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Who decides what genes are best?
People who have the genetics for sickle cell anemia have a greater chance of surviving malaria.
Forget the ethics for a moment: Eugenics is flawed from the very premise that putting all our (genetic) eggs in one basket is somehow a good idea.
Technically evolution decides what genes are best... Eventually.
Shouldn't this be constantly instead of eventually? Genetic changes are happening all the time
Most mutations are irrelevant or don't impact anything until they're duplicated enough times to matter.
For example, every human has 6 to 24 copies of the genes that let us digest wheat: AMY1 (salivary) AMY2A / AMY2B (pancreatic).
If any one or two of those mutate in the next generation, it won't be noticeable or make any sort of impactful change.
This is why changes from one species to another take hundreds of thousands of years (many generations). A whole lot of people will need to accumulate the same mutations and survive (or just reproduce) with those changes (when others don't) for speciation to occur.
About 70,000 years ago, nearly all humans on earth died, leaving behind just a few tens of thousands (maybe up to 200,000) that had just the right combinations of genes to survive. When that happened, humanity lost nearly all of its genetic diversity. It'll be a long time before we diversify again (if we ever make it that far).
I was more thinking like Gattaca where they take the part out of the DNA that causes heart disease and other stuff to give kids the best start at life. Then why can't we use the gene for sickle cell to create a cure for malaria?
If you watched Gattaca and thought, "This is a good blueprint for the future", you missed the point the movie was making.
That's the thing about sci-fi, it's a warning about potential horrors but that doesn't mean horrifying things can't have a positive.
I wholly understand that the point of gataca is oppression that comes from giving humans another metric to oppress. It's spelt out plainly. Unfortunately, like the main character, I'm also the product of people who didn't think about what they'd be passing on. Now in my thirties, I'm in the early stages of arthritis, my eyes are failing, and if family tradition holds I'll have less than a decade before a sudden and undetectable heart condition kills me. If that doesn't get me I have early dementia waiting in line.
I'm three quarters through the life I was given and I knew the name of my killer before I was ten. To me, Gataca is a world where some forethought on my parents would mean never having to do weekly injections so that my flesh does not consume itself. A long and ordinary life without pills every morning or regulating my diet for inflammation.
SciFi isn't about the dangers of science, it's about the dangers of science misused. The moral of gataca is that people are more then the sum of their parts and to value them on such is cruel and unjust. It's that parents have a responsibility to their children, regardless of their own feelings on it. But it's moral isn't that correcting bad genetics is wrong. No one deserves to be born broken.
Ok lets say you have a child. And they tell you he or she won't last past 25 years old, but they can make an "adjustment" so he or she can live a full and happy life.?
That’s not eugenics, it’s gene therapy. Eugenics is when the policy is compelled by the state, for its supposed benefit to society instead of the affected individuals.
woah woah woah. I thought Eugenics was about curing disease's and not about policy or anything doing with the state. And to benefit society. I have way way way misspoke.. Thanks for catching me on that.....no sarcasm.
But that is not what you are talking about.
I know now I mis spoke well typed.
Because the mutation that causes anemia is the one that prevents malaria. You can't have one without the other.
You didn't finish that movie, did you?
I think a big problem is it becomes a slippery slope. We can all agree that heart disease and cancer are bad. What about asthma? Ok, probably bad, let's get rid of that. Near-signtedness? Hmm. Being short? Not having a strong jawline? Male pattern baldness? The "wrong" skin color?
Watch better films.
Do not believe all that they tell you.
I think you were like the second comment on here. But you have to admit it's been good or great discourse.
Okay, three things, least important first:
Using "net" positive already refers to comparing it against the negative. If you want just the positive before comparison, use "gross".
Second, there is no positive to eugenics. There are hypothetical gains to make but they are unrealizable. This is because the mechanisms to decide who gets to reproduce will immediately be corrupted. Immediately. Every time.
And finally, the negatives are huge. Personal anguish, public unrest, widespread violation of civil rights depending on how draconian you make your regime, the downsides are huge and certain.
So unrealizable and uncertain gains at the a huge and certain price: No. No eugenics.
If you want to personally have lots of children with smart, beautiful, talented people, well, get in line.
I don't understand why these troll posts are allowed.
Freedom of speech. Plus mods only respond to reporting.
It has been 0 days since Lemmy Users started considering Eugenics again
You do have to admit though all comments even the ones giving me shit. Are decent reads.
I love how society always goes full circle on eugenics. Where I live recently had it legalised. Anyone protesting it in a wrong manner gets jailed. Someone should study how we can't seem to beat fascism.
You have an inaccurate idea of what eugenics is. The Wikipedia entry starts off covering the reason why it's a bullshit idea.
It's the enforcement that's the problem, not just keeping genetics in mind when procreating. That's the whole thing that makes eugenics eugenics rather than just selective breeding.
There are absolutely zero net positives to sterilizing people against their will and/or forcing people to breed.
Eugenics got a bad rap long before Hitler. It's abhorrent to any kind of sane and just society as it violates the most fundamental of human rights: body autonomy.
I'm not saying folks can't optimize their own progeny however they want. I'm saying that when you enforce your idea of what is and isn't desirable, you break the social contract. And, being real, even geneticists aren't yet fully aware of the level of detail needed to parse out what traits can be safely pruned without losing others. Then there's epigenetics, which makes eugenics even more stupid.
Nah man, it's not just a bad idea, it's impossible to implement without fucking things up. Being real here, your concept of what eugenics is, isn't exactly unheard of. And that's part of the problem. The people most behind the idea are the ones least qualified to implement it. It's a thing bandied about by jackasses wanting their idea of undesirables wiped out, and they never, ever manage to know enough about how genetics works to get close to being able to eliminate anu diseases at all.
No, because eugenics requires inhibiting the fertility of people against their will.
If humanity had complete understanding of genetics and always had the best motivations then possibly but realistically we are never even going to have one out of two.
Like the movie Gattaca
Everyone wears suits and fedoras and drives electric hot rods?
That's gene editing, not eugenics. Taking an already created embryo and messing with it would be gene editing.
Eugenics is a government deciding you have undesirable characteristics so they sterilize you, or deciding you have desirable characteristics so they breed you.
It gets a bad rap because most people opposed genocide and ethnocides nowadays. Hitler wasn't the only one committing them. History is littered with genocides. A lot of successful ones too. Discarding the idea as sullyed by Nazis is denying the horrors.
So we can all be the same. Wiped out by one disease.
I think it depends on how it is carried out.
If I was to have kids, I'd want them to have the best shot at life, and if that includes genetic editing, then I'm making some GMO kids.
If you want to have kids, I should have no say in those kids.
The problem is that eugenics folks are generally more concerned with other people's kids. As with 95% of the problems in the world, if people would mind their own business and let others live as they see fit, there would be no problem.
Note that the main character in Gattaca is also a piece of shit who (a) knew he was on borrowed time and (b) was the only pilot on a multi year interplanetary mission. His need for personal success quite possibly doomed five others.
Edit: I'd actually say that genetic editing is the only way that eugenics could be morally permissible, because without genetic editing technology eugenics relies on controlling the reproductive rights of others. With genetic editing technology, you can just make a better kid on a personal scale.
So why do you get to decide what your kid looks like?
...because that's how having kids works, regardless of genetic editing. Do you think fetuses get a character creation screen or something? Lol.
The fundamental problem with Eugenics is that the more fit for a specific niche you become, the more vulnerable you are to niche collapse. For example, if someone was genetically optimized to be the perfect software engineer, and now AI had made their job redundant, and the rest of their skills were mediocre at best, they now are not fit for anything else. We see this in nature all the time where a species becomes so hyper-specialized at one thing, the second there's a shift in the environment they are instantly past-tense.
Diversity lacks efficiency, but it improves resilience. Another example, if you over-engineer the drive shaft on a truck to very precisely meet the expected load limit and no more to save weight, the second you encounter a situation that overloads the drive shaft it will snap like a twig. The added weight of safety tolerances is inefficient... but it is also the only way to approach a world far too complex for you to anticipate every possible variable.
For an example of how this works in human biology, lets say you found a way to completely eliminate sickle-cell anemia. That's great, people will live much more healthy lives right? Except the second you do that, millions of people that you cured instantly start keeling over dead. Why? Because the sickle-cell was protecting them from malaria, and while it wasn't a great solution, far fewer died from sickle-cell than would have from unchecked malaria.
Engineering is always limited by how many of the real world variables you actually know about. It's the unknown unknowns that will sink your titanic every time. This scattershot, random evolutionary system that produces us? Yeah, there's a reason nature works that way. It's actually the most efficient way to keep surfacing variables you didn't yet know existed. For a lot of really complicated reasons, it's actually impossible for you to think of everything when trying to engineer the perfect human, and a surprising number of things you can't figure out a reason for and assume they're useless at best or a harmful waste at worst, turn out to be the one thing that saves you when everyone else is dropping like flies to a thing you didn't even know could happen yesterday.
All this to a missed knowledge part on myself.
Maybe next time you want to publicly discuss a topic you already know is controversial do some minimum amount of research about what that term actually means before.
Only if the ones dying are fuckin’ Nazi scum.
"no you see everyone else did eugenics wrong, im just going to kill the people I think are bad"
What does killing have to do with any of this?
its eugenics???? what are you not getting
When so many people become murderers, what is your "net positive"?
Curing diseases like a cancer gene or something else that can give the child the best start at life.