xitel said:
If you would have died without medical intervention, be it from cancer or a bad cold, then you are not allowed to breed.
How do you determine whether someone would have died without medical intervention? Simple thought experiment: Person contracts disease. Person receives treatment. Person survives. How do you know that their body wouldn't have been able to fight off the disease itself?
As for the second point, about limiting the gene pool, to be honest the world is already facing an overpopulation problem... Limiting the population growth would actually be beneficial, as it would make the human population as a whole.
Very few people young enough to have children have had a disease that would've killed them without modern medicine, so it would barely affect the population growth. The main cause of population growth is poverty, so if you really care about it, start there.
And besides that, the overpopulation thing is not a good argument. You can't run through a crowded building firing an automatic weapon all around you while screaming "I'm solving the overpopulation problem!" and think people will be OK with that.
Sgt. Dante said:
how about every family is allowed 1 child... and only seleceted families... could have more than that?
Yeah, because that worked so well in China.
Any good system in bad hands will make a system look bad. On paper communism is a pretty neat idea, in practice it's never been used quite right and the people in charge end up abusing their positions.
I'm a communist, so thanks for that argument in support of communism. We just need the right kind of people to run it and it'll be fine...
Even if [intelligence] isn't genetically inheritable it's been proven that single children are generally smarter than kids with siblings
Firstly, source please. Secondly, that is only an argument for your specific one child policy, not an argument for eugenics. Please stay on topic.
Anyway it's not natural selection if we're doing everything we can to help keep the old, weak, disabled and stupid alive when 'nature' would have seen them taken out a long time ago
Yes we are keeping them alive, but old, weak and disabled people still tend to reproduce a lot less than young, healthy, attractive people.
And how do you decide which traits are more preferable? Very subjectively and ideologically, I would say.
as a species we're generally working almost in direct opposition of natural selection.
I admit we may be reducing selection pressure somewhat, but we are not working in
opposition to it. We are not causing weaknesses to be selected
for, only for them to be selected against to a slightly lesser degree. More research would be required to determine to what extent this might be a problem. If science has taught us one thing it is that our intuition is often wrong.
Also natural selection is just as amoral as eugenics. Just because it's natural doesn't make it good.
...more stuff about intelligence...
Again, please stick to traits which are known to be heritable. Anything else is not relevant to this debate!
Q: If through eugenics you could eliminate such genetic diseases like, Cystic Fibrosis, Down Syndrome, Haemophilia or Turner's syndrome would you not say that would improve the quality of life for people that would have otherwise suffered though these diseases or the stress to the family of someone who has these diseases?
If.
As someone pointed out, people with sickle-cell have greater resistance to malaria. It's quite likely that other genes coding for disease also have beneficial effects, otherwise why do they still persist in the gene pool after billions of years of evolution? Genes interact with each other in highly complex ways and we are centuries away from knowing enough to have the confidence to do what you propose without shooting ourselves in our collective feet.
If we had the science necessary to do what you suggest, then we would also have the science to cure people of those diseases you mentioned, so eugenics would be pointless!