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OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with "a purely religious belief". None of the ideas mentioned above is a "purely religious belief", even though s

by hugh 18y ago

OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with "a purely religious belief". None of the ideas mentioned above is a "purely religious belief", even though several of them are half-wrong and the others are half-right. Animals bred for specific traits don't almost-always wind up with severe problems, unless said breeding is done over-zealously (trying to do too much in too few generations) or deliberately for traits which aren't necessarily beneficial to the animal. All modern-day farm animals are the product of a lot of selective breeding over the past few thousand years, and they don't have "severe" problems.

Alex3917 18y ago
"OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with 'a purely religious belief'." If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra-species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.
- hugh 18y ago
  I'm not saying that it's a scientific belief, I'm saying that it isn't a religious belief. There are many other types of belief, including: * belief based on incomplete experience (The traffic on I-80 is going to be terrible on Friday) * belief based on wild-assed guess (oil is going to be under $100 a barrel by the end of the year) * belief based on the fact that somebody told you it was true and you haven't bothered to check (The Nissan GT-R produces 480 horsepower) * belief based on not having thought it out very well (We should invade China!) * belief based on wanting to have that belief purely to annoy others (I think we should kill poor people!) * belief based on personal prejudice (McCain sucks!) * belief based on wanting to conform with the beliefs of your peer group (Lisp is awesome!) "Purely religious beliefs" are characterised by things other than just being unsupported. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that they should be both unsupported and strongly held.
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    Fair enough, I'll settle for non-scientific.
- _h4xr 18y ago
  I would argue that eugenics is a valid belief so long as there is at least one trait that 1) is desirable, or correlated with something desirable (e.g. resistance to a disease, stronger work ethic, lower criminality, resistance to sunburns) and 2) is heritable. So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues. I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    "So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues." You can't just select for one trait and leave everything else untouched. DNA doesn't work that way. Pick up a copy of Animals In Translation the next time you're in the bookstore and skim the chapter on single trait selection, I think it's ch. 4.
    - _h4xr 18y ago
      Of course you can't select for one trait and expect everything else to stay constant. But you can expect that if the trait is significantly positive, and you screen for recessive disorders, selecting for it can be net beneficial.
      - 18y ago

by hugh 18y ago

Alex3917 18y ago

"OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with 'a purely religious belief'." If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra-species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.

hugh 18y ago
I'm not saying that it's a scientific belief, I'm saying that it isn't a religious belief. There are many other types of belief, including: * belief based on incomplete experience (The traffic on I-80 is going to be terrible on Friday) * belief based on wild-assed guess (oil is going to be under $100 a barrel by the end of the year) * belief based on the fact that somebody told you it was true and you haven't bothered to check (The Nissan GT-R produces 480 horsepower) * belief based on not having thought it out very well (We should invade China!) * belief based on wanting to have that belief purely to annoy others (I think we should kill poor people!) * belief based on personal prejudice (McCain sucks!) * belief based on wanting to conform with the beliefs of your peer group (Lisp is awesome!) "Purely religious beliefs" are characterised by things other than just being unsupported. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that they should be both unsupported and strongly held.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  Fair enough, I'll settle for non-scientific.
_h4xr 18y ago
I would argue that eugenics is a valid belief so long as there is at least one trait that 1) is desirable, or correlated with something desirable (e.g. resistance to a disease, stronger work ethic, lower criminality, resistance to sunburns) and 2) is heritable. So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues. I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 18y ago
  "So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues." You can't just select for one trait and leave everything else untouched. DNA doesn't work that way. Pick up a copy of Animals In Translation the next time you're in the bookstore and skim the chapter on single trait selection, I think it's ch. 4.
  - _h4xr 18y ago
    Of course you can't select for one trait and expect everything else to stay constant. But you can expect that if the trait is significantly positive, and you screen for recessive disorders, selecting for it can be net beneficial.
    - 18y ago