4 ms·

Einstein is also a good example of a harsh critic of eugenics, both policies and underlying scientific theories.

champagnois 5y ago
He was a critic of the pseudoscience and bigotry of the time. DNA wasn't even discovered yet. I suppose maybe we have a different set of definitions we are using. I do not view my stances as compatible with those of the time. When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy. You're entitled to your own mental states, but you're clearly not thinking the same thing that most people do when they think of "eugenics".
  - champagnois 5y ago
    I have read a few books that talk of eugenics in the way that I am describing it. Matt Ridley for example (genome book covers it on a chapter). Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. It is only online that I encounter a sort of political extremism in opposition to the idea of leveraging what we know (of DNA) to make the world better.
    - mrtranscendence 5y ago
      > Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that most experts would happily claim, even among friends, that what they're doing relates to "eugenics", which isn't just a sequence of letters that you can find in a dictionary. It's inextricably bound up with a very dark history. Consider why the Wikipedia article for eugenics isn't just a short one-sentence statement that eugenics is about increasing the occurrence of positive hereditable traits.
      - champagnois 5y ago
        I understand your words, but that is not consistent with my experiences literally anywhere outside of social media where people are self censoring to conform to the puritanical zeitgeist of the moment. In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc. On a separate note but still in response -- Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political and is outright banned in classrooms (and some countries due to the politicized nature of the content).
        mrtranscendence 5y ago
        > In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc. And that's fine for China. This may even become the norm in North America and Europe at some point in the future. But that doesn't change facts: most people speaking in English will not talk positively about the term "eugenics", which has a crap ton of baggage that you're just ignoring. > Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political That would be a fine point to make if I were citing Wikipedia as a source for a paper I'm writing. However, what I meant was that eugenics has a history that can't be sharply extricated from what you might believe is the literal meaning of the term. Words are more complicated than that.
        mrtranscendence 5y ago
        As an example of what I'm talking about, no reasonable person would prominently display a swastika even though it's technically an Indian symbol of divinity. That's because it has an immense amount of baggage now almost inextricably bound up with its original definition; if you display a swastika people (at least in the west) will immediately connect it to Nazism. Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information. Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.

He was a critic of the pseudoscience and bigotry of the time. DNA wasn't even discovered yet. I suppose maybe we have a different set of definitions we are using. I do not view my stances as compatible with those of the time. When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
> When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy. You're entitled to your own mental states, but you're clearly not thinking the same thing that most people do when they think of "eugenics".
- champagnois 5y ago
  I have read a few books that talk of eugenics in the way that I am describing it. Matt Ridley for example (genome book covers it on a chapter). Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. It is only online that I encounter a sort of political extremism in opposition to the idea of leveraging what we know (of DNA) to make the world better.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that most experts would happily claim, even among friends, that what they're doing relates to "eugenics", which isn't just a sequence of letters that you can find in a dictionary. It's inextricably bound up with a very dark history. Consider why the Wikipedia article for eugenics isn't just a short one-sentence statement that eugenics is about increasing the occurrence of positive hereditable traits.
    - champagnois 5y ago
      I understand your words, but that is not consistent with my experiences literally anywhere outside of social media where people are self censoring to conform to the puritanical zeitgeist of the moment. In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc. On a separate note but still in response -- Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political and is outright banned in classrooms (and some countries due to the politicized nature of the content).
      - mrtranscendence 5y ago
        > In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc. And that's fine for China. This may even become the norm in North America and Europe at some point in the future. But that doesn't change facts: most people speaking in English will not talk positively about the term "eugenics", which has a crap ton of baggage that you're just ignoring. > Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political That would be a fine point to make if I were citing Wikipedia as a source for a paper I'm writing. However, what I meant was that eugenics has a history that can't be sharply extricated from what you might believe is the literal meaning of the term. Words are more complicated than that.
      - mrtranscendence 5y ago
        As an example of what I'm talking about, no reasonable person would prominently display a swastika even though it's technically an Indian symbol of divinity. That's because it has an immense amount of baggage now almost inextricably bound up with its original definition; if you display a swastika people (at least in the west) will immediately connect it to Nazism. Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information. Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.