But now it’s a double derail, on their own thread! It’s a unprecedented double self derail! History in the making right here.
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IMO it has been a mostly dysfunctional discussion in many ways, with the main focus being that the term MUST be narrowly defined because that is what makes it pejorative. It’s a whole thread of “no true Scotsman”, I took the bait, and we went nowhere.
Not as interesting as patching men to decrease their testosterone production so they don’t rape, or having a kid with a more orangutan-based amygdala than the usual chimp ones so that they might be less of a cliqueish asshole than most humans. But what can you do?
Who decides that these are desirable things to do? Who decides how much to do it?
If it’s parents making a consensual decision, then fine (aside from the separate ethical issues it raises regarding the child). But that’s not eugenics, as eugenics deals with control of group changes.
If it’s decided by someone other than the parents, then you have to deal with the problem that, by definition, at some point it’s going to be forced on someone.
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Because that’s what makes it useful instead of mental onanism.
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There are two possible reasons to use a word: its etymological meaning, or its usage history.
You want a word with the same eytmological root but without the burden of its past usage? Cool! Make one up! That’s how the English language works!
“Eu-” is a Greek prefix meaning “good”
“Gene” is a Greek root and comes from “genesis” meaning “origin.”
The equivalent Latin would be:
“Bene-” as the prefix meaning “good”
“Origo” as the root meaning “origin.”
As the root starts with a vowel, the trailing ‘e’ gets dropped from the prefix, leaving “benorigo.”
That’s pretty ugly, but from here, you can pretty it up however you want:. The study of someone’s good genes could become “benorigonomy.” The attempt to improve the genetics of your own kids could be “benorigology.”
If you tie yourself to existing words, you tie yourself to their existing uses. If you don’t want to be tied to the existing uses, then you shouldn’t use the existing words. It’s really that simple. With new words being invented daily, you have no reason to recycle one that has become tainted by association.
The fact the word “retarded” simply means “delayed” is no excuse for using it to say someone who is “running late” is “retarded,” even though that’s what the word literally means. The word has become laden with a different meaning, and there are so many other ways to say “delayed.”. And even if there weren’t, nothing is stopping anyone from coining a new word or phrase to have the meaning needed without the negative connotations.
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There is no relation between sex drive and testosterone.
Besides, rape is about power, not attraction.
Most importantly, men are not slaves to their hormones who become out of control sex zombies every time they glimpse a bit of ankle. Please give us way more credit than that.
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I want to hack my genes, or that of my future children, ala Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. But I don’t think genehacking will be a thing in my living generation. Or at least, if it is, it will be crude and primitive.
There are a number of genes that are tied to breast cancer. In fact, it is the presence of a single gene that puts one at major risk of it; being able to delete such a gene would be preferable. Bio-hacking.
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I’m sorry, you’re just making up your own definitions here. You can’t always disconnected everything from its history and common usage, and apply your own views to them.
I’m not sure how to give you more “accurate” terms for this stuff, because it’s a whole host of concepts and ideas that your just sort of assuming is the same things.
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popobawa4u: Why does “genocide” have such a bad rap? Nobody seems to be bothered that we wiped out smallpox!
Everyone else: Because the term “genocide” specifically refers to wiping out a group of people and the word is historically and entomologically associated with mass murder.
popobawa4u: But that’s not what I mean when I use the word “genocide”! Why can’t everyone use my definition?
Everyone else: SIGH…
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What would that have to do with rape, anyway? Since etymologically “rape” only means “to grab”:
The term rape originates in the Latin rapere (supine stem raptum), “to snatch, to grab, to carry off”
I mean, to you it means the same as theft or shoplifting, right?
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You wouldn’t rape a car…
But seriously:
This uses rape to mean kidnapping. Politically incorrect, weird, and creepy
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AH Hah! I think I have the delta in definitions from the above.
Deliberate Breeding Examples
- I and someone else decide to mate because we think our gene combination with produce a wonderful baby.
- Woman wanting a baby uses sperm bank and carefully picks just the right donor for a particular result.
- Scientist does gene therapy on his sperm before impregnating his wife with the desire to remove a hereditary disease from his child.
Eugenics Examples:
- Germans kill and sterilize every Jewish person in the population so that their genes can never exist again.
- Trump sterilizes all Americans with an IQ over 100 so that smart people cease to exist in the US population.
- Canada sterilizes all citizens ruled rude by the new rude police.
Deliberate breeding is on the personal level and is opt in. Eugenics is on the population level and is enforced.
And I am not limiting deliberate breeding to just a single person or couple. As you said in your example. Several people at the BBS decide to make a baby. They agree to genetic testing. They agree that the “best” pairing of genes will produce a baby. In the mean time everyone else on the BBS can mate with whomever they want. They can propagate whatever genes they want. This group making a deliberate pairing choice are not taking the choice away from others.
Compare this to a scenario where Falcor decides red heads are bad for the BBS. Falcor goes out and makes sure that no red head (including recessive red heads) can mate ever again. Falcor has now removed the red head gene from the population. This is Eugenics. This is not deliberate breeding.
So there. you now have a word that describe what I think you are aiming for. People making informed science based intelligent choices on who they will mate with with a specific genetic goal while allowing others to make their own choices (for better or worse).
One couple doesn’t eugenics their child. Just like someone shooting their neighbor didn’t genocide one person.
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Words! How do they work!?
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The Cold Spring Laboratory still produces some excellent journals-- I recall using those in my undergraduate education. I think the author of the “What’s so bad about Eugenics” essay is determined to push a particular ideology, and this clouds her judgement.
That eugenics was a dangerous set of ideas, based on the myth of races, and did far more harm that good? I’m okay with that…
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Was the Human genome project a good idea?
I don’t think that qualifies as eugenics. Because, again, it’s not about racial hygiene. It’s about better understanding the human genome. Not the same thing at all, I don’t think, even if eugenics was based on some common areas of study. The Human genome project had nothing to do with race, I’d argue.
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Another current-day reminder of Charles Davenport’s Trait Book is the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) catalogue. This is a large, searchable, up-to-date database of human genes, genetic traits, and disorders. Each OMIM record contains bibliographic references and a summary of the scientific literature describing what is known about a particular gene, trait, or disorder. The following behavioral traits are included in OMIM and in the Trait Book: arm folding, alcoholism, and homosexuality. If Davenport had had access to the internet, this is what the Trait Book most probably would have looked like. For a comparative example, the reference number for “arm folding” in the OMIM is 107850, in the Trait Book, 0482; “alcoholism” in the OMIM is 103780, in the Trait Book, 0856; and “homosexuality” in the OMIM is 306995, in the Trait Book, 31761.[6] This online catalogue is a collection of behavioral characteristics that could possibly be inherited. And while the site states that, “no single gene determines a particular behavior,” because behaviors are “complex traits involving multiple genes that are affected by a variety of other factors,”[7] this fact often gets overlooked in media reports hyping scientific breakthroughs on gene function…
sounds like there’s a connection being made. I suppose that there’s a class argument to be made-- exploiting the HGP for the purpose of individualized treatment holds a lot of promise if you can afford it.
Maybe I’ve been hypersensitized to these sorts of attacks on genuinely useful scientific advances because they’ve been used to attack abortion and birth control.
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Okay… I really hope you’re not insinuating here that I’m anti-choice? Because I’d hope you know I’m not.
Yes, pro-lifers have indeed used eugenics and linked that with Margaret Sanger to argue their case. Pro-lifers have also used non-violent resistance, countercultural concepts, and religion. That is not what I’m doing. Eugenics was an accepted and wide-spread ideology that all sorts of people accepted at face value and used to form all sorts of arguments that were not racist or sexist, Sanger among them (though she was a product of her time, so there’s that).
No one said that we shouldn’t study genetics or DNA and how they shape us as human beings. But again, I don’t think that is eugenics, which is pretty much about racial hygiene and was developed when we had a very primitive understanding of genetics and it’s relationship to nurture, environment, and other factors (social, cultural, etc). It’s aimed at society, not an individual and that’s how all sorts of people deployed it. That’s how people like Sanger used it rhetorically in order to argue for women controlling their own bodies, which was her core and key issue that still matters today. It assumes that DNA is the sole determining factor in who we are and what we do, which people who study epigenetics have disagreed with - they think that nurture and nature very much work hand in hand to form who we are and what we do.
But with regards to implementing eugenics, who gets to decide what’s desirable here? How does that work? What criteria do we use to “cleanse” our DNA of undesirable traits and what are those traits? At what point do we draw the line at what’s good for society vs. what is good for an individual? And that is a moral, ethical, and political question that can’t just be worked out by throwing some science at the problem. Honestly, the view point that we can fix all of humanities ills with science is short-sighted. Science is a wonderful think, and can be an incredible asset to humanity. It can also be terribly destructive. The use of science (or anything that is a tool of humanity) is only as good as the people who wield it. That doesn’t mean we should not embrace and use science, but that we need to accept that scientists aren’t any better than the rest of us, just because of their profession.
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Sounds like most Trump voters (if only he could have been selectively bred out…)
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