@Alan McDougall,
Alan McDougall wrote:I think genetic engineering of the human could be very dangerous.
Of course it could. And aside from the fact that I disagree that we will ever be able to make designer babies (because most gene-trait relationships are far too complicated), I
do agree that as with any powerful technology we need to constantly ask what we
should do and not just what we
can do.
Alan McDougall wrote:Hitler was a fan of the philosopher Nietzsche as I am sure you know
But the problem with Hitler is that he grossly misread Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a moral philosopher, and his superman was someone who transcended the moral dogmas of judeochristian culture. Hitler also grossly scorned Christian morality, but that was a technical idea of Hitler's (he scorned charity for the weak, compassion, etc).
Alan McDougall wrote:he also based much of his super- white Aryan race on Darwinian evolution and he went to great efforts to prove that his ideal of a blue eyed blond German was the real super- race and the rest of us were subhuman or worse.
It was more some of his cronies like Albert Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler who idealized that prototypical Aryan. But yes, many people feel that Hitler and Himmler (who was the chief architect of the Holocaust) had a Darwinian rationale.
That said, Hitler's program was fundamentally NOT about the ideal Aryan race. His practices were WAY too inconsistent to support that (even to the point of conscripting hated Slavs into the Wermacht).
Hitler's regime first and foremost hated Jews, and this is evident from his speeches going back to 1919, from his writing going back to Mein Kampf, from their entire propaganda effort. In fact the Soviets idealized the 'worker' more than the Nazis ever idealized the 'Aryan'. The rationale for exterminating Jews was never to purify the Aryan gene pool -- it was because the Jews were continually blamed for being vermin, plagues, parasites, spreaders of disease, betrayers of humanity, responsible for both world wars, etc. Even until 1945 the Germans were going to diplomatic lengths to
import Jews from occupied countries to bring to their death camps.
But this is my point -- that they culled out their undesirables by just herding them and killing them. You want to change a population, that's one way of doing it quickly -- they killed 25% of the populations of Poland and Belarus, 90% of Eastern Europe's Jews, all told 12-15 million people, and the vast majority were in a matter of 3 1/2 years (June 1941 when they invaded Russia through January 1945 when they fled from Poland).
Alan McDougall wrote:If I had lived in Germany at the time, the SS Nazis would have knocked on my parents front door and removed me
As they did to all 4 of my grandparents and their families in Poland and Hungary, who were Jews.
Alan McDougall wrote:I know this is a little off topic , but is it not just a crude method of genetic engineering?
That was exactly my point. It's a much more efficient way for a cruel state to genetically change a population to simply round them up and kill or expel them, than it is to fiddle with DNA on a population scale and see what happens. And that's why I think the gun, the gas chamber, and the ghetto are much more
likely and much more potentially devastating tools of a 'racial' war than is a genetics lab.
Alan McDougall wrote:Think what a monster like him could have done with genetic engineering, he could have sterilized genitally all those he considered weak and useless and enhanced those he considered strong etc.
He DID try to sterilize people. But they couldn't find a way to do it efficiently enough, so he just decided to kill them in the end. Part of this is because when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they all of a sudden found themselves with 3 million Polish Jews in their custody compared with only a couple hundred thousand who hadn't fled Germany yet by the beginning of the war. And millions more from Russia entered their "possession" after June 1941. They decided on an expedient solution -- mass shootings and extermination camps. It was practical. They regarded Jews as 'vermin' (a common descriptor among the Nazis for them).
Alan McDougall wrote:Genetic manipulation has a much greater potential for evil in a depraved persons control and of course the reverse in a person of righteous character.
But my argument is that it's so much harder to implement than more conventional kinds of butchery, and takes so much more time. I don't see a way in which it becomes state policy to forcibly and
en masse:
1) extract eggs and sperm from millions of people
2) fertilize them
in vitro
3) reimplant them into women
4) ensure that the women don't sabotage these manipulated pregnancies
5) ensure that these manipulated children are cared for as the state wants
6) ensure that these children after 1-2 generations have grown up as expected
It's just too much, too expensive, too time consuming. It's not going to happen on a population scale like that.
---------- Post added at 03:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:56 PM ----------
Zetherin wrote:Unless one believes in a "God" which transcends morality.
By transcending morality you mean he is not concerned with it? How many practicing Christians, Jews, or Muslims do you think would believe in that? I mean the foundational documents of these religions show that God is not a disinterested party.
---------- Post added at 04:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:56 PM ----------
avatar6v7 wrote:True but what god desires is for people to act freely. That is the actuality.
It's a logical conundrum. How can he want us to act a particular way, yet also want us to act freely? How can he be all powerful but let something transpire that he does not want?
