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Comment by rhema | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a future where we can use sperm samples as a panel test for health. We could measure the levels of stress, but eventually many other attributes. There are other epigenetic findings, such as obese fathers producing children more likely to also be obese. These could be re-tooled as an evaluation.

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I can imagine that future, and it is frightening. As a society we imagine our technological progress to somehow imply that we are actually advancing as a species. Recent events suggest otherwise, and putting evolutionary control in the hands of those kinds of people (read: anybody) is likely to be really bad for us all.

Recent events?

Why is it frightening to screen against health problems that cause prolonged suffering throughout an individual’s lifetime?

Because of two things:

1. when it comes down to it, the notion of a disease is actually very wishy-washy. Is homosexuality a disease? The difference between yes and no has a lot more to do with cultural changes in the last 50 years than any science.

2. A lot of things are heritable, and could be health problems if you looked at them the right way. Poverty is heritable, and poverty also results in worse health outcomes, ergo, people below the poverty line shouldn't reproduce, right?

1. That's just the gray fallacy. "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view." Just because some cases are uncertain doesn't mean all cases are equally uncertain. As Asimov put it in The Relativity of Wrong: "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

2. Let's set aside the heredity assumptions for a moment and go straight to the heart of the matter: As a proportion of the people who will be born in the next generation, would you rather have a larger or smaller fraction of them be poor for life? Why?

So, could people discard "gay" sperm or not? Evolutionary it is a bad trait.

Are you asking whether they could, or whether they should?

Final call should be parents' decision all the time, so "could" would be more correct. Or should it be forced by government? But that's yet another can of worms... "That sperm is 50% likely to vote for [insert wrong party]."

The more opportunities for personal, "greedy" optimization compared to global, societal optimization, the more frightening it gets.

Eugenics much ?

Perhaps. It seems analogous to women being able to evaluate the health of their ova.

Of course, and while we're at it, let's tax them extra to reproduce.

A modest proposal, but you should stress your satire more strongly to avoid swift downvoting.

Three in one, well done!

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