Why Eugenics Is Bad

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday someone showed up in the comments on the Quality of Life Post to complain that Eugenics shouldn’t be a dirty word, and wouldn’t humanity be better off without say hemophilia, and he wasn’t scared of it because the Nazis were for it.

Which honestly is a caldron of a) biological ignorance b)historical ignorance c)wishful thinking that separates the dread disease from the carrier.

I’ll start with the last. When answering the comment, for some reason, I thought of it as the genetic side of it, perhaps because in my future worlds the sort of genetic manipulation where someone could go in and remove the gene that causes hemophilia is possible, and I’ve been living in my fiction way too much.

But the truth is, right now, where we live, the only way to “eliminate undesirable genetic traits” in a population is to kill or sterilize the carriers. And I’m again, no matter how crazy you think this might be, going to tell you that killing people for their own good is one of the greatest evils ever. Because it’s never for their own good, but for the interests and pleasure of those doing the killing. This is then wrapped and disguised in altruism.

You can’t know whether someone is perfectly happy with the quality of life that seems terrible to you. And you can’t judge whether someone with some kind of genetic defect will make a positive contribution in the world. (Even complete morons might make someone else smile. Heaven knows we keep dogs and cats who can’t talk and are very dumb compared even to human toddlers, because keeping them and looking after them makes us happy.) If you have to dressed killing someone as “for their own good” you know d*mn well it’s a bad thing. And the question is always always always “where does it stop?” I have perfect empathy with people who care for people at the end of their life and who think it would be best to spare horrible suffering for a few more hours or days or months, since the end seems inevitable. I’d even trust a few people, personally known to me to make that decision for me personally and if I had no other qualms about it (I do. They’re private and none of your business.) We watched my FIL unable to communicate, move, anything for the months it took him to die, and it certainly isn’t how I’d prefer to go.

The problem is every time we grant anyone, be it government, caretakers or institutions the right to make that decision and determine that “the end is inevitable, why not shorten the suffering” it always ends up in the excesses of the MAID program in Canada. Not sometimes. ALWAYS. We now have a long history of places that have allowed people to die to escape suffering (which more or less translates to persuading people to die so other people can stop suffering) and it always ends up in killing people deemed to have “lives unworthy of living” including the handicapped and depressed teenagers.

As someone who, at 33, was bullied into signing to have a nearly-always fatal procedure (in the state I was in by then) because “After all, what good are you doing your husband and children, and how much are you costing them” by doctors and nurses, in a concerted effort, I want all of you who believe doctors and nurses should have that power to think of the worst doctor you know having power over your lives when you’re helpless. (My husband came in before they could do the procedure, pointed out I was so far out of compus mentis just on low oxygen alone that the document would never stand, and that he’d sue them to their back teeth if they tried it. Then he fired the doctor who had ring-led the initiative. Things he didn’t even know included browbeating me on how useless I was because I was “only” a housewife. Younger son was under one, older son was 3. I was just starting my writing career. And I’ve lived 28 years since then. And done a lot of things.)

Yes, sure, hemophilia is bad. But it is not as bad as the life of the heir of Russia seems to indicate. While hemophiliacs at least in the nineteenth century and early twentieth (I haven’t checked current state of the art treatment) lived diminished lives and tended to die young, a lot of Victoria’s descendants with the disease got married, had children and died in their thirties. And a lot of their children are free from the defect. Who are you to judge their lives as unworthy? They weren’t unworthy to them. And again, some of them, at this historical distance at least, seem to have had much fuller and happier lives than “non-defective” people.

Same goes for mandatory sterilization which interferes with people’s ability to judge their own lives and make their own decisions. While I would throw no stones at a woman who carried the gene for hemophilia and chose to never have children — because I can imagine the pain and heartbreak — not only do these women have children (the majority of them) without the defect (I believe only ONE of Victoria’s children had it) but again, who are you to judge that their children’s lives will be unworthy.

And before you say “but the species.” This is where the stupidity about biology comes in. At the current rate of biological knowledge, we don’t actually know what’s best for the species. In fact, unless you have a crystal ball, it is highly unlikely we ever will.

Look, genes link with other genes in weird ways — here it bleeds to point one and my imaginary worlds — and it could be that if you eliminated hemophilia you also would eliminate some highly needed gene or fragment of one. Which a million years down the road will link up to another fragment of a gene in totally random chance, and thereby give humans the ability to live a thousand years. Or survive below zero. Or whatever. We don’t know and we can’t know. And while I am somewhat agnostic on being against tampering with the genes to eliminate the “bad thing” since that at least does have the potential to save humans a lot of suffering, I doubt our ability to do it advisedly in any time frame relevant to this discussion. (Say the next 100 or 200 years.)

More importantly thought, even given that ability by some magic, guess what? Evolution isn’t stopped or even slowed down. Mutations still occur all the time. (No one but us Mutties here.) You probably carry three or four no one has even bothered to track down. And 99% of mutations are bad. Most are bad at the level that isn’t worthy tracking down, such as giving you a slightly higher tendency to hang nails or ugly hair. But some are doozies.

You could perhaps eliminate hemophilia, given enough knowledge and ability, but in the hundred or so years you are doing it, three things just as bad or worse will show up.

Lest we forget Queen Victoria herself, grandmother and grave digger of empires (the later due to being a carrier of hemophilia) had no idea where this had come from because it had never “been a disease of our people.” And it was in fact either the legacy of a long ago forgotten ancestor that just came up in genetic shuffling OR a new mutation in her line. (Though it existed in others.)

To cleanse humanity of “everything bad” would take all of humanity’s results, take forever and, because we are still humans, be subjected to the same kind of creep we see with abortion and euthanasia.

Because there’s money in research, and because people are full of good intentions and want to spare others suffering, we’d start by editing the human genome to get rid of hemophilia, and we’d end by editing out genes for ugly faces, ingrown toe nails, depressive tendencies, inability to manage money, a tendency to talk back, and more and more “untraceable” and slippery characteristics until all there was left of humanity would be an army of look alike, amiable robots. That is supposing anything was left, because nothing is as fatal to a species as a restricted gene set.

And no, eugenics isn’t a bad word because Nazis. Eugenics is a bad word because right now it means killing people. And once humans start killing people for their own good, it never stops with whatever category the society has decided needs killing for being “lives unworthy of living.” (Not to mention that changes throughout history, btw.) Once you start running the killing, the mass graves fill up right quick.

The one thing that Nazis have stopped, rightly or wrongly, is serious study of human populations, because everyone is afraid that some bright boy or girl will decide to eliminate that population over there, because obviously they have bad genes.

To an extent, the extent that refers to “races” as perceived right now, this is no great loss. You see, “race” as the Nazis saw it was a ridiculous thing, because what they actually called “race” to things that were no such thing, including culture. Racially speaking most Jews (except for about 10% of their DNA) were basically Germans. It was their culture or perceived culture (most of them were also perfectly assimilated) that was different.

To study “races” understood as groups that share the same characteristics, we’d need to be either FAR tighter in racial definition, to the point that Portugal, tiny a country and genetically homogeneous as it is, would be something like 10 different races, or far broader, where everyone with skin from so pale they burn by thinking of the sun to lighter than toasted bread is one race.

And the later, at a guess, would devolve into utter incoherence and be ripe for the superimposing of the bias of the researchers.

Could there be interest in studying the human genome and physical characteristics correlated to mental or behavioral ones?

Sure. But those characteristics would have to be very tightly defined, and humans being the scrambled mess we are, again, it would probably devolve into “But I say subject A is more stubborn than subject B because he would not eat the spam and she would.” We really don’t need to pour more money down the rathole of irreproducible studies.

At a guess the valuable researches of the kind would be something like “people with this genetic fragment tend to have brown hair and wake up at five thirty am.” And I think we already have those. Eyes 23 and me report.

So, the Nazis didn’t even really stop the valuable/possibly useful human genome study.

Anything more than that and we’ll end up again in the search for the “gay gene” which can’t be found because at a guess sexual orientation (though certain types tend to run in families over the LONG run) seems to to be determined by a combination of genes, plus conditions of gestation, plus early childhood experiences. ALL sexual orientation, not just the ones that deviate from the norm.

All these things being more or less untraceable is a good thing, because humans being what they are, the maniacs must take anything and push it to eleven. Which means if let’s say the “gay gene” were traceable, I imagine we’d end up with countries made up entirely of gay people, countries where gay people were never born, and some unspeakable combinations that none of us, right now can think of.

I can look at it and think it amazing fodder for a dystopic future world, but not one I’d like to write, except maybe as a comedy, thank you so much.

It seems eugenics, in the end, comes from each individual human’s idea that things are badly arranged and that those people, over there, would be much better if only they were more like him/properly arranged.

The results of applying such notions are always ridiculous and appalling in equal measures.

It takes all kinds to make a world. At least a world worth living in.

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This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
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196 thoughts on “Why Eugenics Is Bad”

    2. That’s because species, like race (but much less so) is a human construct. And the “Higher orders”, from genus up, are even more so. But still not as much as race.

      As an aside, Poul Andersen wrote a novel, “There Will Be Time”, in which existed a “Withit’s Collegiate Dictionary”, in which every race, white, black, brown, yellow and red, carried the definition “From the color, which varies from brown to ivory”. Seems to cover it…😉

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    3. Sure we do. It’s reality that’s wrong, with all of its animals that don’t fit precisely and unambiguously in our definition.

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  2. Well thought out and well said. Thank God Dan rescued you. I have a personal stake in the abortion issue because my mother was adopted as a baby. If she had been born 50 years later, she likely would have been aborted. Likewise the love of my life’s crazy mother told her when my wife was a teenager that if abortion had been legal, she would have used it. Yeah, that was the kind of childhood my wife had.

    As Dr. Zero once wrote, “The paralyzing fear of a dark future is a despicable, cowardly reason to deny the next generation their shot at making it brighter.”

    Also, when I was growing up, I pondered the rampant marijuana use of my contemporaries, and concluded that they had observed morons and how happy they always seemed to be and decided that the path to happiness was becoming a moron. Those who would “better mankind” should contemplate that.

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    1. Oh, there’s an averted abortion in my family tree. Relative was planning a trip to Mexico to get one at a time they weren’t legal in the US. Friend of relative talked her out of it—but also used that information later to pressure relative to keep the baby herself.

      Not exactly adoption, but functionally so.

      They also offered my mother a “therapeutic” abortion after she got rubella while pregnant. Declined, and my sister is in the lucky minority of no birth defects.

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      1. offered my mother a “therapeutic” abortion after she got rubella while pregnant. Declined, and my sister is in the lucky minority of no birth defects.

        ……………….

        Aunt wasn’t offered “therapeutic” abortion. Cousin wasn’t lucky for no birth defects. Legally blind, but had some correction with glasses, and partially deaf. She did attend the School for Blind boarding in Salem. She played (plays?) piano. Unfortunately, for reasonable reasons, she is estranged from her family and therefore the rest of the family. I haven’t seen, or heard from her or of her, in over 40 years. She is alive, or was as of a year or so ago. We know that much.

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    2. I was an unwanted child.

      I was placed for adoption through an agency.

      I have, online, actually had one maniac tell me I were better off dead. Because STATISTICALLY, unwanted children turn out to be bad people. (When challenged for a cite, the crazed person did not provide such.)

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      1. That’s nonsense, but often used. I also was an unwanted child. So was husband. Neither of us put up for adoption, but both unwanted children. And we knew so quite young. (Well, we were both wanted by our dads.)

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      2. Absolutely nonsense. Niece was adopted. I guaranty that people were lined up to adopt her. Including us. Sister won out. Bio mom stated Catholics, didn’t say practicing, but did require baptism + one parent had to be a teacher.

        “But all the children in foster care!!!!” Most aren’t adoptable. Usually because both parental rights haven’t been severed. That doesn’t count extended relatives who could take in to foster the child. Nor the inability to for non-same skin colored parents to adopt.

        In addition, most states, both parents have to sign off on infant being put out for adoption. If one won’t, too bad. Oregon isn’t (or wasn’t 35 years ago when we were looking into adoption) one of those states. If not married, the bio father has no rights unless the bio mother grants them. Encouraged, but not required. In niece’s case both parents signed away parental rights.

        On the flip side, another niece’s husband has a son who shares 50/50 custody with the bio mom. Has since the boy’s birth, even while nephew-in-law (NIL) was deployed on a ship in the Navy. NIL’s half week the baby spent the time with NIL’s mother from the time the baby was born. Once NIL and niece were seriously dating, before engaged, the toddler (by then) stayed with niece. Split is Sunday afternoon to Wednesday (after school now, but noon during before and during breaks now), Wednesday afternoon to Sunday morning. Niece and NIL have the latter schedule. All with no legal intervention.

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    3. I was lucky. When I was a young adult (20s, perhaps), Mom told me that I had been premature. Asked by how much. “A few years.” No resentment; if anything I got a wee bit more of the opposite. Being the baby of the family, much later morphed into “He’s my rock.”. (Yes, there’s a pun in there; not sure if Mom saw it, or if it was Greek to her.)

      Dad was barely tolerated by his mother. She put the Dis in dysfunctional.

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  3. “Which means if let’s say the “gay gene” were traceable, I imagine we’d end up with countries made up entirely of gay people, countries where gay people were never born, and some unspeakable combinations that none of us, right now can think of.”

    Anyone else remember the actual racists who proposed researching a “sickle cell bomb” to get rid of blacks in the 60s and 70s? This is a door that you do NOT want to open, because you may be the one that ends up dead. None of us know for certain what’s in our family trees, or how they will express.

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    2. I never heard that, though $BIG_CITY (Not-south, but got a lot of relocation courtesy WWII jobs) had more than its share of problems. OTOH, by the time sickle cell anemia got well known, I was in college elsewhere. The main thing about it I recall was on Halloween circa 1973, when some black students were going door-to-door encouraging donations for some related(?) charity(?) from other students. And not the well-off ones. “We don’t have any cash. Want some candy?”

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  4.  But it is not as bad as the life of the heir of Russia seems to indicate.

    We should note that as unpleasant as the disease undoubtedly was, it was communists who killed him in the end, not hemophilia.

    Personally, I’m okay with gene editing to remove unambiguously bad single-gene mutations (the various hemophilias, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, other things that lead to a short and miserable life for children) We know fixing those won’t cause any real harm, as most of us *don’t* have mutations in those genes and are just fine.

    I don’t think there’s a single gene for “ugly”, so that would be a problem at a whole different level. :-)

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    1. That’s what David Weber’s Grayson’s thought…. their targeting was just a skosh off, and not all the interactions were known…..

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      1. Their genetic engineering might not have been perfect, but at least they enabled people to live on that toxic planet. What’s worse, social issues caused by gender imbalance, or extinction?

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        1. The phrase “least awful option” applies. And only a population extinction event would remotely justify it.

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          1. During the Time Of Isolation, Lois Bujold’s Barrayar dealt with mutations the old-fashioned way. In a colony suddenly cut off from the galaxy, on a planet that couldn’t support Terrestrial life without extensive modification, with their industry and technology breaking down and wearing out, they too were facing extinction.

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            1. And she shows the nasty consequences, too, in The Mountains of Mourning. A perfectly-healthy baby is killed for having a cleft palate, something easily correctable by surgery now that the Time of Isolation is over. But the killer, who hails from the remote countryside, thinks he/she is doing his/her duty by eliminating mutations.

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          2. TXRed explored that in the two prequel novels to the Cat Among Dragon series. “That gene doesn’t do anything. Slicing it won’t hurt.” Hubris is the first one.

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    2. I remember reading a screed about a Glorious Future written back in the 1950s. You know, the ones predicted to hold flying cars. The author rhapsodized about future developments of genetic editing–like keeping a girl from being “too tall”.

      I was horrified at the author thinking this was a GOOD thing.

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          1. And the bed is being delivered. Can’t WAIT to see what Procrustes will come up with…..

            https://scitechdaily.com/a-word-processor-for-genes-scientists-unveil-fundamentally-new-mechanism-for-biological-programming/

            Arc Institute scientists have discovered the bridge recombinase mechanism, a revolutionary tool that enables fully programmable DNA rearrangements.

            Their finding, detailed in a recent Nature publication, is the first DNA recombinase that uses a non-coding RNA for sequence-specific selection of target and donor DNA molecules. This bridge RNA is programmable, allowing the user to specify any desired genomic target sequence and any donor DNA molecule to be inserted.

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  5. I’ll make no secret of the fact that I believe in efforts to maintain good genetic hygiene. The problem is that eugenics fell into the hands of the Left – and the Left, ever since the French Terror, has wanted to murder their way to Utopia. Eugenics was merely an excuse.

    The way I look at things, a sensible eugenic policy has ground rules:
    1. Everybody has a genetic value that differs from person to person.
    2. Nobody gets to choose their genes. Because of this, there is no virtue associated with having a high genetic value, no vice associated with a low genetic value.
    3. You ARE accountable for what you do with your genes.
    4. We don’t kill anyone for being inconvenient. We are all going to be inconvenient sometime.
    5. Policy should therefore encourage people with a high genetic value to have large families, people with a low genetic value to have fewer children. Having none might be ideal, but asking people to forgo a future is probably too much to ask.
    6. Cultural exhortation, combined with tax breaks, are the most sensible way to accomplish this.

    (Putting on my solid dureum armor now, I expect heavy return fire.)

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      1. And note when pondering tax incentives that the authors of the current tax code cannot manage even first order consequences very well at all.

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    2. Yeah, “encourage people with a low genetic value to have fewer children.” Sounds good. How, exactly? Higher taxes? Fewer social benefits? Societal disapproval isn’t going to be enough. And say, who gets to decide what genes are “high value” and which are “low value”? On what criteria? You’re on top of a big slope there, dude, and you’re wearing greased-up roller skates.

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        2. Being uppity is like Sickle Cell trait: it confers an advantage when a deadly disease is endemic, but there’s a cost.

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    4. “There’s no virtue to having higher genetic value, or vice with lower” except when we’re deciding policy, where folks with higher genetic value OBVIOUSLY get tax incentives and other preferential treatment.

      Seriously? This is the argument you choose to make?

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    6. Mike, I agree with point #5, all except the word, “Policy”. Too many people think that means government doing the incentives, which is at least part of what Sarah is talking about.

      Just allow private charities to offer a stipend for those who remain childless, and other private charities to offer same for those who have large families. And let those charities decide the criteria, and I don’t give a tinker’s damn if they “discriminate”. Their bucks, their choice.

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      1. TXRed nails the entire issue: If either government or insurance is the one paying for it, they have all kinds of incentive to set the policy to reduce the costs…. and these therapies will not be initially cheap.

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        1. So long as people are given choice of insurance carrier, including none at all, and they bear the costs of said policy, so?

          But government, I agree, should be kept several parsecs away.

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            • Insurance companies operate on the basis of collect as much as they can in premiums while paying as little as possible in claims. That’s their fundamental economic principle. And before you dispute that, several people here (including me) have personal experience with denial of claims on preventative regimens because they were deemed more expensive than having something they prevent kill us later.
            • Given the myriad of regulations insurance companies operate under, separating them from government is something King Solomon would find impossible.

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            1. It’s because medical insurance is used all wrong. Insurance is supposed to spread the cost of large but rare expenses over a lot of people, very few of whom will ever actually incur them. Misusing insurance to pay for small, common expenses only increases overhead costs. That’s why ‘home advantage’ insurance policies are a scam — all appliances will eventually fail and have to be replaced, so the insurance premiums have to cover the cost of new appliances, plus profit for the insurance company. You’re much better off stuffing the money under your mattress and using it to buy new appliances yourself.

              So it is with ‘comprehensive’ every-scratch-and-sniffle medical insurance. For small expenses, the bureaucratic overhead costs more than the actual treatment, and allows the insurance company to dictate what treatments the doctor is allowed to offer. Doctors waste their time filling out paperwork while the bureaucrats play doctor. Having the government ‘help’ makes the problem a hundred times worse. See 0bamacare for a horrible example.

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              1. Not only Home Appliance insurance, but the now widely pushed on TV vehicle warranty insurances. My question on the large repairs are “and how much did you pay for the warranty?”

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            2. Oh, I agree that’s the insurance model. Always has been until the gov’t decided to stick its nose into things.

              The problem is, was, and ever shall be the use of force to get your way. No arbitrator who cared about his business model would allow the shenanigans insurance companies pull like unilaterally changing terms and conditions. They only get away with it because your only recourse is a government court or an arbitrator selected by the insurance company.

              And I’m not as black pilled about separating gov’t. Stein’s Law.

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    7. (Putting on my solid dureum armor now, I expect heavy return fire.)

      You should, since you assumed your conclusion, and talked about “encouraging” a value that cannot be rationally established, and does reduce people to your judgement of their genetic value.

      When we don’t even know what the heck is going on now.

      I, genetically, am unable to process folic acid. Got a big genetic test pile done by a doctor who really wanted to get me to abort. About the only thing she could latch on to was a rather expensive folate permutation that I “had” to take, because of that genetic failure.

      It’s not even a question, it’s not an “if triggered.” I am biologically incapable of processing folic acid, my children will be born with spina bifida. This genetic defect doesn’t do anything else.

      Small problem– I actually process it just fine, going off of none of my kids having even the slightest issue.

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          1. Which is why my wife, when pregnant, was encouraged to take a vitamin with extra folic acid or folate (don’t remember exactly which form it’s in in the vitamin), to make sure the baby got enough to avoid spina bifida. We did it, because although she probably was getting enough from her diet anyway, the vitamin was cheap enough that it was worth it.

            Standard cost-benefit analysis. Is the problem rare or common? Are the consequences of the problem happening severe or mild? And is the mitigation cheap or expensive? (“Expensive” doesn’t just mean cost, it can mean side effects, etc.) If the problem is rare but the consequences are severe, e.g. getting into a car accident while not belted in, then you fasten your seat belt because the mitigation is cheap. If the problem is common but the consequences are mild, e.g. catching the common cold, and the mitigation is expensive, e.g. locking down the whole country and making everyone wear masks, then cost-benefit analysis would say don’t do it. (The only way they were able to sell the Covid-19 lockdowns was by claiming that the consequences were severe; they would never have been able to sell that to people with a disease like the common cold or even the flu, which people are used to and know that the consequences are mild. Yes, the flu does kill people — the Spanish Flu killed millions in the early 20th century — but for MOST people MOST of the time it’s a few days of feeling cruddy and then they get over it with no consequences beyond that. That’s part of why they’re not getting anywhere with packing people over bird flu: because so many people hear “flu” and think “not severe”.)

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            1. I’ve always taken folic acid, for exactly that reason.

              Which made finding out that I supposedly can’t use it stuck in my mind so well. ^.^

              Another example is aspirin for heart attacks. It only works in something like two thirds of the population, and that can be determined by a genetic test. (They think.)
              But it doesn’t cause any problems, and it’s cheap. So, it’s just a default.

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              1. I think Insty did a link to a relevant book on Spanish Flu. They were using Aspirin in gram(!) quantities as The Miracle Drug, and indications were that a substantial portion of the fatalities would now be recognized as resulting from Aspirin overdoses.

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                1. I looked for that in my copy of John Barry’s excellent The Great Influenza but didn’t find it. If you think of the title at some point, please post it, as I’d be interested in getting another take on Spanish Flu.

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                  1. Not sure about the book, but El Gato Malo talked about the aspirin doses here. (Ctrl+F “iatrogenic” if you want to skip the COVID discussion.)

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                    1. Great link; thanks! I knew aspirin could be toxic in very high doses, but it never occurred to me that panic might induce caretakers to force fatal doses of it on patients. Granted, we knew a lot less about a lot of things (everything, actually) in 1918. I’m still puzzled that in The Great Influenza John Barry describes (in horrifying detail) what a cytokine storm is, but barely mentions aspirin. I have to wonder if aspirin in high doses could worsen cytokine storm damage and make it fatal.

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                  2. I’m not sure about the book, since I’ve been dealing with distracting issues, (Squirrel!) The El Gato Malo article has a good bit of it, and referenced the key(?) paper on the issue. His link is broken, but a search got the full paper beyond the abstract he posted.

                    https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441

                    Searching for “spanish flu aspirin” brings up several articles, including such conspiracy theory places like the New York Times and Science Daily. :) AFAICT, the first page hits seem to be keying off that paper. Note that some of the doses tried for the Spanish flu are well above what’s now recognized as the LD50.

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                    1. I read the article, too. A few of the dosages were over LD100. As in “Take that much aspirin and you WILL die!”

                      I’ve seen repeated in a few places that if aspirin were submitted today as a new drug it would not be approved for use by the FDA. Too many adverse effects.

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                    2. Wow. That’s a hell of a thing to learn.

                      As to “iatrogenic” and its applicability to recent circumstances, color me deeply unsurprised. I’m pretty sure the “how the hell did he survive” case I know was partly because they removed him from the vent. (To be fair, he *did* have blood clots in his lungs, so that was a proper treatment when they first put him on the vent. But it probably should have been shorter-term than it was.)

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            2. At this point, pretty much all women are encouraged to take folate (or its precursor, folic acid/ vitamin B9) when pregnant or actively trying to conceive, to limit neural tube defects. Toxicity is generally low if one doesn’t overdose on supplements; there is no evidence for toxicity from any dose when derived from food.

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      2. Heaven forbid that the doctor could possibly be wrong. Like the one who assured me that my Covid symptoms were obviously not-Covid, because $SPOUSE and I had them in mid-March, and it wasn’t officially recognized in Flyover County until some time in April.

        I’ll skip the rant; TPTB didn’t provide the county test kits for C-19; all resources went to Blue areas. Until April. #headdesk #teamheadsonpikes

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  6. Nod, “for their own good” really means “for the good of the State”. IE What our “Glorious Leaders” think is a Good Thing.

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  7. It all comes down to “Who decides?”

    If it’s anyone other than the compos mentis individual in question or their appropriately deputized fiduciary/attorney in fact, that’s bad. More badness as a frothy frosting layer runs from advising, convincing, “counseling”, bullying, etc., all the way up to “rounding up at gunpoint and shoving into shipping containers”.

    All the “they do not realize what is really for their own good” is so diametrically opposed to the basic foundational concept of individual rights that it’s just fundamentally offensive to even have people espousing this crap yet again.

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    1. Well, and I’m sorry, but I think not even compos mentis OR their guardian if not can be allowed carte blanche–too many ‘guardians’ may fall into the “but it’s not convenient for ME’ and/or get pressured into it by medical/insurance people of the “but it’s too expensive/inconvenient for US” trap, and if a person is non compos mentis–how can we judge their quality of life? I would say except in cases of a distinct DNR living will–and that is ONLY in a case of DNR, not “already handicapped in some way” we can’t judge the quality of life of another person, whether or not they can communicate it. The default must *always* fall to “preserve life, and care for them to the best of your ability.”

      (If I’m understanding what you meant there. It’s early on a Monday, and brain is still wishing it was in bed.)

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  8. People tend to forget that the U.S. practiced eugenics on a large scale for most of the 20th century. (One of the reasons why Woodrow Wilson is history’s greatest monster…) Virginia was the first state to legally authorize the compulsory sterilization of the mentally defective and “unfit,” in 1924. That year, Carrie Buck was committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded, on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior, and promiscuity. After all, she came from a poor family and had borne a child out of wedlock! (after being raped by a family member…). What more evidence was needed? Her mother was already at the Colony (for being poor, having a child out of wedlock, and having syphilis), and her baby was probably going to end up the same way. Carrie was a perfect test case for the new law, and thus Buck vs. Bell began its trek towards the Supreme Court.

    Shockingly, the Supreme Court decided 8-1 that sterilizing people without consent was perfectly fine if it was necessary to get rid of “those people.” As Justice Holmes wrote for the majority, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The decision in Buck vs. Bell accelerated the practice of eugenic sterilization in the U.S.– and worldwide. In fact, Nazi Germany not only honored the founders of Virginia’s eugenics program but took notes for their own operations. Buck vs. Bell was cited, in defense of Nazi atrocities, at the Nuremberg Trials.

    Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) cooled the enthusiasm for eugenic sterilizations a bit in the U.S., but they didn’t end in Virginia until 1979, when the law was finally repealed. More than 7,000 people (that we know of) were involuntarily sterilized in Virginia during that period, at various institutions. Many more were sterilized illegally before 1924 at the Colony. Very few had any actual mental deficit; they were just poor, and had inconvenient babies, and maybe were a little uppity, and so the powers that be decided to mutilate them.

    Everyone knew what went on at the Colony. And everyone knew other (poor) women in the community who had gone to the doctor for an appendectomy and never were able to have children afterward. And if you scratch the surface, there are still people in the community who think it was the right thing to do, to get rid of “those people.” Oh, maybe the Nazis went too far, but you have to admit they had a point…

    So we don’t have to wonder how eugenics would go in the U.S. It’s already happened here.

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    2. I grew up less than fifteen miles from the Colony (which then became the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital, and then the Central Virginia Training Center, before finally closing down a few years ago) and knew people who worked there after the sterilization era. And I learned nothing about it during my schooling before graduating HS in 1982. Nothing. It wasn’t taught. People knew, but they didn’t know, y’know? To this day, Virginia Route 334 that runs by the grounds is still Colony Road.

      Sometimes slippery slope is a fallacy. I don’t think it is with eugenics. It’s just too tempting for those that come into control of it.

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      1. Indeed. The temptation to wipe out “those people” will always be too great to put the weapon of legal eugenics in anyone’s hands, because it always turns them into Good Men.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. There has to be a term somewhere to describe the times when there really IS a slippery slope and people don’t want you to see it. The most accurate one I can think of: Just the Tip. Because a “just the tip” proposition is exactly what eugenics is.

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        1. Folks who say that something is a slipper slope fallacy as a dismissal are engaging in the fallacy fallacy.

          A fallacy is a thing in formal logic that, if all the inputs are correct, will result in a correct output. An argument being fallacious means nothing except for that the conclusion is not 100% certain given accurate information.

          The Slippery Slope is an observed pattern. It is not formal logic, it does not say “if this, then always that.” It says, “when this barrier is removed, for that change, the following changes tend to be made as well because this barrier has been removed.”

          There’s also a tendency to incorrectly assert that someone is engaging in a slippery slope fallacy because the accuser doesn’t want to engage with the actual argument.

          “We need to get rid of X, because it is not fair that it stops A.”
          “X is also stopping B, C, and D. If we get rid of X to enable A, it will result in B, C, and D.”
          “Aaaaaah SLIPPERY SLOPE YOU HATER!!!!!”

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          1. One of the “Fun Things” about “Screaming About Slippery Slopes” is that plenty of the Left have been known to use the “Slippery Slope Argument”.

            One idiot elsewhere is known to “scream” about “Religious Freedom vs Gay Rights” by claiming “Those Evil Christians Will Do Terrible Things To Gays And Claim It’s Their Religious Freedom At Work”. [Shakes Head Sadly]

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                2. Especially since this is the group that in the very next breath advocates for abortion up to (and sometimes AFTER) point of birth if the baby is “bad for the mother’s mental health” (ie, inconvenient/unwanted)

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            2. Moslems are already doing terrible things to all sorts of people for their religion, and the Leftroids are screeching about what Christians might do?

              Seems to be a common left-wing trait — “Everybody’s rights must be violated because a few people might do [horrible thing]!!” No evidence is presented that they ever would, “but they could!!”

              Leftroids whip up hysteria over imagined evils while ignoring the very real evils staring them right in the face.

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    3. Indeed. All of this.

      …I hate how history is taught in school. You’d think this would be something to burn into people’s memories. But no. “We’ll get it right this time!” is the eternal progressive cry.

      No. It’s never right. Ever.

      Liked by 1 person

          1. Oh, yes. Only invincible ignorance excuses sin. (Which does not mean absolutely invincible. Invincible by reasonable efforts.)

            Crass or supine ignorance, where the person made no effort, does not excuse sin at all.

            Affected or studied ignorance aggravates it.

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    4. Not only The Colony down south. But Reservation systems. Women go to a hospital to have a baby, emerge with baby, but unable to conceive again (tubes tied). Not sure if happened ever go into hospital for medical, say appendices, and emerge sterile, both females and males, or not. One way to prevent growth of the populations. Uncomfortable truths of what governments do. Even ours in north America (both US and Canada).

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    5. There’s still issues with folks, usually working in rural areas, who decide to sterilize the women or girls they’re working on. Not a lot of medical personnel, not a lot of folks to identify malpractice.

      Proving it is really hard, especially when there’s no support for recognizing that they were wronged. After all, babies end your life, you know.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. This. My first-line doctor was the Covid not-vaxx pusher, and we had some interesting discussions. I’d love to drop him, but there’s one hospital complex in the county, and the non-tribal clinics are pretty underequipped. Anything that needs specialists or hospital, one complex. Different doc, same problem. Sigh.

        Next closest complex is 2 hours away by road.

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  9. The future was yesterday:

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved gene therapy products for several conditions, including cancer, spinal muscular atrophy, hemophilia and sickle cell disease. But for most people, gene therapy is available only as part of a clinical trial.

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      1. For you and snelson134:

        The current gene insertion treatments all have known risks, and are not only expensive but are limited in with whom they can be attempted. They are simpler in patients with blood disorders, as basically these days you end up following a procedure similar to a bone marrow transplant. The day has not yet come when a little simple gene insertion is simple and safe, but it likely will be so eventually.
        I’ve followed along sickle cell treatment closely out of academic interest as my first research patients more than 50 years ago were sicklers, and at that time we all were hoping what we were doing would be trying to stave off morbidity and mortality for the afflicted until a real gene therapy could be available.
        TO the best of my knowledge, none of the current approved treatments result in a change that is transmitted to the next generation. Of course most of the current treatments render fertility very unlikely. That also likely will change.
        That’s when it gets really tricky.
        Be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just as there are plenty of horrid people and practices in the practice of medicine, law, politics, and even farming and horticulture, we should not abandon those professions entirely, nor offer them oversight-free existence. Balance is necessary.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Hear !!! Hear !!! Vizzinisguess has an excellent point. The procedures themselves are not necessarily evil/bad. It is the practitioners and their intent that make it bad. The procedures are like guns or knives, in the right hands with good intent they can do good things. In the wrong hands they are dangerous and evil, this is the way of almost every invention since we took control of fire. I myself would not be typing this without Genetic engineering as rituximab a drug used as an adjunct in cancer treatment would not exist without it.

          It is good to hear that the genetic treatments are making advances the first ones for Cystic Fibrosis briefly looked promising and then started having side effects. A plethora of genes would be nice to treat, including CF, Type I diabetes, Hemophilia, and many muscular dystrophies among them. Many other issues might be amenable to these kinds of treatments including many autoimmune issues and the effects of the BRCA gene(s). Some things would be desirable to treat in utero, including various forms of trisomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy) and Things like Tay-Sachs. One here might be very controversial. Trisomy 21 (aka Down’s Syndrome) is not directly lethal and is far more treatable than it once was. It used to be living past 30 was a miracle for a person with Down’s syndrome now they live well into their 60s with only moderate medical intervention. Those persons I have met with Downs syndrome are some of the most joyful lovable folks you’d ever meet and the world might be lesser without them. And yet one can only wonder what their lives would be like without that disability. And of course, they can not hope to choose as likely the choice would have to be made early in gestation

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      2. I would happily use CRISPR tech or something to get rid of crappy genetic depression but I’m an adult who can make my own life choices.

        Also tomorrow is my birthday 🥳

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    2. The FDA….. and the medical profession as a whole….

      Given their recent track record on manipulating RNA, would you trust a single thing they claimed about manipulating DNA? Why?

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      1. I would trust them to confirm stuff I already am sure of with regard to impossibilities, with some caveats. If they so confirm my priors.

        Yet, I might still be wary of trying to use those confirmations as evidence to persuade others.

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  10. IMO Talk from pro-eugenics folks is very similar to talk from pro-communism folks.

    IE “We can do it correctly this time”.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I have a friend who has cystic fibrosis. Currently she has good odds for living into her 50s and having children. She is trying.

        The CF changed her entire families life and certsinly her own. Her parents left Bangladesh and came to the US before she was born because she was.diagnosed with CF in the womb. They came here and sertled here for medical care for their unborn child.

        Because of the CF, she was allowed to plan a future that did not include marriage and babies at 18. She wanted that… and did get married….and the guy literally left town with the dowry.

        so she studied Cyber Security…and did very well at it. While going to school she worked at Walmart as a stocker. Give her small stature and the weight of thungs she had to move, up to a third her body weight routinely and occassionally half, she has a weight lifter build and approach to things.

        When an opportunity came to shlift to something less taxing, being a pharma tech, she took it. She asked my help in preparing for the exam….it was hard as she had no chemical or bio background and word problems were a problem….but she worked hard and passed.

        She is married again and they think the paperwork is done for him to come stateside. We will know later this month.

        Her family was always clerks and store owners maybe a little handicraft, but never knowledge people. Her parents supported her, even the Imams at her mosque did…but they couldnt help her. She had me and others.

        So her CF changed the lives of a lot of people.

        Also she has two younger sisters. The older was a typical shallow teen. She tried working and quit in less than a week because it was no fun. Shortly after she turned 18, she agreed to an arranged marriage and disappeared.

        The younger is wild and already got involved with the law…then when her mother tried to rein her in using old woeld tactics she got family services on her whole family. Fortunately, the girl is almost 18, her parents got excellent council and since they are brown muslim immigrants no one in the government wanted to get involved.

        shetold her parents she is splitting when she turns 18. No job no talent lots of resentment and privilege.

        it underscores the notion that adversity can make you better.

        Had they aborted her…or if the genes were gone, all their lives and lots more aside would be different.

        So yes lesrn to fix the probelms but recognize possible unknown results

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    2. I was going to suggest keeping Marxists from breeding would be a good eugenics policy, then realized they already do a pretty good job of that themselves, biologically. Probably better to eliminate their means of memetic reproduction by eliminating/marginalizing public education, and less deleterious to liberty.

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      1. The problem with Marxists isn’t their genes, it’s the ideas in their heads. The only way to fight an idea is with another idea.

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    4. IE “We can do it correctly this time”.

      …because we are obviously sooooo much smarter than everybody that ever tried to implement [Really Bad Idea] in the past.

      Couldn’t possibly be ‘There is no right way to do a wrong thing’, naw.

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  11. Eugenics isn’t a bad word because Nazis. Nazis are a bad word because eugenics.

    (And the socialism, of course.)

    Liked by 2 people

    2. I think there is probably an objective truth model of human behavior, perhaps God alone knows and can know.

      It is possible that we can fairly and appropriately think of this truth model as an infinite series. (With my usual caveats about ‘if we are talking about enough people’, and so forth. )

      If so, I think there are two details that I am currently confident of, and seem critical. One is that everyone trying to approximate this series with a theoretical model is at best using a finite number of terms, and two that this is not a well behaved infinite series.

      Lots of engineers use a theoretical method involving usefully approximating a non-linear function they can’t handle, but linearizing it around a point with a taylor series expansion. In applied mathematics, a lot of useable infinite series have each term smaller than the previous, so with some number of terms one can know that the approximation is within some maximum error. There are some other criteria, that I understand worse, for well behaved or usefu infinite series, as far as I can tell.

      With this analogy, we can maybe make some predictions about behavior of people holding ideas involving specific terms.

      One of the key ideas may be about the human knowability of the truth of behavior theory. With the really important related ideas being feeling about how to proceed, and how to feel about disagreement or refusal.

      There are two elements of knowability. One is whether human science is limited to a large but finite number of terms. The other is whether the behavioral state space really does require infinite terms. Well, the infinity may only be an engineer’s infinity. If there are a maximum finite number of humans, then depending on individual behavior state spaces, the large group maximum terms may explode significantly combinatorily, but still technically be finite. Does the individual state space include continus variables? Does it preserve a time history, and integrate previous values? Possibly those can give us true infinity, possibly it is only an ‘infinity’ that is large enough for all practical purposes.

      (As an aside, starvation of and brutality towards a population might effectively reduce individual state spaces in some way. It still sufficiently permits totalitarians to be surprised.)

      NSDAP, communists and libertarians may fit the description of being theory modelers trying to translate that into aggregate scale behavior. Potentially this is a surprising result. If this is true, then this criteria is at least two terms. (Knowability, plus ‘do x about that’.)

      Key points of classification include ‘how to feel about disagreement or refusal’. Some possibilities include passively murderous, and actively murderous. (Passively murderous is a criteria I need for a different can of worms, outside the current scope.) Actively murderous is ‘the theory I want is very good, therefore people in the way of that are bad, and I am just to kill them.’

      Eugenics is a theory that certain biological heritable characteristics are really bad, combined with being actively murderous about trying to make that theory into reality.

      However, this was far from the only theory that NSDAP and communist parties were and are making efforts to translate into reality, nor the only one that they were actively murderous in support of.

      Communists and Nazis have/had a lot of leader magic thoery in common, for example.

      Eugenics is less a primary goal for the communists, but is still absolutely something that they wind up doing, for whatever reason.

      another thing in common for the NSDAP, and communists, is that they drew a combination of not always competent thoery obsessives, criminals with theoretical skills, and criminals with no theoretical interests, only a criminal drive or appetite of some sort.

      In summary, I have made a confused mess of theoretically classifying behaviors. Future work may include figuring out whether I am only crazy, or am also on some sort of correct path right now.

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      1. A lot of the outright communists, particularly the Soviets, were explicitly anti-Darwinian – see Lysenkoism – and wanted to treat humans an infinitely malleable blank slate.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. Nazis got most of that eugenics stuff from us. the US, especially the progressives, were huge into eugenics. All the basic textbooks were printed here.

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      1. The Nazis expressly cited Margaret Sanger, founder of what is now known as Planned Parenthood, as one of their main inspirations for the Nuremberg Laws. She openly approved of the Nazis and supported their use of her work. Hillary remains proud of receiving her “Margaret Sanger award”, as are numerous other Democrats.

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        1. Yes. Let’s never forget that Margaret Sanger’s main motivation was eugenics. The people whose birth she was so anxious to control were never people who looked like her.

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  12. a while back when i still listened to NPR they had a whole segment that delved into the Eugenics programs in the US pre WW1, an interesting tidbit that the US started what Hitler picked up and even more fascinating was the fact that when Eugenics was shut down in the US and picked up by Germany many of the doctors and scientist just moved along to the new fields in Germany.

    pretty awful stuff all of it if you ask me and more likely than not being continued with the push for the MRNA tech.

    no thanks

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  13. Where eugenicists go wrong is that instead of trying to breed a superman, they spend all their time trying to stop other people from breeding at all.

    The Howard Families did it right.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I would argue that eugenicists, social Darwinists and all those of similar ilk go wrong as soon as they think of applying their ideas to anyone other than themselves.

      It’s the same old thing. “If only everyone…” and then it’s already over. Everything after that is oppression.

      Oppression, quite apart from all its other manifold sins, doesn’t work.

      Liked by 2 people

  14. Sarah, you pushed the red button again. (What have I told you about pushing that button?)

    Eugenics is bad because it is a stupid idea created by careerist Victorian mid-wits and academics (but I repeat myself) and pursued by liars, thieves, murderers and politicians (alas I repeat myself again). A fad of “scientism” containing no actual science whatsoever.

    It is a lie, in short. A lie told to forward political careers.

    If the people who perpetrated this lie upon Western society were alive today, they’d be DEI advocates, pushing mandatory mad-science jabs, and trying to convince us that #LetsGoBrandon had a head cold last Thursday night.

    I read the original comment, and that person is a Big Government true believer. “Uncle Sugar will never do me wrong, no never.”

    If Eugenics was a thing it would be well applied getting rid of credulous buffoons like that guy. But it -isn’t- a thing, it is a lie and a manipulation.

    Here endeth my red-button response. [/ARRRRRGH!!!!/]

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  15. You may not think it was about eugenics. I’m certain the word was ever used. But a perfect example of the evil mentality is the old movie “Arsenic and Old Lace”. The old aunts decided old bachelors were suffering and helped them along without their consent.

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    1. That movie has nothing to do with eugenics. And you realize the Brewster sisters were crazy, right?

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      1. Honestly, I think one COULD make the argument that it was (or could be) about eugencis (yes, using the English major approach–if the playwright himself told me it was not, I would then let the argument drop, being only a FORMER English major who played the game well but didn’t believe in it)–and that people advocating for killing other people to “spare them suffering” are, in fact, completely starkers and it is and evil one should NOT to aspire to, couched in the blackest of comedy. :p

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  16. Tapping my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney again. His biggest fight was with eugenicists – at the turn of the 20th century. Well before the Nazis showed their insignia to the world, and got oh-so-much praise for it…from their fellow eugenicists in dozens of other countries, including the United States: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2023/05/19/review-the-strange-case-of-dr-couney-by-dawn-raffel/

    There was a five-year-old girl in the Netherlands, I think, who got euthanized because she was “tired of living.” MAID is just the most recent travesty in this crusade. What else is abortion but euthanasia in practice? Eugenics isn’t bad/scary “because the Nazis used it.” The Nazis are the ones who got slapped with the label so no one would look at their fellow travelers hard enough to say, “Hey, wait a minute!” and be able to make it stick.

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    1. While it is just possible I might have lived without the intervention of an incubator (being a bizarrely healthy 3-month-premature baby, which can be laid at the foot of generational genetics at a high altitude and–more importantly–actual divine miracle), I know many, many of my generation (1980) would have died without it, and it is very possible I would not have been so bizarrely healthy without its assistance (which, if nothing else, kept me warm and from catching anything before they gave up and sent me home after just 3 weeks). I read that article about Dr. Couney, and am most grateful to the man.

      Liked by 1 person

            1. Oh, absolutely. My mother, who had been told she could never have children, who had me (most unexpectedly), had another (via fertility treatments) and lost him, and then ended up pregnant at the age of 41 without any medical intervention whatsoever (her doctor was afraid she was gonna get sued) and giving birth not only to a full term baby, but a LARGE full term baby (I was 3lbs 7 oz, and the brother I lost was smaller, and born via C-section. Meanwhile, baby brother was, oh, 8 or 9 lbs?), AND on April 1? Her comment at the time was “G-d has a sense of humor, and it’s a sick and twisted one.”

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  17. Eugenics… Good grief you would think even the ‘crazy’ people would have figured out by now that it just doesn’t work. While humans have made some progress in understanding how they function – every day our medical and biological “experts” find out they were wrong about something and/or way, way off base in their thinking.

    Genetic research on an actual virus causing terrible things may be justified but that cat is not only out-of-the-bag but is a huge danger due to fools and idiots trying to do it and not having a real clue about what’s going on (fake-flu example).

    Overall, genetic based research must be done very careful and at this point in human development, I don’t think anybody alive is really qualified to be messing around with it.

    So, back on track, Eugenics is simply stupid and the refuge of the ill-informed and foolish.

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  18. “I can look at it and think it amazing fodder for a dystopic future world, but not one I’d like to write, except maybe as a comedy, thank you so much.”

    Designer Genes: A Satire. Idiocracy meets Gattaca meets The Sneetches. In the future, prenatal gene editing has become so common that it’s the subject of intense social fads. Entire generations of children are born with teal skin, polka dots, third eyes, etc. Except fads change, and no sooner has one crop of babies been born than gene fashions shift, leaving the entire generation to grow up with woefully out-of-date genes.

    Enter six-fingered Romeo, who defies social convention to woo lavender-scented Juliet. Or some Harlequin who starts tampering with gene requests at the hospital. Or an unmodified Quasimodo who doesn’t fit in with any generation. Or…

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Another comment, Eugenics is “Just Another Attempt” to create Perfect People and that just isn’t possible.

    I once read a story set in a future world where genetic engineering was well developed.

    In the story, a Family Counselor was called in because the parents were upset because their son wasn’t the “Perfect Person” that they wanted.

    The story ends with the Counselor telling the parents that their son was “perfectly” normal and that they weren’t accepting him for what he is but they had unreasonable expectations of him.

    Oh, the Counselor offered THEM HIS SERVICES because they need his services more than their son. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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  20. While I can’t know whether someone is perfectly happy with the quality of life that seems terrible to me, I have no problem with them, UNLESS I am being forced to provide for them. Voluntary charity is one thing, mandated theft to care for other people, regardless of ‘need’, is tyranny.

    I think the best way to sum it up is the quote from Batman Begins. “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.”

    You do make an excellent point about how eugenic selection of genes, by whatever means: direct manipulation, selective breeding, selective weeding, or any combination thereof, may cause loss of genetic diversity leading to a population of poorly adaptive, and therefore selected for extinction, modified humans. Good, bad, or indifferent, when we have the whole mixed-up pile we have now, no matter what conditions we face, we have a better chance of having some random combination work out in favor of continuing whatever our species is at that time.

    That doesn’t mean I don’t think there is some value in tinkering with a small group of people who choose to be tinkered with in the hope of having children who are more adaptable over a wider range of conditions than homo standard. Just don’t force the rest of us into your schemes. Like all capitalistic endeavors, if we see value in it, then we’ll choose to buy into it ourselves.

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    1. You do make an excellent point about how eugenic selection of genes, by whatever means: direct manipulation, selective breeding, selective weeding, or any combination thereof, may cause loss of genetic diversity leading to a population of poorly adaptive, and therefore selected for extinction, modified humans.

      Exactly. Even if Eugenics worked as advertized, with no ethical, physiological, or sociological downside, it would lead to the Monoculture Problem: every individual “perfectly” “optimized” such that any variation would necessarily be “inferior” and, by definition, abuse inflicted on the variant children.

      And we’d all live happily ever after, until something came along that really, really liked the Optimized flavor, and there were no odd-tasting survivors.

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      1. Yeah. We have NO IDEA how all the infinite parts of the genetic code interact with any other, nor how removing one thing–even if it is on the face of it “bad code”–will affect the whole.

        Interestingly, this was a premise in the tv show Person of Interest–one of the early villain’s character arc from villain-to-sort-of-hero was them starting with the attitude that some people were just “bad code” and therefore it was okay to eliminate them. And it was very clear that “bad code” to her meant “gets in my way and/or I don’t like them” (that they happened to often also be corrupt was beside the point, and just something she used to justify it). And one of the protagonists put in a lot of effort to convince this person that it didn’t *matter* if someone might or might not be “bad code” since all life was precious in some way (which is why his other associate basically confined himself to shooting out the kneecaps of problematic bad guys). And while the villain-turned-sort-of-hero never QUITE understood it (being pretty much incapable of it) they cared enough about the other protagonist to at least assent to his preferred viewpoint and living it to the point that whether or not they understood it in their head/soul didn’t matter–they *lived* that viewpoint to its fullest expression.

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    2. I definitely agree that the government needs to get the hell out of ALL “charitable endeavours” and put it back in the hands of private/religious institutions, who will then sort out the various sorts. Will some people fall through the cracks? Inevitably, but I’d posit it would fewer than currently falling through the gaping government-caused chasms, and it might even put a roadblock on the social programmers trying to use the “but it’s too expensive!” argument…

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  21. I fully support genetic counseling for people who have blood relatives with inherited medical problems. If I came from a family with, oh, Huntington’s Chorea, I’d want to know if I was a carrier. That might influence my decision to have kids if I ever marry. Likewise people who come from a larger population known for genetic problems – sickle-cell, Tay-Sachs, what have you.

    Anything beyond that makes me very, very leery, especially if government or insurance companies (but I repeat myself) are involved.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. When FIL developed Parkinsons, we had Dan tested, so we could prepare if that was in store for him. At least the testing we did came back clean. This is amazing, since AFAWK there’s none in the family before FIL. So… spontaneous mutation and not passed to at least THIS son. (the other died in an accident at 40 so the point is moot.)

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    2. A friend of mine had a relative from the very inbred FLDS group that had a massively expressed reinforced recessive gene that developed bone spurs. As in, all of her bones would grow spurs continuously, and she had to have numerous regular surgeries to shave them off.

      Said relative had left that group and become a genetic counselor herself, and vowed to never have children of her own. (It was something about how after a certain number of generations, some genes don’t go back to being recessive, exactly. Mendel was broadly right, but it’s weirder than that.)

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    3. That might influence my decision to have kids if I ever marry.

      Or it might make one very selective about whom one does marry.

      After all, some of those mutations are only a problem for the children if both parents carry them…

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    4. I carry a gene for cystic fibrosis. As does one of my sisters. Oddly enough, her husband, who had three sisters die of CF, is not a carrier and now the two of them have eight healthy children.

      Does getting yourself and your spouse tested for stuff like that count as eugenics? It honestly just seems prudent to me.

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      1. I used to have some degree of tolerance for voluntary eugenics along the lines of what Robert Heinlein described in _Beyond This Horizon_; I am no longer so sure that even that degree is advisable, as it requires IVF. What you describe sounds sufficiently voluntary and self-directed that I can tolerate it.

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  22. Downs syndrome. Seems to be ok to get rid of them. Look up the rates of those aborted throughout Europe and the U.S. CBS looked at Iceland where I believe there were less than 2 born last year and only because of botched genetic testing. 67% of downs kids are aborted in the U.S. We are already there and we already do it.

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    1. Look at how pissed off the various “cure autism” groups go when, gosh, the high function autistics said they didn’t want to be ethnocided. You know, like how those who might have Downs already are.

      Even “for our own good.”

      Apparently, that was not an answer the groups expected.

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      1. Which is particularly something I could rant on, but I’ll keep it simple here:

        So far as we can identify autism with genetics at all, a high percentage are de novo mutations.

        Meaning the only way to “eliminate” it would be to test and abort every child with those mutations, forever.

        No, no, and no.

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      2. Amazing, the number of people who really, REALLY believe that they know what’s best for you, better than you do. And they’re willing to kill you to prove it…

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    2. A friend of mine with a DS child was HIGHLY offended when the doctor tried to schedule an abortion without even asking her. Needless to say, she kept the kid, loves her madly, and the kid is just fine on the DS spectrum.

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      1. yeah. DS is a spectrum. A couple in son’s very bright friend group (Well, you make friends in your own level, you know?) is apparently DS. When she got pregnant doctor was alarmed her daughter was, and kid had to explain “Not unexpected.” Didn’t occur to doctor because they’re not “high on the spectrum” are both very bright (it only affects IQ you should have) and don’t have marked physical defects. Neither does daughter, save for what could be corrected by neonatal surgeries.
        I’m telling this story, because I had NO IDEA DS was a spectrum, and I suspect most people don’t.

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        1. Ah yes, because landing on top of your friend who broke his legs trying to flee a fire is totally better than what happened to those who didn’t try to escape a fire.

          Hey, if XKCD gets to make up stupid qualifications to change the situation, so do I.

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    4. There’s supposedly a treatment for DS that is the biological equivalent of sending all output from the extra chromosome to /dev/null, such that the affected person develops without the problems normally associated with DS (and which presumably could also be used with all the other trisomies that have more devastating effects). However, because of the pressure to abort, there’s no real push to make this treatment widely available.

      Which makes you wonder what other cool treatments might be out there for various conditions, but aren’t getting any development traction because of the pressure to just obliterate the problem.

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      1. There are lots of treatments for lots of things that have been developed but aren’t available, even if clinical testing results were very good. The FDA criteria for approval (when not impacted by external factors) is one factor; pharma company ROI calculations are another factor. For example, say a new anti-cancer drug hoped to be of widespread use only proves viable against some very rare types of cancer – a company might not go through the effort of getting FDA approval and then producing it.

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        1. new anti-cancer drug hoped to be of widespread use only proves viable against some very rare types of cancer – a company might not go through the effort of getting FDA approval
          ……….

          Where “right to try” laws come in. Do not require FDA approval.

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    5. I was thinking about giving people the tools and information to manage their own fertility vs. central authority imposing those decisions, and then was hit by the idea that it is absolutely essential to get government out of public welfare. That it’s probably not a coincidence that eugenics as a government program (as opposed to stuff like stirpiculture in the Oneida Colony, which was more like the fictional Howard Families) starts cropping up right about the time that the government, rather than churches and benevolent societies, began to take on the care of the poor, the indigent, the widows and orphans. Once it’s tax dollars rather than voluntary donations, there’s a certain hostility to the recipients of the aid that shows up, and takes the form of wanting to stop them from breeding.

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      1. Efficiency! Cost-effective use of resources! Rationality! All those progressive buzzwords that treat human beings as building components in the “glorious,” body of the State.

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      2. OUT of health care, too. The progression is inevitable:

        1. There will never be Death Panels!
        2. Death Panels are a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory!
        3. Those are not Death Panels!
        4. You are recommended for MAiD! Take it!

        Medical murder is now the ‘leading’ cause of death in Canuckistan, followed by months-long waits for treatment. But they’re not Death Panels!

        No matter how bad Big Government f*ks up Public Health, the answer is always Moar Big Government.

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      3. When it’s a tax-funded bureaucracy, the priority is always the bureaucrats. Spending budget on the aid recipient just pulls that budget away from the bureaucracy’s benefit. On the other hand, if fewer aid recipients show up – Cancun training conference again, baby!

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      4. A very bright, self-described Big-Government Liberal of my (brief) acquaintance did his sincere best to convince me (and those listening to the conversation) that my giving $5 to a beggar, and the government’s taxing me $5 for Welfare, were equivalent. “Either way, you give five bucks to someone who needs it.”

        My objection that giving makes me feel happy, and, let’s face it, superior to the recipient (who must humble himself, and beg), while getting mugged (“with extra steps”) irritates me, and makes the recipient feel superior to me by demanding (“with extra steps”) and receiving, not only failed to convince him, but was taken as an inadvertent confession of my own moral failing–my desire to “lord it over” the indigent.

        One way psychologically rewards the giver and psychologically punishes the beggar. The other way reverses that. One way improves society, the other nudges it toward End-Stage Socialist Meltdown.

        Mind you, the guy is as bright as anyone here, but he couldn’t/wouldn’t see it except through his own Lefty lens. Two kinds of people, I guess…

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  23. I’ve heard an interesting analogy on euthanasia, comparing it to the “right turn on red” traffic laws. That right turn started out as the driver’s option; you didn’t have to turn on red if you didn’t want to. It’s still legally optional, as far as I know, but have you tried not doing it lately? The driver behind you honks their horn and is angry at you for not getting out of their way quickly enough.

    I’m pretty sure that’s what would happen with euthanasia. It would start out as a choice, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

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    1. It’s not what *would* happen. It’s what HAS happened, everywhere euthanasia has been legalized. Today in Canada, with the MAID panels, the choice offered to many is “We have no openings to treat your depression. But we can help you kill yourself next week. Which would you prefer?”

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      1. Perhaps a public list of MAID panel participants should be started on the interwebs.

        Wait, it’s Canuckistan, so that’s a death penalty hate crime there. Nevermind.

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  24. I read someone argue that it’s not eugenics (and therefore not bad) as long as the government isn’t forcing you to do it. This was a justification for screening embryos for IVF based on genetic qualities, which I already have moral problems with (I think it’s wrong to wilfully and deliberately create life and then destroy it) but if we extend the logic it’s not stopping there. Compelling “defective” people into sterilization but as long as it’s private groups doing it (e.g. parents to their children, or alleged charity orgs doing it as a requirement to receive services).

    Government is just a way of organizing the evil. Without government involvement, it’s still evil.

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  25. No one but us Mutties here.

    Quite so. Looked at properly, every one of us is a massive series of “bugs” in the “program” of the very first collection of chemicals that managed to copy itself.

    While I’m here… A VERY happy Holy Day to all of my fellow USAians. Also best wishes to our friends on the other side of the pond, that they may manage to pull off an electoral miracle for Reform UK on this most auspicious day.

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    1. Happy 4th to all of USAians.

      Happy (belated) Canada Day, July 1st.

      🎆🎇🧨🎆🎇🧨

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  26. Why eugenics is bad. I responded to this topic a while back. Let’s expand on it a bit more.

    My father was born in 1908, mother in 1922. They were raised to believe in improving the world thru breeding better people. Mom bore nine sons.

    In our family, sterilization was referred to as ‘hernia surgery’. Me and a younger brother had hernia surgery, probably due to a speech impairment (which cleared up with time).
    Before he died last year (stage 4 bowl cancer), I talked with an older brother about it. He admitted that it made them part of something evil.

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    1. Speech impairment?

      *sputters wildly and ready to bring down BIG Momma Bear energy on anyone who would think that about my youngest, who is in speech therapy*

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      1. Famous orators throughout history, who generally were noted for their oratory *on top of* whatever amazing thing they’d done.

        But. Hey. There’s a flaw. You don’t want to be guilty of promoting a flaw, do you?

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  27. I grok genetic counseling for specific well-known genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs. Otherwise, The Science (TM) is still only safe-and-effective at the old-school “ban cousin marriages and incest” stage.

    Because the layer on top of the biology that drives behavior is even more complex. Coronachan showed us The Science doesn’t have a handle on the complexity of the human immune system, and it’s hopelessly corrupt to boot. We want to sacrifice kids to that?

    Take friends and family who have a high involvement or investment in Current Thing (aka the Narrative). John Derbyshire remarked that there seemed to be a 1:1 relationship with how much of a curmudgeon a man is, and how well he resists “growing in office” whether it’s one in D.C. or the NR offices in NYC. Frex: Mrs. Hoyt, who held the line from day one on the pinkopox and got pushed out of tradpub.

    Which traits do you want to lose? Agreeable, go-along-to-get-along people support valuable relationships. Curmudgeons get marginalized. Both/And: pull one thread of a characteristic low- or high level and the whole thing unravels.

    That’s even without going another layer up from the brain/mind into the metaphysical. If you can’t put Love or Truth or Beauty into the experiment box that makes it not-real? Baloney.

    Humans are amphibians: we often become a thing we pretend to be (and sideways, or backward) so Stalinist cultures warp people in peculiar ways. “Everyone who survives gets greyed.”

    Arguably, the cultures that create people like that are more dangerous even than, say a hemophiliac or that whatsit, the conflict-junkie gene; so we’d want to weed out the kind of people who are more likely to create those cultures in the first place, right-? Pick the society you do not want to have: We’ll just sacrifice them to Moloch and get the shiny-pony utopia! Bah.

    The sad thing is that as crazy-pants as what I just typed is, somewhere, somewhere in the bureaucracies and halls of power there are men right now who think those are all just super-dooper ideas beavering away to frame a good Narrative for them…

    The image for this post is perfect.

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  29. Seems to me is that eugenics is a case in point of progressivists’ (they don’t believe in progress, but in progressivism) hubris and the root cause of their nemesis.

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      1. At least two, and if I’m remembering it right, I think three were part of the Nazi eugenics program, where they mated the most striking Nordic dames (voluntarily or not) with Wehrmacht and Gestapo officers who exemplified Aryan characteristics to produce superior tow-headed, blue-eyed kids.

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          1. They also had Project Lebensborn: take “Aryan” appearing kids away from their families by age 6 and place them with “Aryan ideal” parents. You can brainwash kids easier than adults.

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            2. Oh, they took them as old as fourteen. When trying to get them back, the people found that fourteen year olds still remembered, ten year olds could have their memories jogged loose with, say, Polish nursery rhymes, and the little children — that was where it was the worst.

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            1. Yeah, that’s what it was called! It’s been years since I learned about it in History, taught by someone who was a kid during the war, whose neighbor was in the program. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing — in some cases, it was more of a charity for Norwegian unwed mothers, if they knew who the dad was, and if the both were exemplars of Nordic genotype, and the SS doctors certified that the blood tested free of Jewishness, whatever that means.

              But after the war, if you took the assistance, it was looked at as collaboration. It got so bad that the mom of one of the band (Anne something or other) ended up having to flee and go into hiding.

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                1. Yes, that was the first one to have “come out”. I’m guessing that either both parents were sufficiently Aryan to have passed muster and it’s just where the ball landed on genetic roulette wheel, or the SS officer in charge of that district took pity on pregnant woman and let her in anyway.

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              2. They institutionalized a great number of the babies — obviously all under five — as their defective mothers proved they had to be mentally deficient. Which, of course, did lead to their being mentally deficient through neglect.

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