Antidysgenics

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by francois, Jul 4, 2009.

  1. francois Schwat? Registered Senior Member

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    What is so bad about eugenics? All it involves is the use of knowhow to improve the human condition. Like all potent technologies, it should be used in moderation and with care. Even though it may evoke bad imagery in many people, it is an important and obvious tool in our kit that should be used to improve the serious and growing problem of the collectively weakening genome.

    Eugenics means artificially selecting genes for desirable traits in an organism to make it better for some purpose. The assumptions are that our traits are caused by our genes and genes are propagated from parent to progeny. By selectively breeding an animal, say, a dog, we can cause its offspring to have a certain set of genes that will give it a certain set of traits. Artificial gene and trait selection is how we got so many different strains of dogs.

    Eugenics absolutely works and that means there is substance to those assumptions. Many different and useful strains of dogs were created because there were people who were expert breeders who knew how to select for traits by mating one dog with another. Breeders knew how to mash the bulldog's face so when it clamped onto a bull's jugular, blood would run down the sides of its squashed muzzle without restricting its breathing. Breeders knew how to make bulldogs incredibly tenacious and unrelenting. Selective breeding works incredibly well and dogs are a magnificent example of this.

    Dogs are one thing and humans are another. A trait in a dog that is useful to us makes it desirable. What about humans? Who decides what traits are desirable in humans? My answer is that we all do. Humans appear to be, and really are, a diverse and varied group, but even more, we are similar in the basic ways of biology, psychology and personality. There really isn't much contention about what makes a person good. Basically people like people who are intelligent, humorous, caring, compassionate, driven, honest, good looking, reliable, relatable, energetic, happy and generous. Likewise, I'd argue there are qualities that people of all kinds can agree are undesirable traits to have in a friend or relative. Stupid, ill-humored, indifferent, lying, ugly, unreliable, unrelatable, lethargic, unhappy and stingy. Even no good cheating liars do not like being lied to. Positively nobody does. These rules and ethics extend even beyond humans. Dogs have a sense of ethics and fairness. They know jealousy and when they are done wrong. Ethics is basic and it is ingrained in our neurology at a low level. Cheating liars are obviously bad and nobody wants them, so why not get rid of them if we've got the technology?

    If it were up to me, I wouldn't get rid of lying cheaters. We might need them, who knows? We've lived with them for an eternity and we're still around. Best not to mess with the rule of unintended consequences too casually. But the point is that ideas like desirable and undesirable aren’t as flimsy and relative as many think.

    For all practical purposes, good and bad traits aren't really subjective. Imagine hypothetically there exists a gene which causes a person for, when she turns 30 years old on the dot, causes a levitating saw blade to emerge from her gut and start shredding her apart. It doesn't kill her right away, but it rips pieces of intestinal flesh several feet away at the people in the food court (she's at the mall). Rancid bile and hot blood and feces decorate in all directions. She's gurbling desperate suffocated shrieks as her knees slam the tile. She's not enjoying herself one bit. She collapses into a revolting pile of human pieces. The paramedics come and mop up what's left.

    Maybe I'm Hitler and all that for thinking this, but I wouldn't be against a law that prohibited parents, who knowingly have that gene, from breeding. I don't like the thought of people dying from horrible saw blade death (HSBD).

    I know the HSBD scenario is ridiculous, but it's exaggerated to make a point. And the point is that genetic maladies can be human tragedies that, like others, don't have to occur. What about Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis? Huntington's disease, I would argue, is far worse than HSBD. Unlike HSBD you have no idea when it's going to come. Usually sometime between 35 and 45 and it can come quickly or slowly, you have no idea. It's a neurodegenerative disease, which means it screws with your brain. You first lose motor skills, then you lose your ability to plan and think. It's like premature Alzheimer's in a lot of ways. I remember working at the liquor store one day, I was 20, I think. Some old lady came up and asked me if she saw a man of some description. Apparently, he had Alzheimer's and he stopped at an exit for her to pee. He forgot why they'd stopped and he took off and left her. It's sad shit and it made an impression on me. I don't know what became of it. He's probably dead now. Or not, which would be even worse for the family. Whatever. Imagine having that when you're 40 when you should be growing a family, being productive and having a fulfilling life.

    Huntington's disease, HSBD, AIDS, cancer, cystic fibrosís, lupus and all kinds of stuff are uncontroversially bad. What they all have in common is that they cause incalculable human suffering. That is bad. Indeed, there are a slew of genetic ailments that could be prevented with basic low-dose genetic filtering.

    Genetic filtering has always been a part of the human condition and it is what made us human to begin with. It is what made us strong, disease resistant and excellent problem solvers. There is evidence that when humans settled down and became civilized our genetics changed quickly and greatly to accommodate for our changed lifestyle. Living in large cities among many strangers requires a different suite of skills and abilities than living in a small tribe of hunters and gatherers. Undoubtedly, people became more tolerant of strangers, more likely to reciprocate. Undoubtedly changes were made to accommodate for a different diet. People lived shorter lives due to worse nutrition. Filtering was still there and existed for much of our existence. In the beginning of the 20th century, roughly one in six children were expected to not live beyond 12 mainly due to diseases. Living in dirty cities, working in dark sooty factories for meager wages was demanding on the genome. Filtering changed slightly in a quickly changing environment, but it still, as always, favored strong, fit, intelligent and adaptable individuals.

    But now, while the filter still exists for much of the world, in the dominant first world countries, its strangle on us is significantly weakened.

    I don't think people are necessarily stupider today, although I think being stupid today is easier than it ever was. Going further than that, I think being wholly weak is easier today than it ever was. The government gives away millions to welfare moms, who lack the hardware to take care of themselves, so they can produce welfare babies who won't be able to help growing up into parasites. We've got vaccines that are responsible for a low infant death rate, but also make it easier for weaker constitutions to pass into the world and into the next generation. We've got a failing education system that allows a person who can barely read and write obtain a Bachelor's degree. There is hardly any requirement to make it in this world.

    I accept Darwinism as the only working explanation for the life on this planet. I also believe, as do many liberals, that we shouldn't base our morals on the same idea. But we still have to acknowledge the importance of Darwinian natural selection, as it was always a given during the history of humans and it is no longer with us. The way our systems are built does not acknowledge this and it is unsustainable. As errors build up in the collective genome, health will correspondingly deteriorate until the health care system completely collapses and anarchy prevails. When the system shatters, natural selection will again take its grip. But we don’t want to take that road.

    That situation doesn't have to happen, and neither does another Nazi Germany. If we acknowledge the fact that natural selection, which was a constant in our evolution, is now gone and our present situation is unsustainable we might logically resolve to set some rules and both situations could be averted.

    One possible way to mitigate this problem would be for the government to create a program that would give $1,000 to any citizen who let himself be sterilized. The idea may leave a bad taste in the mouth for many, but the utility would far outweigh any such outcry. The government wouldn't be imposing itself on anyone or forcing anyone to do anything. The program would only make it possible for any person to make a quick $1,000 for something he might have wanted done anyway. It's non-invasive and it would prevent all kinds of maladies, because after implemented, overnight there would be a lot fewer poor people procreating. There would be many fewer children born into poverty.

    I wouldn't advocate full-blown eugenics, but instead a more watered down version—you might call it antidysgenics. Unlike full-blown eugenics, antidysgenics wouldn't involve the selective breeding of only the best. It would merely select against genes that cause things that are uncontroversially bad like HSBD, Huntington's disease, retardation, blindness, lupus and others. I would advocate antidysgenics because it lets you neatly circumvent the problem of What is a bad trait? and Who decides what traits are bad? because there is far less contention about what traits are unequivocally bad than those that are unequivocally good.

    The other reason I would advocate antidysgenics is because eugenics is such a potent technology, it should be used in moderation to hedge against the plausibility of unintended consequences. For example, one of the major benefits of the internal combustion engine is that it is cleaner than the horse and buggy. With internal combustion engines roads don't need to be covered with horse manure. Because of this the engine became successful and it is now ubiquitous and we have places like Houston, LA and Shenzhen, cities choking with ozone created by the heated exhaust of the cars powering the cities. So much for clean. If full-blown eugenics was implemented, who knows what the unintended consequences would be. Whatever they are, they would be large. Whenever you have a monstrous change in span of a small timescale, the probability of that change being harmful and undesirable increases dramatically.

    There’s no reason we shouldn’t set up commonsense rules to give our children better health and fitness. The reason laws are passed is to increase utility for everyone. A child without Huntington’s disease or HSBD enjoys greater utility than a child with. I don’t frankly see the problem.
     
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  3. visceral_instinct Monkey see, monkey denigrate Valued Senior Member

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    I agree with your stance. Some disorders really are that bad.
     
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