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Aswad -> RE: What are some of your most controversial opinions? (2/9/2008 2:41:17 PM)
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ORIGINAL: SL4V3M4YB3
This science died when people realised that evolution works best when random genes are mixed together rather than individually selected through breeding. All people have defects in their chromosomes, these defects only become apparent as diseases when those recessive genes are all there is to choose from.
Actually, this science died when people went "ZOMG, noes! Hitler did that!", sort of like the fear of everything "nuculear" ...
In GA theory, there are demonstrated advantages to selective breeding, and in social sciences, it has been demonstrated that the IQ average undergoes negative drift. What happens is that a fat tail builds up, and then ice ages and the like come along, wiping out most of the population, and the fat tail then becomes the average. Then the average starts to drift downward again. Selectively enhancing a few traits slightly isn't a problem. Excluding certain traits, or strongly enhancing them, is a significant problem, called monoculture.
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So sure you can breed athletes but they are more likely to also end up with haemophilia, sickle cell anaemia, osteoporosis etc.
Actually, inbreeding is used to solve such problems in GA. The only issue is that there may be benefits to each of them that we do not realize. Hence, by avoiding monoculture, we retain genes that could be useful in the long run. Offering financial incentives to not have a second child with Downs Syndrome is really just mimicking what nature was doing all along, except it's being nicer about it. An Ice Age or resource shortage would not be nearly so nice about it, and those do pop up at regular intervals.
As long as one retains diversity and limits selection to a slight shifting of the balance away from uncontroversially negative genetic traits, it's a net win for the species, and also pretty much in line with what evolution looked like before modern society enabled us to keep all the individuals that nature would have weeded out. The difference being that it's a more gentle approach, and one that is opt-in. Left unchecked, however, people like aspies would be weeded out, and there's no shortage of examples of great historical figures that would never have happened if popular eugenics were performed. Hence my qualifying statements.
Note also that it's effectively an arms race. If China starts doing it, your choice is to be left behind in the dust and hope they don't get expansive, or to start doing it yourself, on their terms, rather than your own. New technology and the opportunities it brings are the proverbial Pandora's Box, but you have to grab it and make it your own, or else someone else will make it theirs. You can't put it back into the box, but you can choose how you want to use it, and that can lead to some control over how others will use it.
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Hybrid theory is that the best genetic mix is a diverse one and you don’t get that by limiting the gene pool by only allowing people with a certain IQ to reproduce. The idea of eugenics is counter productive to itself and has long been realised as such.
I quite agree. Eugenics has to be a gentle nudge, or else you lose everything in the long run. Of course, that happens anyway, but I digress.
Helath,
al-Aswad.
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