What do you think of eugenics? Why?

Sure, you can measure a lot of traits that are desirable, but that's a tiny fraction of what eugenics is about. Eugenics wants to breed humans with positive traits and eliminate humans with negative traits. That's a lot of fucking work and requires an understanding of human genetics and physiology that we don't have.

Take intelligence for example. Intelligence is the result of multiple structures in the brain working together in a way that you ascribe value to. If you make a change to one part of the brain and the result will almost certainly be unpredictable. You'll have to reevaluate the criteria upon which intelligence is judged to make sense of the data, and once you do that you'll have to be accepting of much more genetic and behavioral variation.

Eugenics is built upon the theory of breeding, not genetics. It's not good science.

Hey dipshit, I was arguing that it doesn't even make sense on a scientific level, let alone an ethical one.

100% pro, life is a disease and nobody should reproduce

Wow, how edgy.

Really crawls in the skin

I think it's obsolete by technologies like CRISPR.

chill nobody's gonna take ur babies away

Human bio-engineering isn't going to be a thing for a long, long, long time. CRISPR is cool and it's a big step forward, but it's not as big as nerds online make it out to be. Additionally there's still ethical concerns that need to be ironed out in that area anyways.

And anyways, eugenics is an unsubstantiated, unscientific theory, so it was obsolete from the very beginning.

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The rate of the advance of genetics is pretty spectacular because of machine learning. We are getting much better at modeling how genes code proteins and discovering what genes correlate with what traits. There could be (and almost certainly are) counterproductive cascades while just selecting for all genes related to attractive phenotypes that are not obviously related to unattractive phenotypes, but it's nonetheless likely that you could see some level of positive improvement.

Also, eugenics sort of does work at a breeding level. Most standards of intelligence are heritable in some degree, as far as they've been measured.

I think very few people will use CRISPR on embryos if they don't have to, at least outside of Asia.

Argue about how unethical it is all you want, but its been practiced by farmers to grow bigger crops and raise healthier animals since way before there was even a theory to support it, so it's got a pretty undeniable track record, objectively speaking.

That being said, my personal opinion is that eugenics has a history of being used as a scapegoat for tribalistically motivated genocide, and always will be until we can clear the air on it and apply it in purely scientific ways, ie, make it an ivory tower. a slopy use of the ivory tower analogy, but my point stands

Haven't even seized the means of production and already acting like you own the joint and can run eugenics programs, smh tbh fams.

Yeah, sure, let's do eugenics! It worked out so great for wolves, right?

Ugh. There's loads of things nerds on the internet oversell, but machine learning is one of the most obnoxious and misunderstood ones. It isn't magic. It won't provide us with any new scientific theories by itself. It's really great at one thing: finding patterns in vast amounts of data. That's it.

Machine learning will not be able to tell us which phenotypes are good and which ones are bad, because that's a subjective value judgment. For human bio-engineering to even be viable humanity needs to reevaluate it's current the criteria it uses to ascribe value to genetic traits.

Except I wasn't. I was arguing that the theory itself was unscientific. Lrn2Read fam.

No it fucking doesn't. Most of the animals that humans have bread have ended up with chronic health issues, and the crops we've bred have been orders of magnitude more susceptible to different diseases.

The lesson to be learned here is that the traits we find desirable aren't necessarily good for the organism being bred.

Pretty easy to fuck up IMO.
Get rid of sickle cell anemia and in a few years when global warm's turned the whole world into a tropical swamp fuck we all died of malaria, if only there were people with the malaria resistance sickle cell anemia gives you!

To be fair that wasn't real eugenics. We still can't even perform real eugenics yet because we haven't fully identified what segments of genetic code affect what phenotypes. Everything we've been doing so far has been guesswork like a monkey tapping at keys of a piano. Sure it'll get some patterns going but it won't play Bach until it learns the finer points of how the piano works.

That image looks like it is from that one instructional website that tells you how to communicate with animals.

His point was that people bred dogs in order to have some charecteristics they perceived as positive and now we have entire breeds who can't breed and have eye problems all their lives. this is not about how much guesswork you put into it, you'll never get "real" eugenics because by definition you can't know what results your experiments will have.

I don't look forward a future in a capitalist "utopia" filled with beautiful, hyper-intelligent aristocrats who are all miserable and unhealthy. The working classes of the world will probably be forced to become grotesque abominations who have to modify themselves heavily to survive. :((

Eh it seems to have worked out pretty well to me

You're not very bright, are you?

Cut off the food supply. Simple eugenics, those unable to survive should die.

Its a stupid idea
Because, its pseudoscience and scientism mixed together which is insane and borderline Catholic Church, Sharia Law level of collectivized insanity. Besides humans will have to do the decision making and humans are imperfect, therefore imperfect decisions about who gets to breed will be made. You'll have some research which certain biased fallible scientists think is sound, which will lead to a general theory and methodology for hte application of eugenics, then we find out 3 decades after implementation that this theory is as sound as maybe Lamarckian evolutionary theory was compared to Darwinism. Which means millions of families were denied and millions of humans were genetically expunged (their lineages at least) for no good reason. This kind of error, which is systematic and built in by the problem of induction is not something that will go away, ever. I would rather physicists make these kinds of errors and fix them down the road, than socio-biologists and geneticists who are significantly less acquainted with hard science and reproducibility. There are a number of things from the racial, eugenic science movements that are useful heuristics for examining social issues and human development but they do not together constitute a science or a field of scientific inquiry. They are a political, quasi-religious set of beliefs that stem from the Englightenment and do not have anything to do with scientific

In a scenario where the rich are engaging in eugenics, the more likely outcome is that a hale and healthy working class left to breed unrestricted will be ruled over by a sickly, pale class of Charles IIs.

Studying and understanding genetic code in enough detail can definitely lead to creating organisms containing specific desired traits. If you grow them in the right conditions with the right code you'll have exactly what you want without any guesswork. The only real issue being unavoidable mutations but it still beats the hell out of the chaotic system "mother nature" has set up.

The royal families of europe didn't practice eugenics, and in the short term it does yield healthier, more attractive offspring. This is an indisputable fact, athletes produce consistently athletic offspring because of the heritability of those traits. The Hapsburgs were marrying cousins, most of whom were not attractive to begin with.

More likely, those cutting the food supply would be killed. It would be eugenic though, as it would eliminate the inferior genetics that makes a person so retarded to think that they could cut the food supply to the majority of the population and expect to survive.

Necessarily you must have a life longer than the organism you wish to breed. So if we could make a ruling class of humans who live for thousands of years and breed the short lived humans every 12 years I suppose it's possible after some centuries.

They're not the same but they are both eugenics

😂

That is impossible without not only the knowledge of what every single gene does but also the ability to accurately predict how they will interact with one another when they are placed in a given sequence. Any attempt at eugenics before that is just mysticism that is incapable of providing results that can be scientifically analyzed.

Good god, it's like you're literally retarded

satan does wet work for god. ofc he's not bright.

yeah, "in enough detail" being the keyword here. at some point you're going to have to make experiments and you're gonna have a bunch of pug humans.
thats enough to throw the entire project in the dustbin tbh.

Fun fact: any time sexual reproduction occurs a form of eugenics is happening via natural selection. Have fun trying to eliminate all non-asexual life on earth just to avoid your phobia of this mystical thing called eugenics.

Don't confuse pseudoscientific Autism Level bullshit with intelligence. Intelligence, and the myriad proceses that compose it, no doubt is greatly influenced by genetics, but there is no way to measure it. It certainly cannot be expressed in whole numbers between 0 and 140.

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Consciously selecting traits based on desirability isn't the same thing as derisible traits being passed on because they're evolutionarily advantageous.

If eugenics were a thing you'd be one of the first to go probably.

Well, at least there is one way to find the mentally deficient among us.

People who can't command their own language and have never shown curiosity in abstract thinking or other types of cultures or scientific pursuits are idiots, verifiable stupid and incurious people. There are idiots and it can be measured, not with numbers but it can be intuitively gauged just by spending a few minutes listening to someone speak.

Okay, but you're back to , which you responded to by saying it's scientifically complicated. Now you're saying it's ethically complicated, which in many cases it is not. Even brute force eugenics can adapt to drawbacks and progress to some degree, and probably a large degree. You're being dishonest here.

I disagree, there's plenty of people who are highly capable of reading people and social situations who wouldn't be considered intelligent under your definition. furthermore I would argue that incuriosity and anti-intellectualism are symptoms of the culture that we live in and not of genetics.

You're pretty much wrong. A lot of measurable aspects of intelligence, like pattern recognition or memory, correlate moderately with blood relation despite separation or adoption. You're just parroting things because you want to believe them.

What the fuck are you talking about, I'm not . I think that it's a scientifically, ethically, and socially complicated problem with no easy answers. You can't brute force eugenics because eugenics isn't a scientific theory. You would have to change eugenics so completely that it wouldn't even make sense to call it eugenics anymore. And even then you would still have to deal with the social and ethical questions that your new theory raises.

Science isn't just dipshits in a lab doing experiments fam, there's a lot more to it than that.

Yeah they're usually sociopaths, they can't read and don't have any curiosity towards science or abstract thought because that's not part of their survival strategy. I've met lots of these people who are very attuned to emotions of others, play off social anxiety elegantly, navigate networks of different sub cultures, always know when to show up or leave, never leave a bad impression etc. They're sociopaths, they have high social and emotional intelligence and are fucking retards who would never invent anything or discover anything.

They of all people should be subject to eugenics. Intelligence is measured by the 'g factor' where different forms of intelligence all correlate positively with each other. So someone who is good at spatial reasoning, likely also has high color acuity, decent motor skills and dexterity and probably equally adept verbal intelligence. They all go with each other, athletes have good reaction time, good visuo-spatial skills, good timing, good social skills etc. People who have just one thing or a very limited number of things are lower on the scale for intelligence, as athletes are (their traits which are a type of intelligence all correlate but are less impressive than the aforementioned set of traits). So a 'people person' is likely a sociopath, they overdeveloped low level systems of intelligence instead of just being a normal functioning mediocre person which is what they were biologically at birth. Smart people are almost always in academia or STEM or published authors or working for the government/design firms/top art houses etc. I've met very few people who are highly intelligent that are unemployed and never finished their degree at university, there are lots of exceptions, but the majority of "smart people" who can't into mathematics, science, medicine, tech, writing, philosophy are generally sociopaths. Which, again is an overdeveloped set of low level faculties which have utility but more often than not in primitive social settings or as an auxiliary activity supplementing normal human life. I wish I could believe that everyone is intelligent and that they all have unique insights but the majority of socialites I've met are fucking morons and their incurious nature is a tell-tale sign of arrested development of higher faculties and the executive function center of the brain.

:/

I concede your point, and will not use the word Eugenics anymore. Let me rephrase the OP just for you:

What do you think of Yujenics? Why?

No offenses, but it sounds like you have a lot of baggage judging from this post. Using your baggage (or opinions) as an argument for a policy like eugenics is exactly why Holla Forums criticizes Holla Forums for being putting "feels>reals". Not all socially and emotionally adept people are sociopaths, and I would argue that this is an just another area of human intelligence.

I find myself wishing that I wasn't such a moron when it came to social situations all the time. My girlfriend isn't as (analytically) intelligent as I am by more than a bit, but we work well together because she's very intelligent artistically, socially, emotionally, etc.

People are different and that's a good thing. Not everyone needs to be smart imo.

Well I guess that depends on what your theory of "Yujenics" says, doesn't it? If it's anything like eugenics then it's a shitty, unscientific theory.

Is that a satisfactory answer?

Stupid, and unwarranted.
That's not what that exchange was about, it was about whether there are indeed stupid people and if you can indeed tell them apart from smart people using basic measures of intelligence (like g factor or just listening to them speak or solve basic problems). I wasn't arguing about eugenics, though I think intelligence is probably one of the most heritable traits out there besides height.
No I know that, the person I was responding to posited a person who was socially and emotionally adept but would score low on 'g' factor or Autism Level tests which I responded to in kind, by saying that they are likely a sociopath. Most socially adept, emotionally adept people are also highly intelligent and would score higher on 'g' factor scales and ig tests than the average human would. The idea being that certain types of intelligence happen to be easy ways to get resources and mating opportunities and some organisms overdevelop these skills as a survival/mating strategy because they would otherwise have an insecure ability to access resources (because they're an unexception, mediocre intelligence in terms of the 'g' factor types of intelligence). This is more nuanced than you are portraying it which is why I said your response was stupid and unwarranted.
I don't know anything about you or her, I can't verify if you are being honest or accurate. So an anecdote is worthless, and also even less rational than the level of discourse already seen in this thread with retards saying that eugenics=natural selection.
Stupid people are more likely to be violent and to pass on traits that encourage violence and thuggery; they're also less likely to be artistically talented (especially visual arts, rather than musical arts, besides composing), less likely to be empathetic and less likely to have any ability to help themselves if they fall into disarray in their lives. They're a liability. I don't support eugenics because its unethical and inefficient. That doesn't mean idiots aren't real and that they are a good thing. I just don't care enough to go out of my way to force people to be intelligent, by gene therapy and brain training. That's not something that concerns me, and its probably a good thing if people who are dumb aren't forced to be intelligent as their could be long term social and cultural consequences to doing that (which again people in this thread have suggested as a solution to eugenics).

Fair enough. It did seem like defending eugenics when you said "They of all people should be subject to eugenics", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here.
I tend to disagree with this claim. I would love to be proven wrong btw, so if you have a source for this I'd like to see it.
My anecdote is just as valuable as your unsourced claims.
I disagree, but if you have sources to back this up I'd love to see them.

If you measure a person's worth by how intelligent they are you're going to have a negative opinion of unintelligent people.

It seems pretty obvious to me that a small degree of eugenics would help society considerably with little to no harm. It all hinges on the fact that, for some reason, people seem to view reproduction as a human right, and denying this is somehow literally Hitler-esque. I know someone will just throw some "edgy" or "fedora" insult my way, but I honestly find that absurd.

But then again, like with race, racial differences and similar debates, it will be all rendered moot when Gattaca tech arrives.

I think it happens naturally anyways, though the "state" creating a program for it seems inhuman.

Nah. Smart women have fewer kids because they wait later to get married and focus on careers. The Flynn effect was the result of public health advances for developing kids and is leveling off. From now on, people are mostly going to get dumber, unless there's some technological change or state intervention.

It's shit.

I don't care about the "good of society", the "future of mankind" or any of that crap. I won't have myself be lynched, if society decides to.

What about sterilized?