What's the technical problem with liberal eugenics?

If liberal eugenics is synonymous with selective breeding, then it has always been the fact in nature. There are many unconscious characteristics that cause mate selection by the female.

In birds, for instance, the quality of a male's plumage and song quality tell the female much about the genetic makeup of the male. How well he acquires food and how disease resistant he is, qualities that she wants to pass on to her offspring.

Symmetry is also important in mate selection by the female. It was discovered that female scorpionflies prefer mates with the most symmetrical wings, i.e., the opposing wings of the same length. Apparantely , it's true with people too. People whose faces are the most symmetrical are deemed the most attractive and sexually appealing. The actor Denzel Washington has been found to have a very high degree of facial symmetry and is appealing to the opposite sex, at least the viewing public, which helps his box office ratings.

Now, of course, we have the ability to determine a person's genetics through DNA testing. The question is whether our mate selection becomes conscious through DNA testing. It already is conscious to a certain extent because the female may select a mate by his economic means of support, whether he will be able to provide the financial security long term enough to rear her children. But whether we will select mates based on the conscious knowledge of their genetic makeup is the question. Will we date several people and then request a copy of their DNA before we make a final selection?

But it's another leap to suggest that people will manipulate the genetic makeup of their children by gene splicing, an Orwellian leap.

First of all, thank you very much. In my view selective breeding includes the abstention of an individual from reproduction, even when they has the opportunity to have children. For example, if I had a girlfriend willing to have children with me (impossible scenario), I would know that an hypothetical child could inherit my biological defects through my genes: high-functioning autism, low i.q., depression, ugliness, modest height etc.. Maybe I could send my hypothetical girlfriend to a sperm bank.
That's particulary valid for females, who have more reproductive opportunities than males: if they have biological defects with a genetic background (diseases, low iq, ugliness, etc.), I think that they should be encouraged to avoid the spread of their alleles.
I don't see anything immoral with "gene splicing" or genetic editing, but, as I have read, it's very difficult to do it for the alteration of polygenic traits (height, iq, etc.), because we don't know the causal variants and with CRISPR only a small number of genetic manipulations can be operated. I think that the most promising technique is embryo selection, with polygenetic scores for complex traits. In particular, very interesting is the idea to create a great number of egg cells to select the best embryo among a great number of embryos so produced.

If you were to ask apes to design an improved ape, do you think they would come up with a human? Would they call for a smaller, weaker frame but better communication skills? They would probably do pretty much what you did, call for a bigger, faster ape. The reality is that you don't know what would make a better human. You are worried about ugliness and height? Did you know that shorter men live longer than tall men. Maybe to an ape, we are all ugly. That is the concern over genetic diversity. Our knowledge of what is truly important is at best poor. If you go about in ignorance removing parts of the human inheritance, you are setting us up for failure, putting us in a position where a single disease could wipe us out since we don't have the diversity to survive. You find very few American Elm trees anymore. Until the 30's, they were very common, very shapely, a very nice tree - until the Dutch Elm beetle arrived and killed just about all of them off. Good thing we had other types of trees. I think turning all humans into one type would not end well.

Thanks. We perectly know what make an human happier: an high iq (associated with longevity, abstention from crime, income, etc.), an attractive face, a tall height (but not too tall, which would decrease longevity), etc. There are a lot of studies which can indicate what make a man happier, apart from the fact that eugenics concerns especially health, the absence of diseases, which are universally a bad thing. You say that eugenics is a dangerous interference with natural selection, but you don't consider that the wealth and technology of the First world have already wiped out natural selection, we live in a world where the only active selection is artificial (condoms, etc.) and sexual (especially for ugly males). I personally think that an eugenic plan should increase also the genetic diversity: I am the kind of person that would suggest a white woman to mate a black male, if the choice is between two men of the same health, attractiveness and intelligence but of different ethnic background. If we selected human embryos for valuable traits and the absence of disease, we would do the same thing that natural and sexual selection do. There is not reason to think that natural (almost ended) and sexual selection are better in choicing the traits and the genes to spread and preserve.
Now I want to explain why I am so obsessed with eugenics: it seems to me only solution to prevent the problems that I am facing. Like I have said, I carry a series of diseases and defects, because my entire family is the consequence of what the Victorian eugeneticists would have called dysgenic matings: my father is ugly, my grandmother has suffered for almost 60 years from depression and now she is 89, my sister suffers from depression too and she is ugly, etc. Now she has a boyfriend, and I am afraid that she could give birth to an other ugly, autistic, depressed, low-iq individual. I grew up in a normal enviroment full of stimuli, but my defects have made my life an hell.

Actually, that is exactly what we don't know. Attractiveness is highly subjective and has nothing to do with the quality of the human or his or her ability to contribute to society. If you made everyone the same height with the same features, people would just start focusing on nose shape or skin tone. You propose breeding out all the variation in human appearance, variations that nature has spent forever breeding in because you think you know the right answer. I think if you asked a number of people across the world you would get wildly varying opinions on beauty. As for IQ, what type of IQ do you suggest we breed for? Artists, musicians, mathematicians, chess players? The IQ you value (whatever it is) is not what others would value and is likely not solely what the human species needs to succeed.

There is no species wide consensus as to what the perfect human is. Whoever makes the decisions transfers their biases into the answer. I don't think you want the entire human race to reflect the biases and preferences of a few.

What are you saying? We should do nothing in front of the cruelty of nature that make so many defective and ill individuals, people without the possibility to have a normal life, work, have social relationships, sex, etc.?


You don't trust my judgment and I understand it, since I am a moron, but consider that the hypothetical scientists and doctors who would direct an eugenic program could do their research about this problem, by examining each biological trait (personality traits, i.q., physical aspect, etc.) which could influence human life and happiness, and decide when to intervene.


There is a subjective component to attractiveness, but scientific studies have demonstrated that the opinions of different people about the same face are higly correlated (r=0.8-0.9). You are nearly right when you say that attractiveness doesn't contribute to society and doesn't influence the value of an individual (I don't know anything like human value), but you cannot deny that it surely influence the economic success of an individual, because scientific studies have demonstrated that ugly people earn less.


If everyone had the same height and the same features, I am sure that people would be treated in a more democratic manner, considering that now ugly people are higly discriminated in various settings (dating, employment, etc.).


I don't know the right answer, scientists and psychologists will study the correlations between certain human genetic traits and human outcome and happiness, and I am sure that they will find traits like health, intelligence, and beauty highly correlated with human happiness. Nature is a blind mechanism, again there is not reason to imagine that a group of scientists can be better at that, and natural selection is not operating in today's world, where nearly only sexual and artificial selection influence the human genetic pool. There is a genetic distance between stupid individuals and intelligent ones, but I don't think that select for intelligence would reduce genetic diversity so much, also because intelligent people don't have the same ethnic background and genetic variants which increase I.Q. are different. I imagine that there are features like a short stature or a gracile body that have been selected by nature for their utility in certain enviroment, but that now, in today's world, are useless and tend to reduce human happiness.


When scientists have asked to Maori to rate the face of English people, they have noted a strong similarity between the judgments of Maori and those of Englishmen.


To succeed IQ is not enough, but, again, we can force scientists to study the correlation between different biological traits and enviromental factors and human outcome to understand what to do. Unfortunatelly for low-IQ people like me, the famous psychologist Charles Spearman has isolated the g-factor, which is correlated with all the abilities needed for activities like engineers and mathematicians, which are among the most productive members of our society. Good artists and musicians don't have to have an IQ: they need a specific talent, but the society don't need a lot of them.


Again, we need to have good scientists to find what human traits influence happiness and outcome.