What can eugenics do for a population?
 

Can it eliminate all or at least most genetic diseases? Of course, it can't prevent new mutations from taking place, but it can eliminate the deleterious genes which are already present, right? If so, to what degree? Can it really create a "master race"? Can it achieve, say, a 30 pt average IQ increase? Can it undo thousands of years of evolution and turn, say, the Negritos into a tribe of tall, muscular athletes? Can it backfire and cause an increase in serious genetic diseases or a significant drop in IQ?

Basically what I'm asking is how far can it go? And, how can it backfire and become detrimental to a population?

Theoretically it could make us all aryan übergötter, but, you know, it's only theories.

Anybody?

Eugenics is playing God. Playing God is dangerous. There is no God, so there can't be eugenics.

It would suck! Everyone will choose the same traits for their children, and humanity will end up being a heap of inbred people. Besides, how can we know what are the most adaptive traits? For instance, a negrito could be the best genotype for times of hunger. Likewise, a tall, slender, and dark African is best suited for the tropics than a bulky, red-haired viking, whereas the opposite is true for the North Pole. Have you seen the movie "Gattaca"? It's quite illustrative.

well, now we have some form of eugenics also, because the dumb people are getting more children than intelligent men, and getting more help from government aids, when in a natural environment they would be the first to die out..

Nothing good, in the long run. For me, it is contrary to the good of humanity on an ethical basis. If one operates merely on utilitarian basis, that person has to consider, who will decide what human traits/characteristics need to be fixed?

Wrong. There was a god: the environment. The environment shaped eugenics (natural selection) for all of our early history, and with great effects I might add. Today we have the upper hand on the environment and natural selection has stagnated. I think we have a responsibility make sure our species does not deteriorate because of this. But that's not what the thread is about...

Only natural selection is a good eugenic program.

The ones that are objectively bad: congenital heart defects caused by genetic factors, mental illnesses caused by genetic factors, etc..

Even in those cases the line is difficult to draw. For example, thalassemia is definitely bad, but in heterozygous individuals talassemia-codifying genes can offer protection from malaria.

Perhaps we're engineering a more docile population? In some ways that's a good thing. Who wouldn't want to be a child their entire life? Sure beats the existential crises that come with high intelligence.

---------- Post added 2012-05-18 at 22:05 ----------

Then forget about eliminating the ambiguous ones and focus the effort on the ones that are unquestionably bad. There aren't any benefits to having hemophilia, or some for of the gene responsible for it, for example, are there?

Actually, we don't know. Perhaps hemophilia genes could confer resistance to some undiscovered diseases. Besides, a combination of seemingly deleterious genes could actually give place to a new, more adaptive organ or structure. For example, the trunk of the elephants must have looked like a deformity at the very beginning, but afterwards it became a useful structure.

Okay, but what about the diseases that cause the seemingly healthy 14 year old athlete to keel over and die during a warm up? Those can't possibly have any benefits. What about certain cancers that are genetic? How can those be good?

You don't need to worry about those diseases: nature is already killing the carriers and we can't do anything about it.

Not necessarily, the genes responsible for them could and often do lay latent if I'm not mistaken.

You can't avoid that, since those genes are going to appear anyway because of mutations.

But how often does that happen? I imagine such mutations would arise only rarely.

Eugenics will be the future revolution that lifts mankind to a new level of evolution.
Our greatest tool for manipulating our world is our minds and bodies so it makes perfect sense to engineer this tool to perform better and faster.

I hear what you say Drogomir. You may wish to fix terrible diseases. But when you open this door, you open the door to Pandora's box. Somebody, someday, may wish to selectively eliminate people born disfigured that are costly to repair,or that are unattractive. Somebody, someday, may wish to eliminate people of a certain height, weight, age, etc.