this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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You don't have to go out of your way to defend things that are putting a nice veneer on eugenics.
And for the record, if you read the article it's clearly about them being arrogant and generally absolutely fucking weird. "If more people like us don't have children, the world will stop seeing innovation and economic prosperity. It's very important that the right people reproduce."
I have now read the article, and what you just quoted is nowhere to be found. I would really like to know where you found the text you quoted.
In fact, neither the article nor the interviewees defended eugenics, at all. They even addressed the issue explicitly near the end of the text.
I'm not defending these people, or saying that they are saints, but there was no indication that they were supporting eugenics. To the contrary, they spoke against it.
Actions speak louder than words. There is nothing particularly wrong with eugenics in itself; it is how some people choose to carry it out that becomes questionable. When eugenics is used to propagate racist or dumb ideas.
These guys are a real trip. They screen, select & hand-pick embryos (that is eugenics). But then they turn around & claim they're not eugenicists, because "they're not racist" (????). Cool story, bro? But you're eugenicists.
Imagine, if you will, your friend loudly says he HATES peppermint ice cream. Peppermint ice cream is so terrible. He orders vanilla. He takes out a bag of peppermints, hits them with a hammer, and rolls each spoonful of vanilla ice cream in the crushed peppermint bits. That's...that's peppermint ice cream. You claim you don't like it, but took multiple, direct actions that resulted in peppermint ice cream, which you are enjoying. 🤨 These people are weird AF.
This makes several assumptions not supported by science. Eugenics presupposes that genetics alone is a significantly large factor influencing traits like intelligence and "predisposition to criminality" that you can just selectively breed humans like farm animals and thus improve the whole population over time.
If you dig deep enough into the history and science, that's not necessarily true, and even to the extent it is is fucking complicated. It ignores or discounts environmental factors, cultural norms, and probably more I'm not thinking of atm.
Picking general intelligence, however that's defined, eugenics says you need to get two highly intelligent people to produce offspring and thier children will automatically be smart. In reality they might have an edge, but that edge can be lost if the kids aren't provided with a stable home environment, healthcare so they can thrive, high-quality education, etc. It doesn't mean shit if your kid is the next Einstein according to an IQ test (which are fraught with problems by themselves) if they can't read.
The topic is higly debated by people much more educated than I who spend thier whole lives studying the topic. I'd encourage you or anyone interested to do some reading on the subject from actual experts (which I, for the record, am not) with backgrounds in genetics and especially anthropology. "The Myth Of Race" by Robert Sussman was an incredibly eye-opening book for me personally that obviously focuses most on race but eugenics gets covered too.
I think we are more or less in agreement. 🙂 I focus almost exclusively on the 'strictly physical' side of eugenics, cross-breeding & GMO but for humans. I see people who are fucked up, carry horrible genes, have undesirable physical traits. Sometimes they even mix & match with others that have bad genes/traits, and sometimes they even know bad things could happen...then their offspring has bad physical traits or medical problems & they're all shocked pikachu face. How could this happen?! Well, because Mommy and/or Daddy are fucked up. And yeah that weird heart defect got passed down. Sickle cell anemia, passed down. Things of a physical nature. Good inputs, probably good outputs. Known bad inputs, hey...let's not be shocked when there are bad outputs.
Intelligence, character traits, waters get significantly murkier. That's just not how I think (because enough of it, I believe, is wrong). And I think this cringey couple overestimates their intellectual capacity. They might get A plusses on tests, but the way they're interacting with the 'real world' displays a general lack of awareness, mental illness, & I think there's some Main Character Syndrome at play.
Fair enough. I took your original comment a certain way, probably cause the way it sounded is the way a significant potion of the population thinks. Physical variation is a much more understood (and less dangerous) thing too.
They "spoke out against it" while saying and doing things that are literally the definition of positive eugenics.
"In other words, positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged, for example, the eminently intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics