centre. For the most part human attractiveness has remained largely static. We know what we want to fuck, and we always want to fuck it. The issue has always been access; not the differences in what some people find attractive. We all know what is attractive. Those that don't typically are dysfunctional.

3) How would you decide who most beneficial the person to society? what is your measuring stick? who makes the most people happy? most technological advancements under their belts?

Traits which lead to success; these traits have always been the same. High attractiveness, high intelligence and low chance of genetic diseases. We currently engage in sexual selection towards the opposite. Our society is a dygenic one. Lynn's series of essays did an assessment of multiple studies of modern, and premodern 'mating habits' (gross term for humans being in love but it's the one he uses) and the trend was typically that smarter men got stronger, and got the smarter and healthier wives (typically having multiple or several concubines.) whereas the weaker, and dumber men trended towards having no or only a single wife.

Social mobility in premodern times required you to be pretty smart; and you got to the top of a human social structure by being smart in the first place. Sure you can fuck it up eve if you're smart (no human is perfect), but generally smart people were also the ones running things, and fucking everything with a pulse.

4) how would the program weigh the variables? what if someone is "attractive" but not intelligent and/or beneficial?

I feel you're not really understanding. (Or I phrased it poorly) A eugenic program as laid out by Galton when he wrote his essays had a very strict - almost a caste system - set of labels each person would be slapped with. That's what most modern people likely think of in their heads when they read 'eugenics' ala the Nazi's and their triangles and prisoner assessment system. I don't agree with that. Galtons proposal was useful in so far as it simply put forward the idea that we need to correct the issue that success (in all factors, financial, social, educational, etc) in an industrial(ising) society is negatively associated with fertility rather than positively.

That should be achievable by marketing contraception to poorer families, making it, free and constantly recommended. While offering family subsidies, childcare, and other programs to the middle and upper classes. Promote the ideal of the family home with a wife and multiple children; encourage businesses to promote men over women, encourage women to defer education over children and offer later life programs for them to go to college/get into work. That would be my proposal anyway; no idea if that would work, but I'm essentially working backwards from what isn't working. It would be a pretty massive undertaking for any government; but I'd see it the same as setting up medical, or school infrastructure: An investment in the future.

5) What high level of something things like intelligence, attractiveness, and how beneficial becomes less "desirable" to nature should we continue with breeding with those traits

I am having a tard moment because I have no idea what you're asking?

The problem I see with this is you are trying to decide negative and positive traits when most of the time it is dependent on situation or nature. To clarify what I mean is being highly intelligent could now be seen as a positive but if some catastrophe occurs where food is scarce intelligence becomes less beneficial because it requires high levels of calorie with not enough benefits. I guess to sum it up I feel like it would pigeon hole humans as a whole by limiting diversity and lead to bad outcome for humans continued existence as a species on earth and if possible in other planets in the future.

Intelligence is always valuable. It has been valuable since humans first began being humans. Lynn goes into detail in this in his published essays; but the simple way of putting it is that we have as a species almost always selected for intelligence. We are social, tool user creatures; the ones that rise to the top of the hierarchy generally do it by being the best suited for that role, and once there they hoard women and wealth. There have been a few studies into this such as Neel and Chagnon in 83 of an Amazon basin peoples in a preindustrial state where they found that in the Hunter gatherer groups the man at the top of the hierarchy was having 8.6 children (on average.) and the men at the bottom were having a lot of masturbation; a further study by David Buss in '94 outlined that the rise to the top of the hierarchy once the 'head man' dies requires not just physical strength, but charisma, intelligence and charm to stop the other competing men from just killing or expelling you.

Howell (1979) in the Kalahari desert found the same, as did Hill and Kaplan (198 in Paraguay. Preindustrial societies selected for intelligence and strength because those traits allowed for success in the social structure which explicitly brought with it women; and with women naturally came lots of children and therefore you pass on your genes. Our society is Dysgenic; meaning while intelligence, strength and attractiveness correlate with success massively; the availability of mates and the process of sexual selection has rendered that success a negative trait for passing on your genes. Typically financial gain, intelligence, education and success are negatively associated with fertility in an industrialized society. These traits are then not passed on; and you see a regression of the middle towards negativity. You end up with dumber kids essentially.

I cannot think of a situation where you would want less intelligent children unless you are literally trying to breed a underclass? In which cause a eugenic system would still be needed, but it would reward the dumbest, most useless; least productive and successful members of society with high fertility. Even in times of famine intelligence is needed to get us out of that famine; it is required for forming coherent societies and keeping us alive, unless we regressed to pre hunter gatherer society and then abandoned social interaction beyond mating a high intelligence is not a negative. Intelligence is our competition; no different to a stag with horns. Any society with a resource shortage, and a hierarchy will have the intelligent trend towards the top of that society because it is that much of a successful trait within our social groups no matter how they might form.

We already engage in eugenics, we have family planning, we teach contraceptives and we put educational/career success as more important than fertility for men and women. The only proposal that Galton, Lynn, others and now myself have is that there be a reordering to promote fertility among the more successful over the less.

Tard thunderdome = Kiwi Farms

Nah, I've seen an actual tard thunderdome; camp I worked at two of the kids went into the bathroom and started headbutting each other and the others wouldn't let them leave until one of them bled. Could I have stopped it? Yes. Should I have stopped it? I'm not going into a bathroom full of children that pathologically lie without at least three other adult witnesses. I literally say my life flash before my eyes once because I was talking to one of the crying kids alone (out on the front porch of the cabin in full view); and when a camp director walked past and asked what was wrong the kid out of nowhere tard shouted 'Johan hit me! He hit me and called me a cunt and then hit me again!' The director just said 'No he didn't' and moved on. Which is good for me since he's clearly used to the kids shit, but does kinda make me worry about the kids ngl.

To bring my insane, pompous ramble to a close: This does of course presuppose that you and Lemming agree with the idea that success within society and the traits associated with it are something we should want to preserve. I've seen people argue otherwise with gusto and I don't really have an answer to that concept.

The values you mention are
* intelligent
* attractive
* beneficial to society

The first two are easily defined, the third is very broad and poorly defined.

What is the benefit of eugenics in favor of the most attractive? Isn't that a kind of nature virtue signalling, when there is no certainty that that beauty signifies healthier traits?

It seems very hard to define benificial to society well, since there are so many ways in which people can be beneficial to society in different roles.

We are generally attracted to healthy things yes; and generally beauty did correlate with health. Obesity by itself is anywhere between 40-70% hereditary (according to the NHS.); many disfiguring birth defects and later life diseases are hereditary; and you can spot certain immediate defects by the effect they have on the face/boyd.

But yes, attractiveness is just 'virtue signalling'. But typically the mechanical process of actually having children trends towards working best when you're attracted to your partner. I'm not talking about breeding a race of aryan supermodel women (though that would amazing.) but realistically if we're proposing a eugenics program for society humans will weigh attractiveness pretty high up there on gut alone.

As for beneficial. Intelligence, good health and normal mental function are essentially of universal use. Sure we could have some sort of world ending event as Gunt.Inc says where these things are not useful; but at that point we may as well be discussing the effect of FTL induced mutations because it's so far beyond the scope of the idea of introducing a eugenic society that it may as well not matter. We know that IQ tracks with life success extremely closely, and that IQ is very heritable. But that high education and life success tracks negatively with fertility when in the past it would track positively. A eugenics program would instead aim to encourage the successful to breed more than the unsuccessful.

EDIT: Let the autism ratings reign down upon me.
Also I edited 'slave race' to underclass because it made more sense.

 

[Lemmingwise]

The "beneficial to society" could be put into tangible terms by defining what is beneficial for society. Reactionary types are not, bleeding hearts are not, and short sighted folks are not.

Why not?

Nah, I've seen an actual tard thunderdome; camp I worked at two of the kids went into the bathroom and started headbutting each other and the others wouldn't let them leave until one of them bled.

God gracious

 

[Niggaplease]

we bred dogs into genetic inbred abominations that it's mere extisence should constitute animal abuse, why would you think its a good idea to pull that kind of shit on humans? eugenics is just selective breeding.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

we bred dogs into genetic inbred abominations that it's mere extisence should constitute animal abuse, why would you think its a good idea to pull that kind of shit on humans? eugenics is just selective breeding.

Yeah, but that's not an actual argument against it. That's an argument against breeding retards. We have a pretty good grasp on what traits are successful and while we can't say exactly what genes do exactly when in regards to those traits (yet); we can predict outcomes via observation. No different to when we decided to breed dogs. We bred both the pug and the Poodle. One is a barely functioning retard, one is a vicious, easily trained, easily socialized gun dog that is smart enough to learn when to kill on command.

We already engage in selective breeding of humans, we just don't do it under lab conditions (yet).

God gracious

Shit got grim, and funny. Working with special needs kids was unironically pretty rewarding; but you have moments where it just makes you have to walk outside and get some fresh air because of how insane some of them are. One of the kids kept asking me to throw away my batteries because he was scared he'd accidentally swallow one and die.

 

[Puff]

I'm just worried about unintended consequences, which is why I like eugenics lite (TM) of just offering money to any 18YO who wants a vasectomy.

I mean, at what point do we notice that we've accidentally bred 10% of the population to be schizo or autistic? How much should we worry about physical fitness beyond simply being healthy? What is the correct percentage of crazies since they seem to be the ones who actually invent things? The sociopaths? They run all of our businesses and governments, but do we need more or less of them?

It's not THAT simple.

 

[Niggaplease]

Yeah, but that's not an actual argument against it. That's an argument against breeding retards. We have a pretty good grasp on what traits are successful and while we can't say exactly what genes do exactly when in regards to those traits (yet); we can predict outcomes via observation. No different to when we decided to breed dogs. We bred both the pug and the Poodle. One is a barely functioning retard, one is a vicious, easily trained, easily socialized gun dog that is smart enough to learn when to kill on command.

We already engage in selective breeding of humans, we just don't do it under lab conditions (yet).


Shit got grim, and funny. Working with special needs kids was unironically pretty rewarding; but you have moments where it just makes you have to walk outside and get some fresh air because of how insane some of them are. One of the kids kept asking me to throw away my batteries because he was scared he'd accidentally swallow one and die.

yeah but whose to say in that quest for perfection we'd mutate to retardation? to achieve perfection we'd have to sorely limit the gene pool, and even then you may achieve only a small pool of what you deem genetically superior. That's also not taking in the wild card that nature can sporadically mutate. You'd have to spend copious amounts of resources to dig into everyone's genetic make up to make sure that you minimize the chances of potential mental or physical deficiencies, not only that you have to sustain this over fucking decades. This isn't like breeding cats or dogs where you can mass produce breed standards in a short amount of time. not to mention the potential for inbreeding which can revert years of work.
Eugenics isn't sustainable nor practical. The best way to get stupid to not breed so much is to educate the ignorant, offer state subsidized birth control and abortions to those who are poor and want it, and limit the amount of kids you can claim on welfare as well increasing more punitive measures for deadbeat dads and actively make examples to the public. If the system that fuels breeding is more rewarding naturally more breeding, but if missing a child support payment lands some one in jail for a long ass time then idiots would think twice before barebacking a welfare queen. Trying to damn humanity to possible genetic fuck ups underneath the banner of the genetic superiority is only a band aid on a gaping wound.

 

[EmuWarsVeteran]

That Mostly depends on what you mean with eugenics. If you mean breeding out genetic diseases, we're already doing that partially by simply informing the parents and offering adoption as an alternative. So no reason not to do it.

If you mean trying to selectively breed humans. It won't work, period. Selective breeding works on animals to some degree, and even then actual experiments require added genepool to renew the inbreeding factor, and the reason why it works partially is that mental retardation in animals isn't that important, because they don't need to learn complex maths, social structures, language and ethics. So having a portion of them be total mongs doesn't matter so long as you get the traits you need. Posterior race mixing will fix it anyway.

But mental challenges are far more noticeable in humans. And shit is, part of why humans are so intelligent is our weakness, one of the biggest reasons for our brain growth is how weak our mandibles are and indeed is the reason why so many have issues with wisdom teeth cutting into their own flesh. To make people more intelligent, you'd have to prepare the organism to push more nutrients to the brain, the skull to grow larger and the face muscles to be even weaker, as a result you'd get severely mutated children with an astonishing degree of issues due to either having a metabolism that's completely out of control or skeletal and muscular systems so out of wack they'd be unable to even live without being coddled. Either way, and trying to raise kids with perfect bodies would require increased testosterone and muscle mass, causing lesser self-control and a much larger divestion of nutrients to said muscle mass, meaning again, either their metabolism is out of wack or they'll starve their own brains.

See where this is going? Inbreeding failed consistently for a reason. Perfection doesn't exist, biology is all about compromise. Deliberate inbreeding on mass scale would end in an evolutionary dead end.

 

[Crankenstein]

Why not?

Because A bleeding heart would make policies and programs that makes them feel better but aren't exactly functional or makes much logical sense, for example, outlawing abortion, hate crime laws, and gun bans. These make some folks "feel" good, but don't make much sense. A short sighted member of society would agree with the bleeding heart, which would lead prominence of the notions of; for example, defunding the police. Reactionaries would possibly agree with both and vote in screw balls that would make such things law, or the inverse, refuse to even hear an opposing opinion, and with enough numbers cause a deadlock and halt any progress in either direction.

 

[Puff]

There's always the quick and dirty "shoot everyone with an IQ under 90" and I'm being nice with the IQ number.
I don't really see how that could go wrong from an actual genetics standpoint, but the logistics and optics wouldn't really work.

 

[Big Bad Wart]

I am having a tard moment because I have no idea what you're asking?

I was just trying to ask that if breeding for these aspect ever correlated for negative survival would you keep going. The reason I ask is basically what @EmuWarsVeteran said a lot of these things would require sacrifices in other aspects like muscle mass because more energy would be put toward the brain , and to add it could change humans birth process since increase in head size would make it harder for women with small hips to give birth due to the expansion of the cranium.(this would lead could lead to a lot of deaths)

 

[EmuWarsVeteran]

There's always the quick and dirty "shoot everyone with an IQ under 90" and I'm being nice with the IQ number.
I don't really see how that could go wrong from an actual genetics standpoint, but the logistics and optics wouldn't really work.

Well first off, how we measure IQ is very flimsy and varies by theory, currently IQ is actually more of a guideline than anything. Taking IQ seriously as an objective solid number is extremely stupid.

Furthermore, people's IQ varies wildly throughout their lifes, and most kids have under 90IQ, so you'd literally shoot most of the future generation routinely... you know that might cause an extinction event.

And finally. IQ is measured as deviancy from the mean, the mean being 100. This means if you execute everyone under 90 you'd have to re-calculate the new mean, do tests again, and since you pushed the mean up people who previously scored 100 will now score 90, so you're gonna purge again, push up again, purge again... until there's almost no one left.

Finally. Believe it or not, stupid people are an extremely valuable resource and people with high IQs tend to be the biggest fuckups in history. Why? Simple. Science. You see, back in the day philosophers had 2 tendencies, empiricism vs rationalism. Empiricism said you should actually find evidence for your claim. Rationalism said all you needed was philosophy, no evidence required, "cogito ergo sum" isn't just their proof of existance, they literally thought it was enough with thought alone to define reality without analyzing it. This conflict was most commonly defined as ants vs spiders.

Empiricists went on to create the scientific method. Rationalists went on to spawn postmodernism. Need I say more. Well shit is. One of the biggest points rationalists and later postmodernists used against the scientific method and empiricism before it, was that empiricists were on average stupider. And they were right. Scientists on average have a lower IQ than pseudo-scientists.

Why? Simple. It takes someone that understands his own intellect isn't enough to base their work on following evidence wherever it leads blindly. Stupid people who learn about their own stupidity are some of the greatest scientists because they do not trust themselves more than they trust their experiments. People with high IQs on the other hand typically are raised without facing such challenges, they are a lot less humble. Because of this, they become too good at making excuses for their own ego. They forget they shouldn't believe their own lies. And because of this they turn to pseudo-science when their worldview is challenged. That is not to say there are no scientists with extremely high IQ. Quite the opposite. There's plenty and they are some of the best. But on average, "intelligent" people prove quite stupid when mixed with research, whereas "low IQ" may never be the brightest shining stars in the history of science, but can be trusted to reliably keep adding experiments to the pile without inserting their bias.

And this is why eugenics will always fail. Compromise, people, it's inevitable.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

yeah but whose to say in that quest for perfection we'd mutate to retardation?

Why would we do that? We would have to consciously aim for that. You don't just fucking become a retard out of nothing.

to achieve perfection we'd have to sorely limit the gene pool,

So...this is not actual eugenic theory? This is pop science eugenic theory? You don't aim for 'perfection' nor do you severely limit the gene pool. Eugenics as proposed by Galton and the then at the time eugenic societies was a change of associated fertility of the successful as a result of society industrializing from the negative to the positive.

and even then you may achieve only a small pool of what you deem genetically superior.

That...what? Why? Why would it result in a small pool of 'genetically superior' people? If we're defining the meaning of superior then it can be as big as you fucking want it to be! Furthermore! No one is talking about genetic superiority; eugenics is the interaction of success within society and fertility rates; not the genetic engineering of superman.

That's also not taking in the wild card that nature can sporadically mutate.

Ah yes, the tricky problem of 1.45 × 10−8 errors per bp. How horrifying. Humans mutate slowly, very slowly; even slower than we actually previously thought we did. We only inherit about four dozen mutations from our parents; which is fuck all. It's easily accountable by diversity of population. Which is not an issue in a eugenic society rather than the whacky fantasy land of pop science because you're not machine gunning the proles. The 'wild card' of mutation is that is changes base pairs, but if you reward traits rather than specific genes that's not an issue.

I mean, even if you were going after a specific gene then seeing it mutated would just lead you to not let that mutation breed; or correcting that mutation using germline engineering (which is a whole other messy fucking subject).

You'd have to spend copious amounts of resources to dig into everyone's genetic make up to make sure that you minimize the chances of potential mental or physical deficiencies.

No you don't. Why would you? A eugenic society is one that actively selects for successful traits. It doesn't go off of specific genes, nor does it go off of single traits. It selects for success. No different than a preindustrial society; but done so in an artificially boosted way. if you saw an increase in literal retards then those literal retards are not going to be successful; and would therefore have a lower fertility rate.

A eugenic society as proposed by The Eugenics Societies did not advocate for the breeding of specific people, but the reversal of the high fertility/low success & High success/Lower fertility that has become the norm within industrial society. Galtons only proposal of segregation was of the lowest classes of people such as the severely retarded and disabled. But we do that anyway now by dint of just not fucking them. (Except for midgets, they get to have kids. But those kids tend to die, so self correcting issue really.)

not only that you have to sustain this over fucking decades. This isn't like breeding cats or dogs where you can mass produce breed standards in a short amount of time.

You also have to sustain dog breeding over decades if you want the traits to remain the same. It is in fact exactly like breeding cats and dogs; just like them we wouldn't be selecting for specific genes, we would be selecting for associative traits. If we wanted to breed only a race of people with a specific gene then yes it would be more costly. A very costly program of having people donate material to be read; and then...buying a machine to read it which costs about a grand. You can do the actual reading on a laptop if you were so inclined. The Min.ion my university lets me use is a little one that plugs in; and it can read the whole genome if you need it. Never done that myself as the machine does the reading in real time and I don't really need all the data so I generally halt it.

The bottleneck we have of genetic data is that we have so much of the fucking stuff that biologists now have to become data and computer scientists as well to actually analyse it. We can read a human genome for around about a grand a person. A one off payment that could be done at birth; it would actually cost less than funding six months of school meals to test every baby born each year in the UK. We don't because of data confidentiality issues and the fact that the NHS is incompetently run; IIRC one of the scandanavian countries does a prebirth screening and as a result Downs is extinct there now (or soon will be).

There's always the quick and dirty "shoot everyone with an IQ under 90" and I'm being nice with the IQ number.
I don't really see how that could go wrong from an actual genetics standpoint, but the logistics and optics wouldn't really work.

Holy shit! You don't need to kill anyone!

I was just trying to ask that if breeding for these aspect ever correlated for negative survival would you keep going. The reason I ask is basically what @EmuWarsVeteran said a lot of these things would require sacrifices in other aspects like muscle mass because more energy would be put toward the brain , and to add it could change humans birth process since increase in head size would make it harder for women with small hips to give birth due to the expansion of the cranium.(this would lead could lead to a lot of deaths)

Ah.

We already don't breed for survival. We are not undergoing natural selection anymore; we engage in elective sexual selection. Humans make an informed choice to breed or not to breed and as a result only the most extreme negatives right now that affect survival are being weeded out. We are dysgenic. People who would die younger are not, infants that would die from preventable natural causes due to weakness are not. I personally don't see that as a bad thing; I'm not a fan of dead babies. But it is having a dysgenic effect on society.

Regarding the specific issue that @EmuWarsVeteran raises...that's insane. Our heads are already too big; births for women are hard, much harder than they should be. We have the C-section and advanced medicine, and trained staff to assist with that; which is actually one of the reasons why we are dysgenic. We are capable and willing to let babies and women die under natural selective pressure live; I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does have consequences. What he is describing is not a eugenic society but rather engineering an organism. Designing something with intent is different to trying to adjust fertility rates.

If we could tailor humans to the point where we would be able to actively choose things like a tradeoff between muscle mass and intelligence then we wouldn't be human anymore. That sort of technology is literally world changing. The bleeding edge of gene therapy now for something like cystic fibrosis, a well understood and studied condition shows success rates of less than 10% in alleviating symptoms. Making Khan would probably be harder than making the actual Enterprise.

A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting eugenics policies put forward by Lynn, Galton and the societies that were formed in the 30's (except the Nazi's, those mad bastards did shoot the tards) as actively selecting specific genes; or attempting to induce specific changes in humans. I would argue that there is significant evidence that it is not the case that Galton. et al were referring to DNA, or to specific genes but rather to a trait based assement of breeding as DNA was not functionally discovered until 40 years after Galton was dead, and twenty years after the eugenics societies were formed. I feel that would hamper a gene based policy.

Lynn possibly? But I'm rereading some of his essays from his book now and there's no mention of anything beyond trait selection.

If a trait is negatively associated with success to the point where it is killing the child, then by definition the trait will not continue...since it's dead.

 

[EmuWarsVeteran]

Why would we do that? We would have to consciously aim for that. You don't just fucking become a retard out of nothing.

So...this is not actual eugenic theory? This is pop science eugenic theory? You don't aim for 'perfection' nor do you severely limit the gene pool. Eugenics as proposed by Galton and the then at the time eugenic societies was a change of associated fertility of the successful as a result of society industrializing from the negative to the positive.


That...what? Why? Why would it result in a small pool of 'genetically superior' people? If we're defining the meaning of superior then it can be as big as you fucking want it to be! Furthermore! No one is talking about genetic superiority; eugenics is the interaction of success within society and fertility rates; not the genetic engineering of superman.


Ah yes, the tricky problem of 1.45 × 10−8 errors per bp. How horrifying. Humans mutate slowly, very slowly; even slower than we actually previously thought we did. We only inherit about four dozen mutations from our parents; which is fuck all. It's easily accountable by diversity of population. Which is not an issue in a eugenic society rather than the whacky fantasy land of pop science because you're not machine gunning the proles. The 'wild card' of mutation is that is changes base pairs, but if you reward traits rather than specific genes that's not an issue.

I mean, even if you were going after a specific gene then seeing it mutated would just lead you to not let that mutation breed; or correcting that mutation using germline engineering (which is a whole other messy fucking subject).

No you don't. Why would you? A eugenic society is one that actively selects for successful traits. It doesn't go off of specific genes, nor does it go off of single traits. It selects for success. No different than a preindustrial society; but done so in an artificially boosted way. if you saw an increase in literal retards then those literal retards are not going to be successful; and would therefore have a lower fertility rate.

A eugenic society as proposed by The Eugenics Societies did not advocate for the breeding of specific people, but the reversal of the high fertility/low success & High success/Lower fertility that has become the norm within industrial society. Galtons only proposal of segregation was of the lowest classes of people such as the severely retarded and disabled. But we do that anyway now by dint of just not fucking them. (Except for midgets, they get to have kids. But those kids tend to die, so self correcting issue really.)


You also have to sustain dog breeding over decades if you want the traits to remain the same. It is in fact exactly like breeding cats and dogs; just like them we wouldn't be selecting for specific genes, we would be selecting for associative traits. If we wanted to breed only a race of people with a specific gene then yes it would be more costly. A very costly program of having people donate material to be read; and then...buying a machine to read it which costs about a grand. You can do the actual reading on a laptop if you were so inclined. The Min.ion my university lets me use is a little one that plugs in; and it can read the whole genome if you need it. Never done that myself as the machine does the reading in real time and I don't really need all the data so I generally halt it.

The bottleneck we have of genetic data is that we have so much of the fucking stuff that biologists now have to become data and computer scientists as well to actually analyse it. We can read a human genome for around about a grand a person. A one off payment that could be done at birth; it would actually cost less than funding six months of school meals to test every baby born each year in the UK. We don't because of data confidentiality issues and the fact that the NHS is incompetently run; IIRC one of the scandanavian countries does a prebirth screening and as a result Downs is extinct there now (or soon will be).


Holy shit! You don't need to kill anyone!


Ah.

We already don't breed for survival. We are not undergoing natural selection anymore; we engage in elective sexual selection. Humans make an informed choice to breed or not to breed and as a result only the most extreme negatives right now that affect survival are being weeded out. We are dysgenic. People who would die younger are not, infants that would die from preventable natural causes due to weakness are not. I personally don't see that as a bad thing; I'm not a fan of dead babies. But it is having a dysgenic effect on society.

Regarding the specific issue that @EmuWarsVeteran raises...that's insane. Our heads are already too big; births for women are hard, much harder than they should be. We have the C-section and advanced medicine, and trained staff to assist with that; which is actually one of the reasons why we are dysgenic. We are capable and willing to let babies and women die under natural selective pressure live; I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does have consequences. What he is describing is not a eugenic society but rather engineering an organism. Designing something with intent is different to trying to adjust fertility rates.

If we could tailor humans to the point where we would be able to actively choose things like a tradeoff between muscle mass and intelligence then we wouldn't be human anymore. That sort of technology is literally world changing. The bleeding edge of gene therapy now for something like cystic fibrosis, a well understood and studied condition shows success rates of less than 10% in alleviating symptoms. Making Khan would probably be harder than making the actual Enterprise.

A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting eugenics policies put forward by Lynn, Galton and the societies that were formed in the 30's (except the Nazi's, those mad bastards did shoot the tards) as actively selecting specific genes; or attempting to induce specific changes in humans. I would argue that there is significant evidence that it is not the case that Galton. et al were referring to DNA, or to specific genes but rather to a trait based assement of breeding as DNA was not functionally discovered until 40 years after Galton was dead, and twenty years after the eugenics societies were formed. I feel that would hamper a gene based policy.

Lynn possibly? But I'm rereading some of his essays from his book now and there's no mention of anything beyond trait selection.

If a trait is negatively associated with success to the point where it is killing the child, then by definition the trait will not continue...since it's dead.

You do very much so become a retard out of nothing. At least from the population genetics standpoint. Because the number of traits that are otherwise positive but turn out to cause retardation is extremely high. What you just advocated for was even worse than actual driven eugenics. Blind eugenics is just inbreeding without the care for the biology. Success in society has a very strong factor of inheritance. Eugenics based purely on it would be exactly the same thing the feudal lords did in the past, and end the same way, severe retardation and infertility, much faster than driven eugenics would.

You could eliminate the inheritance factor from society to avoid that, but to do so you'd have to destroy the family unit as a whole. You'd have to go full marxist but with a lot more classism to boot. This would not work societaly.

Furthermore. Spoiler alert buddy. Most people are poor, most people will be poor, no matter the system. At best you can hope for a strong middle class. But if you keep poors for breeding and try to overbreed the rich you have by definition cut off most of your gene pool just like other kiwis already explained. Except I was assuming you were at least trying to keep inheritance away but no, quite the opposite, you kept all the negatives of what we said with none of the positives. This is absolutely insane.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

You do very much so become a retard out of nothing. At least from the population genetics standpoint. Because the number of traits that are otherwise positive but turn out to cause retardation is extremely high.

Just to clarify; so I'm not misrepresenting you, and you're not misrepresenting me.
You are saying that there is an extremely high correlation between success in society and being literally (as in medically) retarded? That the traits that would lead you to be successful in society are the same traits that make a person retarded? I would...like, to hear some example which you can provide.

Because currently what I have said is that eugenics should be adopted in the form proposed by Galton, Lynn, et al to encourage the successful within society to have more children as intelligence, attractiveness and health are all incredibly heritable and that currently success within society breeds negative fertility.

That is my argument in full. Which part of that exactly, do you disagree with and why?

What you just advocated for was even worse than actual driven eugenics. Blind eugenics is just inbreeding without the care for the biology. Success in society has a very strong factor of inheritance. Eugenics based purely on it would be exactly the same thing the feudal lords did in the past, and end the same way, severe retardation and infertility, much faster than driven eugenics would.

No. You're just objectively wrong. The premise of a Eugenic society is not inbreeding. It has nothing to do with inbreeding. Inbreeding is when you increase consanguinity; which would be very hard to do in a eugenic society when you are aiming for a larger fertility rate among what is the middle classes over the poor; the result of that would yes be an immediate shrinkage of the poor...which would then shrink the middle class as well into the poor, and the least successful would not have children while the most successful would. All eugenics is, is natural selection but by human hand; it is the rewarding of success with fertility through artificial means rather than allowing it to happen naturally because humans are no longer naturally selected.

Wealth in society is inheritable yes; putting aside the issue of multi generational wealth loss in the middle class, the fact that the wealthy have such low fertility makes the impact of wealth inheritance so massive. If they had more kids, they'd be giving less to each child. Conversely if the poorest had less children they would be able to give more to each child.

This is literally what Galton - the man who invented Eugenics (along with Darwin) - said:
Page 17, Inquiries into Human Faculty and it's development.
'a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had”
It is, word for word; the process of natural selection undertaken by humans.
It is not:
Shooting the disabled.
Fucking your sister.
Breeding for specific genes.
Breeding for specific individual traits.
Breeding for mutant big brains (that post was also insane btw)
Breeding for specific philosophies.
Breeding for anything other than success with society.

It is a notation of the trend within modern society where success is correlated with low fertility which is an inversion of the selective pressure humans have up until now been subject to. Further it is a proposal to reverse this trend by incentivising the successful to have more children.

You could eliminate the inheritance factor from society to avoid that, but to do so you'd have to destroy the family unit as a whole. You'd have to go full marxist but with a lot more classism to boot. This would not work societaly.

Not unless you presuppose that humans are all these blank slate units and that wealth from the middle classes does not recirculate. Neither of which is true.

Furthermore. Spoiler alert buddy. Most people are poor, most people will be poor, no matter the system. At best you can hope for a strong middle class. But if you keep poors for breeding and try to overbreed the rich you have by definition cut off most of your gene pool just like other kiwis already explained. Except I was assuming you were at least trying to keep inheritance away but no, quite the opposite, you kept all the negatives of what we said with none of the positives. This is absolutely insane.

The other kiwis 'explanation' was both not an explanation and also wrong. There will always be people at the bottom of a success hierarchy yes that is correct. That's about all that is correct; the purpose is not to stop the poorest from breeding, it is to flip the imbalance of fertility when ratio'd against success. The encouragement of the successful to breed and the discouragement of the least successful to breed.

What you are saying is literal bullshit. It's pop science nonsense.

 

[Big Bad Wart]

What he is describing is not a eugenic society but rather engineering an organism. Designing something with intent is different to trying to adjust fertility rates.

When you talk about playing with fertility rate you know that your artificial going to select for things like the environment does? Meaning that human will slowly get bigger head head since you creating an artificial societal force pushing towards higher intelligence therefore larger craniums to fit the brain. Your eugenics society is you engineering through means of societal pressure to push towards the what you argue are desired traits

Our heads are already too big; births for women are hard, much harder than they should be. We have the C-section and advanced medicine, and trained staff to assist with that; which is actually one of the reasons why we are dysgenic. We are capable and willing to let babies and women die under natural selective pressure live; I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does have consequences.

this sounds very comes off as very callous. the point I was making with the whole birth thing was that humans would be required to be in women stomachs for a shorter period and therefore making them come out more underdeveloped and susceptible the germs and bacteria.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

When you talk about playing with fertility rate you know that your artificial going to select for things like the environment does? Meaning that human will slowly get bigger head head since you creating an artificial societal force pushing towards higher intelligence therefore larger craniums to fit the brain. Your eugenics society is you engineering through means of societal pressure to push towards the what you argue are desired traits

No.

When I talk about artificially causing higher fertility I am talking about traits that are already being selected for in terms of success but are not then being passed on due to the correlation of lower fertility with higher success. This also holds true world wide, with the poorest nations having massively high fertility compared to the richest.

What I am proposing is natural selection. Darwinian selection. We have avoided it since we industrialised because we have no had to deal with it. Eugenics is the restoration of Darwinian selection; the most suitable will breed, the least suitable will not. Whatever comes out of that is whatever comes out of that.

The traits that the evidence I have seen suggest we will select for are intelligence, social charisma, beauty and robust health. If it also selects for a big a head then the people with the big heads will undergo natural selection and if it turns out the big heads make them live long, healthy, successful lives with other bigheads then they will produce children and the trait will continue.

Or they'll die; and the trait will not continue.

this sounds very comes off as very callous. the point I was making with the whole birth thing was that humans would be required to be in women stomachs less an therefore making them come out more underdeveloped and susceptible the germs and bacteria.

Do you mean that the big head people would be born earlier? If so maybe? It may be that success is linked with big heads and big birth canals. Or the women die, and the big head people don't get to breed. If your child dies from a disease in a modern hospital then your child was extremely premature and sickly. It would be sad; but it would also prevent the traits that led to the child dying from being passed on from that child.

What I am describing is the process of evolution. It is not controversial science; the controversy is that humans for the past few hundred/thousand years have been chipping away at the hold that natural selection has one us. Eugenics is the proposition to restore that hold to ensure that those who are successful breed; and those who are not do not.