That one struck me as well. I don't know anyone who considers that "off-limits."
The eugenics and race ones are the touchiest in my experience.
The eugenics and race ones are the touchiest in my experience.
The idea that unlike all species, humans cannot be selectively bred for various traits, is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it.
Animals bred for specific traits don't almost-always wind up with severe problems, unless said breeding is done over-zealously (trying to do too much in too few generations) or deliberately for traits which aren't necessarily beneficial to the animal. All modern-day farm animals are the product of a lot of selective breeding over the past few thousand years, and they don't have "severe" problems.
If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra-species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.
There are many other types of belief, including:
* belief based on incomplete experience (The traffic on I-80 is going to be terrible on Friday)
* belief based on wild-assed guess (oil is going to be under $100 a barrel by the end of the year)
* belief based on the fact that somebody told you it was true and you haven't bothered to check (The Nissan GT-R produces 480 horsepower)
* belief based on not having thought it out very well (We should invade China!)
* belief based on wanting to have that belief purely to annoy others (I think we should kill poor people!)
* belief based on personal prejudice (McCain sucks!)
* belief based on wanting to conform with the beliefs of your peer group (Lisp is awesome!)
"Purely religious beliefs" are characterised by things other than just being unsupported. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that they should be both unsupported and strongly held.
So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues.
I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.
You can't just select for one trait and leave everything else untouched. DNA doesn't work that way. Pick up a copy of Animals In Translation the next time you're in the bookstore and skim the chapter on single trait selection, I think it's ch. 4.
1) Selecting for any single trait, even without recessive disorders, is going to select for other traits as well. For example, selecting for IQ might make individuals more prone to heart disease. Humans are pattern matching machines, and most of the things we consider to be human traits aren't controlled by a simple genetic switch that can be flipped on or off. Even selecting for something as simple as skin color can cause all sorts of problems. For example, most black people are lactose intolerant. Even if it isn't melanin that causes this, selecting for this one trait is going to bring with it all the other traits of the population.
2) Even if there are some traits you can select for without damaging the individual, that doesn't mean society as a whole will be better off. Societies are an emergent phenomenon and you it's impossible to predict what a society will be like based on it's component parts.
3) Who gets to decide what's good and what's bad for an individual? Who gets to decide what's good and bad for a society? What if something good for a society is bad for the individual, or vice versa?
4) Eliminating massive amounts of biodiversity within the species makes humans more vulnerable to extinction. Furthermore, evolution happens in S-curves. By selecting the "best" individuals you are almost certainly eliminating whatever mutation would start the next S-curve. Look at peacocks for example. Each female peacock wanted to mate with the male with the biggest tail. So male peacocks evolved to all have really big tails. That's why today the only place you ever see peacocks is in the zoo. This is just a case of premature optimization; in this case they've basically optimized themselves out of existence.
If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance, how are we supposed to tackle infinitely more complicated issues like the above?
2) Actually, people who model societies based on IQ (by, for example, taking a large sample of people and then randomly removing samples until the average IQ moves up or down a bit) have found that high IQ clearly makes things a lot better -- income is up, unemployment down, crime way down, etc. But this is complaint #1 again: "Why improve things without knowing all the side effects?" Because it's worth the risk, and progress is impossible if you don't.
3) The only serious example I've proposed is a private charity. I don't think there should be a philosophical objection to the government using eugenic policies to counter the dysgenic effects of welfare and tax systems. If you know that welfare makes irresponsible people breed, the only way to maintain equilibrium is to give them a reason not to.
4) There are plenty of extinct species that are pretty humanoid, but with smaller cranial capacities. often, it looks like the bigger-brained proto-humans just killed them off. In general, this optimization has worked out as a random mutation. And intelligence, unlike a peacock's tail, is about adaptability within an environment, not sexual selection within a group at the expense of the same. In fact, when you look at fertility rates compared to education (the best proxy I have, sadly -- but education correlates very well with IQ) you find that the educated ones reproduce less because they spend their time accomplishing other stuff.
If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance
You're referring to the low correlation between SATs and college performance, right? And you're ignoring that schools select people on multiple criteria, including SATs, such that everyone is at about the same level academically. So Smith's SATs show he's great at math, but a mediocre writer. And Jones' SATs show he's not too bright, but his admissions essay is jaw-dropping. Smith double-majors in math and CS; Jones majors in philosophy. They can get the same GPA even though they have different SATs, because the SAT is one of several criteria on which they're selected. The other obvious example is a student with high SATs and a poor GPA (smart, but no work ethic) versus the opposite; they could perform at about the same level, in the same school, but only because the high-SAT, low-GPA student is at the bottom of his SAT cohort, and the other student is at the top of his.
Also, it was nice of you to just focus on college performance. As far as I know, IQ test results predict income, fertility, crime and civic participation better than any other variable measurable from childhood. Could be environmental, of course, but most of the tweaks for raising IQ seem to be temporary -- the only known ways to raise IQ into adulthood seem to be having smarter parents and getting proper nutrition.
Of course, I don't think we should breed as a policy. It's enough to admit that such a policy is possible, probably beneficial, but perhaps not worth the total costs. I'm glad you're able to consider it rationally.
And anyway, eugenics doesn't have to go that far -- what about policies that just reverse the dysgenic effects of low-education, low-accomlishment, high-crime types breeding more:
"The effort is not aimed at eradicating the hereditary traits, but rather at the occurrence of homozygosity. The actual impact of this program on allele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection."
The word eugenics really describes two different things. Trying to reduce homozygosity, and long term breeding to select specific traits. While what you are describing is called eugenics, I think it's a little disingenuous since it's not the type of eugenics the original author was talking about. (The list was a list of taboo subjects, and there is clearly no taboo surrounding talking about blood testing for Tay-Sachs.)
I'm just pointing out there is nothing "religious" about a belief that eugenics works. Eugenics is just a straightforward application of basic genetics, and has been demonstrated to work in humans and other animals exactly as the theory describes. There may be some engineering issues, but many human traits can be modified by eugenics.