I think it's the opposite. In an arranged marriage the spouses are selected by their family irrespective of the merits of the kids involved. Free choice means y

I think it's the opposite. In an arranged marriage the spouses are selected by their family irrespective of the merits of the kids involved. Free choice means you will select the spouse based on the merit of the spouse. I think it's much more likely to lead to gene selection. If beautiful people marry beautiful people and ugly people marry ugly people, you effectively get a sort of breeding (I know we don't like to use these animal terms but that's kind of what it is). Now you can refuse to call a natural preference "eugenics" but the reality is that you are still expressing a preference for some characters that you think are desirable and your progeniture is likely to inherit some of those characters. This was of course a lot less prevalent in a society that lived in small villages with very little mobility (and therefore very little mating choice), which is why I think it's a process that only kicked in at the XX century. My guess is that we will see the effect in this century. Works with dogs, should work with humans.