Posted on 12/29/2008 4:45:27 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
There is one known example of human selective breeding working well.
In the 19th Century, a large number of idealistic northern-European communes formed in one of the counties of western New York State. One of them, while believing in marriage, also followed their leaders view that he should select who would reproduce with whom. The resultant children would be raised by the mother and her husband as their own. His decisions were of the order of, “You are smart and you are strong, so make a child.”
Just based on his guesses, in three generations, that small commune produced about 60 national leaders in diverse fields. However, had it continued just one more generation, there would have been “genetic collapse”, resulting in a large number of failed pregnancies and retardation and deformity, because of inbreeding.
Currently, the Chinese are unsuccessfully attempting to do the same, but are failing because their selection criteria are severely flawed.
For example, having people in their breeding program because they are ideologically correct, politically connected, wealthy, or have a genius in one field. They also began with too small a genetic pool, so are having inbreeding problems.
Interesting read. Not sure about state-sponsored sterilization, but I’ve often and not-quite-seriously entertained the idea to give all 15 year old boys vasectomies (whch are reversible) and only had the procedure to reverse allowed after say completion of college or 10 years of solid work history or joined the military perhaps we might diminish the steady entropic drift of society while not descending ourselves into Brave New World-class evil. I know of one malefactor receiving welfare in 4 adjacent states who has fathered 113 children with scores of women and never once held a job nor raised a single one of these children. I’m quite sure this is not the record, but it serves to illustrate my point.
The results of people demanding God/religion/ethics being kept out of science.
Eugenics is evil...it was the basis for the final solution in Hitler’s Germany. On a personal note, My wife’s great Aunt suffered some sort of breakdown during WWII. She was lobotomized and sterilized in a hospital near Richmond VA. If you had ever met this woman...you would not be so flippant about this evil belief-Eugenics.
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> If you had ever met this woman...you would not be so flippant about this evil belief-Eugenics.
Excuse me? I am not aware of being “flippant” about eugenics. I knew next to nothing about it, so I asked questions and drew conclusions. Something wrong with that?
> However, the morality of it is the primary issue. Who would have the right to tell another whether or not to have children and that some of those children should be killed because they have genetically undesirable traits and society’s resources shouldn’t be “wasted” on them? Would you trust our current Congressional Clowns to make those decisions? Would you want a Kennedy (or, perhaps worse, a Clinton) deciding on the eugenics goals? Would we be bred for the population’s benefit, or only the benefit of those deciding what the breeding goals are?
There is a clear danger in the Scientific Method, then, because Morality tends to play little-or-no role in the exploration of scientific knowledge.
Or, for that matter, in the advance of Technology.
So we have these hugely “interesting” fields for Science to explore — like eugenics, birth control, euthenasia, germ warfare, chemical warfare, &tc — where the constraints aren’t scientific or technical in nature: they are and ought to be Moral and Ethical constraints.
But science isn’t really geared to constrain itself morally and ethically, and scientists don’t like it when people constrain them.
That has to be a problem!
> It goes to show the danger of divorcing science from any moral constraints. This is the danger that those who wish to keep *religion* out of science fail to see.
> Science can deal with the *can* part. Religion deals with the *ought not to* part.
> That’s also the crux of the embryonic stem cell research issue. And the euthanasia issue.
Well said.
> Eugenics poses a problem for Darwinians. Because if one cannot breed humans like dogs to obtain desired breeds (artificial selection), then neither can nature do it by natural selection.
But I haven’t seen any compelling evidence to suggest that humans cannot be bred like dogs. If anything, heuristic and anecdotal evidence suggests that humans have very strong family traits that do get passed along from one generation to another.
Therefore, Darwin is probably correct.
(I believe that Evolution and Creation coexist very well. Evolution tells us how things happened, and Creation tells us why.)
Yes, there are all kinds of sociological problems, mostly caused by spiritual factors. However, the eugenist says that these problems of man are genetic. They are due to tainted germplasm. Which means that a man suffering from supposed "hereditary pauperism" may pull himself out of pauperism, but his germplasm is still tainted. So his descendants will be paupers, regardless of what he did with himself. In this eugenic world-view, people of unfortunate circumstances and lifestyles, such as prostitutes, drunks, the chronically unemployed, the so-called feeble-minded, those mired in vices etc, cannot be redeemed. It matters not one whit if they found faith in Christ and turned themselves around, their genetic material is tainted. So, according to the eugenists, they must be sterilized, segragated, euthanized, or whatever.
It seems to be not well known that Pol Pot was a eugenist. He believed that political dispositions were biological. He killed about 2,000,000 people who suffered from 'incurable incorrect political dispositions', leaving the ones who had correct political inclinations. Not that this made any difference though. You would think that the elimination of all that political incorrectness would have resulted in a good politically correct Khmer Rouge society today, with or without him--if it were true that humans can be bred like dogs, that is.
You mean ALL Obama voters, and the “messiah” himself:
“Er, um... uh, uh, uh, umm... er ah, wha-wha-what I, er-ah mean is, well er ah, you know, I’m... uh, ummm...”
God created plants for their simplicity…
He created animals for their innocence…
He created man for his intellect.
God said to “Be fruitful and multiply… subdue the Earth,” and he gave man dominion over every lower creature.
Animals are living creatures, having the spirit of life breathed into them, they are not eternal creatures possessing a soul; but human beings are not animals. Every human individual is created in God’s image, meaning each possesses free will, an intellect, and an eternal soul. We are more than flesh and blood having a spirit of life breathed into our nostrils by God, Our Father in Heaven. Man is destined for eternity, and, if we accept the grace of Christ, we become adopted sons of God, and thus heirs to His eternal Kingdom.
What God creates, he creates for a divine purpose, which He alone knows. Humans procreate, but do so only by God’s command and His authority. Man merely cooperates in the procreative act. It is God who fashions the human soul at the moment of conception, and who knits together the bone and sinew within our mother’s womb: “Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5 (Catholic Douay Rheimes Bible)
For this reason, all genetic tampering, manipulation, and other such techniques of human “breeding” are intrinsically evil, and thus immoral in practice, whatsoever.
I am replying to all people who post here. Ray Kurzweil has given us an idea of what might happen in the future. Workplace automation might cause pressure on humans to take some genetic enhancements in order to keep up with automation in the workplace. People will compete with each other and with software or robotics. It is possible that many professional or vocational occupations will be absorbed by workplace automation.
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