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Does the net positive of Eugenics out weigh the negative? How so? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Patnou@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

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I mean this in a way to give a child the best start at life. Instead of having to worry about heart disease or addiction or something else. And if people have an immunity to one thing that the other does not. We take the gene from the first person to create a medicine for the other person. I think it gets a bad rap because Hitler. To put it another way. If a person who is 80 and has an immunity to diabieties or cancer or whatever. And we can take that gene and put it into a new born so the kid never has to worry about it.

EDIT: Maybe I mistyped. I meant Eugenics in the sense that without killing anyone or anything. We can take take a gene from one person edit it. So it does not cause heart disease or cancer or addiction or whatever. Case in point if a child has a family history on both sides that he or she will have diabetes or breast cancer, or heart disease or something. Why not take that gene from myself or anyone else (without killing anyone) to give the kid a shot at a decent life since the gene will stop the diabetes or heart disease........I really really need to reword this question in a couple days. But hey at least it's getting interesting answers.

EDIT 2: This post was supposed to be altruistic. No harming anyone else. Or killing kids or whatever.

EDIT 3: Since the downvote brigade has come. Downvote the most. All this to a missed knowledge part on myself. But you guys and gals have been great for the discourse. Cause at this point there is no getting out of downvote hell lmao.

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[–] GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

The fundamental problem with Eugenics is that the more fit for a specific niche you become, the more vulnerable you are to niche collapse. For example, if someone was genetically optimized to be the perfect software engineer, and now AI had made their job redundant, and the rest of their skills were mediocre at best, they now are not fit for anything else. We see this in nature all the time where a species becomes so hyper-specialized at one thing, the second there's a shift in the environment they are instantly past-tense.

Diversity lacks efficiency, but it improves resilience. Another example, if you over-engineer the drive shaft on a truck to very precisely meet the expected load limit and no more to save weight, the second you encounter a situation that overloads the drive shaft it will snap like a twig. The added weight of safety tolerances is inefficient... but it is also the only way to approach a world far too complex for you to anticipate every possible variable.

For an example of how this works in human biology, lets say you found a way to completely eliminate sickle-cell anemia. That's great, people will live much more healthy lives right? Except the second you do that, millions of people that you cured instantly start keeling over dead. Why? Because the sickle-cell was protecting them from malaria, and while it wasn't a great solution, far fewer died from sickle-cell than would have from unchecked malaria.

Engineering is always limited by how many of the real world variables you actually know about. It's the unknown unknowns that will sink your titanic every time. This scattershot, random evolutionary system that produces us? Yeah, there's a reason nature works that way. It's actually the most efficient way to keep surfacing variables you didn't yet know existed. For a lot of really complicated reasons, it's actually impossible for you to think of everything when trying to engineer the perfect human, and a surprising number of things you can't figure out a reason for and assume they're useless at best or a harmful waste at worst, turn out to be the one thing that saves you when everyone else is dropping like flies to a thing you didn't even know could happen yesterday.

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