(+)Eugenics, Yea or Nay?

[blu]

who was this directed at?

also nazi eugenics != eugenics. please avoid that fallacy

Yes, nazi eugenics = eugenics. Hence the word "eugenics".

wow... that's like science christian/creation science is science because it has the word 'science' in it...

I think alliebaba is a troll. no one can be that stupid

 

[FLGoldilocks]

Where eugenics is defined for the sake of this discussion as:

The use of genetic technologies that we possess or shall come to possess to enable parents to determine what genetic traits are passed on to their children, with the stated aims and goals of eliminating genetic disease, improving the human form (eg:restoring the human ability to synthesize our own vitamin C, should it prove possible to repair the damaged pseudogene), prolonging life, and improving the quality of human life.
​

Honestly, I'm kind of torn. The idea of being able to ensure my children would be entirely healthy and not ever have to endure some of the health conditions my family has faced (diabetes, heart disease, etc.) is a very nice thought. They're my kids, and I love them, and naturally want them to be healthy. But...on the other hand, people get sick, they die. It does happen, sad though it may be. And what would happen if people didn't get sick and die? We could end up with an even more grossly overpopulated planet.

And it starts with improving the quality of life...but where does it end? A prospective mom goes in intending nothing more than to ensure her baby won't get diabetes like the baby's grandmother and father did, and walks out having decided she's going to have a blue-eyed, blond-haired girl that will be 5'9" and be thin all her life, and with an IQ higher than Einstein's.

I recently read a book called Mount Dragon by Douglas Preston, I think it was. It was not about this specifically, but it was, in basic terms, about a research facility that was trying to alter a gene so that people would never get the flu again. I don't want to give away the entire plot to the book, in case someone on here hasn't read it and might want to, but suffice it to say, that things did not go well. And I kind of tend to think this might be the same thing: it starts out as a very well-intentioned goal, and the people doing it do it with the highest ethics and only the best ideas, but in the end, it will be warped.

 

[syrenn]

Where eugenics is defined for the sake of this discussion as:

The use of genetic technologies that we possess or shall come to possess to enable parents to determine what genetic traits are passed on to their children, with the stated aims and goals of eliminating genetic disease, improving the human form (eg:restoring the human ability to synthesize our own vitamin C, should it prove possible to repair the damaged pseudogene), prolonging life, and improving the quality of human life.
​

Honestly, I'm kind of torn. The idea of being able to ensure my children would be entirely healthy and not ever have to endure some of the health conditions my family has faced (diabetes, heart disease, etc.) is a very nice thought. They're my kids, and I love them, and naturally want them to be healthy. But...on the other hand, people get sick, they die. It does happen, sad though it may be. And what would happen if people didn't get sick and die? We could end up with an even more grossly overpopulated planet.

And it starts with improving the quality of life...but where does it end? A prospective mom goes in intending nothing more than to ensure her baby won't get diabetes like the baby's grandmother and father did, and walks out having decided she's going to have a blue-eyed, blond-haired girl that will be 5'9" and be thin all her life, and with an IQ higher than Einstein's.

I recently read a book called Mount Dragon by Douglas Preston, I think it was. It was not about this specifically, but it was, in basic terms, about a research facility that was trying to alter a gene so that people would never get the flu again. I don't want to give away the entire plot to the book, in case someone on here hasn't read it and might want to, but suffice it to say, that things did go well. And I kind of tend to think this might be the same thing: it starts out as a very well-intentioned goal, and the people doing it do it with the highest ethics and only the best ideas, but in the end, it will be warped.

Lest say right now you are pregnant and have the choice of repairing the diabetic gene. Would you do it or not? Would you repair you unborn babies diabetic flaw?

 

[pans trogladyta]

The phrase "quality of life" has been used to justify killing off anyone who is old, handicapped, mentally deficient, and even for the Holocaust, yet you are trying to tell me I am jumping to conclusions in insisting that it is ambiguous? Sorry, I am not going to drink the Kool-Aid.

To late, you're already gulping it down. To reiterate, a simple, straight forward, well defined question was asked. And you went all mengele on it. See the point now?

 

[FLGoldilocks]

Lest say right now you are pregnant and have the choice of repairing the diabetic gene. Would you do it or not? Would you repair you unborn babies diabetic flaw?[/QUOTE]

This isn't a simple question for me. You see, I already have 2 children. Both seem to be perfectly healthy, fortunately. So...if I were pregnant right now, and had the option of correcting the diabetic gene as you suggest, I would want to fix it, but I would also feel guilty, as though I cheated my two existing children and favored this new baby. Does that make sense?

Now, asking me if I didn't having any kids already, and was pregnant with my first child, yes I'd want to fix it.

I'm not saying the idea is a bad one, my concern is that there are people who would twist and warp it to suit their own purposes. They would take what starts out as a really wonderful thing (correcting gene issues to create healthier people) and change it.

I think, if there were a way to ensure that the only purpose it was used for was ensuring health, it'd be a great thing. It's when it goes beyond that that I am concerned.

 

[syrenn]

This isn't a simple question for me. You see, I already have 2 children. Both seem to be perfectly healthy, fortunately. So...if I were pregnant right now, and had the option of correcting the diabetic gene as you suggest, I would want to fix it, but I would also feel guilty, as though I cheated my two existing children and favored this new baby. Does that make sense?

Now, asking me if I didn't having any kids already, and was pregnant with my first child, yes I'd want to fix it.

I'm not saying the idea is a bad one, my concern is that there are people who would twist and warp it to suit their own purposes. They would take what starts out as a really wonderful thing (correcting gene issues to create healthier people) and change it.

I think, if there were a way to ensure that the only purpose it was used for was ensuring health, it'd be a great thing. It's when it goes beyond that that I am concerned.

yes you love your children, and no you would not have cheated your first two if the option was available to them.

The bottom line is you are for positive eugenics. You would avail yourself and your children of positive eugenics.


The rest I agree is not good

 

[Quantum Windbag]

lol at windbag repeating thing I said pages ago as if he's somehow telling me something

Where did you say that eugenics is a psuedo-science?

 

[Coyote]

Where eugenics is defined for the sake of this discussion as:

The use of genetic technologies that we possess or shall come to possess to enable parents to determine what genetic traits are passed on to their children, with the stated aims and goals of eliminating genetic disease, improving the human form (eg:restoring the human ability to synthesize our own vitamin C, should it prove possible to repair the damaged pseudogene), prolonging life, and improving the quality of human life.
​

I always worry about unintended consequences......as such, is there any such thing as "positive" eugenics?


Gattica?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Until you can set up experiments to prove your theories, and have them replicated by other experiments, eugenics will remain a psuedo-science.

What is the evidence for evolution?

DNA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Allele - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Genetic engineering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heritability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You lost me here, where is the repeatable experimentation that makes using any of this on human beings into a legitimate science?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

I have said from the beginning that there is no such thing as positive eugenics because it has negative effects.

Once again you fail at literacy.

Positive Eugenics: Increasing the prevalence of desirable alleles/traits through genetic manipulation, selective breeding, etc.

Negative Eugenics: Reducing undesirable (oft racial) traits through sterilization, extermination, etc.

Again, I ask what seems to be a simple question. What do you do with the mistakes? Especially the ones you do not find until generations later because you cannot predict the future. Your positive eugenics is nothing but a pipe dream, which any honest person would admit. You are a deluded fool who thinks that just because you have good intentions nothing bad will happen. The universe does not work that way.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Tay Sachs isn't undesirable? Haemophilia isn't undesirable?

What else do you eliminate when you, thinking you have all the answers, snip out those genes? Until you can know that with certainty you have no business practicing gene therapy.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Where eugenics is defined for the sake of this discussion as:

The use of genetic technologies that we possess or shall come to possess to enable parents to determine what genetic traits are passed on to their children, with the stated aims and goals of eliminating genetic disease, improving the human form (eg:restoring the human ability to synthesize our own vitamin C, should it prove possible to repair the damaged pseudogene), prolonging life, and improving the quality of human life.
​

Honestly, I'm kind of torn. The idea of being able to ensure my children would be entirely healthy and not ever have to endure some of the health conditions my family has faced (diabetes, heart disease, etc.) is a very nice thought. They're my kids, and I love them, and naturally want them to be healthy. But...on the other hand, people get sick, they die. It does happen, sad though it may be. And what would happen if people didn't get sick and die? We could end up with an even more grossly overpopulated planet.

And it starts with improving the quality of life...but where does it end? A prospective mom goes in intending nothing more than to ensure her baby won't get diabetes like the baby's grandmother and father did, and walks out having decided she's going to have a blue-eyed, blond-haired girl that will be 5'9" and be thin all her life, and with an IQ higher than Einstein's.

I recently read a book called Mount Dragon by Douglas Preston, I think it was. It was not about this specifically, but it was, in basic terms, about a research facility that was trying to alter a gene so that people would never get the flu again. I don't want to give away the entire plot to the book, in case someone on here hasn't read it and might want to, but suffice it to say, that things did not go well. And I kind of tend to think this might be the same thing: it starts out as a very well-intentioned goal, and the people doing it do it with the highest ethics and only the best ideas, but in the end, it will be warped.

Which is why people should not simply assume that good intentions trump actual results. JB is on here trumpeting positive eugenics like the very intent to select only beneficial traits will somehow eliminate all negative effects through attrition. Random mutations will occur in descendants of even people with customized genes, and there will be disasters because someone makes a mistake in a lab. Some of the problems might not show up for generations, but it is fine to proceed because we have good thoughts.

Then he accuses people who are simply asking questions of being religious fundamentalists because he is to lazy to actually read their posts and notice that they are challenging the people who disagree with him.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The phrase "quality of life" has been used to justify killing off anyone who is old, handicapped, mentally deficient, and even for the Holocaust, yet you are trying to tell me I am jumping to conclusions in insisting that it is ambiguous? Sorry, I am not going to drink the Kool-Aid.

To late, you're already gulping it down. To reiterate, a simple, straight forward, well defined question was asked. And you went all mengele on it. See the point now?

No.

Improving the quality of life leaves a lot of really bad ideas that progressives love to spout on the table.

I fail to see how that post justifies any comparison to Joseph Mengele. Please explain it to me in detail, so I can understand it.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Where eugenics is defined for the sake of this discussion as:

The use of genetic technologies that we possess or shall come to possess to enable parents to determine what genetic traits are passed on to their children, with the stated aims and goals of eliminating genetic disease, improving the human form (eg:restoring the human ability to synthesize our own vitamin C, should it prove possible to repair the damaged pseudogene), prolonging life, and improving the quality of human life.
​

I always worry about unintended consequences......as such, is there any such thing as "positive" eugenics?


Gattica?

You are trying to convince a religious zealot that God actually does not speak to him. Unintended consequences are impossible because he thinks positive thoughts.

 

[JBeukema]

When a women goes to a sperm bank to get a sample for artificial fertilization, isn't she choosing what traits her child will have?

Forget the sperm bank, women choose as well as they can every time they decide which man to have sex with based on whether he's attractive or not.

You both are essentially expressing Shavian Eugenics.

Shaw thought that women subconsciously selected the mates that were most likely to give them superior children. He believed that human beings would naturally tend toward biological improvement, without the need for political intervention.

It's not a 'belief', it's a fact. People are 'programmed' to find certain traits (such as bilateral symmetry) attractive. While cultural preferences develop, the underlying attributes remain unchanged.


It's all evolution, Ed.

Each of 14 test subjects (10 male, age 26-37 yr; 4 female, age 16-46 yr) rated the artificial female face depicted in Figure 1 (below) as ``beautiful'' and as more attractive than any of the six faces in a previous study based on digital face blends7. The design principle is clarified in Figure 2. First the sides of a square were partitioned into 24 equal intervals; then certain obvious interval boundaries were connected to obtain three rotated, superimposed grids (thick lines in Figure 2) with rotation angles +- arcsin 2-3 and arcsin 20 = 45o. Higher-resolution details of the fractal8 grids were obtained by iteratively selecting two previously generated, neighbouring, parallel lines and inserting a new one equidistant to both (for clarity, some fine-grained detail is omitted in Figure 2). Shifted copies of circles (also omitted for clarity) inscribable in thick-lined squares of Figure 2, scaled by powers of 2, account for transitions between non-parallel face contours such as facial sides and chin. To achieve a realistic impression, some colors were first matched to those in the photograph of a real person, then further edited digitally. Figures 3-5 isolate important feature-defining lines of the first, second, and third self-similar8 grid, respectively. Hundreds of alternative simple geometric designs I tried led to less satisfactory results.
The face satisfies several ancient rules used by mathematically oriented artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, e.g.: it is symmetrical; the distance between the eyes equals one eye-width or one nose-width; the tip of the nose is about half the way from chin to eyebrows

FACIAL BEAUTY AND FRACTAL GEOMETRY

 

[syrenn]

You are trying to convince a religious zealot that God actually does not speak to him. Unintended consequences are impossible because he thinks positive thoughts.

So if they find the gene for breast cancer and the entire female line in your family has died of it, would you have the gene fixed in any daughter you may have?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

You are trying to convince a religious zealot that God actually does not speak to him. Unintended consequences are impossible because he thinks positive thoughts.

So if they find the gene for breast cancer and the entire female line in your family has died of it, would you have the gene fixed in any daughter you may have?

Probably, and I would do it with the intellectual honesty that I am using eugenics, and that I might be dooming other people to die horrible deaths as a result of unintended consequences. That is the difference between JB and me, I know it is potentially evil, and accept that I might be making a bad decision. He simply thinks that because his intentions are good, he gets a pass on dealing with the negative consequences.

 

[syrenn]

You are trying to convince a religious zealot that God actually does not speak to him. Unintended consequences are impossible because he thinks positive thoughts.

So if they find the gene for breast cancer and the entire female line in your family has died of it, would you have the gene fixed in any daughter you may have?

Probably, and I would do it with the intellectual honesty that I am using eugenics, and that I might be dooming other people to die horrible deaths as a result of unintended consequences. That is the difference between JB and me, I know it is potentially evil, and accept that I might be making a bad decision. He simply thinks that because his intentions are good, he gets a pass on dealing with the negative consequences.

Then the bottom line is that you do support positive eugenics.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

So if they find the gene for breast cancer and the entire female line in your family has died of it, would you have the gene fixed in any daughter you may have?

Probably, and I would do it with the intellectual honesty that I am using eugenics, and that I might be dooming other people to die horrible deaths as a result of unintended consequences. That is the difference between JB and me, I know it is potentially evil, and accept that I might be making a bad decision. He simply thinks that because his intentions are good, he gets a pass on dealing with the negative consequences.

Then the bottom line is that you do support positive eugenics.

No, the bottom line is there is no such thing as positive eugenics. I am just a selfish asshole sho thinks I have the right to do whatever I need to equip my family as much as possible for the dangers of the world we live in.

 

[syrenn]

Probably, and I would do it with the intellectual honesty that I am using eugenics, and that I might be dooming other people to die horrible deaths as a result of unintended consequences. That is the difference between JB and me, I know it is potentially evil, and accept that I might be making a bad decision. He simply thinks that because his intentions are good, he gets a pass on dealing with the negative consequences.

Then the bottom line is that you do support positive eugenics.

No, the bottom line is there is no such thing as positive eugenics. I am just a selfish asshole sho thinks I have the right to do whatever I need to equip my family as much as possible for the dangers of the world we live in.

Its semantics QW,positive/negative The bottom line is you would avail yourself of eugenics if the opportunity presented itself to save your children and fix a gene.