Note: I am firm believer is[sic] Eugenics, so I might be a bit biased.
You might want to explain that a bit further, before you get associated with the tragic events of the early 20th century and downvoted into oblivion.
You might want to explain that a bit further, before you get associated with the tragic events of the early 20th century and downvoted into oblivion.
1. Auto-eugenics: the ethical obligation one feels, when one knows they have horrible DNA, to adopt instead of breed.
2. Eugenic engineering: currently, this means "do IVF, look at the zygotes, and pick the healthiest ones to try to implant." In the future, this could involve genetic patches from healthy donors ("gene cleaning") or just plain hacked-in transhuman bonus features.
3. Eugenics, under the original botanical definition of the term: pairing people with really great DNA, and encouraging them to breed as much as possible, and repeating this process over several generations. We already vaguely do this naturally by interpreting health-signals like height or breast size as indicative of mating potential, and we're doing it more explicitly when we select good sperm/eggs from a donor clinic to pair to our own. (The final sci-fi-ish step in this one would be for women to volunteer to/get paid to/pay to (depending on supply vs, demand) "adopt at conception" genetically-"optimized" children matched by the clinics themselves. This would probably be in addition to the gene-cleaning techniques from 2.)
Oh, and I guess I should mention this last one, which is closest to the "problematic" version but which, surprisingly, has been attempted to success (i.e. Nobody being unhappy with the arrangement):
4. Libertarian eugenics: Pay people you'd be afraid of reproducing, to not have kids any more. This could be a state rent-transfer, but it's also possible to make it an entirely bottom-up process: any individual activist with some money to give can do their own "vigilante eugenics," finding, say, crack-addicted mothers and offering a lump-sum to get their tubes tied[1]. And this has happened: http://www.radiolab.org/story/251887-what-if-no-destiny/
Really, "the bad eugenics" is a ghost from the past, more an artefact of Nazi beliefs about racial purity than any productive approach to solving the problem.
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[1] Okay, this is less "eugenics" and more "euteratogenics" plus a little "euepigenics." But we're making people here, not show-grade Dalmatians; we care about more than their potential as good breeding stock.
In particular let's look at OP's example - he has mutations in different genes, so he is not is risk group for the disease that 23andme mistakenly reported him for. However if he would have an an offspring with someone who has complementary mutation in same genes, the offspring would stand much higher chance of inheriting that disease.
Instead, I suppose the suggestion would, "Well, go adopt!", which is a less than satisfactory answer for probably like 99.9% of all of the public, seeing as how nobody bothers to get a "genetic checkup" before they reproduce, and we're pretty much wired to prefer our own offspring to others when it comes to parental investment. All in all, the only context I've ever really heard these sorts of conversations in seem to be surrounding people who have terrible conditions that they are afraid of passing on, not two otherwise healthy individuals who have no idea whether or not their offspring could inherit some kind of genetic disorder that it latent in them. Yes, that is the problem isn't it? Also, given the amount [read:lack] of effort in "planning" that some people seem to put into reproduction, I wouldn't be surprised if this remains the problem...forever.
* Let's say on average you have 10% chance of having your child inherit something bad. If you show only partners that have this value halved over time you will see a positive trend.
For example, you may have heard of Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision which affirmed the constitutionality of involuntary eugenic sterilization. (Holmes: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough.") The Nazi eugenicists, when brought to account at Nuremberg after the war, mounted a defense which revolved around the American eugenics movement in general and this Supreme Court decision in particular.
For further example, perhaps you share the common misconception that the idea of mass execution for eugenic reasons, and the particular method of using gas chambers for this purpose, originated in some uniquely twisted mind among the Nazi eugenicists. This is not the case; that purpose, and that method by which to achieve it, were first postulated in a 1918 Army textbook, which drew inspiration from a 1911 Carnegie Foundation-funded "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population."
As you see, the United States has made this mistake once before, even to the extent of enshrining it in our highest canon of law. The Nazi regime, far from originating these ideas we now recognize for the horrors they are, merely took them to their logical conclusion; in judging the entire Jewish race an intolerable blight upon the genetic purity of a nation, and acting in accord with the vanguard of then-modern eugenic theory to prevent that blight from spreading further, the Third Reich demonstrated conclusively and incontrovertibly the fundamental inhumanity of the entire eugenic concept. In that demonstration, the modern objections to eugenic ideas find their origins and their vehemence -- this latter, in particular, perhaps all the more telling in a society whose disinterest in the hard-won lessons of history seems to grow by leaps and bounds.
Consider, too, that the leading exponents of eugenics in decades past were every bit the equal of anyone today in their conviction that they were the intelligent and enlightened wave of the future, and perhaps you may find it easier to understand how your "ghost from the past" could -- given enough arrogant confidence that we know enough not to repeat past mistakes but may this time rely upon ourselves to do it right -- turn out a vicious revenant after all.
However, we never did any eugenics. We thought about it: explored, in all its Consequentialist glory, every facet of the avenues available to us at the time; had our strategists and think-tanks outline hard-nosed evaluations of the pros and cons of such actions; but, then as now, it never came to anything. There was no top-down governmental push to force sterilization, or death, by active selection from the population. And as far as I can tell, with the way the US government is designed, there could be no such push; there isn't an arm of the government from which it could legitimately originate.
Even without the Nazi example to reflect upon, the deepest into depravity the American system would likely have sunk would be something like sterilizing entrants into our dystopian prisoner-industrial complex. :)
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Seperately, I must just point out, your last paragraph reeks of Reactionism[1] -- just because we were wrong, does not mean that we will be wrong in perpetuity, and there is no reason to flinch away from even evaluating the consequences of things like eugenics when those consequences are constantly changing alongside advances in technology.
There may come a point where there will be no negative consequences at all -- a point when, say, a mother can just take a pill to ensure that from then on she will conceive completely genetically-healthy children. To flinch away at that point would be madness. The question is, how close must we be before flinching away is not madness, but just sub-optimal in the net-present-value of global DALY[2]? And how close are we now?
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... or to summarize http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year
I always hate, in argumentation, to approach the realm of personalities -- but you strain credulity, not to mention Hanlon's Razor, far beyond bearing. Did you read the article I linked in the comment to which you replied? Have you ever read anything on the subject of the American eugenics movement? Or do you argue from this blatantly false premise in support of some ulterior motive? Perhaps you are ignorant; perhaps you are malicious; perhaps you are both. The facts of the matter being what they are, you cannot possibly be neither.
"We never did any eugenics."
Your third paragraph beggars belief even further. Perhaps you aren't aware that in California, the eugenic sterilization of prisoners was not made illegal until 1979 -- and the practice itself continued until three years ago.[1] And there's far worse in the history of American eugenics -- circa twenty thousand free men and women sterilized, at the order of eugenics boards which judged them unfit to reproduce, in the state of California alone. Twenty thousand! Are they not enough for you to acknowledge this atrocity for what it is? How many more do you require?
"We never did any eugenics."
The most generous assumption I can make is that your argument originates in a combination of dewy-eyed optimism regarding the advancement of human knowledge, and abysmal ignorance regarding history so recent it's barely left the category of current events. Even then, your argument remains morally repugnant in the extreme -- you argue, in essence, that the American eugenics movement was and remains utterly blameless, pure and innocent of any wrongdoing, because after all it was the Third Reich, not the United States, who in accord with the soundest eugenic theory committed enormities hideous enough to rate among the very foulest blemishes of our species' far from stainless history.
Had the Nazi eugenics programs arisen de novo, had they been the entire invention of Nazi theorists working from Nazi first principles without any relation to the eugenic theories then in American vogue, you would have a point. But they did not; ignore it though you may, it remains established and incontrovertible fact that Nazi eugenics were in every sense an outgrowth from, and a development of, American eugenics -- and not merely in the realm of pure theory; the early Nazi eugenics programs received not merely intellectual support, but actual funding, from such luminaries as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
American eugenicists trained Nazi eugenicists, collaborated with them, supplied them with funds, encouraged and abetted them in every possible fashion on their way to enormities such as "Action T4" -- a bloodless name for the eugenic murder of a third of a million unfortunates, that of course being only the figure known with certainty and very probably short of the real number of victims -- and even the scourging of the Jewish race itself.
On an individual level, such behavior might be called complicity to murder, perhaps conspiracy to murder, perhaps accessory before the fact of murder -- among the very gravest of crimes, even on that small scale. The same, scaled up to the level of whole societies, beggars description. And there you stand, bright-eyed and smiling, and blithely insisting that American eugenicists, American progressives, are pure as the driven snow, smirched by not the tiniest drop of the lakes and rivers and oceans of blood spilled in the name of their abominable theories. Our forebears, in their foolishness, unleashed horror beyond description and beyond compare. When they saw the enormities that resulted, it made them wise, and they laid down the tool which had turned so disastrously in their hands. Yet there you stand, smiling, ready to pick that tool up again. Tell me, how many millions will it take this time, to make you as wise as those who've gone before?
Oh, but of course, you cry, it won't happen that way this time! After all, we're so much better and smarter now than anyone before, and we will be ever so careful not to repeat the Nazi horror! And I have no doubt that's true. After all, we're so much better and smarter now than anyone before! And so, too, will be the new horror you unleash, and always with the most unimpeachable of good intentions:
"We never did any eugenics."
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Precisely what you mean by "Reactionism" I am not sure. I am no longer young enough to love chaos, and I am reasonably familiar with recent history; I suppose this might make me look reactionary on some subjects and from a certain point of view, but I have never since childhood dreamt of dignifying any opinion I might hold with a name involving either a majuscule or an "-ism".
Your links, I'm afraid, shed little light on the matter. The comic strip, while well executed in a technical sense, had no obvious point; I did get a little way into the Slate Star Codex page, but found myself unable to continue past the point where its author, for the sake of narrative convenience, defined "violent dispute" in such fashion as to exclude the American Civil War.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/califor...