Its an interesting scalability problem where women not in rape or arranged marriage cultures have been screening sperm donors for inheritable characteristics fo

Its an interesting scalability problem where women not in rape or arranged marriage cultures have been screening sperm donors for inheritable characteristics for quite some time, depending on where they live. The stereotypical sci fi dystopia outcomes don't resemble "American women, turned up to 11" as much as they should, and also don't seem to resemble whatever delta you'd expect to see between populations with different mating standards. Or put another way, if GE and eugenics rants are a century old thinly veiled anti-feminism rant full of codewords and dog whistles, it doesn't seem to match actual outcomes very well, to the point it can't be taken seriously anymore. Its possible that some reversion to the norm signal is stronger than the limited fine tuning individual women can perform when they select mates, and that reversion to the norm effect could be overwhelmed by advanced enough genetic engineering. Possibly. Or possibly not. Usually in soft sci fi and journalistic fiction, genetic engineering and eugenics has been a place holder for cut and paste style plot line of a comic book villain revival of the nazi party. Now that plot line can be interesting as contemporary social commentary or an alt hist if well written, but using genetic engineering as a stage piece is super old and tired and should be retired. Fiction needs a new macguffin to write about nazis or genetic engineering. And at that point somewhat more realistic speculative hard sci fi or predictive social science can intelligently discuss somewhat more realistic predictions, a little less comic book villain.