No, selective breeding and/or culling are about as far from 'natural' selection as it gets.SadisticFire said:Edit:As several people pointed out that the proper term I'm probably looking for is(That I can't believe I forgotten) Eugenics Sorry bout' the confusion. Though I do think Natural selection might've been removed though so I guess title still fits.
Anyway, no, removing the 'unfit' by either sterilisation or culling is just a plain bad idea. It has a certain logic in theory, but as others have said, the slope it leads to is way, way too slippery. Once you let that horse out, it's impossible to decide what counts as eligible for elimination.
A slightly greyer area is pre-natal screening (speaking personally we decided not to screen for any conditions because we didn't want to have to make that decision, but I think it's morally ok) and genetic testing of parents, with a voluntary decision not to reproduce. But even in those cases it's difficult - we decide to screen for Down's and it's fine, but then what if we start screening for congenital deafness? Deaf people have a full mental life and can live quite comfortably with their disability. And what about screening for sex? Any kind of embryo selection is fraught with moral difficulties - and I speak as someone entirely pro-choice.
The fact is that children with most serious conditions will die before reproducing in any case. Many abnormalities lead to infertility and anything that *doesn't* do that, then - well, who's to say what's fit and what isn't? If I'd been born in ancient Sparta I'd probably have died on a mountainside because I'm too small and weak. My skills as a mathematician would not have been considered valuable to them. And we can *always* point at Stephen Hawking in these arguments!