What is immoral about eugenics?
- Thread starter Muhlenberg
- Start date
You have some knowledge or insights you want to share with us to back this up?
Exactly 
Unless you believe Bill Gates is the best specimen of humanity.
Seriously though, Bill is a bit unusual. When you look at most of the people that decide world or national policy and so on, you dont find the top scorers in intelligence, you find good students only, not geniuses.
Lava
Unless you believe Bill Gates is the best specimen of humanity.Seriously though, Bill is a bit unusual. When you look at most of the people that decide world or national policy and so on, you dont find the top scorers in intelligence, you find good students only, not geniuses.
Lava
DarkMadMax
Registered Senior Member
spuriousmonkey said:
You can when you are designing the system. Reason that specialists are prone to go extinct is because the system which made those specialists first place is blind - its the environment, environment change ,requirements change old stuff goes extinct if it doesnt adapt. There was no planning no long term goals for specialists, stuff specialists were specialized in was passing , immediate. And so are specialists themselves.
Its the same trend in all systems - including human made ones, when specialization is beneficial specialists appear ,when its more beneficial to have universal elements they start dominate.
Implementation doesnt matter- only thing matters what is on the input ,what is on the output and what is the criteria of selection.
Fact is our evolution had pretty basic goals and criterias of success - survive, produce more of your own. Well we have homo sapiens, we are so successfull at this basic task that we surivive and produce more of our own against all odds, risking depleting the resources to the point that not only for use there will be no sustainable environement but even for any other semi complex systems.
So well imgaine you have a goal to design a system. What would be your first task? -determine what system should do and criteria of success,we want prolly the system to be resilent to externals factor (to not go extinct) ,we do want it to meet and probably exceed initial criterias (thus evolutionize to next level) . In our humble case we gonna design "intelligent species system". Person A may see the goal of a system to produce knowledge and technology , person B may see its goal in producing more bananas/suv/big macs/offsprings,Person C may see the goal in uniting with some imaginary being ,etc. ,etc. Whose design is better? whose system is better? Whose system goals is better? - put em together competing for resources and you will find out eventually.
DarkMadMax said:
That sounds good, but the problem is we don't understand shit about how to make a human. Virtually all research is done on model systems such as the mouse, and still then our knowledge is rather patchy and limited. We are in no position to design anything from scratch. And we won't be in the near or far future. Hence the only option that is left is tinkering with what we have. And we will be doing this without having a clue on what we are doing.
Doesn't that sound promising?
DarkMadMax
Registered Senior Member
spuriousmonkey said:
Wow a lot black guile pessimism towards science from the man in the field himself.
First we do know "shit about human" , you may say we do not know every single relevant and irrelevant (mostly irrelevant) detail yet but as of know we already know a lot. And we know more every day.
Second we do not need "to know how to make human" - its is pretty easy and method was known for pretty long time , Malen one f@cks female and u get one in 9 months, you can make it in lab now too ,and even from single cell (well a bunch of cells,lots discarded junk in the process -technology is young). Problem is that the resul is shitty - human are crappy and we dont need to replicate more of them. They are already replicating in ridicolous quantities -more than enough for any need. And most of them is pure trash ,their sole result of existence is catastrophical diminuation of natural resources.
And third and most important: You seem to be dead set -if its not human ,we dont need it . looks this way -if its human we dont need it. We need BETTER. We dont need better medecine ,cybernetic enchancment, eugenics programs, or anything like that. -Base is junk ,discard it and work with new one. Resources spent to patch humans into something better are not worth it .Not saying it can't be done - just not worth time and resources invested.
You say we are in no position to "anything from scratch" . Well that depends how you define " scratch" . While it could be nice and sweet to be a little god and desing your own personal unverse "from scratch" then we indeed far from this celestial competence. But we can do humble things pretty well - such as a new materials , power generation technolgies , complex mahcinery , and ohh and behold !- systems for information processing ,analysis and (maybe surprise to you) decision making and problem solving .
Yah I said it - decision making and problem solving. We already have it - various AI expert systems . It in pretty early stage and takes a microscope to distinguish self managed systems from carefully scripted ones and they only appeared in last 15 years . We already have enough data input/output and computing technologies to do anything humans cant ever dream off doing by themselves , we even have enough data processing technologies to read and analyze this data without a weak human link. Only thing which is in not developed enough yet is learning, decision making and problem solving.
A lot of IT technology as of now serves a crutch for deficient humans - half of all IT (number pulled straight out of my ass ) is dedicated to make a bridge between slow thinking human and data available . Because majority decision making and problem solving need to be made by humans ,then translate back his decision to the system. But more and more systems are completely automated now , in recent years number of those systems and even entire fields which are compltely automated grew up immensely . Humans there are just supervisors adjusting control parameters - system does everythign else by itself . And you know what? -those systems are designed by humans. Now talk about "not being able to design anything".
Systems is a broad term . Evertyhing is a system - human society is one too. Decision makign is one as well. Natural selection and evolution too. Now we dont need to replicate exactly any of them - thats not what we need ,we need to design better ones. Such as for example power generations and energy transfer system. Or optical signal processing .Or safe data storage/retrieval/computing .
Now you may argue that we didnt design such things as nanosystems ( self replication and repair) or higher level of decision making and problem solving (AI ) - but we did design them, they are not as good as natural ones yet , though. Same way as early steam powered engines were ineffeicent compared to natural ones .Now compare contemporary fission nuclear power plant to anything on earth in terms of serviceablity ,energy output, manageablity,cost ,etc. Or military guiding and targeting systems - they blow anything natrual out of the water.
Now our replicating and self repair systems are pretty crude (conveyor) .As well as AI (expert systems, automated control and management systems) . -Doesnt mean we can't perfect them in long run . Up to the point when thye can perfect,design and maintain themselves.
We can't make a human equivalent AI yet - but thats not because its not possible.Its simply because we are not there yet and 95% of humans isntead of working towards it spent their worthless lifes sleeping,replicating ,consuming, polluting . Most of them are simply too dumb to do anything usefull , many who are smart enough do other irrelvant things (in best case slightly relevant) and only a tiny bit works to improve it . Even worse those 95% are opposing directly and indirectly try to ruin most of the job those 5% do . Now talk about inneficient system!.
I don't think that was the point of spuriousmonkey's post. I believe we're saying that humans are too complex to create from scratch, which is true. We do not know every alternative splicing of every gene in the human genome. We do not know how each protein folds (I believe that's why we have the protein folding page in the Bio section). We also don't know how each protein is specifically used. I think this is the danger of eugenics. You never know what you're going to lose when you make someone more intelligent, stronger, healthier, or even a "better lifeguard." While the ultimate genetic diversity would be impossible (the strain on the environment would be too great), I think it's best we stick with "all things tend toward disorder" type thinking. Sure, some people will choose others based on personality and looks, but that doesn't mean that every chromosome in their gametic cells is a specific conformation. Finally, I think you have a little black guile pessimism when it comes to the complexity of the human machine. Computers only work in binary, humans have many more times the processing power. We use it for things like picking up a glass or beating our hearts instead of focusing on math. But then, this is a topic for another section.
DarkMadMax said:
That I am a man in the field could be a hint though. That I might know how the current status of the knowledge is. There is basically no direct research done on the development of human beings. Mos of it is done with model systems such as transgenic mice. And they are basically black boxes. You can wish it that we know a lot, but wishes are not the same as reality.
W
WildBlueYonder
Guest
didRepo Man said:
the isssue is personal civil rights vs. the power of society (in this case Western medicine, or laws, or ideology) to tell people how to live, what to believe, what to wear, what to think
i don't care how this all sounds in a contained society that exists on earth, expansion will occur, and we'll be in no place to control anyone's lives who are living at the edge of our existence.