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Is Dawkins wrong about eugenics?

arthwollipot said:
I've been following the thread quite closely, thanks. If you apply the principle of eugenics to nonhuman animals, it's called selective breeding and it results in domestic breeds of animal, hence dogs are a successful example. Or if you like, if you selectively breed humans, it's called eugenics.

As far as I know, no deliberate eugenic program has been run on human animals for long enough for it to have a significant effect. You'd need to run such a program for several generations at least.
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A major difference being that we didn't know we would end up with dogs as they are today. This was not a stated target. There are no artists' renderings of today's dogs on 10,000 year old walls (so to speak) as a design document at a pitch meeting.

While there are ways we influenced their adaptation by picking which animal bred with which, the factors of selection (which animals to breed) were very rough (good hunter. Ok, but why is it a good hunter?) and well beyond our understanding (what do you mean its olfactory senses can detect as low as 14 parts per million? Wait parts of what? What's a molecule?), nature did quite a lot of selecting in its typical way.

They "evolved" to be more useful to us because we became an environmental factor that changed. So they changed, too.

But yeah, the underlying philosophical and scientific building blocks of how to alter the attributes of an animal weren't even there. By the time we came up with "animal husbandry" dogs were already 90% of the way to being dogs. We've made some variations on it here and there.

I think there's a lot of the usual "historiography" error going on with this "we made dogs into dogs as we know them" issue. We're taking our knowledge and ways of thinking now and trying to imprint that onto the motivations and activities of our ancestors. In that vein, it seems almost more like the more recent and more "fully informed" versions of coming up with new breeds with a specific outcome in mind, well, those are all the ones with complicated unintended consequences going on.

Because we cut the part of the process out where nature goes "uh, no, that's not going to work" or at least the part that goes "ok, let me work out some new arrangements of the structures in the respiratory system before we go shrinking it so much, please stand by for approximately 2 centuries while mutations permeate...*hold track of dogs barking incessantly*"

All of that, plus, of course:

"As sure as anything, I know this:

They will try again.

Maybe on another world.

Maybe on this very ground, swept clean.

A year from now? Ten?

They'll swing back to the belief:

That they can make people...

"Better."

And I do not hold to that."

-Malcolm Reynolds in "Serenity"
 
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The Man said:
Also another difference between animal breeding and eugenics is that in animal breeding the controlling population is not part of the breeding population. In eugenics the controlling and breeding populations would be the same.
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Not necessarily. You could have a separate population upon which eugenics was practiced, with which the controlling population didn't interbreed.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
If it was focused on that one thing, why not? A human-designed program could take in to account things that happen to a person after they have procreated (by discouraging children from breeding) or take in to account information about relatives.

Of course, it's highly debatable if focusing on this one thing would lead to overall benefit.
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And selection pressures for that particular trait could be made much higher than in nature.
 
Using the word "eugenics" is foolish. Too much baggage, too many bad implications.


Instead, how about "Transhumanism"?

Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.[1][2]

Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as the ethical[3] limitations of using such technologies.[4] The most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.[2]

The contemporary meaning of the term "transhumanism" was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".[5] The assertion would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.[5][6][7]

Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion.[5]

In 2017, Penn State University Press in cooperation with Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and James Hughes established the Journal of Posthuman Studies[8] which is the first academic journal explicitly dedicated to the posthuman which has the goal of clarifying the notions of posthumanism and transhumanism, as well as comparing and contrasting both.
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Now, "transhumanism" may sound a bit strange, but at least it doesn't conjure up images of jackboots in the same way as "eugenics".
 
Puppycow said:
Using the word "eugenics" is foolish. Too much baggage, too many bad implications.


Instead, how about "Transhumanism"?



Now, "transhumanism" may sound a bit strange, but at least it doesn't conjure up images of jackboots in the same way as "eugenics".
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One major difference is that transhumanist ideas wouldn't require any imposition of force on other people.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Eugenics is limited to genotypes, Transhumanism also has a cybertechnological component.
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Perhaps they don't mean precisely the same thing, which is just fine as far as I'm concerned. Transhumanism could include improving the genotypes.

Are there ethical ways to improve genotypes, bearing in mind that a baby can never really consent to anything in advance. Then again, nobody asks to be born, and indeed it's impossible to obtain consent in advance when creating a new sentient lifeform.

Is it really more ethical to just leave it all to nature to determine (occasionally nature makes a horrible mistake) or at least we could make sure that terrible genetic conditions like Huntington's disease are eliminated from the gene pool?
 
Roboramma said:
One major difference is that transhumanist ideas wouldn't require any imposition of force on other people.
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Yeah, and the reason eugenics is bad is primarily because it usually involves imposition of force on other people. Although perhaps it's conceivable that it might not. There's two issues with eugenics: the ends and the means. Of course, if you disagree with the ends, then the means are irrelevant, but if the ends are desirable, then perhaps a more ethical means to the ends is possible.
 
Ian Osborne said:
I'm sure Dawkins would agree with you here, but you're arguing against the ethics of eugenics. Do you not think the eugenics you outline above are achievable? I'm not asking if they're desirable, or beneficial - are they achievable?
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You're still missing it. Reread:

It contradicts his argument that it is feasible, which only works if you're using "eugenics" as a generic word for "directed breeding of any kind or purpose". If we use eugenics as it is actually defined, it can't be feasible; "eugenics" literally means "improved genes";
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You (or Dawkins) cannot argue "but what if eugenics except there's no improvement", because if there isn't a posited benefit, it isn't eugenics. The "improvement" is supposed to be the achievement. So, no, it's not achievable.
 
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Checkmite said:
You're still missing it. Reread:



You (or Dawkins) cannot argue "but what if eugenics except there's no improvement", because if there isn't a posited benefit, it isn't eugenics. The "improvement" is supposed to be the achievement. So, no, it's not achievable.
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The "improvement" can be subjective. You and I don't have to agree that the goal is a good thing for the people choosing to practice eugenics to think it is.
 
arthwollipot said:
That's a very good point. Thank you.
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But it's not actually the case, every dog breed was a deliberate goal, whether breeding them to be small enough to go down fox holes, or big enough to take down a boar. People didn't need to know the mechanism that allowed us to breed for specific traits they just needed to understand that 2 smaller dogs were more likely to have offspring that were small. The same is true across all the animals we have domesticated, whether that be cows that produce more milk, or hens laying eggs constantly. People have been knowingly breeding for specific traits for millennia . And we have emperical evidence of how rapidly this can happen thanks to the Russian fox experiment.
 
Roboramma said:
The "improvement" can be subjective. You and I don't have to agree that the goal is a good thing for the people choosing to practice eugenics to think it is.
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And we know people as a population will practice eugenics if they can, sex selection of fetus is a good example, albeit simplistic.
 
Dawkins thinks eugenics is morally wrong.

Does anyone here think he doesn't think it is morally wrong?
 
Roboramma said:
The "improvement" can be subjective. You and I don't have to agree that the goal is a good thing for the people choosing to practice eugenics to think it is.
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This is a somewhat specious argument; naturally the people who favor eugenics would consider their proposed end goal (typically, "fewer impure/nonwhite people in society compared to pure Europeans") is an improvement, otherwise they wouldn't pursue it. But then, if you're one of those impure/nonwhite people, I'm sure that you not only wouldn't consider the situation an improvement, but would rather positively contend that it is the opposite. So you're essentially conceding that whether eugenics is "feasible" is itself subjective, and depends on whether you consider the proposed improvements to be improvements. Unless you're arguing that by "feasible" you just mean that killing or forbidding impure/nonwhite people to have children will eventually result in a net lower ratio of impure/nonwhite people to white people, which I don't think anybody attacking the feasibility of eugenics was questioning.

But that doesn't seem to be what Dawkins is arguing about though, because he's talking about genetic traits like "running" and "jumping" (which again, was never the kind of thing historically selected-for by eugenicists). Again redefining eugenics to simply mean "directed breeding", Dawkins argument can actually be simplified to "heredity exists", in which case thank you for bestowing this great wisdom upon us, Professor? But as above, I'm confident that this isn't what people who question the feasibility of eugenics are getting at; I think they're very definitely talking about whether or not the "improvement" really does improve anything, and it's actually Dawkins that is "missing the point" (or deliberately ignoring it and trying to force his own, which I can certainly see him doing).
 
Darat said:
But it's not actually the case, every dog breed was a deliberate goal, whether breeding them to be small enough to go down fox holes, or big enough to take down a boar. People didn't need to know the mechanism that allowed us to breed for specific traits they just needed to understand that 2 smaller dogs were more likely to have offspring that were small. The same is true across all the animals we have domesticated, whether that be cows that produce more milk, or hens laying eggs constantly. People have been knowingly breeding for specific traits for millennia . And we have emperical evidence of how rapidly this can happen thanks to the Russian fox experiment.
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That still leaves what I'll call the "ratio of influence" between what we might be pushing for and what could actually survive.

"Smaller dog" also came with "different shaped tail" and "knees higher up on the leg" at the same time (for example). The result was not known when the intention was laid down. Natural selection had to fill in everything we didn't account for. Painfully (literally and figuratively) slowly.

That's not a process we want to have play out on humans for a few centuries (at least) while we "trial and error" our way around.

The Russian experiment had the aid of much more modern understandings and ability to control for variables (not even conceived of in the past). Plus that analogy rather illustrated how long the equivalent would take for humans. Plus I don't think that one really took into consideration the "is this animal still as suitable for basic survival purposes in its natural environment as it is for the increased traits selected."
 
Puppycow said:
Perhaps they don't mean precisely the same thing, which is just fine as far as I'm concerned. Transhumanism could include improving the genotypes.

Are there ethical ways to improve genotypes, bearing in mind that a baby can never really consent to anything in advance. Then again, nobody asks to be born, and indeed it's impossible to obtain consent in advance when creating a new sentient lifeform.

Is it really more ethical to just leave it all to nature to determine (occasionally nature makes a horrible mistake) or at least we could make sure that terrible genetic conditions like Huntington's disease are eliminated from the gene pool?
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See, there's the language that sets off alarm bells.

No dice.

Once you open the door to "eliminating" certain genes "for the good of all mankind" there's no going back.
 
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