Is Dawkins wrong about eugenics?

[Elaedith]

It seems clear to me that he is saying eugenics is bad on ideological, political and moral grounds, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it would 'work' (in the sense that humans are not immune to genetic influences on physical and behavioural traits demonstrated by other species).

The context provided is that facts ignore ideology, something that should be obvious to skeptics who traditionally use such arguments to attack the idea that beliefs or desires change reality.

There is some ambiguity over the use of the term 'works'. One would need to clarify that this refers to it being technically possible to change human characteristics through selective breeding. If you include obtaining desirable social consequences under the definition of 'works' that would be a different implication.

 

[Earthborn]

Yes, Dawkins is wrong. The whole point of eugenics was to eliminate heritary disease by selective breeding; the species we have selectively bred tend to have more heritary disease than the ones we didn't because of this selective breeding. Selective breeding is just not precise and specific enough.

Also not all species can be bred selectively equally successfully. Just because we did it to cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses doesn't mean it will work with humans.

 

[theprestige]

Dawkins is a world renowned evolutionary biologist. Eugenics isn't some weird thing outside of his wheelhouse. It's not like he started going off on rap music or the designed hitter rule.

The designed hitter rule? That sounds like a eugenics program to me.

 

[abaddon]

Nonsense. All we need to do is decide what traits we want to see selected, and then do it. No need to know which genes code for them. We did that with dogds for thousands of years.

Ah, but the law of unintended consequences looms. Pure bred flat faced dogs are bred for no reason other than some aesthetic. But they get a ton of respiratory issues because of it.

There is no reason to think that human eugenics would not result in similar unintended consequences.

What would those consequences be? Nobody knows.

And that is really what Dawkins is getting at.

The primary objection I have seen is that it would require the entire human population to agree to such a mad eugenics program. That is false straight away. The creation of new dog breeds is trivially happening all the time. It does not require all dogs to participate. just a viable population to work with.

One can really selectively breed most anything for whichever trait one does want, or whichever one wants to eliminate.

The real problem is that to even start such a crackpot project, one would have to do astonishingly unethical things. All ethics, morals and whatever one likes get tossed out the window on a whim.

Suppose, the aim is to get taller humans, for example. Simples. Get a tall woman to bounce soft parts with a tall bloke. Produce a tall progeny. Right?

Wrong. People don't work that way. It would be a mountain to climb to even find volunteers for such.

And because of the random nature of mutation, they could well produce a Tyrion Lannister, which opens a whole other appalling vista.

 

[Belz...]

I can't help it, the Bene Gesserit selectively bred me to make bad jokes.

That's odd. I thought you were only capable of making good ones, and nothing else.

A million years of eugenics and I'm the Kwisatz Hackarach.

See? Brilliant.

 

[I Am The Scum]

If by "Eugenics" he means the very broad concept of whether humans could be subject to selective breeding towards particular outcomes, then he'd be right(ish).

Cavemonster beat me to it. Dawkins is only right if we consider eugenics to be a synonym for selective breeding, which it isn't.

But his point is still difficult to believe even if we ignore that gross oversimplification. Compare "Eugenics works" with the statement "Abstinence-only education prevents unwanted pregnancies." In theory, it would "work." However, most everyone on this forum is familiar with the fact that this plan doesn't quite work out when put into practice. We know what happens when "abstinence only" has been attempted, and it would be foolish to ignore this data.

So if anyone has some data regarding eugenics "working" that they'd like to share, let's see it. I think that's the most scientific approach we have available.

 

[Belz...]

Ah, but the law of unintended consequences looms. Pure bred flat faced dogs are bred for no reason other than some aesthetic. But they get a ton of respiratory issues because of it.

Yes, but it worked. No one says there are no negative consequences.

 

[Mumbles]

Of course not; but even positively arguing for the "feasibility" of eugenics is immensely tone-deaf - which, as I said, is certainly a Dawkins specialty. Dawkins is narrow-mindedly focused on "making a (completely unnecessary) point" about humans being no different from other kinds of animals, utterly oblivious to the implications of what he's chosen to say. The optics of for instance casually comparing the lives of the kinds of people most typically targeted by eugenics schemes to farm livestock; or the non-sequitur of trying to compare economically-driven breeding programs executed by humans against chattel animals for the benefit of those humans, with a socially-driven program that is executed by humans against other humans that will benefit only the humans executing it while devastating the humans it targets.

Particularly bad given the open white nationalist and eugenics movements that are active today. Dawkins effectively gave both movements his personal seal of approval.

We keep telling y'all - this is how these groups form and increase their stature. "Oh, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's possible." Dawkins stupidly just rushed to stand right alongside them, for no reason. When he's using the exact same arguments as Nazi wannabes, most people with any sense of this will assume either that he's one of them, or that he simply refuses to learn his lesson - a useful idiot.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

You're thinking of Lamarckism.

? I don't get this comment.

 

[qayak]

Nonsense. All we need to do is decide what traits we want to see selected, and then do it. No need to know which genes code for them. We did that with dogds for thousands of years.

The part of that that is hard with humans is the roughly 13 years to sexual maturity, 18 if you consider age of consent laws. Dogs reach sexual maturity in 6-12 months. Then you have the issues of inbreeding. The offspring that show improvement on the trait are bred together in hopes of further improvements.

I believe Russian researchers performed your experiment on arctic foxes. They bred for friendliness and docility. It took 19 generations, an 20 years, for them to get to their goal. 19 generations in humans is a long, long time.

 

[theprestige]

But to date the attempts at practicing eugenics have been scientifically dubious: implemented by people who thought "criminality" was an inherited trait, for example.

It's a lot like communism: whether the theory's sound or not, all the real world attempts to practice have been flawed to the point of risibility.

It's hard to do something morally repugnant in a scientifically-rigorous way. Especially something that requires thousands of human test subjects over multiple generations spanning hundreds of years.

---

People keep pointing out the deficiencies in purebred dogs, as if that's evidence that eugenics doesn't work. In reality it's evidence that the breeders of dogs didn't care about those deficiencies.

---

As for breeding out the "criminality" trait, I don't see why that should be scientifically dubious. The idea of a "criminal" gene is probably dubious. But it seems to me that a more docile, less combative personality would tend to contribute to a more peaceful, more crime-free society. You couldn't get there in a single generation, though.

If it were me, and I didn't care about the ethics of human experimentation, here's how I'd do it:

First, I'd commission two studies from the social scientists: One a study of which personality types or traits tend to a more crime-free community. The other a study of which personality traits are most conducive to effective teaching.

Then I'd start interbreeding people who express those traits. Assuming for the sake of argument that a certain amount of docility was the goal, my first few generations would be focused on expressing that docility. Once I'd gotten that population, I'd start more focused breeding among them to breed out the deficiencies that crop up alongside this expression. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But I'd never do that, because human eugenics, while scientifically valid, are morally repugnant.

 

[theprestige]

The part of that that is hard with humans is the roughly 13 years to sexual maturity, 18 if you consider age of consent laws. Dogs reach sexual maturity in 6-12 months. Then you have the issues of inbreeding. The offspring that show improvement on the trait are bred together in hopes of further improvements.

I believe Russian researchers performed your experiment on arctic foxes. They bred for friendliness and docility. It took 19 generations, an 20 years, for them to get to their goal. 19 generations in humans is a long, long time.

Yeah, but that's logistically hard, not scientifically hard.

 

[abaddon]

I get the feeling the pretense is going to drop and the "To keep everything fair and balanced we must accept Dawkins as an atheist extremists, on par with Fred Phelps" arguments are going to start coming out soon.

I don't. Up thread, it was claimed that Dawkins only clarified after "an internet scolding". This is obviously false. Even reading timestamps demonstrates that.

I do not agree with Dawkins always. He always post some misinformed garbage from time to time. But we all have.

That's OK. We all go off on one once in a while.

This is not one of those times.

 

[qayak]

Particularly bad given the open white nationalist and eugenics movements that are active today. Dawkins effectively gave both movements his personal seal of approval.

We keep telling y'all - this is how these groups form and increase their stature. "Oh, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's possible." Dawkins stupidly just rushed to stand right alongside them, for no reason. When he's using the exact same arguments as Nazi wannabes, most people with any sense of this will assume either that he's one of them, or that he simply refuses to learn his lesson - a useful idiot.

This is silly. That bad people do bad things can never be an excuse not to discuss, or do, things.

 

[abaddon]

Particularly bad given the open white nationalist and eugenics movements that are active today. Dawkins effectively gave both movements his personal seal of approval.

We keep telling y'all - this is how these groups form and increase their stature. "Oh, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's possible." Dawkins stupidly just rushed to stand right alongside them, for no reason. When he's using the exact same arguments as Nazi wannabes, most people with any sense of this will assume either that he's one of them, or that he simply refuses to learn his lesson - a useful idiot.

Then you are part of the problem.

The simple fact is that if we wanted, we could breed a race of "Uberhumans" if we so chose to do so. There is no scientific blocade to doing so. You can pretend all you like that it is impossible, but it isn't.

Dawkins argument is that arguing against whether we can do it is a fools errand. We already know we can.

Thus it is rather pointless to argue that we cannot do something that has already been demonstrated.

Instead, Dawkins argues that we should address the matter on moral and ethical grounds. The science is already done. No point arguing against facts.

 

[PursuedByABear]

And it didn't occur to you that I was responding to the OTHER part of your post?

Which part? Here it is.

"If the question is can we breed bigger people, then sure, eugenics can work. If the question is can we breed more intelligent people, then sure, eugenics can work.

If the question, however, is can we breed better people, then surely the jury is out until we firstly decide what would constitute better people, and secondly establish whether we can isolate those traits genetically."


If you mean the "secondly" part, that quite obviously you can't tell me that you can breed for traits which we haven't even identified yet. It's impossible to say whether we can until you have decided what they are.

 

[Belz...]

? I don't get this comment.

Look up Lamarckism vs Darwinism. It's an interesting contrast.

 

[theprestige]

Ah, but the law of unintended consequences looms. Pure bred flat faced dogs are bred for no reason other than some aesthetic. But they get a ton of respiratory issues because of it.

There is no reason to think that human eugenics would not result in similar unintended consequences.

There's also no reason to think that humans would treat all side effects as acceptable trade-offs for one obsessed-over trait. I think if a thousand-year breeding program for humans were instituted, phase one would be about expressing desirable traits, and phase two would be about breeding out the undesirable traits that manifest during phase one. The end result would trend towards a "sweet spot", where the desirable traits were expressed to the degree possible without bringing along undesirable traits.

The desirable traits wouldn't find their maximal expression (as we do with purebred dogs), but the resulting humans would probably be a lot more performant overall than the current haphazard crops we produce.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

1) Dawkins is right about Eugenics.
2) Eugenics are morally reprehensible.
3) Many people seem to feel so strongly about #2 that they have trouble admitting #1

There is also discussion about whether or not it is OK to even say #1, because it will lead to all sorts of problems, but I think that's sort of out of the OP's intended discussion.

 

[abaddon]

Which part? Here it is.

"If the question is can we breed bigger people, then sure, eugenics can work. If the question is can we breed more intelligent people, then sure, eugenics can work.

If the question, however, is can we breed better people, then surely the jury is out until we firstly decide what would constitute better people, and secondly establish whether we can isolate those traits genetically."


If you mean the "secondly" part, that quite obviously you can't tell me that you can breed for traits which we haven't even identified yet. It's impossible to say whether we can until you have decided what they are.

Funny enough, that was Dawkins exact point. And you somehow missed it in the red haze of hate.