They absolutely are wrong from a scientific perspective.
Quick sidetrack: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what people of the time meant by eugenics, because it’s rightly been associated with Nazis. That’s just where eugenics inevitably winds up, and it can’t and shouldn’t be uncoupled from that history. But prior to that it was considered a progressive cause, because the ideal was to reduce or eliminate human suffering by stopping disabled people, criminals, and other people considered undesirable from having children and thus preventing more disabled people, criminals, etc from being born to begin with.
But that’s not how genetics or criminality works. Most disabled people aren’t born with their disabilities, and those that are aren’t necessarily inherited from their parents; with deaf people for example, the vast majority have two hearing parents and they’re deaf due to a de novo mutation. If no deaf person has children ever again you would still have roughly the same number of deaf people in the world.
In addition from a genetics perspective, eliminating a trait from the gene pool can have weird, unexpected effects downstream. Maybe once you remove a lot of these things you think are undesirable at the same time, it causes a collapse of something else you didn’t even know was related.
I mean that sounds like they tried it with promising results but made avoidable mistakes.
If we really wanted to do it, with almost 80 million “top 1%” people in whatever category you want to optimise it’s hard to say that the genepool isn’t big enough, and also hard to argue against the fact that eugenics would work, but given the people who start it will be dead by the time any results are shown is it really worth ruining that many lives for is the real question - why not use genetic engineering on embryos and cell cultures if you want to improve human bodies (still not saying we should), as it’s faster and less disruptive to existing people
I mean from a purely scientific perspective they aren’t wrong… Moraly however…
First read then comment, if you leave a wall of text without reading the comments im just blocking you.
They absolutely are wrong from a scientific perspective.
Quick sidetrack: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what people of the time meant by eugenics, because it’s rightly been associated with Nazis. That’s just where eugenics inevitably winds up, and it can’t and shouldn’t be uncoupled from that history. But prior to that it was considered a progressive cause, because the ideal was to reduce or eliminate human suffering by stopping disabled people, criminals, and other people considered undesirable from having children and thus preventing more disabled people, criminals, etc from being born to begin with.
But that’s not how genetics or criminality works. Most disabled people aren’t born with their disabilities, and those that are aren’t necessarily inherited from their parents; with deaf people for example, the vast majority have two hearing parents and they’re deaf due to a de novo mutation. If no deaf person has children ever again you would still have roughly the same number of deaf people in the world.
In addition from a genetics perspective, eliminating a trait from the gene pool can have weird, unexpected effects downstream. Maybe once you remove a lot of these things you think are undesirable at the same time, it causes a collapse of something else you didn’t even know was related.
Read the other comments before writing a wall of text that is completely meaningless because its already common sense in the thread.
Delete your comment about how eugenics is scientifically plausible if you know it’s wrong or deal with people telling you it’s wrong. 🤷♂️
Are you illiterate? I said that we are talking about what the scientists in 19th century thought.
they are very wrong scientifically
From a nowadays perspective absolutely.
the spartans tried eugenics… worked for a couple generations, and then they were so completely inbred that they fell
I mean that sounds like they tried it with promising results but made avoidable mistakes.
If we really wanted to do it, with almost 80 million “top 1%” people in whatever category you want to optimise it’s hard to say that the genepool isn’t big enough, and also hard to argue against the fact that eugenics would work, but given the people who start it will be dead by the time any results are shown is it really worth ruining that many lives for is the real question - why not use genetic engineering on embryos and cell cultures if you want to improve human bodies (still not saying we should), as it’s faster and less disruptive to existing people