May 11th - Eugenics

[oleander_rue]

Eugenics is rather a pet topic of mine, considering my field of knowledge. It's curious how "good science" is so quickly warped for political reasons. It also surprises me how little of this information is common in the US. Do schools ever teach that Nazi Germany got ideas about breeding humans from us? And that lots of eugenics ideas were

Comments

[laytonc32]

They don't want children to know that the Nazis got that from us. Not sure why we can't teach these mistakes so we can learn from them.

[oleander_rue]

I think people like to believe that the stuff that happened in Nazi Germany couldn't happen anywhere else. Nah, people just need a little nudge to act like that.

[jayj79]

I'm actually for forced sterilizations in some circumstances.
Severe rape cases should be punished by castration (though one must be careful about false accusations and the like).

Heck, in my ideal utopian society, everyone would be sterilized (with some sort of reversable procedure) until they can pass a parenting test (that also evaluates their financial ability to support a family). Of course, in reality there are too many complications for such a thing to work.

I'm also not totally against euthenasia. Especially of the voluntary type.

But yeah, those other studies are sick and brutal. And remind me of the plot backstory of "V for Vendetta". Of course, I don't doubt that our governments hands are just as dirty of such things as others.

[oleander_rue]

Hmm, I can't think of many/any times sterilization is useful, though chemical castration can certainly help (haha, another pet topic - I remember once starting a comment in class with "Not to sound like an expert on chemical castration, BUT . . . "). Unfortunately violent rapists/pedophiles tend to act out in new ways even with castration (and guys really need to relax about false accusations, it's far below 3% of cases).

Sterilization should at least be allowed. Our medical system is bullshit - most women who want to be sterilized can't be. There are far too many people in the world already and it's too goddamn hard to even get cheap, working ways of preventing more. Argh!

[khall]

       Actually...eugenics has become a politically charged word. But...actually it is just 'husbandry' as in animal husbandry, applied to people. If you make a strong woman and a strong man have babies...their kids will tend to be more muscular, or smart or whatever else you're breeding for, like race horses or...corn. But...when you choose to use it for 'racial' reasons then you've stepped outside science. I like eugenics for the sci-fi aspect of breeding a super-soldier. That's freaking awesome. But...race is a social construct. I could be mongolian and just my last 16 or so ancestors were cauc so I am 'white'. It's dumb.

K.

[oleander_rue]

Except it's faulty when applied to humans on any useful timescale. Our generations are too long and we have too many recessive and multigene traits that we don't understand. Good traits are often linked with bad, like families with many engineers have lots of autistics, and families with many writers have lots of schizophrenics. Is intelligence genetic? Yes, genetics is the biggest factor, but that doesn't mean we understand how its inheritance works. Blindly flailing around with these traits doesn't show results because of all the throwbacks and unseen factors. I have an awesome book that shows the correlation for different traits and genetic relation (using twin studies) but it'd at my old house, unfortunately.

[khall]

*grins* Well...so you have to plan a few hundred years in the future. No big deal.:)

K.

[beigekhakis]

then you have to check out my blog, I wrote a bit on the topic:
paolosilv.wordpress.com