Thread: Why have Eugenics Studies and Policies fallen out of favor?

Originally Posted by montra

Eugenics was the popular science of the day back during the turn of the 20th century. It was led by people like Margret Sanger who thought it a good idea to promote contraception to black people, so as to wean their reproduction so as to strengthen the human gene pool. She did this by creating Planned Parenthood.

Organizations often seek goals different from their founders.

Of course, the climax was the Nazi fascination with eugenics and the subsequent racist and genocidal implications that went along with it. This pretty much put the nail in the eugenic coffin. Had it not been for this I'm pretty sure scientist would still be promoting it.

Scientists in most of the non-fanatical world had already rejected eugenics as a flawed concept before the Nazis came to power. It's just not statistically or theoretically valid. It certainly wouldn't have been supported after the development of population genetics.

In fact, society still promotes in via abortion. If your unborn child is "defective" then in the garbage he or she goes.

There is something of a difference between aborting a fetus that will face debilitating mental or physical disabilities--or those that will likely die shortly after birth due to untreatable genetic conditions--and a systematic program to redirect human evolution. Eugenics goes quite a lot further than simply working to eliminate inherently and undoubtedly debilitating genetic errors from the gene pool. There's a huge difference between aborting a fetus with, say, Tay-Sachs disease and proposing a systematic campaign to eliminate all black people because their skin color is deemed inferior.

Originally Posted by Someone

Organizations often seek goals different from their founders.



Scientists in most of the non-fanatical world had already rejected eugenics as a flawed concept before the Nazis came to power. It's just not statistically or theoretically valid. It certainly wouldn't have been supported after the development of population genetics.



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So eugenics can be used with livestock and animals but not people?


Hmmm. What then is the major difference in your opinion between animals and people?

Originally Posted by Someone

Organizations often seek goals different from their founders.



There is something of a difference between aborting a fetus that will face debilitating mental or physical disabilities--or those that will likely die shortly after birth due to untreatable genetic conditions--and a systematic program to redirect human evolution. Eugenics goes quite a lot further than simply working to eliminate inherently and undoubtedly debilitating genetic errors from the gene pool. There's a huge difference between aborting a fetus with, say, Tay-Sachs disease and proposing a systematic campaign to eliminate all black people because their skin color is deemed inferior.

Are you saying that abortion and eugenics are mutually exclusive so long as the reasoning for such abortions do not target the "defective" unborn from having offspring?

Originally Posted by Someone

Organizations often seek goals different from their founders.



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Yep, kinda like the United States government.

Originally Posted by Someone

Correction; they know how to accentuate certain features at the expense of others.

Not all "features" are good. Therefore accentuating the good ones at the expense of the bad ones is not a horrible thing, it is smart evolution.

Originally Posted by Someone

No doubt selective breeding can make more desirable products for limited economic uses. I do not want human beings to become commodities suited for economic purposes determined when conceived. Eugenics utterly fails at delivering general forward progress towards environmental fitness; it only achieves progress towards artificial goals and dysfunction.

Economic "uses"... Economics are the fundamental component of any society - those societies who failed to realize this are now the poorest. A unit of labor is a unit of labor, whether that labor is producing animal hides or automobiles. Some groups were able to build farm communities and eventually begin the process of trade specialization. These more successful groups should have every right to safeguard their utopias from dysfunctional foreigners who will only detract from society, especially foreigners who have no track record of building or maintaining civilization.

Originally Posted by Someone

You are misunderstanding the laws of nature, and why artificial selection is suboptimal in the context of those laws. Our concepts of what is environmentally adaptive are almost always wrong. We would eliminate useful traits because they are considered suboptimal in the present environment, only to leave ourselves vulnerable in the future.

Societies have been known to commit suicide. An autopsy of ancient history would show that seemingly megalithic civilizations vanished for the most innocuous of reasons. Even contemporary examples like Rome prove that its experiment with multiculturalism and tolerance led to its downfall - at the hands of hostile outsiders no less. These foreign tribes had no chance of assimilating into Rome and should not have been allowed into Roman society to begin with.

Originally Posted by Someone

Not even remotely. Marxists are humanists, and therefore reject the commoditization of humanity as proposed by eugenicists.

Exactly, Marxists would prefer and would probably thrive in any society where everyone lives in equally sized mud huts, in a land with infinite resources. Marxism in its purest form, which mandates universal equality unto all, has failed everywhere it has been implemented.

Originally Posted by Someone

Utterly irrelevant to the present political and economic climate in those countries. A stronger correlation lies with a history of colonial oppression and industrial suppression.

I don't buy the tireless "blame Whitey" argument. Explain how north Asians, notably the Japanese and the Koreans, have managed to build societies that rival or even exceed European standards of civilization, even though they have been enslaved, colonized and exploited for centuries by Europeans as well as each other.




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Originally Posted by montra

Eugenics was the popular science of the day back during the turn of the 20th century. It was led by people like Margret Sanger who thought it a good idea to promote contraception to black people, so as to wean their reproduction so as to strengthen the human gene pool. She did this by creating Planned Parenthood.

There are NO facts in your post concerning Sanger and planned Parenthood - there is nothing but the usual Life Propaganda.

Sanger had some belief that negatively affected people like the feeble-minded should not have children, buit the idea of breeding a "superior race" woffended her.

She did have some opinion that the lighter skinned races were superior to darker skinned, but she tolerated no discrimination in her staff, and simply wanted to allow blacks and minorities, along with whites who she worked hard with, to be able to limit their family size to avoid suffering and death in the children,

Of course, the climax was the Nazi fascination with eugenics and the subsequent racist and genocidal implications that went along with it. This pretty much put the nail in the eugenic coffin. Had it not been for this I'm pretty sure scientist would still be promoting it. In fact, society still promotes in via abortion. If your unborn child is "defective" then in the garbage he or she goes. Of course, people who advocate abortion would never admit to as much, but them is the facts.

And the current conservatives are working hard to to do the same with "defective" children NOW.

"Defective children" need endless programs, support assistance both medical and educational and day to day care. The Right's constant refrain to end the Dept of Education, which is what supplies education for autistic, Dons syndrome and other children, along with medicaid, medicare, and all the other programs that help the helpless is simply another way to "throw defective children in the garbage", like they were 40 years ago.

Originally Posted by fiddlerdave

"Defective children" need endless programs, support assistance both medical and educational and day to day care. The Right's constant refrain to end the Dept of Education, which is what supplies education for autistic, Dons syndrome and other children, along with medicaid, medicare, and all the other programs that help the helpless is simply another way to "throw defective children in the garbage", like they were 40 years ago.

Our schools used to look like Hitler youth camps - nothing but healthy, physically fit white children. Now our schools are dominated by overweight and obese brown people.





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I don't think certain people should be allowed to reproduce, but the criteria isn't necessarily about genes as much as it's about having the ability and intent to viably raise your children.

Originally Posted by montra

In fact, society still promotes in via abortion. If your unborn child is "defective" then in the garbage he or she goes. Of course, people who advocate abortion would never admit to as much, but them is the facts.

One reason why I support abortion is because it's people with lower-intelligence-apt genes that are relatively more likely to need abortions than those with higher-intelligence-apt genes, based on all evidence I've acquired. I fully and proudly admit that.

Originally Posted by DeathStar

I don't think certain people should be allowed to reproduce, but the criteria isn't necessarily about genes as much as it's about having the ability and intent to viably raise your children.

You are one of those who believe that things like "culture" and "environment" will produce intelligent, non-criminal offspring...