Human eugenics, are you for or against it?

[Ultrashogun]

What is your opinion on applying selective breeding to humans? How would you enforce it?

Personally I believe it would be positive for mankind, we do it to basicly everthing biological around us(animals, plants) why not also to ourselves?

[Dr.Stein]

I am against it. That's Nazism, Hitler's dream For me it is similar as genocide!

*hits the table*

[Ultrashogun]

I am against it. That's Nazism, Hitler's dream For me it is similar as genocide!

*hits the table*

Hitler also built the german highway, that doesnt mean that everybody who drives fast is a fascist.

[Ultrashogun]

Anyway, did you know that the americans were actually the forerunners in the field of eugenics before the nazis came?

[G-Do]

Against.

Reasons:
1) Diversity is valuable. What seems like a crappy allele now might be critical for survival a hundred years down the road, when we're all sucking smog and living on grubs a thousand feet below the irradiated surface of the earth. It is difficult to predict in advance how the environment will change, so we should keep the genetic diversity we have. This rule applies to agriculture, too. Imagine that we artificially select for a certain rice crop, and that this selection process weeds a lot of variation out of the rice genome. What happens when a blight hits and there's no innate resistance in the rice? A famine, that's what.

2) It's impractical to get rid of recessive alleles, for three reasons: (a) removing the homozygous recessives from the breeding pool alone often takes hundreds of generations to produce an appreciable effect on the allele's frequency in the population, and the government may not have a eugenics policy in hundreds of generations, let alone ten generations, (b) you can try to get rid of carriers, too, but carrier detection methods aren't always perfect; they suffer from problems of sensitivity and specificity, and (c) you won't be able to convince people to give up the right to have children - especially in certain western societies, where that right is all but sacred - especially if carrier detection methods suffer from high false positive rates (this would mean that a person gets marked as a carrier and is forbidden from having children when s/he doesn't even have the disease).

3) The most important reason: it is unethical for a body of people to regulate whether a single person can or cannot bear a child. The real rub, here, is in your initial statement: "Personally I believe it would be positive for mankind, we do it to basicly everthing biological around us(animals, plants) why not also to ourselves?" If you replace "ourselves" with "each other" you'll see what I mean.

[Dr.Stein]

Hitler also built the german highway, that doesnt mean that everybody who drives fast is a fascist.

Yeah I know the "Deutschland über alles" thing. It is great, no doubt, they can conquer the world with their thought and technology but they cannot make "superhuman", because that's too far IMO

[mith]

We could use a lot less stupid people but it would be hard to do because idiots are very hardy people lol

[Dr.Stein]

We could use a lot less stupid people but it would be hard to do because idiots are very hardy people lol

[sachin]

NOT Totaly against It.

Because This Have Some Great Advantages Too.

Just we have to limit the Uses of It.

It looks difficult but not Impossible.

[Dr.Stein]

I like the idea, it is a genius thought but I don't expect anything for the practical

[MrMistery]

I'm with mith... i look around me each day and am astonished by the immense, ever increasing number of idiots...

[rvidal]

Against.

Reasons:
1) Diversity is valuable. What seems like a crappy allele now might be critical for survival a hundred years down the road, when we're all sucking smog and living on grubs a thousand feet below the irradiated surface of the earth. It is difficult to predict in advance how the environment will change, so we should keep the genetic diversity we have. This rule applies to agriculture, too. Imagine that we artificially select for a certain rice crop, and that this selection process weeds a lot of variation out of the rice genome. What happens when a blight hits and there's no innate resistance in the rice? A famine, that's what.

2) It's impractical to get rid of recessive alleles, for three reasons: (a) removing the homozygous recessives from the breeding pool alone often takes hundreds of generations to produce an appreciable effect on the allele's frequency in the population, and the government may not have a eugenics policy in hundreds of generations, let alone ten generations, (b) you can try to get rid of carriers, too, but carrier detection methods aren't always perfect; they suffer from problems of sensitivity and specificity, and (c) you won't be able to convince people to give up the right to have children - especially in certain western societies, where that right is all but sacred - especially if carrier detection methods suffer from high false positive rates (this would mean that a person gets marked as a carrier and is forbidden from having children when s/he doesn't even have the disease).

3) The most important reason: it is unethical for a body of people to regulate whether a single person can or cannot bear a child. The real rub, here, is in your initial statement: "Personally I believe it would be positive for mankind, we do it to basicly everthing biological around us(animals, plants) why not also to ourselves?" If you replace "ourselves" with "each other" you'll see what I mean.

Great answer. I agree.