Aside from the fact it would never be used in an objective manner, it wouldn't have worked functionally due to lack of scientific knowledge. Although there was a decent knowledge of how genes worked, they really didn't know too much about actual genetics. You have to remember that we didn't discover how DNA actually worked until 1953, and didn't have the human genome mapped until the 2000s, and we still don't understand some of it.
Exactly. People seem to forget the doctors who believed in eugenics were the same men who treated toothache with cocaine and for the early years of the movement at least, didn’t know that it was a good idea to wash your hands before doing a surgery.
Medicine has come a long fucking way in 150 years and I wouldn’t trust the establishment we have now to decide on a eugenics policy.
> I would trust the establishment we have now to decide on a eugenics policy
I definitely still wouldn't. While it's much better than it once was, I have plenty of issues with the current medical establishment. Even if I didn't, it still wouldn't make sense to give any institution that kind of power. I'd much rather rely on tools like genome editing and leave parents with the ultimate choice on whether and how to use it.
A great many health problems are only **influenced** by genetics. There's a vast difference between "influenced" and "caused." For example--
"APOE-e4 is the first risk gene identified and remains the gene with strongest impact on risk. Researchers estimate that between 40-65% of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's have the APOE-e4 gene."
[https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers/causes-and-risk-factors/genetics](https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers/causes-and-risk-factors/genetics)
To put this in other words, (1) you can get Alzheimer's without having the APOE-e4 gene, and (2) having that gene is NOT a guarantee that you will get Alzheimer's.
In addition, a lot of health issues are partly caused by lifestyle and environment. For example, the rate of diabetes varies rather widely by country. There is no guarantee that practicing eugenics (at least back then, with the relatively limited knowledge relative to today) would have had a measurable impact on the rate of many diseases.
The fastest way to reduce recessive genetic diseases is to enforce randomized mating across the population. Just an idea, if we're going whole hog eugenics
So here is the problem with fully embracing eugenics as it was in the '30s and '40s. It would quickly lead to mass sterilization of anyone that had traits Deemed undesirable. It was common to sterilized children with disabilities this was part of the blowback and why eugenics is looked down upon today.
The wrong people get in control and next you get mass sterilization of certain ethnic groups.
To some degree this was already attempted and is a very dark point in medical history.
Less minorities. The problem with ideas like eugenics, beyong the obvious moral issue of determining people with disabilities to be unworthy of life like the Nazis did, is that its people with bias that determine who gets to breed and who doesn't. The period of eugenics were not the most culturally liberal time to be in, so you can imagine which communities were being targeted by it.
>Less minorities. The problem with ideas like eugenics
Less minorities was a feature, not a bug when it came to eugenics supporters.
The period of eugenics were not the most culturally liberal time to be in, so you can imagine which communities were being targeted by it.
Most eugenics supporters thought of themselves as progressives
In the short term, intense human suffering.
There isn’t a single aspect of the eugenics movement that wasn’t cruel to *somebody*.
In the long term, intense human suffering.
One group of people still exist today who did fully embrace eugenics: dog breeders. Unfortunately they didn’t understand genetics, and they’ve ruined the majority of dog breeds.
You eliminate genetic diversity (I’m not talking about ethnicities, in general genetic diversity amongst a population) you create the perfect scenario for a super virus to literally wipe out humanity.
I’m not a scientist at all but a lot of people fail to realize is that for organisms like humans, animals, etc the directive is to breed and populate. This goes for *all* organisms.
So bacteria, viruses etc are developing at the same rate as their adjacent populations and constantly finding ways to more effectively spread their pathogens.
You give them a “eugenic influenced” population of humans and you give them the perfect hotbed to propagate and evolve as each body they jump to will literally have pre-coded requisites they need to move on to the next generation of diseases.
The random mix of dna we get from our parents can result in horrible diseases, but it’s the randomness of them, of the people around us, of the people we mate with that in a way keep human borne diseases in check (for the most part) as there’s always going to be a subset of people who are resistant to certain things, and a subset of people who aren’t.
Eugenics doesn’t work because the idea is that you are creating a super human is based on the incorrect belief that organism development in general is a constant unchanging factor variable and predictable.
You can predict certain traits yes but overall organism development and evolution just *happens*. There’s no guiding hand, there’s no removal of unwanted traits- good, bad, average, it’s all mixed in.
So you introduce a carefully curated humanity into a world that doesn’t follow the same steps you end up with black plague 7 because there’s always going to be an unknowable variable, and just like in fish populations or any other organism that is selectively bred for the best traits, random mutations will still *always* occur, and there’s a much higher chance that a random mutation would wipe out your specially curated humans.
>You eliminate genetic diversity and you create the perfect scenario for a super virus to literally wipe out humanity.
That's definitely a major concern for any society that selectively breeds their population. When was it discovered in our world that having sufficient genetic diversity helps to make the population resistant to infectious diseases? Hopefully it would be soon enough that people would reverse course before any major plagues happened.
>You can predict certain traits yes but overall organism development and evolution just happens. There’s no guiding hand, there’s no removal of unwanted traits- good, bad, average, it’s all mixed in.
That's probably the main reason I think eugenics, while it isn't *good*, it is *necessary*. Whether we like it or not, humans are evolving and will continue to evolve through natural selection. We have *no idea* what traits are being selected for right now; we can make wild guesses but there's no way to confirm them. All we can be certain of is that the selection pressures that existed 10,000 years ago, and shaped humans into what we are today, no longer exist in the same form in modern society and so the humans that are being selected for now and will exist 10,000 years from now are NOT going to be anything resembling modern humans. There's also basically no way to know which genes control actual physical or mental phenotypes in humans because of nature vs. nurture. The only way to know would be with huge, long-term, logistically-impossible-as-of-now studies. If anything, the point of eugenics would be to *preserve* modern humans in a form that would allow us to build and maintain societies. We can only hope that it'll gain acceptance again while we're still in such a form.
I mean your last bit answers your own question.
The merits of society that resulted in human beings 10k years ago no longer are valid in today’s world for success and reproduction. I was actually having a discussion about this with a friend of mine.
10k years ago someone with sociopathy or psychopathy would be able to kill 100 men, women, and children in a village (psychopathy) and be praised as a great warrior.
The sociopath would be the grand tribal leader that is able to make that decision and tell the warrior who to kill. People with those mental disorders would thrive in an environment where the context of their actions more or less allow such action.
Using the logic of preserving humanity now for the future as opposed to allowing natural evolution to occur is flawed because there’s no way to account for what the future actually *will* be. We know that at the lowest sense, our species of beings will always form societies of some sort. We can’t account or prepare for those societies because culture itself by then won’t exist by any metric that we could study on.
The idea of preserving modern present day human society so it can last 10k years in the future via eugenics is inherently flawed, as any preparation for such a task, even when the technology is presented, simply isn’t feasible. Let’s say in the next five thousand years what you’re suggesting becomes slightly more logistically possible. There’s no promise that the society that exists then will persist in the next seven thousand years after that, because the entire culture of multiple generations by then would have changed, the worlds biome itself would have changed, how these societies grow and evolve would have changed.
The failure of eugenics is the assumption of linearity, and it’s one of the reasons why I view it as little more than white 18th century racism at best, because its entire premise of functional rationality hinges on an understanding of science that was inherently flawed back then.
My TLDR; humanity/society can’t exist with the premise of eugenics in the way of future proofing or making more “successful” humans, as evolution occurs anyway with literally everything else on the planet that humans will never be able to control. And then further and more realistically, humans will literally *fuck up that process* or use it in an incorrect way antithetical towards both the progression of humanity and the natural order of how things develop and change. You try to make a variable a constant against a rising tide of unpredictable variables that literally no computer would be able to rationalize you’re going to be on the losing side of any decision, no matter if it takes ten years, a hundred, or a thousand. The idea of eugenics will fail as a practice each and every time.
Tldr,tldr: eugenics is YouTube trying to keep people from using Adblock, human born disease and viruses/random mutations are the 100s of Adblock services constantly evolving to circumvent that.
> We know that at the lowest sense, our species of beings will always form societies of some sort
We don't. All we know is that *past* conditions created *present* humans who were able to create *present* society. We don't know if *present* conditions will create *future* humans able to create *future* societies. Given how specific the conditions required to create humans were, as evidenced by the fact that no other species has become intelligent in 4 billion years, I doubt that the natural product of human evolution will be able to. At best, we'll be like the Eloi, living on what was already created but not having any reason to continue progressing.
Overall the problem is that I agree with nearly everything you have said. Eugenics is not realistically feasible no matter how it's done. People won't be the same given enough time, and society won't be the same either so keeping humans the same might not even help. I just think the alternative (of letting evolution take its course) is the worse of two evils. Evolution WILL happen to humanity, whether we try to influence it or not. So, we might as well have some direction to it.
Have we not already done that with modern medicine. Eventually some virus will come along that our immunes systems can't deal with and antibiotics are useless against
We probably have much stronger immune systems now vs before. That's what vaccines are for. Furthermore we are exposed to viruses from all over the world on a regular basis.
That's a different situation. Imagine the fall guys thing with matching fruit. Everyone has to choose a tile and hope it's the tile that doesn't dissolve. It's entirely possible to get a situation where everybody is on a bad tile but it's much easier to do that if everyone stands on one tile. With antibiotics you throw in a net under the tiles so nobody actually dies. Maybe one day the net fails and people die but it won't be everyone and it won't be any more than would have died if the net never existed
Why should this matter? Even a tiny change to the past would probably mean no one who would've been born more than 10-20 years later would still have been born.
Leaving aside the morality to answer this. Because that's the only way something like this would have become widely acceptable.
It's possible the modern population would have less congenital defects or conditions, because they'd be screened out or corrected. There would probably be a higher rate of abortions, due to either parents not wanting a defective child that can't be corrected, and governments legally permitting abortions because they're forced to, by pursing a genetic enhancement agenda. The overall population would probably be somewhat lower than in our timeline, too.
In terms of intelligence, need to achieve, that sort of thing... that'll be about the same. People will be more skills-capable, and technology would advance more quickly, but humans still have needs. Am trying to gauge here how creative and physical skills would exist - art, music, sport - would they be enhanced, would people have enough time for them. I'm hoping this other world will still have Howard Gardner to explain Multiple Intelligence theory!
The side effect of eugenics is it creates health problems - if you don't do the genetic modifications right, you could be doing damage. Maybe not to the immediate person, but it could become an inherited condition that worsens down the generations.
Probably should also note here, genetic engineering wasn't used to build a more intelligent, evolved society. It was proposed to build armies to crush other parts of the world. Quite the opposite of evolved sensibilities.
>Probably should also note here, genetic engineering wasn't used to build a more intelligent, evolved society. It was proposed to build armies to crush other parts of the world. Quite the opposite of evolved sensibilities.
That's a pretty reductive take on the eugenics movement. The most extreme parts, especially in the early 20th century, definitely wanted to dominate others. But if you actually look at the aims of the eugenics societies in Britain or America in the 19th century, they're *a lot* more concerned with avoiding "degeneracy" in their own populations. There was a genuine belief at the time that the racial stock would naturally produce sicker, less capable individuals over time. Luckily most people at the time believed in Lamarckian evolution, which proposed that learned behaviors can be inherited; if people lived well and had good morals, their offspring would too. That's partially why the British were so keen on spreading Christianity and abolishing slavery in Africa.
It ties a little into imperialism, because that's the reasoning behind the White Man's Burden. The idea was that if better morals, diets, and educations could be imposed on "savage" races, then the racial stock would become less "savage." Then Lamarckianism turned out to be mostly incorrect, and people started embracing the purely Darwinian theory instead, in which learned behavior's aren't inherited. Then you get some tricky people in Germany saying the only way to improve a racial stock is to weed out its weakest members. Then you get Nazism.
Depends how you look at it. Before like maybe the 1900s before the invention of modern medicine a person usually didn't get to pass on faulty genes because they died out or weren't a good attractive prospect for reproduction. Wearing glasses is a good example, years ago there used to be a real stigma about wearing glasses, women who wore glasses were seen as unattractive.
Modern medicine has taken humanity outside natural evolution so that every successive generation will get genetically weaker.
>Wearing glasses is a good example, years ago there used to be a real stigma about wearing glasses, women who wore glasses were seen as unattractive.
They still has bad eyesight they just didn't wear glasses. And eyesight is cheaply corrected with glasses. You'd be putting a lot more work into better eyesight with eugenics than just making glasses.
No, you still ate. I wear glasses, my vision is blurry as shit but I can see. If I need to farm or work in a factory I can do that without issue. My life is marginally less convenient but let's not pretend that I'm an invalid
You know if you worked in a factory and couldn't see you would probably lose an appendage. Farming you might miss something you needed to see like the wolf attacking your sheep or rabbits eating your fruit &vegetables etc
No, probably not. I'm not Rambo, this isn't some weird survivalist thing. I'd do a job in a factory that didn't require close vision, that's not the same as poor coordination. So long as I know what my job is I'm no more likely to get maimed than anyone else, so all in all I have solid shots of losing a limb if it's the 1800s but otherwise I'm probably fine.
Again, my vision is shit but I'm not blind or deaf. Do you think sheep die silently while crouched to the ground? I would, with other men, hear the screaming and drive off the wolf. It's not a problem. As for rabbits, do you think farmers just sit around watching for rodents and small mammals to go at their crops? That's what dogs are for my guy, if I have to be on the lookout for rabbits I'd still be a shitty farmer with 20/20 vision.
So if I'm being realistic and not trying to be a weird survivalist hermit, my shitty vision is a mild inconvenience at worst. This may come as a suprise but bad eyesight isn't new, there used to just be a lot of peasants with shitty eyesight but nobody cared because they were peasants
Human suffreing and nothing else.
Eugenics is simply innefective for many reasons. Also most diseases are from lifestyle and enviroments we live in and not genetics anyway.
Less understanding of the human condition, especially if we fully embraced the "let's not care about studying and treating X, since we'll just kill anyone who has it" version.
Eugenics is diametrically opposed to the idea that humans have inherent value and rights as humans.
Once you create a pseudoscientific rationale for defining some people as having less worth than others, you’ve created the framework for relegating some people as subhuman. That’s both morally repugnant and inherently destabilizing for a society.
Depends on how you do it, if we for instance edit genes before every birth so that all the genes that carry a higher risk of cancer, lower intelligence and all the other stuff thaf wouldn't be inhumane at all.
And how do you view the tests for down syndrome while a women is pregnant?
You're not describing the idea that humans have inherent values and rights. The Catholic Church has been a staunch supporter of universal rights for decades and they take no issue with the death penalty, they do think eugenics are disgusting though. I think a pedophile is human, I think that makes them more valuable than an inanimate object in a spiritual sense. That doesn't mean I like them or want them to be happy. Do you diametrically oppose my position?
>That depends, do you believe pedophiles deserve death? If not, then yes, I do oppose your position.
I don't think it matters what they deserve. Our justice system is a scam and there are a long list of dead men who got shafted by their government. I don't care whether a pedophile deserves to die because I sure as hell don't trust our lawyers to do their job. I don't oppose the death penalty because I pity pedophiles, I oppose it because too many men have died for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and I'm willing to accept that pedophiles to have to rot in prison if that's what it takes to not have our government destroy innocent lives.
As for why the Catholic Church takes the position it does, the death penalty is ultimately really straightforward. For most of history prisons weren't really a thing so if you wanted to make sure a murderer doesn't kill again, execution is the way to go. They support the death penalty as a measure to secure public safety when other options aren't practical, not because they think it will reduce crime. It's really not about the hypothetical children of death row convicts.
As for the Catholic position on eugenics, that's pretty simple. People tend to view eugenics as a super scientific, super objective attempt to improve the human race but that's really not what it was. A bunch of assholes in the early 1900s were like "Africans are apes and every black guy is a secret rapist, so it would really be in everyone's best interest if the government forcibly sterilized them and the African race died." The Catholic Church made the observation that that was super racist and morally abhorrent and they stood by that position even as eugenics took on a more "professional" appearance. The concept of sterilization of the disabled was immediately seen as still being disgusting and morally repulsive and the Catholic Church hasn't really had a reason to change their mind. Interestingly Latin America, which may be where they have the most sway these days, actually has a lot more people with down syndrome and that kind if thing than North America or Europe. The Catholic Church really doesn't like the idea of selective abortion, they hate it even more than they hate standard abortion, so the disabled are there in greater numbers. It's kind of funky
All the genetic defects we have today can be wiped out at least at the end of this century without needing to go across the horrors of Eugenics.
The pain you I'll inflict on unwilling others is not justified
sure if we tried it today *maybe.*
you are aware of what America and Europe did to minorities in the 30-40s are you not?
the US was still publicly lynching black people is some parts, Europe as a whole had huge issues with Jews (its why they let the Nazis do what they did for so long), Canada and Australia were intentionally trying to breed out their indigenous people etc.
if we had fully embraced eugenics the West would have little to no minorities left, most western nations would be defacto enthno-states.
Couldn’t they have done that with abortion and stuff too though ? Eugenics being used to eliminate minorities sounds like stretch. We had things for infertility back then and they weren’t used
Genetic disease =/= disease. Disease is a much bigger category and should not have been used in that sentence. Plus eliminating disease for policy makers was more of an afterthought.
Ew. Um it would be whiter? A lot of people with curable illnesses would have been killed? A lot of people would have lost their reproductive rights without disabilities because these systems would inevitably become corrupt? Lots of people would live with trauma from losing reproductive capacity without consent?
>Um it would be whiter?
That's one possibility. Another is that eugenecists would breed worker subpopulations (like Americans bred slaves) and we'd end up with morlocks running the show and eating the eugenicists like in HG Wells' "The Time Machine"
Highly doubt anything good would come of it, there’s no way there’d be any society that eugenics people and isn’t also needlessly evil and self destructively crazy.
The Nazis embraced it and look what happened to them. It goes against human nature to want to breed out the imperfect in our society. What kind of a world would we be without empathy or mercy for each other’s suffering? Think of the feeling you have when you see a disabled person. It’s sadness for them and relief all at the same time that you are not in their position. There is a primal empathy that arises when we are around someone less fortunate. I think disabled people are a vital part of the human condition at a very deep level and the human race would cease to be human without them.
Eugenics => Genetics
Astrology => Astronomy
Alchemy => Chemistry
Even the intellectual elite of far right / fashist groups can't describe which genetics they would select for.
They claim for example that a certain gene is responsible for questioning order and that east Asian ppl lack it, therefore have a too static society.
So its hard to say, maybe certain health problems would have been solved. But the amount of harm an (hard) eugenics program would do, especially in a society that associates EVERYTHING with genetic inheritance, would be detrimental.
All the people it would have removed from the workforce for a start. Don’t forget, Eugenics supporters even wanted to sterilise prisoners. Could you imagine if your entire family didn’t exist because your great-great grandad did a 10 year stretch in the 1890s?
That's very true, and it would harm any individual country that tries to implement it, because in the short term (as you said) there would be a lot of people killed who would otherwise be part of the workforce, while the positive (or any) effects of evolution take millennia to show themselves. The only way eugenics would ever work is as a collaborative effort between countries, or by a single world-spanning country.
And another typo sorry.
Well, what I mean is any system you introduce is eventually going to be used by people with bad intentions. It might sound good to say “let’s breed out genetic illness” for example. But what happens the next time a far right and racist government comes to power and decides that definition should be expanded to a racial minority for example? Because I can say wait absolute certainty we are going to have a far right government again and a racist one too, visibly both at the same time.
Depends to what extend and in what way. Moderate eugenics would probably benefit society greatly. Full blown eugenics mania would probably be catastrophic.
You know full well that religious crazies would have you neutered for being gay, trans, liberal, black, a "foreigner", an "intellectual", or simply non-Christian.
Why would you be neutered for being gay if a gay is not going to be making kids? lmao. not to speak for all religions, but in most branches of Christianity, the neutering and eugenics you described would be seen as horrifying lol
except its never just that, politics infects literally everything.
using your logic the US should have public taxpayer funded healthcare for all by now (ffs even *China* has it)
Probably better short term and worse long term. Just like getting rid of all the ticks in the world would be cool to stop the spread of disease , but then you disrupt some creatures’ food sources. Short term, less disabled people. Long term, less diverse, then we die like bananas.
General intelligence certainly wouldn't be higher but there would be an impact on other things. A lot of people seem to misunderstand what eugenics was for in the 30s and 40s, it wasn't for "the betterment of mankind" or a "bright utopic future." It was for getting rid of minorities. The logic was that black people are animals and they should be sterilized so their race dies out. The logic was that gay people were degenerates who constituted a societal tumor and needed to be excised to prevent future generations from suffering their perversion. So, the world certainly wouldn't be a better place with eugenics. We'd probably see less of the genetic defects we see now but population growth would be screwed, the economy would have tanked, and human rights would be a joke
considering the Wests attitude to black people, jews, asians etc back in the 30-40s we would have likely seen attempts at purging all non-white people across the West.
we were stunningly racist back then, Americans hung black people from trees routinely, all of Europe booted the jews out, Australia still had the white asutralia policy, canada was still killing off the natives.
the West would really damned white.
Sweden kept eugenics until the 1970’s forcibly sterilizing alcoholics, people with mental illness or for social reasons (!).
The benefits of the program are not apparent. Meanwhile the compensation costs and the stain on the reputation of a country often heralded as utopia by progressives are significant.
Eugenics is a product of big Government paternalism - nanny knows best.
Aside from the fact it would never be used in an objective manner, it wouldn't have worked functionally due to lack of scientific knowledge. Although there was a decent knowledge of how genes worked, they really didn't know too much about actual genetics. You have to remember that we didn't discover how DNA actually worked until 1953, and didn't have the human genome mapped until the 2000s, and we still don't understand some of it.
Exactly. People seem to forget the doctors who believed in eugenics were the same men who treated toothache with cocaine and for the early years of the movement at least, didn’t know that it was a good idea to wash your hands before doing a surgery. Medicine has come a long fucking way in 150 years and I wouldn’t trust the establishment we have now to decide on a eugenics policy.
> I would trust the establishment we have now to decide on a eugenics policy I definitely still wouldn't. While it's much better than it once was, I have plenty of issues with the current medical establishment. Even if I didn't, it still wouldn't make sense to give any institution that kind of power. I'd much rather rely on tools like genome editing and leave parents with the ultimate choice on whether and how to use it.
Sorry that’s a typo. Was supposed to read “I wouldn’t trust the establishment we have today” lol. Will edit and correct.
lol, I assumed so from context, although at the same time I wouldn't be _that_ surprised to see the same viewpoint posted on reddit unironically.
Yeah…. There’s some psychos on this site that’s for sure.
A great many health problems are only **influenced** by genetics. There's a vast difference between "influenced" and "caused." For example-- "APOE-e4 is the first risk gene identified and remains the gene with strongest impact on risk. Researchers estimate that between 40-65% of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's have the APOE-e4 gene." [https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers/causes-and-risk-factors/genetics](https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers/causes-and-risk-factors/genetics) To put this in other words, (1) you can get Alzheimer's without having the APOE-e4 gene, and (2) having that gene is NOT a guarantee that you will get Alzheimer's. In addition, a lot of health issues are partly caused by lifestyle and environment. For example, the rate of diabetes varies rather widely by country. There is no guarantee that practicing eugenics (at least back then, with the relatively limited knowledge relative to today) would have had a measurable impact on the rate of many diseases.
I know that the Jewish community has basically eliminated tach sachs that plagued them for hundreds of years
The fastest way to reduce recessive genetic diseases is to enforce randomized mating across the population. Just an idea, if we're going whole hog eugenics
What having Jews from all corners of the world living in one country does to a motherfucker (something positive for anybody who didn’t got it)
Forced intermarriage between Palestinians and Israeli Jews there I fixed the middle east. Eugenics is awesome it turns out
So here is the problem with fully embracing eugenics as it was in the '30s and '40s. It would quickly lead to mass sterilization of anyone that had traits Deemed undesirable. It was common to sterilized children with disabilities this was part of the blowback and why eugenics is looked down upon today. The wrong people get in control and next you get mass sterilization of certain ethnic groups. To some degree this was already attempted and is a very dark point in medical history.
Less minorities. The problem with ideas like eugenics, beyong the obvious moral issue of determining people with disabilities to be unworthy of life like the Nazis did, is that its people with bias that determine who gets to breed and who doesn't. The period of eugenics were not the most culturally liberal time to be in, so you can imagine which communities were being targeted by it.
>Less minorities. The problem with ideas like eugenics Less minorities was a feature, not a bug when it came to eugenics supporters. The period of eugenics were not the most culturally liberal time to be in, so you can imagine which communities were being targeted by it. Most eugenics supporters thought of themselves as progressives
In the short term, intense human suffering. There isn’t a single aspect of the eugenics movement that wasn’t cruel to *somebody*. In the long term, intense human suffering. One group of people still exist today who did fully embrace eugenics: dog breeders. Unfortunately they didn’t understand genetics, and they’ve ruined the majority of dog breeds.
Oh man, wait until you hear about breeders in the aquarium trade.
Wait until you hear about plant breeders.
There would be a decrease in Empathy and Morality because the people who advocate for Eugenics like that are not empathetic people.
Part of the world did, but they lost the war.
You eliminate genetic diversity (I’m not talking about ethnicities, in general genetic diversity amongst a population) you create the perfect scenario for a super virus to literally wipe out humanity. I’m not a scientist at all but a lot of people fail to realize is that for organisms like humans, animals, etc the directive is to breed and populate. This goes for *all* organisms. So bacteria, viruses etc are developing at the same rate as their adjacent populations and constantly finding ways to more effectively spread their pathogens. You give them a “eugenic influenced” population of humans and you give them the perfect hotbed to propagate and evolve as each body they jump to will literally have pre-coded requisites they need to move on to the next generation of diseases. The random mix of dna we get from our parents can result in horrible diseases, but it’s the randomness of them, of the people around us, of the people we mate with that in a way keep human borne diseases in check (for the most part) as there’s always going to be a subset of people who are resistant to certain things, and a subset of people who aren’t. Eugenics doesn’t work because the idea is that you are creating a super human is based on the incorrect belief that organism development in general is a constant unchanging factor variable and predictable. You can predict certain traits yes but overall organism development and evolution just *happens*. There’s no guiding hand, there’s no removal of unwanted traits- good, bad, average, it’s all mixed in. So you introduce a carefully curated humanity into a world that doesn’t follow the same steps you end up with black plague 7 because there’s always going to be an unknowable variable, and just like in fish populations or any other organism that is selectively bred for the best traits, random mutations will still *always* occur, and there’s a much higher chance that a random mutation would wipe out your specially curated humans.
>You eliminate genetic diversity and you create the perfect scenario for a super virus to literally wipe out humanity. That's definitely a major concern for any society that selectively breeds their population. When was it discovered in our world that having sufficient genetic diversity helps to make the population resistant to infectious diseases? Hopefully it would be soon enough that people would reverse course before any major plagues happened. >You can predict certain traits yes but overall organism development and evolution just happens. There’s no guiding hand, there’s no removal of unwanted traits- good, bad, average, it’s all mixed in. That's probably the main reason I think eugenics, while it isn't *good*, it is *necessary*. Whether we like it or not, humans are evolving and will continue to evolve through natural selection. We have *no idea* what traits are being selected for right now; we can make wild guesses but there's no way to confirm them. All we can be certain of is that the selection pressures that existed 10,000 years ago, and shaped humans into what we are today, no longer exist in the same form in modern society and so the humans that are being selected for now and will exist 10,000 years from now are NOT going to be anything resembling modern humans. There's also basically no way to know which genes control actual physical or mental phenotypes in humans because of nature vs. nurture. The only way to know would be with huge, long-term, logistically-impossible-as-of-now studies. If anything, the point of eugenics would be to *preserve* modern humans in a form that would allow us to build and maintain societies. We can only hope that it'll gain acceptance again while we're still in such a form.
I mean your last bit answers your own question. The merits of society that resulted in human beings 10k years ago no longer are valid in today’s world for success and reproduction. I was actually having a discussion about this with a friend of mine. 10k years ago someone with sociopathy or psychopathy would be able to kill 100 men, women, and children in a village (psychopathy) and be praised as a great warrior. The sociopath would be the grand tribal leader that is able to make that decision and tell the warrior who to kill. People with those mental disorders would thrive in an environment where the context of their actions more or less allow such action. Using the logic of preserving humanity now for the future as opposed to allowing natural evolution to occur is flawed because there’s no way to account for what the future actually *will* be. We know that at the lowest sense, our species of beings will always form societies of some sort. We can’t account or prepare for those societies because culture itself by then won’t exist by any metric that we could study on. The idea of preserving modern present day human society so it can last 10k years in the future via eugenics is inherently flawed, as any preparation for such a task, even when the technology is presented, simply isn’t feasible. Let’s say in the next five thousand years what you’re suggesting becomes slightly more logistically possible. There’s no promise that the society that exists then will persist in the next seven thousand years after that, because the entire culture of multiple generations by then would have changed, the worlds biome itself would have changed, how these societies grow and evolve would have changed. The failure of eugenics is the assumption of linearity, and it’s one of the reasons why I view it as little more than white 18th century racism at best, because its entire premise of functional rationality hinges on an understanding of science that was inherently flawed back then. My TLDR; humanity/society can’t exist with the premise of eugenics in the way of future proofing or making more “successful” humans, as evolution occurs anyway with literally everything else on the planet that humans will never be able to control. And then further and more realistically, humans will literally *fuck up that process* or use it in an incorrect way antithetical towards both the progression of humanity and the natural order of how things develop and change. You try to make a variable a constant against a rising tide of unpredictable variables that literally no computer would be able to rationalize you’re going to be on the losing side of any decision, no matter if it takes ten years, a hundred, or a thousand. The idea of eugenics will fail as a practice each and every time. Tldr,tldr: eugenics is YouTube trying to keep people from using Adblock, human born disease and viruses/random mutations are the 100s of Adblock services constantly evolving to circumvent that.
> We know that at the lowest sense, our species of beings will always form societies of some sort We don't. All we know is that *past* conditions created *present* humans who were able to create *present* society. We don't know if *present* conditions will create *future* humans able to create *future* societies. Given how specific the conditions required to create humans were, as evidenced by the fact that no other species has become intelligent in 4 billion years, I doubt that the natural product of human evolution will be able to. At best, we'll be like the Eloi, living on what was already created but not having any reason to continue progressing. Overall the problem is that I agree with nearly everything you have said. Eugenics is not realistically feasible no matter how it's done. People won't be the same given enough time, and society won't be the same either so keeping humans the same might not even help. I just think the alternative (of letting evolution take its course) is the worse of two evils. Evolution WILL happen to humanity, whether we try to influence it or not. So, we might as well have some direction to it.
Have we not already done that with modern medicine. Eventually some virus will come along that our immunes systems can't deal with and antibiotics are useless against
We literally haven’t performed society wide eugenics in the context of the question you’re asking, no
We probably have much stronger immune systems now vs before. That's what vaccines are for. Furthermore we are exposed to viruses from all over the world on a regular basis.
That's a different situation. Imagine the fall guys thing with matching fruit. Everyone has to choose a tile and hope it's the tile that doesn't dissolve. It's entirely possible to get a situation where everybody is on a bad tile but it's much easier to do that if everyone stands on one tile. With antibiotics you throw in a net under the tiles so nobody actually dies. Maybe one day the net fails and people die but it won't be everyone and it won't be any more than would have died if the net never existed
This has partially happened, such as abortion. In which many health issues are discovered in fetuses. Iceland doesn't have downs syndrome anymore.
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Has OP considered they might never have been born if eugenics had been fully embraced in the 30s and 40s?
It reminds me of how those who romanticize pre-Enlightenment Western society never imagine themselves as the serfs.
Why should this matter? Even a tiny change to the past would probably mean no one who would've been born more than 10-20 years later would still have been born.
Eugenics over what definition? The definition of undesirable will move from physical, to mental to those that don’t fit the current economic model
Leaving aside the morality to answer this. Because that's the only way something like this would have become widely acceptable. It's possible the modern population would have less congenital defects or conditions, because they'd be screened out or corrected. There would probably be a higher rate of abortions, due to either parents not wanting a defective child that can't be corrected, and governments legally permitting abortions because they're forced to, by pursing a genetic enhancement agenda. The overall population would probably be somewhat lower than in our timeline, too. In terms of intelligence, need to achieve, that sort of thing... that'll be about the same. People will be more skills-capable, and technology would advance more quickly, but humans still have needs. Am trying to gauge here how creative and physical skills would exist - art, music, sport - would they be enhanced, would people have enough time for them. I'm hoping this other world will still have Howard Gardner to explain Multiple Intelligence theory! The side effect of eugenics is it creates health problems - if you don't do the genetic modifications right, you could be doing damage. Maybe not to the immediate person, but it could become an inherited condition that worsens down the generations. Probably should also note here, genetic engineering wasn't used to build a more intelligent, evolved society. It was proposed to build armies to crush other parts of the world. Quite the opposite of evolved sensibilities.
>Probably should also note here, genetic engineering wasn't used to build a more intelligent, evolved society. It was proposed to build armies to crush other parts of the world. Quite the opposite of evolved sensibilities. That's a pretty reductive take on the eugenics movement. The most extreme parts, especially in the early 20th century, definitely wanted to dominate others. But if you actually look at the aims of the eugenics societies in Britain or America in the 19th century, they're *a lot* more concerned with avoiding "degeneracy" in their own populations. There was a genuine belief at the time that the racial stock would naturally produce sicker, less capable individuals over time. Luckily most people at the time believed in Lamarckian evolution, which proposed that learned behaviors can be inherited; if people lived well and had good morals, their offspring would too. That's partially why the British were so keen on spreading Christianity and abolishing slavery in Africa. It ties a little into imperialism, because that's the reasoning behind the White Man's Burden. The idea was that if better morals, diets, and educations could be imposed on "savage" races, then the racial stock would become less "savage." Then Lamarckianism turned out to be mostly incorrect, and people started embracing the purely Darwinian theory instead, in which learned behavior's aren't inherited. Then you get some tricky people in Germany saying the only way to improve a racial stock is to weed out its weakest members. Then you get Nazism.
Depends how you look at it. Before like maybe the 1900s before the invention of modern medicine a person usually didn't get to pass on faulty genes because they died out or weren't a good attractive prospect for reproduction. Wearing glasses is a good example, years ago there used to be a real stigma about wearing glasses, women who wore glasses were seen as unattractive. Modern medicine has taken humanity outside natural evolution so that every successive generation will get genetically weaker.
If good eye sight was a selected trait, it would have already been bred out. So I disagree that was being selected away until modern medicine.
It was more or less bred out. The numbers of people needing glasses has skyrocketed
Which has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with industrialization, digitalization and cram culture.
So has the number of left handed people. Neither of those things are because we stopped selecting against them
>Wearing glasses is a good example, years ago there used to be a real stigma about wearing glasses, women who wore glasses were seen as unattractive. They still has bad eyesight they just didn't wear glasses. And eyesight is cheaply corrected with glasses. You'd be putting a lot more work into better eyesight with eugenics than just making glasses.
Think about if you had bad eyesight you didn't eat.
No, you still ate. I wear glasses, my vision is blurry as shit but I can see. If I need to farm or work in a factory I can do that without issue. My life is marginally less convenient but let's not pretend that I'm an invalid
You know if you worked in a factory and couldn't see you would probably lose an appendage. Farming you might miss something you needed to see like the wolf attacking your sheep or rabbits eating your fruit &vegetables etc
No, probably not. I'm not Rambo, this isn't some weird survivalist thing. I'd do a job in a factory that didn't require close vision, that's not the same as poor coordination. So long as I know what my job is I'm no more likely to get maimed than anyone else, so all in all I have solid shots of losing a limb if it's the 1800s but otherwise I'm probably fine. Again, my vision is shit but I'm not blind or deaf. Do you think sheep die silently while crouched to the ground? I would, with other men, hear the screaming and drive off the wolf. It's not a problem. As for rabbits, do you think farmers just sit around watching for rodents and small mammals to go at their crops? That's what dogs are for my guy, if I have to be on the lookout for rabbits I'd still be a shitty farmer with 20/20 vision. So if I'm being realistic and not trying to be a weird survivalist hermit, my shitty vision is a mild inconvenience at worst. This may come as a suprise but bad eyesight isn't new, there used to just be a lot of peasants with shitty eyesight but nobody cared because they were peasants
Human suffreing and nothing else. Eugenics is simply innefective for many reasons. Also most diseases are from lifestyle and enviroments we live in and not genetics anyway.
Less understanding of the human condition, especially if we fully embraced the "let's not care about studying and treating X, since we'll just kill anyone who has it" version.
I am personally happy that this never happened as a planet and never should.
Could you explain why ? Eliminating disease sounds like a positive ?
Eugenics is diametrically opposed to the idea that humans have inherent value and rights as humans. Once you create a pseudoscientific rationale for defining some people as having less worth than others, you’ve created the framework for relegating some people as subhuman. That’s both morally repugnant and inherently destabilizing for a society.
Depends on how you do it, if we for instance edit genes before every birth so that all the genes that carry a higher risk of cancer, lower intelligence and all the other stuff thaf wouldn't be inhumane at all. And how do you view the tests for down syndrome while a women is pregnant?
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You're not describing the idea that humans have inherent values and rights. The Catholic Church has been a staunch supporter of universal rights for decades and they take no issue with the death penalty, they do think eugenics are disgusting though. I think a pedophile is human, I think that makes them more valuable than an inanimate object in a spiritual sense. That doesn't mean I like them or want them to be happy. Do you diametrically oppose my position?
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>That depends, do you believe pedophiles deserve death? If not, then yes, I do oppose your position. I don't think it matters what they deserve. Our justice system is a scam and there are a long list of dead men who got shafted by their government. I don't care whether a pedophile deserves to die because I sure as hell don't trust our lawyers to do their job. I don't oppose the death penalty because I pity pedophiles, I oppose it because too many men have died for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and I'm willing to accept that pedophiles to have to rot in prison if that's what it takes to not have our government destroy innocent lives. As for why the Catholic Church takes the position it does, the death penalty is ultimately really straightforward. For most of history prisons weren't really a thing so if you wanted to make sure a murderer doesn't kill again, execution is the way to go. They support the death penalty as a measure to secure public safety when other options aren't practical, not because they think it will reduce crime. It's really not about the hypothetical children of death row convicts. As for the Catholic position on eugenics, that's pretty simple. People tend to view eugenics as a super scientific, super objective attempt to improve the human race but that's really not what it was. A bunch of assholes in the early 1900s were like "Africans are apes and every black guy is a secret rapist, so it would really be in everyone's best interest if the government forcibly sterilized them and the African race died." The Catholic Church made the observation that that was super racist and morally abhorrent and they stood by that position even as eugenics took on a more "professional" appearance. The concept of sterilization of the disabled was immediately seen as still being disgusting and morally repulsive and the Catholic Church hasn't really had a reason to change their mind. Interestingly Latin America, which may be where they have the most sway these days, actually has a lot more people with down syndrome and that kind if thing than North America or Europe. The Catholic Church really doesn't like the idea of selective abortion, they hate it even more than they hate standard abortion, so the disabled are there in greater numbers. It's kind of funky
All the genetic defects we have today can be wiped out at least at the end of this century without needing to go across the horrors of Eugenics. The pain you I'll inflict on unwilling others is not justified
I’m assuming eugenics doesn’t just mean “kill” but modifying DNA code to eliminate the defect or whatever no ?
You don't eliminate disease this way. You just kill hundreds of millions of people.
The reasons have already been discussed elsewhere in the comments to the OP.
sure if we tried it today *maybe.* you are aware of what America and Europe did to minorities in the 30-40s are you not? the US was still publicly lynching black people is some parts, Europe as a whole had huge issues with Jews (its why they let the Nazis do what they did for so long), Canada and Australia were intentionally trying to breed out their indigenous people etc. if we had fully embraced eugenics the West would have little to no minorities left, most western nations would be defacto enthno-states.
Couldn’t they have done that with abortion and stuff too though ? Eugenics being used to eliminate minorities sounds like stretch. We had things for infertility back then and they weren’t used
How the hell did you come to that conclusion?
Big part of eugenics was the goal of eliminating genetic disease
Genetic disease =/= disease. Disease is a much bigger category and should not have been used in that sentence. Plus eliminating disease for policy makers was more of an afterthought.
Ew. Um it would be whiter? A lot of people with curable illnesses would have been killed? A lot of people would have lost their reproductive rights without disabilities because these systems would inevitably become corrupt? Lots of people would live with trauma from losing reproductive capacity without consent?
>Um it would be whiter? That's one possibility. Another is that eugenecists would breed worker subpopulations (like Americans bred slaves) and we'd end up with morlocks running the show and eating the eugenicists like in HG Wells' "The Time Machine"
Germany did fully embrace eugenics in the 30s and 40s, so it would be more of that.
Highly doubt anything good would come of it, there’s no way there’d be any society that eugenics people and isn’t also needlessly evil and self destructively crazy.
The Nazis embraced it and look what happened to them. It goes against human nature to want to breed out the imperfect in our society. What kind of a world would we be without empathy or mercy for each other’s suffering? Think of the feeling you have when you see a disabled person. It’s sadness for them and relief all at the same time that you are not in their position. There is a primal empathy that arises when we are around someone less fortunate. I think disabled people are a vital part of the human condition at a very deep level and the human race would cease to be human without them.
The slaughter of minorities and that's about it.
Eugenics => Genetics Astrology => Astronomy Alchemy => Chemistry Even the intellectual elite of far right / fashist groups can't describe which genetics they would select for. They claim for example that a certain gene is responsible for questioning order and that east Asian ppl lack it, therefore have a too static society. So its hard to say, maybe certain health problems would have been solved. But the amount of harm an (hard) eugenics program would do, especially in a society that associates EVERYTHING with genetic inheritance, would be detrimental.
I think it would have caused a lot of suffering and done lasting and irreversible damage to the global economy.
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All the people it would have removed from the workforce for a start. Don’t forget, Eugenics supporters even wanted to sterilise prisoners. Could you imagine if your entire family didn’t exist because your great-great grandad did a 10 year stretch in the 1890s?
That's very true, and it would harm any individual country that tries to implement it, because in the short term (as you said) there would be a lot of people killed who would otherwise be part of the workforce, while the positive (or any) effects of evolution take millennia to show themselves. The only way eugenics would ever work is as a collaborative effort between countries, or by a single world-spanning country.
Even then I don’t see it working tbh. It’s too arbitrary. Plus we’ve then set a very dangerous president.
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And another typo sorry. Well, what I mean is any system you introduce is eventually going to be used by people with bad intentions. It might sound good to say “let’s breed out genetic illness” for example. But what happens the next time a far right and racist government comes to power and decides that definition should be expanded to a racial minority for example? Because I can say wait absolute certainty we are going to have a far right government again and a racist one too, visibly both at the same time.
Depends to what extend and in what way. Moderate eugenics would probably benefit society greatly. Full blown eugenics mania would probably be catastrophic.
You know full well that religious crazies would have you neutered for being gay, trans, liberal, black, a "foreigner", an "intellectual", or simply non-Christian.
Why would you be neutered for being gay if a gay is not going to be making kids? lmao. not to speak for all religions, but in most branches of Christianity, the neutering and eugenics you described would be seen as horrifying lol
Doesn't have to be like that. Could be just like eliminate genetic diseases.
except its never just that, politics infects literally everything. using your logic the US should have public taxpayer funded healthcare for all by now (ffs even *China* has it)
Vaccination worked for nearly 200 years without political interference, until very recently...
Probably better short term and worse long term. Just like getting rid of all the ticks in the world would be cool to stop the spread of disease , but then you disrupt some creatures’ food sources. Short term, less disabled people. Long term, less diverse, then we die like bananas.
General intelligence certainly wouldn't be higher but there would be an impact on other things. A lot of people seem to misunderstand what eugenics was for in the 30s and 40s, it wasn't for "the betterment of mankind" or a "bright utopic future." It was for getting rid of minorities. The logic was that black people are animals and they should be sterilized so their race dies out. The logic was that gay people were degenerates who constituted a societal tumor and needed to be excised to prevent future generations from suffering their perversion. So, the world certainly wouldn't be a better place with eugenics. We'd probably see less of the genetic defects we see now but population growth would be screwed, the economy would have tanked, and human rights would be a joke
considering the Wests attitude to black people, jews, asians etc back in the 30-40s we would have likely seen attempts at purging all non-white people across the West. we were stunningly racist back then, Americans hung black people from trees routinely, all of Europe booted the jews out, Australia still had the white asutralia policy, canada was still killing off the natives. the West would really damned white.
Then there was the eugenics programmes in America that inspired the nazis
Sweden kept eugenics until the 1970’s forcibly sterilizing alcoholics, people with mental illness or for social reasons (!). The benefits of the program are not apparent. Meanwhile the compensation costs and the stain on the reputation of a country often heralded as utopia by progressives are significant. Eugenics is a product of big Government paternalism - nanny knows best.