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Setting aside the obvious ethical issues (the over-riding morality of which being acknowledged), it would seem that eugenics would have some solid scientific support thru what we have learned from Animal Husbandry and Plant Propagation.

That is very much an "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" statement.

Could the human race, if treated as nothing more than animal stock, be changed through selective breeding? Yes, it certainly could. A lot of genetic problems could be removed by not allowing those who are carriers of them to breed. Similarly, desirable traits could be selectively chosen to be spread more widely or even universally.

The only real problem in that case is that the "breeding stock" has the same lifespan as those making the eugenics decisions. If you are breeding cattle or dogs, you can get a new generation every couple of years or so, thus during a career a breeder can handle a couple dozen generations. You might only get two complete generations during a career of a eugenicist.

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?

Could the human race, if treated as nothing more than animal stock, be changed through selective breeding?

Look at the situation in our country right now. Young girls, ages 12, 13, and 14, are rewarded for having babies. These girls are not the brightest, most accomplished in the population.

Anyone who thinks our welfare system is not selectively breeding hasn't looked at the numbers.

> 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!