Lemmies of Lemmy do you believe in eugenics? why or why not?

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I believe that it exists as a concept. That's what you're asking, right?
- I believe in the right hands that some types of eugenics can do a world of good. I know hitler and japanese did it and it got an ugly label. But what about if we could tell a parent this child will have no diseases his entire life at the stage of birth? Kind of like Gataca
  
  All other concerns aside, I think if we start controlling genes we’ll end up writing our genes into a corner.
  
  I just think of south Korean beauty standards and how I have a hard time differentiating all the kpop artists due to the homogeneous beauty standard being universally applied.
  
  Eugenics at face value, lol.
  
  Assuming your honesty and good faith on asking this question, the real treasure on our gene pool is it's diversity. Eugenics would, by definition, reduce it. You could assume that it's a low price to pay for health, longevity, strength, intelligence, beauty and so on, but it's not that simple. Even some diseases (~~out~~ or the possibility to develop it) can be beneficial under the right circonstances, e.g. sickle cell anemia can improve resistance to malaria.
  It would be great to be able to prevent most diseases before it happens and treat it if it happens (for free, in a universal health care system), but eliminate the genes would be a very bad idea, a healthy specie needs it's diversity to avoid extinction, and we sometimes feel like we are above that risk, but we are not that special.
  
  Until some folks can't afford to cleanse their genes and are denied the right to have children for "safety reasons" and suddenly, fertility and genetics are under state control.
  
  Gattaca was taking a lot of license for the sake of the movie. A lot of diseases are multifactorial and while genes might play a role, they’re not the only factor and often not even the main factor. The movie ignored things like epigenetics, early life exposures, lifestyle, age, sex, and just plain variance that are all factors that can play into chronic diseases.
  That being said, allowing parents to make decisions based on genetic testing isn’t itself eugenics. Eugenics is a top-level idea revolving around the idea of improving the quality of human genetics as a whole. And that requires an institutional judgement of what are good quality genes and bad quality genes, which necessitates us saying some people are better quality than others and opens up the door to racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/etc. Eugenics is always bad, while personal medical decisions based on genetics can be reasonable.

42 comments