[sgillen]

Couldn’t you bake in variety as one of the desirable characteristics to pass on to the next generation? And also from that tweet it’s not even clear that Dawkins would disagree with you.. it seems like you are disagreeing with the common criteria for good that people will come up with rather than if eugenics itself would work. You even say yourself that if you were omniscient that eugenics could work...

Like I do understand what you are saying, but it seems weird to me to take this one tweet you disagree with and conclude that Dawkins has only a shallow understanding of evolution, especially when it seems like you only disagree on the nuances of a definition.

[andrewla]

I gave the tweet as an example of a more general trend. The linked demonstration shows a similar shallowness (the focus on mechanism) which is what brought it to mind.

On the other point, I don’t even understand what it means to breed for the trait of “variety”. It’s a collective, not an individual trait. If you allow individuals to practice eugenics by selecting their mates through mutual assent then that works, but that’s not eugenics.

[sgillen]

Fair enough..

I was thinking of a hypothetical eugenic society, where they could let (force?) everyone to breed every X years. Then they could try to optimize that entire batch of mates to optimize whatever traits they chose plus some measure of variety in the gene pool. Would that satisfy your definition of eugenics?