3 ms·

I guess I misunderstood the meaning of the term eugenics because I thought it was very much intentional artificial selection applied to humans. To reiterate -

• Alpha3031 2mo ago
  If someone says just the word, it's hard to say if they mean just artificial selection, which can and is done to some extent today via genetic counselling by medical geneticists, coercive selection at a society-wide level advocated for by a certain social movement, and the social movement itself, which certainly held some pseudoscientific beliefs regarding how if we just did this and that, we could achieve genetic perfection and cure all social ills and all that. All of those things get called eugenics. It's like how there's a difference between the medical study of nutrition and how some social media influencers will tell you if you eat X, Y and Z these are superfoods that will mean you will never get a cold for the rest of your life and it will cure cancer or some other nonsense.
• datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
  I agree mostly with the other commenter that it’s like nutritionist vs health influencer. But I’d also say that there’s an inherent bias to the word “eugenics” fundamentally: the implication that there are objectively good genetics and bad genetics for humans. In the extreme case there are genetic defects that cause stillbirth and put the mother’s life at severe risk, but this is almost never what is meant by usage of the word “eugenics”. Again, to conflate the two concepts is useful only to people who have caused immense human suffering.