this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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No they acknowledge that the technology could be used that way. But there's a lot of actual medical problems we can catch this way. Imagine you carry the Huntington's gene. How much would you pay to make sure you don't pass that down to your kids?
Nothing. That's what health insurance is for. Also practically noone has any issues with preimplantation diagnostics when it comes to things that are clearly genetic diseases, what rubs people the wrong way is a) selecting by bullshit criteria, e.g. sex, eye colour, curliness of hair, whatever, b) making designer babies the default at the expanse of erm wild ones, worst of all, c) the combination.
And ethics aside the arguments should be obvious it's also a bad idea from the POV of the honest eugenicist: Humanity's genetic diversity is already low as it is it would be fatal to allow things like fashions to narrow it down even more.
Humanity is already shaping its own selection criteria, we might need to start doing something extra to avoid evolving ourselves into a corner by non-PID means. Random example: C-Sections. No mother or baby should die in childbirth, yet, the selective pressure towards more uncomplicated births getting removed might, over many many many generations, leave us with very few women who would survive a natural birth which doesn't sound like a good situation for a species to be in, to be reliant on technology to even reproduce. Thus is might become prudent to artificially select for e.g. wide-hip genes.
Yeah, but nobody here is suggesting racial criteria. This article is specifically about screening for health issues. Reading more into it, it seems like they've paired big data with genetic screening to lay odds on health problems that aren't just a single gene going the wrong way.
Edit to add, there's no such thing as an ethical Eugenicist. The theory was based on racism and sterilizing "undesirables". This isn't Eugenics.
There's a debate about that ongoing, whether the word and basic idea can be divorced from its history with scientific racism. I don't really have a skin in the game but would like to point out that psychiatry didn't cease to be called psychiatry when we stopped physically abusing inmates, showing them off to gawkers, whatnot, got rid of phrenology, etc. You can make arguments both for "we must start from a clean slate" as well as "let's own the bullshit of the past to have something to teach students to not do".
That's because phrenoloy and the other theories are under Psychiatry and Psychology. You don't throw out Astronomy because of Heliocentrism. Eugenics was specifically developed to produce racial outcomes. It's a theory, not a field of science.
It's first and foremost a word meaning as much as "good stock", or, more modern, "good genes". Nazis didn't actually use it, at least not prominently, they were all about "racial hygiene" -- very different implications.
As to "specifically developed" I'm not so sure I don't know enough about Galton. What I do know is that he first did e.g. twin studies to figure out the relative importance of nature vs. nurture and stuff. People motivated by hate don't tend to be that thorough meaning if he had more information he might've ended up on the other side of the fence but as said I don't know nearly enough about his work to actually draw conclusions, ask a literary critic or such.
His base assumption was something called genetic determinism. Which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as debunked as you would think. He also tried to link body build and head measurements to genetic determinism.
And No. The Nazis absolutely loved Eugenics. The entire Western world did. The Nazis literally made it a required subject in grade school.
Eugenics needs to go die in a fire. There's no need to resurrect the name or practices when we're talking about actual genetic science.
I was talking about words. Said required subject was called Rassenlehre, very much not a calque of eugenics.
If anti-racist biologists want to reclaim the word, or even appropriate it as the case may be, I'm not going to call them racists over it. That needs to be judged by the practices.
Yeah that's not whose arguing we should put call genetic modification eugenics. And the Germans didn't use an English word? Shocking. Truly shocking.
I'm sorry but that sentence doesn't parse for me.
It's not an English but Greek word and yes it exists in German. Nazis (unsurprisingly) weren't big on loan words but it doesn't end there: The non-racially charged German word would be Erbgesundheitslehre, erm, "erf health lore". Just as neutral as a term as "genome health theory" would be. But that's not what the Nazis used, they specifically used a term that included "race".
One factor that comes to mind which would make me, if I were a geneticist, argue in favour of the term would be people using the term "eugenics" to smear things like screening and IFV to get rid of Hutchinson's. Sure the field has plenty of ethical question marks but much of it is perfectly kosher, yet there's people who are opposed on principle and are fighting hella dirty. Re-claiming, even appropriating the term then gets you out of the defensive.
But, as said: I don't have a skin in the game. As said, there's arguments for and against.
You really should read your own sources.
(my apologies for the quite literal translation I can't be arsed but an AI will do much, much worse on that kind of dense language).
Note the completely neutral actual definition, nothing about race after "denotes". If you scroll past all the racist history to the section 'modern form of eugenics" you see a brief section about abortion, of pre-implantation diagnostics being considered (by some at least) to be eugenics, then next short section on trans- and post-humanist ethics also containing eugenics as a major theme.
I'm not deep into that area either but I don't think racial themes are common among transhumanists.
I don't have access to the book wikipedia cites, but, well:
So not only does wikipedia misquote the source, the source shouldn't be bloody cited in the first place because it contradicts itself within the span of two sentences: If there's a distinction, they aren't synonymous. Mostly that stuff is just not talked about at all in the public discourse, I'd be very sceptical about inferring any distinctions from practically non-existent use of those terms.
"respectively in Germany mostly synonymous with" also doesn't make any sense, really. Semantically speaking: Respectively to what? German uses the word all the time this is a very very sloppy use I can't make heads and tails of what it's actually intended to mean.
Are we actually arguing about the use of the word in Germany, though. All, literally all I actually said about my opinion on the issue is, I quote:
That's all. Literally all. That's my opinion on the matter. If you want to criticise something, criticise that, don't go off on tangents.
So now you're saying your source is useless and not to be trusted? I mean, it's Wikipedia, I'm not surprised. But your original assertion that the Nazis weren't into Eugenics is still dead in the water. It formed the basis of their racial theories.
I was citing that article for a particular reason: To show that the Greek word exists in the German language. Here, have another source.
I NEVER FUCKING SAID THAT. And you're taking that baseless libel back, right fucking now. Don't you fucking dare call me a Nazi fucking apologist I wouldn't even be alive had my grandfather had a single Jewish grandparent more.
I said they weren't into the word, but preferred ones that were a) not Greek b) German and c) included "race" in some way.
It's still eugenics, you just used more words to describe it.
Eugenics isn't inherently bad, but humans suck and will make it bad.
No. Eugenics is race theory as much as it's anything scientific. It was about making sure the "correct" races had children. I don't know what the name for this is in science but Eugenics isn't about making kids healthier, it's about making them whiter.
No that's literally what it means:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics
But this isn't selective breeding, unless you twist the definition to the point where it means something wholly different. If I understand right, this is just screening embryos for potential health problems.
Genetic screening has been around for awhile now. The scam here (if there is one) is them claiming this is new. Maybe they have a better screening, but this is not Theranos.
The theory of eugenics is specific to racist ideology. They sterilized minorities so they couldn't have children because they wanted more white people. That's why it says "inherited qualities of a race, especially of human beings" it is specifically calling race out as separate from the idea of all humans.
Closest, but the method used by eugenics is specifically selective breeding, and is specifically about races or breeds even when you twist the definition like you did here.
You specifically left out the “a science” part, which is also part of the “kids’” definition for eugenics in your source.
eugenics noun eu·gen·ics yu̇-ˈjen-iks : a science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
Removing the “a” from the beginning completely changes the meaning of the word, which is why you did it.
Shame.
If this is indeed like GATTACA selecting specific embryos after fertilization is not really selective breeding. Selective breeding is picking the parents. This is picking the children. You could do both but it didn’t seem like that is what was happening. I could still see this likely leading to problems genetically not dissimilar to problems with inbreeding. Genetic diversity requires the randomness of life to be useful long term.
Did you miss where they do that by sterilization? And qualities of a race or breed?
Do you speak English? Is this a translation error?
Edit to add-
And you present it like there's multiple definitions. There is not. This is Merriam's entry-
The second one is for kids. The follow on context under the actual definition also makes it very clear that this was selective breeding by sterilization, closely related to white supremacy ideology.
You specifically left out the "a science" part, which is also part of the "kids'" definition for eugenics.
eugenics noun eu·gen·ics yu̇-ˈjen-iks : a science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
Removing the "a" from the beginning completely changes the meaning of the word, which is why you did it.
Shame.
I'm not native speaker so please excuse my stupid question. How does the "a" change the meaning? My language doesn't even have articles so I have troubles with using them or understanding such nuances.