[montereynack]

This is a dangerously wrong and even ignorant opinion. There is everything wrong with eugenics, and it’s all contained in the core idea that you have some notion of what is “good” for your children (and correspondingly, further parts of the human race). Other people have already pointed out the “eugenics will be used for political gain” component, which is absolutely true and kills it there. Another issue which I don’t think you appreciate though is the need for genetic diversity and genetic drift. The act of going about systematically pushing everyone’s genes in a certain direction is not only impractical, since we really don’t know enough about genetics to do that reasonably well, it’s also incredibly stupid because we’re getting a temporary “positive” payoff now by potentially screwing up our ability to adapt later. Mistakes are the spice of life, literally; don’t try to get rid of them, you’ll only hurt yourself.

[xwdv]

If you know what you want to adapt for, which I feel we have some good ideas already, then it's more efficient to push evolution straight toward that.

[montereynack]

Well...

1) even if we were all-knowing about what we’ll need in the future, we still don’t know enough about genetics to reliably “push” towards a set goal. Yes we know genetics plays a huge role in things like your body condition, your age, etc., but the degree to which those genes affect - and are affected by - your environment and at what stages they begin working, and where we should alter them, is so far almost completely unknown. Eugenics is grounded in the old idea that much of “you” is just genetics, but we know that idea now to be not just old-fashioned but outright wrong, in that there is a combinatorial number of possibilities enabled by your environment. It’s like calling the codebase of google search the same as the discord codebase because they’re both made of underlying C code (or whatever); technically true but also not true at all.

2)we really don’t have any idea what we should be pushing towards. Maybe right now we think that pushing towards greater strength, for example, would be a good idea, but maybe down the road we discover that one of the genes we made dominant actually makes us very susceptible to some virus strain, overall making the population die at a much higher rate compared to how things would have gone if we had not tried to play god. There are many, many variables you can’t even begin to account for; I find the words “Life finds a way” remarkably suitable to this discussion.