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> There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work This is completely false to such an extent that I've read it several times to see if I

> There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work This is completely false to such an extent that I've read it several times to see if I've misunderstood. Humans have been breeding new varieties of plants and animals for millenia. Compare modern bananas to their ancient ancestors[1] or the modern chihuahua to its wolf ancestors. Heck, you can have substantial changes in just a dozen generations if your selective pressure is strong (or even one, if you sterilize every single light skinned person the next generation will be much darker skinned). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type#/media/File%3AInside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type#/media/File%3AInsi...

woodruffw 4y ago
We’re talking about humans, not bananas. Similarly, the implication with eugenics is that we can somehow improve general human intelligence or other desirable traits, not fruit bearing capacity. The scientific consensus is that we don’t even know what general intelligence is, much less which complex of genes produce it. Edit: and, to be clear: the reason we can successfully breed bananas (or dogs) with desirable traits is because we aggressively cull the undesirable traits. I assume you understand what this would imply in human beings, and why this is unacceptable.
- concordDance 4y ago
  "That doesn't work" and "that's unethical" are not the same thing. We can select for anything we can measure. E.g. if we did sperm harvesting from everyone who scored top marks in memory tests and sterilised the rest we'd get a population that's very good at memory tests (and probably also has better memory than today's average). In theory we could attempt to measure general intelligence using a battery of tests for everything we can think of and this would probably improve general intelligence. It would probably also give us all Tay-Sachs.

woodruffw 4y ago

We’re talking about humans, not bananas. Similarly, the implication with eugenics is that we can somehow improve general human intelligence or other desirable traits, not fruit bearing capacity. The scientific consensus is that we don’t even know what general intelligence is, much less which complex of genes produce it. Edit: and, to be clear: the reason we can successfully breed bananas (or dogs) with desirable traits is because we aggressively cull the undesirable traits. I assume you understand what this would imply in human beings, and why this is unacceptable.

concordDance 4y ago
"That doesn't work" and "that's unethical" are not the same thing. We can select for anything we can measure. E.g. if we did sperm harvesting from everyone who scored top marks in memory tests and sterilised the rest we'd get a population that's very good at memory tests (and probably also has better memory than today's average). In theory we could attempt to measure general intelligence using a battery of tests for everything we can think of and this would probably improve general intelligence. It would probably also give us all Tay-Sachs.