The problem is "eugenics" has two meanings which is unhelpful for this discussion.
1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes
2) the more generic practice of trying to improve the genetic characteristics of your children.
I don't think there is much point in debating 1). But we would be naive to think we are not already doing 2). What else is a prenatal test for down syndrome? What else is selecting your mating partner for desirable characteristics? In animals it's called breeding and it works pretty well. And if you can patch the DNA of your kids to remove potential risks of cancers or other deficiencies, why wouldn't you? Is it better to let cancer take its toll?
A problem is that some see 2 as a subset of 1, upset at the idea that parents would wish to terminate pregnancies early that have strong indications of defects. I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".
Granted, if everyone were sequenced and had access to that information it probably wouldn't take too long before certain categorizations became a requirement on the dating profiles, and that's a slippery slope...
(Regardless, nature filters us all by genetics in several stages, and our entire concept of sexual attraction and social groupings are based on the most direct form of priliminary selection for genetics that evolution could achieve with our limited available senses.)
>I do imagine a good chunk of those people are of the horribly broken belief that abortions should be outlawed altogether, so not sure how many specifically go against such "filtering".
no, it is quite quite bafflingly the other way around. those who are against abortions non-religiously almost always make exceptions for rape, risk to the woman's life or health, and things like Down's.
When making decisions that will affect (in planned and unpredictable ways) the phenotype of a person over their entire life course - society / medical experts and researchers etc necessarily need to have a say.
We can't beat or euthanise our children, neither should we have carte blanche over their genetic makeup.
Note - I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't employ gene modification to ameliorate health issues or even to improve other metrics. However this is absolutely not just 'down to the parents'.
But there's still some really major issues with 2).
Do you think it would be fair to have the children of billionares to be much much more intelligent than normal people, let along the children of poor people? I'm not sure what the answer is, but its very worth thinking about. If you could grow an Einstein in a lab, imagine if all the Einsteins that were grown ended up being biased to Musk-adjacent worldviews.
There is no path that turns "I would like to terminate my pregnancy if the outcome is unfavorable" into "I would like to commit genocide on everyone whose genetics I do not like".
Granted, someone who already wishes for or aligns with the idea of ethnic cleansing might start by only publicly sharing their wish for the former to begin with, but I don't see a sensible argument for it being a natural extension of the former.
"I would like my child to not be deaf" -> "Many (most?) people would prefer their child to not be deaf" -> (3) "Deaf community shrinks" -> "Social support for deaf people is reduced/seen as not necessary" -> "Parents of deaf children are blamed for carrying out the child" -> "Parents are nudged (forced) to terminate the pregnancy" -> goto (3)
In a some way this is already happening (eg Judges forcing cochlea implants on babies while denying the parents support in learning/teaching sign language to the child)
Many people see this as an attack on the deaf community and their culture - and I have to agree.
In terms of slippery slopes, this argument is climbing atop one. Where does that end? Should we ban doctors from performing surgeries that would save someone's hearing? Should we ban protective gear that might diminish the size of the deaf community?
It's simply a horrible argument to suggest that you have to protect a disadvantaged community by making sure they don't shrink. There's much better ways to be respectful of the great human beings these people are.
A shrinking deaf community has nothing at all to do with ethnic cleansing, and social support does not shrink for less common diseases - it's usually the opposite, with support proportional to how rare and inconvenient the disability is.
Let's try a small thought experiment: Some birth defects stem from dietary issues in the mother during pregnancy, like folic acid deficiency or alcohol consumption.
Let's imagine that we discover that deaf children are primarily caused by a particular vitamin deficiency during pregnancy. We can then either spread the information so parents can supplement, or even fortify foods and cause the community to massively decline or even disappear - or we could withold the information on the vitamins to artificially maintain the population of the deaf community.
You could even extend it to a scenario where we end up relying more and more on artificial insemination or other early processing - the impact of many dietary deficiencies happen extremely early, so to maintain the community we would then have to artificially cause said deficiency to maintain the population of the deaf community.
Heck, we can always just make people deaf later if you wanted to maintain their community. We could also make more people get into "accidents" so that the quadriplegic community is maintained. Sounds absolutely insane when you start to discuss maintaining the population of disabled communities, doesn't it?
Back to the topic, cleansing of the deaf in this context implies a hatred for deaf people in general and wanting to remove all deaf people, which is an emotion entirely unrelated to sympethesizing with the disability of being deaf and wanting to avoid causing more such disability.
Many people see the deaf community as something that should ideally disappear by curing them.
I wonder if 100 years ago, the same activists would fight for survival of the leprosy community and its specific culture.
I can understand glorifying pathology if nothing can be done about it. It is a form of coping, similar to the coping that we usually engage in with regard to death. But once the underlying condition starts being curable and the glorifiers attempt to block treatment of children in the name of maintaining the pathology for future generations, they IMHO cross the line to outright evil.
Deafness is a huge handicap, in many ways significantly worse than blindness. That the victims of this horrible ailment start to self identify with it isn't a reason to subject new humans to it.
I have previously had to install simple things like doorbells for deaf people, which is done through a very strobe light that can be seen from almost the entire apartment... if you're not behind a closed door at least.
The idea of it being genuinely difficult for a person to be warned or notified is terrifying. Put your phone in your bag and you might as well have left it at home. Honking, people yelling or screaming for you to move out of harms way, even air sirens... You'll have no idea.
I agree, though one could make the argument that our modern nanny states have been pretty brutal at enforcing health policies during covid, and if they convince themselves that they can eradicate certain diseases by mandating DNA patching or pregnancy terminations, them doing so "for our own good" is in the realm of the possible.
But we are in coercion territory. What I am saying that we already practice eugenics without coercion, we just don't call it that.
As far as I can tell, our modern nanny states haven't been 'pretty brutal at enforce health policies during covid'.
I agree that there were pretty strong restrictions, many of them unnecessary. But in most places the population was pretty compliant or otherwise ignored the demands. I don't remember much brutality.
There's definitely a sane debate needed on this. I think there's a lot of things here people wouldn't be against, but at the same time more thought needs to be put into this. Like what if you could GMO your kids to be smarter, but it costs a lot. Should this be illegal, or should the govt pay for it for poorer people, and it just gets better and better.
I doubt that there'll be a sane debate about this and I would love to be proven wrong.
We shouldn't let biology and genetics be forever kept hostage by the fact that 100 years ago some racists (who did not even know what DNA was) used crude mechanisms like castration to push their specific forms of social engineering.
There is a lot of potential problems written into your exome, and some of them can be prevented. Treating a condition which has already taken hold is much more complicated and often less successful. Personalized medicine is pretty much the only way forward nowadays.
So far, the gathering of great deals of data on people has not been used for purposes that benefit such people. For example, one of the biggest uses of mass surveillance and data collection is to improve the targeting of marketing, which generally does not benefit the people being marketed to, and indeed often is done to their detriment.
And then a side effect of all of this is that this huge mass of data is just sitting there to be used for even more nefarious purposes. I can easily imagine a world where an end user is required to submit their genetic data in order to prove their age for an age-controlled app, for example.
Sure, you can imagine it, but you should be able to imagine better solutions too. Far easier to ask for a government ID, or better yet, have a third party, which is trusted, use a cross-check, so that the raw data is never shared, just a binary, yes/no to the age check.
If we only imagine the bad outcomes, we'll miss on many good ones. And part of those misses will be worse bad outcomes. For example, if you object to the creation of a third party that could validate your age, what you get is a direct ask for your ID, which is the current reality and far worse.
That's why at-home sequencing should become the norm.
But to be fair, I see no issues with genetic testing of embryos that could still be aborted. If a person would grow up with a serious illness it could be considered.
But then genetic modification should be accessible too, to preserve the life but update the code.
The antidote to that (I think, I've got loose vibes about biology and genetics) would probably be introducing more variation via some manipulation of the genome, maybe crispr?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I'm responding to flamebait, not posting it. and expressing my point of view in a sentence or two instead of the usual walls of watered down text common here does not make it unsubstantive.
If you mean you aren't intending to post flamebait, of course I believe you, but your posts have certainly been flamebaity in the sense that we use the term here, which is mostly about the effects such posts tend to have (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Snark, provocation, denunciatory rhetoric, comments with high indignation/information ratio - all this is against the site guidelines. We're not talking about borderline calls here!
1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes
2) the more generic practice of trying to improve the genetic characteristics of your children.
I don't think there is much point in debating 1). But we would be naive to think we are not already doing 2). What else is a prenatal test for down syndrome? What else is selecting your mating partner for desirable characteristics? In animals it's called breeding and it works pretty well. And if you can patch the DNA of your kids to remove potential risks of cancers or other deficiencies, why wouldn't you? Is it better to let cancer take its toll?