It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.I would argue that the reason it wouldn’t work is ideology. People would want to make more people of the kind they like, which would lead to failures in the species. Consider how Dalmatians are selected for color, but that means they’re now mostly stupid.
Generally speaking whenever people who think they’re smarter or better than others try to organize things ‘for the common good / the betterment of humanity’ they end up making things objectively worse. Sometimes it’s because their class interests blind them; sometimes they just aren’t as smart as they thought they were. Sometimes they’re plain evil, like Mao, and all that talk of improvement was smoke.
14 comments:
Thoroughbred racing horses, with their fragility, are fine examples of eugenics.
So are purebred German Shepherds, with their penchant for hip dysplasia.
So are modern wheat and corn plants, with their vulnerability to unanticipated disease or bug infestation that can wipe out whole fields.
One thing that any systems engineer knows is that when dealing with a system--and a living organism assuredly is a system--when trying to optimize a system, it's critical to be aware of the tradeoffs: it's not possible to optimize the system by optimizing every subsystem in it. It's necessary to determine a priori what characteristic is desired for optimization, and to recognize that others will need to be suboptimized to achieve that. Optimizing the system as a whole means that no particular subsystem can be optimized.
No part of a system operates in isolation.
Too, it's necessary to keep in mind that, when trying to optimize a life form, that effort is itself just one of the myriad evolutionary pressures extant.
Eric Hines
Erik, your comment on Shepherds is interesting. American AKC Shepherds bred for appearance have lots of medical issues. European GSDs that have come from the field lines used in the eastern block militaries tend to be very functional and healthy.
Trying to improve humans ..... a whole different kettle of fish that's never been done successfully and should not be attempted ever again. That won't stop some people from trying.
Especially since with CRISPR and other gene-modifying tools we can "select out" the "harmful" genes, or turn other ones on and off. There's a lot we don't know about the silent genes, the spaces, and other things. The surprises probably won't be happy surprises.
I've read a lot of those science fiction stories. Heck, I even wrote one [geneticists ignored a silent gene and introduced lethal results that caused a society-wide chain reaction and near civil war]. None of them are especially cheerful or encouraging.
LittleRed1
And there is a small suite of genes and gene alleles that's associated with a higher probability (but not determinatively so) of Alzheimers. Snipping one or more of those, with what results?
Snipping without replacement? That might interfere with downstream folding to form the (correspondingly folding) proteins that used to be formed by the unsnipped stretch.
And things like gene(s) associated with malaria resistance having gotten paired in some way with seemingly unrelated gene(s) associated with increased likelihood of sickle cell anemia.
There are a potful of apparent gene associations scattered along. And the genes themselves, in aggregate, turn out to be a minority of the whole structure. Those spaces and dead spots....
Eric Hines
Yep. Taking the randomness out of reproduction would likely lead to characteristics that might be useful in the immediately-foreseeable future but would turn out to be disastrous in unforeseen situations 100 or even 50 years down the road.
I'm reminded how long it has been since I've re-read any Heinlein.
Nobody argues it wouldn't work. In fact it's exceedingly difficult to get anybody to under (micro)evolution doesn't stop at the collar bone.
It's wrong. Full Stop.
Dalmatians are not conscious of any desire to make puppies like themselves as opposed to "just puppies." Eugenics is going to work great until it doesn't. It is analogous to many government programs to fix things for the poor or oppressed or disadvantaged. The first intervention gets the low-hanging fruit and everyone marvels at how great this all is. And it is. And in some world where human beings had the self-discipline to pause there and not come back for fifty years for another harvest, it is all grand. But that is not this world.
And it is never going to be. We aren't built for it somehow. We are compelled to come back and say "We solved half the problem. Let's extend what we just did and solve the other half."
Those who cannot distinguish animals from humans have serious exegetical deficiencies. No animal has a soul; all humans do. To think that a body can be re-engineered without consideration for the impact of the soul is foolish in the extreme.
And yet it's inevitably coming. Especially with the advances CRISPR has made with Cas9 enzymes and the rapidly lowering cost of components and increasing availability of materials.
20 years ago Rush mentioned the practice of "add-a-dick-to-me" and its counterpart "choppa-dick-off-me" surgeries. I thought he was kidding--and yet it came. That happens to be the precursor to this manipulation of which we chat today.
Meantime, John Paul II:
In discussions and debates over gender-affirming care and gender transitioning, we need to keep in mind another point emphasized in Veritatis Splendor: the unity of the soul and the body in every person. John Paul II reminds us of the traditional teaching that a soul expresses itself in a body, and a body is informed by an immortal spirit. He adds too that “by rejecting all manipulations of corporeity which alter its human meaning, the Church serves man and shows him the path of true love, the only path on which he can find the true God.”
XKCD on genetics
It depends on what you mean by "works." Eugenics certainly will produce changes in a gene line, often intended changes, which is a decent definition of the technique's "working" and the one that Dawkins seems to mean. Whether the changes will be truly good or bad changes is like asking whether the evolution of a species is an improvement or not: it is, or isn't, depending on whether it increases the odds of successful reproduction under future conditions.
We can't always predict the future conditions, and evolution itself has no foresight. Dinosaurs were very fit until their planet got smacked. Much earlier, a lot of organisms were very fit until photosynthesis produced vast quantities of oxygen as waste products. If human beings had been around back then, would eugenics that favored dinosaurs or their successors been "successful"? What about eugenics that favored aerobic or anaerobic organisms?
A fair point.
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