Eugenics or the proper thing to do

[Chaigidel]

discuss why eugenics is good or bad , or logical or illogical

[Earl of Rochester]

Good because quite frankly we are foolish not to improve our genetic pool. Its perhaps outdated though seeing as we are only years away from being able to manipulate genes as we please. Which is of course far more effective than Eugenics.

[Gary88]

well in terms of selective breeding it is just fraught with danger, the prime example is dogs where selective breeding has made dogs 'purer' at the cost of massive health problems from heart defects to joint problems. it simply narrows down the gene pool which is akin to inbreeding. you cant really achieve it either because say you wanted only attractive humans (this is a huge simplification) you essentially have to say 'no ugly people can have children' which you couldnt enforce even if you wanted to. genetics aims to get the best from what you have but i just have big morals problems with it and to me it goes against what life is about.

[Earl of Rochester]

well in terms of selective breeding it is just fraught with danger, the prime example is dogs where selective breeding has made dogs 'purer' at the cost of massive health problems from heart defects to joint problems. it simply narrows down the gene pool which is akin to inbreeding. you cant really achieve it either because say you wanted only attractive humans (this is a huge simplification) you essentially have to say 'no ugly people can have children' which you couldnt enforce even if you wanted to. genetics aims to get the best from what you have but i just have big morals problems with it and to me it goes against what life is about.

Well you obviously would have to organize it.

For example,
Take the top 20% healthy humans
Of this group take the top 10% in intellect
Of this group take the top 30-40% in looks
This group does all the mating
The end result is a healthier, smarter, better looking race.

Obviously it would be more complicated than this, just an example of how a system would work.

And its easy to enforce it, we are talking about Eugenics, you sterilize the ones that aren't suitable for mating.

[MaximiIian]

Take the top 20% healthy humans
Of this group take the top 10% in intellect
Of this group take the top 30-40% in looks
This group does all the mating
The end result is a healthier, smarter, better looking race.

Obviously it would be more complicated than this, just an example of how a system would work.
And its easy to enforce it, we are talking about Eugenics, you sterilize the ones that aren't suitable for mating.

Wouldn't it be more effective to have those folks go around and have them breed with everyone else, so as to spread those traits around a bit? That way, you'd have those "good" traits being spread around within the "rest" of the population. Eventually the "good" traits, being dominant ones, would become commonplace and universal.
Besides, what you are suggesting would create a severe population bottleneck, which would eventually kill our species off.

[Gary88]

ahh, easy then and quite clearly morally justifiable too. no hint of 1984 here...

[Chaigidel]

I think the direct manipulation of our genes is far more dangerous and could have highly unforseen side effects--- eugenics is a safer method I think of improving the genes.--- but you might miss the greatest minds if you eliminated say people with a predisposition to whatever hawking has lou gherigs?--- and also I think you would miss things like grit and survival instinct. :o but im not sure

[Kanaric]

Eugenics goes against how genetics works so its pointless and idiotic to follow. Eugenics is an outdated theory that died with the Nazis.

If eugenics actually worked then it would mean two midgets cannot have a regular child, when this is not the case.

[mightyfenrir]

Well you obviously would have to organize it.

For example,
Take the top 20% healthy humans
Of this group take the top 10% in intellect
Of this group take the top 30-40% in looks
This group does all the mating
The end result is a healthier, smarter, better looking race.

Obviously it would be more complicated than this, just an example of how a system would work.

And its easy to enforce it, we are talking about Eugenics, you sterilize the ones that aren't suitable for mating.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree that the human race should become so petty as to save the best looking of the smartest people when they breed and not allow anyone else to produce offspring. It's not only a little asinine but it's also arrogant and foolhardy. It's also what Hitler and Mengele were involved in and quite frankly, the world is better with a lot of stupid ugly rednecks with no teeth than it could ever be with a race of Brad Pitt looking Stephen Hawkings. Sadly I think that's because smart people become arrogant just as fast as dumb people and they think they can solve everything... then you end up with the terminators.

Eugenics goes against how genetics works so its pointless and idiotic to follow. Eugenics is an outdated theory that died with the Nazis.

If eugenics actually worked then it would mean two midgets cannot have a regular child, when this is not the case.

I've seen that happen, and it's weird. not weird like it shouldn't be allowed to happen, just odd. Genetics is like one of those stapled shut bags you'd get at a kids party... you never know what you're getting out of it but you make due... and that's how it should be.

[Earl of Rochester]

I'm sorry, but I can't agree that the human race should become so petty as to save the best looking of the smartest people when they breed and not allow anyone else to produce offspring. It's not only a little asinine but it's also arrogant and foolhardy. It's also what Hitler and Mengele were involved in and quite frankly, the world is better with a lot of stupid ugly rednecks with no teeth than it could ever be with a race of Brad Pitt looking Stephen Hawkings. Sadly I think that's because smart people become arrogant just as fast as dumb people and they think they can solve everything... then you end up with the terminators.

I think it is petty to fight the laws of nature. In nature only the best of the gene pool survives to mate and produce offspring. Thanks to modern medicine this law no longer applies and those with the most dangerous of genes can reproduce to their hearts content. An issue is the rise in chronic disease and disabilities. A good answer to this would be Eugenics, a much better one would be direct manipulation of the genome. I fail to see why improving our race is a bad thing.

[Chaigidel]

doesnt the probability go up that they will have a child with dwarfism tho?

[Garbarsardar]

Let me just provide a small timeline for the eugenics advance:

1883. Galton introduced the term Eugenics to describe ideas and proposed practices of racist superiority and sterilization.

1884. Galton stated "The Jews are specialized for parasitical existence upon other nations."

1895. German eugenicist Dr. Alfred Ploetz published "The Excellence of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak", in which he attempted to show "That a misdirected humanitarianism was threatening the quality of the race by, fostering the protection of its weaker numbers."

1898. A eugenic sterilization bill was unsuccessfully introduced into the Michigan Legislature. It provided for the castration of all inmates of the Michigan Home for the Feebleminded and Epileptic.

1904. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, a corporate foundation endowed by Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, established a biological experiment station at Cold Spring Harbor. New York. Eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport was its first director in both the U.S. and Germany. The eugenics movement was in large part supported by corporate funds.

1907. Indiana passed the world's first compulsory sterilisation law for all "confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles who were confined in State institutions. By 1980 thirty states and the colony of Puerto Rico posted similar laws.

1912. The first international Congress of Eugenics was held at the University of London. The president of the Congress was Major Leonard Darwin son of Charles Darwin. One of the English vice- presidents was First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, later Prime Minister. German vice-presidents included M. von Gruber, professor of hygiene at Munich and Dr. Alfred Ploetz president of the International Society for Race Hygiene. American vice-presidents included Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard University and Alexander Graham Bell.

1914. The First National Congress on Race Betterment was held in Battle Creek, Michigan. A 'segregation and sterilisation' program was proposed to reduce the number of "defective and antisocial" people in the population from 10 percent to 5.77 percent by 1955 by sterilizing 3.76 million Americans.

By 1914 eugenics was taught in the U.S. at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Clark and other universities. In Germany, in this year, the Reichstag (the German parliament) considered a eugenics sterilization law.

1916. Madison Grant published The Passing Of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History, in New York, in which he stated: "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to a community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when of use to the community or race."

1922. H H Laughlin, the Expert Eugenics Agent of the United States House of Representatives Committee on immigration and Naturalization published the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law. This model formed a basis for any state sterilisation laws and for Nazi Germany's 1933 law. Laughlin listed the categories of people who were to be subjected to mandatory Sterilization:

The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis... are the following: Feeble-minded; insane (including the psychopathic); Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); Epileptic; Inebriate (including drug-habitues); Diseased (including the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious, and legally segregable diseases); Blind (including those with seriously impaired vision); Deformed (including the crippled). and Dependent (including orphans, naer-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers.)

1925. Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf to the glee of the eugenicists. Hitler's book included the following statements:

It is a half measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones.... The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as whole.

The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height.

The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center at all life. It must take care to keep it pure.... It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world.... It must put the most modern medical mean's to the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease... and put this into actual practice.

Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.

1927. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the United States Supreme Court's decision in Buck v. Bell. Buck was Carrie Buck, a 11-year old girl committed to the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Virginia, where Bell was the superintendent. Carrie's mother was also an inmate at the same institution. Carrie had recently given birth to a child and the state of Virginia wanted to have her sterilized against her will. Associate Justice Holmes wrote.

The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck is the probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, and she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization, and thereupon makes the order... We have seen more then once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for those lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned. in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world. If instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from brooding their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

1932. The Third International Congress of Eugenics was held in New York. Dr. Theodore Russell Roble of the Essex County Mental Hygiene Clinic in New Jersey presented "Selective Sterilisation for Race Culture" in which he called for the sterilization of at least the 14,000,000 Americans who had received low intelligence test scores since World War 1. In this third year of the Great Depression, Roble said:

...

there are those who believe that our population has already attained a greater number than is necessary for the efficient functioning of the race as a whole. Certainly our present picture of millions of unemployed would point to the belief that this suggestion is a reasonable one. It would undoubtedly be found, if such research was possible, that a major portion of this vast army of unemployed are social inadequates, and in many cases mental defectives. who might have been spared the misery they are now facing if they had never been born. It would certainly be understandable how many of them would prefer not to have been born, if they could have known what was in store for them on this Earth where the struggle for existence, and the urge toward the survival of the fittest makes it necessary for all those who would survive to possess a native [genetic] endowment of at least average intelligence.

1933. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Socialist (Nazi)Party-came to power in Germany.

Hitler put into law the Nazi Act for Averting Descendants Afflicted with Hereditary Diseases. This sterilization law was directly based on H.H. Laughlin's Model Eugenical Sterilization Law of 1922. Compare the categories of victims under Laughlins model (check 1922 in this chronology) with the following criteria for sterilization used by the Nazi Eugenic Courts that were set up in 1933:

* (1) Congenital Mental Deficiency;
* (2) Schizophrenia, or split personality;
* (3) Manic-depressive Insanity;
* (4) Inherited Epilepsy;
* (5) Inherited Chores;
* (6) Inherited Blindness;
* (7) Inherited Deafness;
* (8) Any grave physical defect that has been inherited;
* (9) Chronic alcoholism, whom this has been scientifically determined to be symptomatic of psychological abnormality ...

Between 1931 and 1939, 375,000 forced sterilisations were performed under this act. Accordlng to Wallace R. Duell, a German correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, the official rationales were as follows -

* Congenital feeble-
* mindedness 203,250
* Schizophrenia 73,125
* Epilepsy 57,730
* Acute alcoholism 28.500
* Manic-depressive insanity 6,000
* Hereditary deafness 2,575
* Severe hereditary physical- deformity 1,875
* Hereditary blindness 1,125
* St. Vitus' dance 750

TOTAL 375.000

Source

[Axe-Battler]

Why would hitler want to change manic depressive people? He was bipolar himself...not kidding they found that out...that explains his incredible intensity when he spoke to his people, and his fanatical dedication to his beliefs.

[Serious Spamurai]

Why would hitler want to change manic depressive people? He was bipolar himself...not kidding they found that out...that explains his incredible intensity when he spoke to his people, and his fanatical dedication to his beliefs.

He was also part Jewish and the majority of his living family were in Mental Asylums. He was 5' something, he had Parkinson's, many also believe he was gay. The very model of a hypocrite.

[Garbarsardar]

He was also part Jewish and the majority of his living family were in Mental Asylums. He was 5' something, he had Parkinson's, many also believe he was gay. The very model of a hypocrite.

No, he was not Jewish. This is in fact a rumour circulated by the Socialist Party during the 1929 elections to discredit the NSDAP. It is interesting though that this move demonstrates that being Jewish was a disadvantage and this opinion was shared by all the political spectrum in Germany.

For more, read this.

Oh, and the rest of Europe as well and the United States (for more read "The international Jew" by Henry Ford-yes, this Henry Ford)

Humanity has become wise enough to discuss those forms of physical sickness over which it formerly drew the veil of shame and secrecy, but political hygiene is not so far advanced. The main source of the sickness of the German national body is charged to be the influence of the Jews, and although this was apparent to acute minds years ago, it is now said to have gone so far as to be apparent to the least observing. The eruption has broken out on the surface of the body politic, and no further concealment of this fact is possible. It is the belief of all classes of the German people that the collapse which has come since the armistice, and the revolution from which they are being prevented a recovery, are the result of Jewish intrigue and purpose. They declare it with assurance; they offer a mass of facts to confirm it; they believe that history will provide the fullest proof.

[Denny Crane!]

Does screening embryos count as eugenics?

[Chaigidel]

I would actually think so seneca-- any sort of selective breeding or birthing is a kind of genetic control -- so i guess would fit?

[Denny Crane!]

Seemingly a far stretch from what Garb describes, however hideous that conception screening embryos for fatal and awful diseases seems morally justifiable.

Of course it only counts as eugenics if it takes care of recessive genes and stops these diseases being inherited.

[Tom Paine]

Seemingly a far stretch from what Garb describes, however hideous that conception screening embryos for fatal and awful diseases seems morally justifiable.

Of course it only counts as eugenics if it takes care of recessive genes and stops these diseases being inherited.

Actually however it works, its eugenics - if its aborting embryos, its eugenics. If its killing kids, its eugenics. If, however, it is the prevention of inheritance of chromosome x, then its actually genetic engineering and very different.

[Denny Crane!]

Actually however it works, its eugenics - if its aborting embryos, its eugenics. If its killing kids, its eugenics. If, however, it is the prevention of inheritance of chromosome x, then its actually genetic engineering and very different.

Well in the case of aborting an embryo where the child would only live six excruciating months (some diseases like that are routinely screened in the UK) then it is moral as far as I am concerned, so I support eugenics