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.
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.