Sunday, April 13, 2014

Modern day Eugenicists should be ashamed of themselves

     As societies began ensuring greater equality of opportunity, to that very degree they select out young people of ability to pursue career interests over reproduction. At the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, welfare programs provide incentives to young women of low ability to regard reproduction as a greater source of income than employment. The result, eugenicists argue, is a doomed, dysgenic society (i.e., one destructive of genetic patrimony).
     At its root, eugenics is an interdisciplinary conceptualization of the genetic consequences of social practices for current human and future. Applied to animals, it would not be controversial. The counter-response was (and still is) an unspoken denial that human evolution is an ongoing process: hybridization has supposedly eliminated subspecies, so that the fundamental human genotype is now claimed to be virtually immutable, with only trivial intraspecies variation existent. Even while conceding that humankind is indeed the product of evolution, proponents of human particularism assume that human beings are the one species no longer affected by that process.
     Humanity, they argue, is the issue of a single African woman (‘Eve’), and any subsequent or future human evolution is only ‘skin deep.’ Eugenicists tend to be skeptical of this view, which they regard as rooted more in wishful thinking than in objective science.  Their model of human evolution is similar to that of the dog, which was bred independently in different places at different times from various subspecies of wolf. Most of that diversity is between African populations. Even if it could be proved that a human ‘Eve’ actually existed, 150,000 years of evolution in isolated groups living under the most diverse conditions has produced enormous inter and intra-group diversity, which is a great resource but also a disability when it takes the form of genetic illness, low intelligence, or lack of altruism.
     Human ecology does not limit itself to the present population but defines society as the entire human community over time; we should act as nature’s stewards, and simple parental responsibility mandates self-restraint. Thus modern eugenics goes hand in hand with neo-Malthusian thinking, which views the current global population as already exceeding the planet’s long term carrying capacity, and is generally opposed to the view of a Julian Simon (1932-1998), who dismissed concerns regarding overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and global pollution.
     Positive eugenics refers to approaches intended to raise fertility among the genetically advantaged. These include such genetic techniques as in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning ̧ and also ways to encourage use of those techniques, for example, targeted demographic analyses and financial and political stimuli.

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