I agree with your premise that talking about the things we do to improve the chances of success for the next generation shouldn’t be taboo, and that many of these things, such as selecting egg and sperm donors, are already happening today.
However, I want to point out one of the biggest dangers, which you did not mention. We THINK we know what genetics are desirable, but we view this through the narrow lens of our current environment. Who’s to say that today’s anxiety-stricken, over sensitive, neurotic individual isn’t the one who survives in times of danger while their easygoing cousins fail to recognize the danger and don’t survive? Who’s to say that today’s medical syndrome doesn’t provide protection against some currently unknown pathogen?
It’s hard to balance these ideas against the desire we all have for our kids to lead happy and successful lives in an immediate future world that’s not likely to look significantly different from our current world, but we should think long and hard about whether we know better than millions of years of evolution what actually constitutes good genes.
I agree that government should not impede the ability of potential parents to obtain relevant information. As someone who supports more freedom from government control, however, I certainly wouldn't want the state to be in charge of "improving the genetics of the next generation". Just because we already delegate too much to government is not a reason to let them even more in our private lives.
Interesting article. I have long felt that the term "eugenics" was a bit like the term "racist." My grandparents were first cousins who lived to be in their mid 80s and early 90's when they died in the 1970s. Their two children, however, died at 50 and 57 of heart disease and cancer. I'm their granddaughter, and I think they should never have been allowed to marry and reproduce. I say this because I believe it's wrong to saddle your own children and their children with a genetic legacy you wouldn't want for yourself.
So like a study you wrote this piece to sample responses, the breadth of loosely interlinked topics and the likelihood for conflation may have diluted it.
My assertion: the species is a lousy arbiter of success and direction.
We don’t even grasp the greater interdependencies, let alone know how to mildly dabble without creating dumpster fires…. Yet perhaps that is our one uniquely adaptive trait
This piece is quite provocative. However, Diana presumes more ability to project the outcome of a given pregnancy than we currently and are likely to have. Thus, it comes down to the statistics of probability, which turns many people off. I am all for full disclosure and freedom of action. I will have to think about the issue of outlawing sibling reproduction. That is a tough one, but I believe that the probabilities likely differ profoundly between sibling pairs depending on their genetic heritage. Thanks for the food for thought.
I think Incest taboo, state control of reproduction, and personal preferences need to be separated conceptually in any such discussion.
Parent child incest vs sibling incest and ability to have actual consent to power-imbalanced situations to me is a more significant discussion in and of itself. Likewise I think it’s startling naive to think that of all children born today, none are the result of our-of-wedlock incest. It’s famously well hidden.
State control of reproduction generally has gone quite badly historically due to the biases of the power entity that defines undesirable.
Personal preferences in what child two people wish to have seems to be the historic leveling point, from ancient prayers and shamans to modern genetic profiling.
Any given reproductive event in humans generates hundreds of point mutations in the gametes which fuse. Knowing what the resulting genetic profile has in store can help (necessary) with understanding the chances of healthy children: merely profiling parents is not (neither necessary nor sufficient).
Side note: I’m quite lucky my own parents profiles were close - I’m homozygous for the CCR5 Delta 32 mutation, and therefore almost completely immune to HIV/AIDS, smallpox, and the plague. Not all humans with similar genetic profiles produce lethal double-recessive conditions.
It would be hard to disentangle all the factors that have influenced our personal and our collective views on incest, consanguineous marriage, and other actions that could be considered "eugenics". Some hardwired instincts may have a role although it's hard to tell what's real and what's a "just so story". I've seen reports that marriages between people who grew up on the same kibbutz are rare, much less common than would be expected; and the reason might be due to a sort of unconscious instinct against sibling marriage. Torah has a long list of forbidden marriages, some of which might seem really weird to modern sensibilities, but I've seen scholars attribute them to preventing conflict within a polygamous household, not eugenics. Dynastic Egypt is the only culture I've ever heard of that actually encouraged sibling marriage by its inheritance rules, which might at least partly explain why there were so many shortlived dynasties.
On a lighter note, there's a comic description of an unfortunate outcome of a family's enforcement of its own eugenics rules in the book, "The Wind Done Gone", the memoir of Scarlett O'Hara's Black half-sister. Scarlett's mother was forbidden by the family to marry the love of her life, a distant cousin from a different branch of the family from New Orleans. The family's reason? "The Curse of Haiti". Their distant common ancestor was a Black slave, and the family was afraid any children would be visibly Black. (This might seem familiar to those who follow the gossip about the royals' criticism of Prince Harry's
I have run the same argument in my head but using a different exemplary analogy. Ask someone 3 questions:
1 Do you believe in eugenics? You will almost certainly receive a no.
2 Do you believe that a woman carrying a likely disabled baby has he right to an abortion? Likely a yes.
3 All women in Iceland have made this decision and the country has no people at all with Downs Syndrome. Is this wrong? Likely no.
So you agree with eugenics? There are two facts that need addressing with this issue - firstly the Nazis who wanted to breed blonde children didn't really know what they were doing, as DNA wasn't discovered till the 50s. Secondly they were selecting for arbitrary traits not genuinely targeted ones like avoidance of actual disease. The E word really need redefining as selective reproduction for reasons OTHER than objective health.
The discourse around 'eugenics' highlights the yawning gap that typically exists between intellectual and common sense reasoning. I enjoyed this piece very much for demonstrating that.
I agree with your premise that talking about the things we do to improve the chances of success for the next generation shouldn’t be taboo, and that many of these things, such as selecting egg and sperm donors, are already happening today.
However, I want to point out one of the biggest dangers, which you did not mention. We THINK we know what genetics are desirable, but we view this through the narrow lens of our current environment. Who’s to say that today’s anxiety-stricken, over sensitive, neurotic individual isn’t the one who survives in times of danger while their easygoing cousins fail to recognize the danger and don’t survive? Who’s to say that today’s medical syndrome doesn’t provide protection against some currently unknown pathogen?
It’s hard to balance these ideas against the desire we all have for our kids to lead happy and successful lives in an immediate future world that’s not likely to look significantly different from our current world, but we should think long and hard about whether we know better than millions of years of evolution what actually constitutes good genes.
I agree that government should not impede the ability of potential parents to obtain relevant information. As someone who supports more freedom from government control, however, I certainly wouldn't want the state to be in charge of "improving the genetics of the next generation". Just because we already delegate too much to government is not a reason to let them even more in our private lives.
Interesting article. I have long felt that the term "eugenics" was a bit like the term "racist." My grandparents were first cousins who lived to be in their mid 80s and early 90's when they died in the 1970s. Their two children, however, died at 50 and 57 of heart disease and cancer. I'm their granddaughter, and I think they should never have been allowed to marry and reproduce. I say this because I believe it's wrong to saddle your own children and their children with a genetic legacy you wouldn't want for yourself.
So like a study you wrote this piece to sample responses, the breadth of loosely interlinked topics and the likelihood for conflation may have diluted it.
My assertion: the species is a lousy arbiter of success and direction.
We don’t even grasp the greater interdependencies, let alone know how to mildly dabble without creating dumpster fires…. Yet perhaps that is our one uniquely adaptive trait
Great article. Very thought provoking. Love the point about contested terms and the tendency to euphemism.
This piece is quite provocative. However, Diana presumes more ability to project the outcome of a given pregnancy than we currently and are likely to have. Thus, it comes down to the statistics of probability, which turns many people off. I am all for full disclosure and freedom of action. I will have to think about the issue of outlawing sibling reproduction. That is a tough one, but I believe that the probabilities likely differ profoundly between sibling pairs depending on their genetic heritage. Thanks for the food for thought.
I think Incest taboo, state control of reproduction, and personal preferences need to be separated conceptually in any such discussion.
Parent child incest vs sibling incest and ability to have actual consent to power-imbalanced situations to me is a more significant discussion in and of itself. Likewise I think it’s startling naive to think that of all children born today, none are the result of our-of-wedlock incest. It’s famously well hidden.
State control of reproduction generally has gone quite badly historically due to the biases of the power entity that defines undesirable.
Personal preferences in what child two people wish to have seems to be the historic leveling point, from ancient prayers and shamans to modern genetic profiling.
Any given reproductive event in humans generates hundreds of point mutations in the gametes which fuse. Knowing what the resulting genetic profile has in store can help (necessary) with understanding the chances of healthy children: merely profiling parents is not (neither necessary nor sufficient).
Side note: I’m quite lucky my own parents profiles were close - I’m homozygous for the CCR5 Delta 32 mutation, and therefore almost completely immune to HIV/AIDS, smallpox, and the plague. Not all humans with similar genetic profiles produce lethal double-recessive conditions.
It would be hard to disentangle all the factors that have influenced our personal and our collective views on incest, consanguineous marriage, and other actions that could be considered "eugenics". Some hardwired instincts may have a role although it's hard to tell what's real and what's a "just so story". I've seen reports that marriages between people who grew up on the same kibbutz are rare, much less common than would be expected; and the reason might be due to a sort of unconscious instinct against sibling marriage. Torah has a long list of forbidden marriages, some of which might seem really weird to modern sensibilities, but I've seen scholars attribute them to preventing conflict within a polygamous household, not eugenics. Dynastic Egypt is the only culture I've ever heard of that actually encouraged sibling marriage by its inheritance rules, which might at least partly explain why there were so many shortlived dynasties.
On a lighter note, there's a comic description of an unfortunate outcome of a family's enforcement of its own eugenics rules in the book, "The Wind Done Gone", the memoir of Scarlett O'Hara's Black half-sister. Scarlett's mother was forbidden by the family to marry the love of her life, a distant cousin from a different branch of the family from New Orleans. The family's reason? "The Curse of Haiti". Their distant common ancestor was a Black slave, and the family was afraid any children would be visibly Black. (This might seem familiar to those who follow the gossip about the royals' criticism of Prince Harry's
I have run the same argument in my head but using a different exemplary analogy. Ask someone 3 questions:
1 Do you believe in eugenics? You will almost certainly receive a no.
2 Do you believe that a woman carrying a likely disabled baby has he right to an abortion? Likely a yes.
3 All women in Iceland have made this decision and the country has no people at all with Downs Syndrome. Is this wrong? Likely no.
So you agree with eugenics? There are two facts that need addressing with this issue - firstly the Nazis who wanted to breed blonde children didn't really know what they were doing, as DNA wasn't discovered till the 50s. Secondly they were selecting for arbitrary traits not genuinely targeted ones like avoidance of actual disease. The E word really need redefining as selective reproduction for reasons OTHER than objective health.
And more
https://open.substack.com/pub/sinatana/p/doctors-may-i-ask-you-a-question?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/sinatana/p/the-mask-of-all-skams?r=zickz&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
You may really want to add this to the pot☝️
Usually eugenics means imposing a selection, bias on a entire population. Not individuals within that population choosing mates, and or sperm banks.
The discourse around 'eugenics' highlights the yawning gap that typically exists between intellectual and common sense reasoning. I enjoyed this piece very much for demonstrating that.