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Comment by Avalaxy | Hacker News Reader

> The only thing to add to that, where you have to be slightly careful, is if an animal hasn’t got strong genes. And then you interfere and you allow that animal to procreate. You could potentially be making the gene pool weaker and more susceptible to mange. That’s where you have to be a bit careful.

It's interesting that we can talk about this in such an objective and rational way when it involves non-human animal species, but when it involves humans this statement suddenly becomes extremely controversial.

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Also frowned upon when done to humans, but accepted by most humans in regard to animals: slavery, raising for food, taxidermy, hunting for sport, neutering and keeping as pets, etc.

Some people don't think this treatment is appropriate for non-human animals either.

Personally I eat other animals, but I'm against both eugenics and cannibalism.

The problem is most people do not have a rational basis for the differences in the behaviors you outlined. The reasoning generally rests completely on logical fallacies.

It's very rational to want the treatment of humans to be held to a high standard when you yourself are a human.

But I am also a primate, mammal, vertebrate, animal, terran life-form. And going the other direction I am homo sapiens as opposed to neanderthal, caucasian, German, member of my specific family. Why draw a sharp line specifically at "human"..?

Because humans are made in the image and likeness of God.

It is true that without a foundation for human exceptionalism, like belief that humans were designed for a special purpose by a higher power, it becomes very difficult to answer ethical questions of why humans should be treated differently than other animals. The eugenics movement was strong in American institutions in the early 20th century.

If your comment was some kind joke please disregard my comment.

Sorry to see you getting down voted into the basement, I too am a devout theist. I don't think the nature of your argument being theistic is the primary reason you are getting down voted though. I think if you built a stronger set of arguments about why this matters and how it relates to humans deserving a better level of treatment than other animals your comment would fair better.

A decent example might be something like, "As a Christian, I believe all humans are made in the image and likeness of God. This gives humans a special place in the order of the universe in Gods eyes and God asks us to respect that view in relation to how we treat other human beings. Giving humans a higher level of reverence than other animals. Being made in Gods likeness is also a reflection of the higher order cognitive, spiritual, and social faculties that humans share and other animals often don't display. Although we do see animals having some advanced emotions or social ordering we don't see them simultaneously containing all the high order functions that humanity does at once"

I wrote Christian because I'm a Christian, you might be part of any religion or none. Something like the above comment might be more constructive in the future best wishes.

The problem is that you’re approaching the discussion with a completely different philosophical framework than most people have, so they’ll latch on to specific things they disagree with in your example comment and dismiss the rest. For example your statement “I believe all humans are made in the likeness of God” will lead to “well I don’t”, and the discussion is over.

I think it’s more effective to find the core issue of disagreement, which here seems to be whether or not ethics can exist without some kind of a moral authority.

Christians have a tough time in public discussions these days, unfortunately because of some blunders in the past and poor arguments in the present.

I agree with all of your comment. However, I think many people presume the purpose of the HN comments section is to have a robust debate that helps the community arrive at some conclusion. I think there is a lot of value in comments that simply share a persons point of view. I would really enjoy hearing others perspectives outside of secular scientific/evolutionary viewpoint and christian viewpoint.

Particularly it would be great to hear from people with hindu backgrounds as they often have a lot to say about our relationship with animals.

> going the other direction

Many do go in this other direction.

One reason is that we can communicate with (most) other humans to establish the shared boundary in a way we cannot (as reliably?) with other life.

I make no particular claim here as to how this reason should be weighed against the various other reasons pulling in the various directions.

How is that actually relevant though? Do your morals change when it comes to humans you cannot communicate with?

Historically, that seems pretty common

One of the things "morals" is is a negotiation with society about what should be construed as blameworthy. Potential participants in that negotiation may have different treatment without, as you said, it "rest[ing] completely on logical fallacies," which is why I brought it up.

I am not saying this makes up the entirety of my moral system, and I am explicitly (here) saying that a naive application does not.

Because humans that extract value from animals outcompete the humans that don't.

It's in a humans best interest to believe the narrative that allows them to extract that value without moral uneasiness.

If octopuses wanted to be treated humanely they would reply to this comment and say so!

Nit (doesn't challenge your argument), but plenty of sci-fi short stories explore (and glorify the concept of) humans as pets for some random aliens.

I share your sentiment in the regard that it highlights an obvious difference between how we think about humans and animals. I think you probably know why applying darwinisim to human society is "extremely controversial".

On a side note, what constitutes "good genes" nowadays?

The ability to exploit finite natural resources (including human health and lives) in a maximally efficient way? Accumulating as much money as possible?

Would you prefer to reduce human population to a wealthy, healthy remainder and purge all people who cannot sustain themselves?

What does sustaining yourself mean in terms of "benefit to society"?

Is making money by burning fossil fuel - or facilitating and developing systems that (unnecessarily) burn more fossil fuel - a contribution to a "better human gene pool"?

Can sustaining yourself make life worse for others?

Would you approve eugenics, if yes, to what degree?

These are ethical questions as old as humanity.

Overcoming naive social darwinism is arguably one of the reasons that todays "civilized" society can even exist.

I appreciate your comment as a start for a discussion, but I also dislike the implications that I read into it.

People who earn obscene amounts of money and deplete natural resources hardly contribute to an improvement of the human gene pool.

And to me it seems that most people with physical or psychological handicaps that deem them "unfit" already are poor, die young and often don't procreate.

What exactly do you believe the link is between someone's profession and their genes? Because your comment reads like you believe there are genes for things you consider moral and immoral.

I was aiming at the fact that money is today a prime signifier of "evolutionary fitness", if that makes any sense.

In my tangent about natural resources and fossil fuel I wanted to suggest that making money (especially big money) is strongly correlated with consumption of natural resources. (see tragedy of the commons)

Mostly indirectly, even in professions that to not directly "burn fuel".

Sell more goods, buy more property, consume energy. Which of course is also a necessary part of modern life.

The problem is scale. We are not getting more efficient in depleting natural resources (as in using less for more), we are maximizing monetary gain.

That being said, I have no problem if you discard my answer as incoherent rambling.

On the other hand, I don't understand why I was implying "immoral genes" or anything like that.

I think power (specifically geopolitical) is significantly more of an indicator than money.

There are people substantially less wealthy than, say, Zuckerberg, who are far more likely to survive in a civilizational collapse/population bottleneck type evolutionary scenario.

In that sort of circumstance I'd rather be a Dr Strangelove (or high ranking military official, or an Air Force 1 crew member) than a Warren Buffet.

Humans have technology like medical care and a lack of natural predators that substantially mitigates any impact gene pool deficiencies might cause, whereas wild animals do not. So there's no real danger that the human population will collapse without eugenics. That isn't true of the wild. This changes the ethical calculus quite a bit.

A weaker gene pool puts a huge strain on our medical systems though.

For examples: the gut microbiome directly impact our health, diets influence gut microbiome, junk food has a negative impact on it, it is mostly inherited from your parents

Which means in just a few generations you can end up with massive changes. Diabetes, obesity, cardio vascular disease, cancer, &c.

I think we shouldn't have blind faith in tech, we can fix broken bones and a few other neat things but we're far from having the right tools to work on these kind of problems on a global scale, especially since we usually detect the changes after they're too late to properly revert them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983973/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5385025/

https://www.popsci.com/holiday-junk-food-gut-microbiome-fibe...

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/most-of-the-mi...

Genetic Load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_load

We take this on because we can leverage technology to improve lives.

We take this on because it might be one of the things that makes us human.

> It's interesting that we can talk about this in such an objective and rational way when it involves non-human animal species, but when it involves humans this statement suddenly becomes extremely controversial.

Because historically people mistook skin color and phrenology and other nonsense for "good genes" and caused grave injustices. The attitudes aren't even fully eliminated and so eugenics is rightly viewed with suspicion.

"Breeding" is also the crudest of methods to produce "good" humans because we value relationships and individuals much more than we do cattle or show dogs. Medicine is the proper science to treat disease in humans.

Humans are supposedly born with inalienable rights - life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our societies in the West are built upon this shared foundation of rights. To deprive any adults of the ability to procreate would be considered barbaric, as they want to pursue the creation of "life" with their liberty, and to support their own happiness.

Meanwhile, nature is just raw competition, we're used to talking about genetic evolution in natural populations. Natural creatures aren't deemed to have any right to their own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, or at least not by most humans outside environmentalists.

> To deprive any adults of the ability to procreate would be considered barbaric

There are two ways to look at this. There is a difference between forbidding people to procreate, for example by forced sterilization, and simply not forcing things with unnatural interventions, for example with IVF for people who cannot conceive in a natural way. I don't think it's barbaric to see IVF as detrimental to the human gene pool.

Just a thought, is IVF an unnatural response to ubiquitous unnatural hormone disruptors and the proposed reduction in gametes? Would IVF even be known outside of the lab if men were as virile as their grandad (generally speaking)?

I would look for sources of this in a conflict of interests. Most humans don't care about the fate of other species, as competition for resources is relatively rare. An exception is where animals can be turned into a resource to extract, with overgrown chickens as an example.

Whereas humans compete with other humans, and it's in one's interest to manipulate others to be less of competition, but more subservient instead. Even if the human who advocates for it doesn't benefit from it, their descendants will.

With conflicting interests at play, rational neutrality is hard to achieve.

The quote takes a position of non-interference with the process with naturally occurring selection pressures on animals.

When the discussion involves humans and eugenics, it's the complete opposite and revolves around substituting a human chosen selection criteria with all the possible inclusion of criteria with very limited knowledge of the long term impacts, a minimal knowledge of short term impacts, and often biases driven by hubris and racism assessing the benefits vs the unknowns. That's why it's controversial.

The history of 'scientific' human eugenics is absolutely full of controversies and links to controversial things like involuntary sterilization campaigns, genocides, etc.

Oddly, people tend to get touchy when someone starts trying to provide justifications that decide who will live well, poorly, or not at all.

What makes for “strong” genes in humans? Accepting the axioms of that discussion is a quick way to arrive at eugenics.

It's a lot harder to play god of men than of wild animals.

Yea because humans aren't animals. Our behaviors haven't been dominated by our genes for quite some time.

Have you even met us?

I'm not OP but I don't think either of those statements is accurate.

We don't engage in eugenics and we do engage in medical care because people are more than animals and we value individual survival more than gene pool hygiene (might be the wrong term?)

Humans aren't the only species to tend to their injured. Even some ants do that. The motivation is still debatable - is it done selflessly or because cooperation improves our own chances? Could that mean empathy is just an evolved impulse to help ourselves that was naturally selected? In some animals there may be an element of maintaining appearances that complicates things further. But there's no evidence to suggest that we aren't animals too or that the line we draw to separate less from 'more' isn't just drawn in some arbitrary place.

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