> "Even the selection of mating partner is a form of eugenics."
Only when the selection is done by those who aren't the two partners (e.g. arranged marriages, theoretically rape in the absence of abortion). Otherwise it's natural selection between partners - there's no guarantee the aspects two people find attractive in each other are genetically heritable.
> "College graduates only marrying college graduates, repeat that for many generations and it is bound to have an effect."
Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits attractive, and will assort on these variety of traits, not on a hierarchy of traits.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=3...
"Eugenicists realized that assortative mating did not always produce the best offspring, so sought ways to popularize what they considered to be good marriages. Francis Galton urged the brightest and the healthiest individuals to marry each other. He found an ideal situation in German university professors <emphasis mine> (then all male) who tended to marry the daughters of professors or their female graduate students <emphasis mine>. This positive expression of eugenics encouraged the selection of good mates through popular health books and Fitter Families Contests held at state fairs. The training of field workers at the Eugenics Record Office included exercises to help them analyze mate preferences and make better eugenic choices."
Evolution naturally tends in that direction.
> Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits attractive, and will assort on these variety of traits, not on a hierarchy of traits.
Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are unattractive.
A lot of what people find attractive about each other are personalities (and only some traits are heritable, not entire types), and artifacts of how people were raised or adapted to how they were raised.
> Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are unattractive.
Of course, though moreso the latter. Eugenics, as a term, to have meaning, is an extreme of breeding behavior. It isn't just regular assortative mating among local populations.
Thank you. Having preferences =/= eugenics.
That's circular logic. The whole point of the argument is that eugenics (as it is normally understood) is of a piece with regular assortive mating; people look for good aspects in a partner all the time, and there's no clear sharp line between that and what we normally call eugenics.
> The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”
Eugenics is a societal phenomenon. Which is why arranged marriages belong in the eugenics camp. Assortative mating from free choice is not eugenics, regardless of the outcome over many generations.
If beautiful people marry beautiful people and ugly people marry ugly people, you effectively get a sort of breeding (I know we don't like to use these animal terms but that's kind of what it is). Now you can refuse to call a natural preference "eugenics" but the reality is that you are still expressing a preference for some characters that you think are desirable and your progeniture is likely to inherit some of those characters.
This was of course a lot less prevalent in a society that lived in small villages with very little mobility (and therefore very little mating choice), which is why I think it's a process that only kicked in at the XX century. My guess is that we will see the effect in this century. Works with dogs, should work with humans.
Individual trait selection allows a multitude of traits to thrive. Social trait selection tends not to.
You cannot easily have children with someone you never met, after all, barring IVF with an unknown donor.
It's a spectrum as well - not a binary choice. Some cultures prefer their children to marry within culture, and this expectation is set by the parents/grandparents etc; i consider this a form of eugenics, albeit mild and likely not harmful.
That's more a case of dysgenics; it reduces genetic diversity which tends to make it easier for hereditary diseases etc. to appear (particularly if it results in a small dating pool e.g. immigrant communities in second countries). My back-of-the-envelope guess is that that tendency is probably doing more direct harm than anything else we might worry about (e.g. class segregation).
I think there's enough infidelity around to cancel out this effect. You have around a million n*great grandparents at n=20. How many of those are likely fathered by "somebody else"? And that's just at n=20; evolution runs much slower than that. Even with perfect class-based marriage, good genes have inevitably worked their way across the social ladder through infidelity by now. "Bad" inbred lines only exist as lines; when measuring the total effect, illegitimate children need to be included, but of course they are invisible.
so what happens to men who want children?
This will be of course only a stopgap measure until artificial wombs become readily available.
And frankly I am not sure which is more dystopian: a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly, vs the present where a kid has to live with those things he can do nothing about.
But we're all defective today, one way or another. It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking, and a lot of those people will have a bad upbringing or something else to hold them back. It's true that being beautiful and above average smart will get you through life so much easier though.
Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.
Also, if we weed out "bad genes", we might get a surprise down the line, where those gene were actually essential for out survival as a species, and we might be wiped out by a pandemic or something similar.
Yeah, I dunno, eugenics is hard, ethically speaking. Yes, I would have liked to be beautiful...who wouldn't ?
its actually impossible because the only objective measure of gene quality is the performance of the organism and the performance of the organism depends on the environment.
The main problem in Gattaca wasn't that some people were genetically superior, it was that they were marked as superior and others were discriminated against.
However, one objective fault I see in the movie (from what I remember, it's been many years) is that their "valids/invalids" system assumes that non-GE people are automatically inferior, which may not be the case (and also depends on the task/role). Even today, some people obviously won the "genetic lottery" (like Michael Phelps, who's obviously genetically optimized for swimming compared to most humans, though this doesn't make him good at other things), while others clearly lost.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'm sure Phelps could lift more and cycle faster/further than most people on earth.
If anything, the fact he's good at swimming means it's likely that he's also really good at other sports - just like someone good at one sort of cognitive task is probably good at most.
I can cycle faster and farther than most people on Earth too. That doesn't mean I can compete at a pro level, or worse an Olympic level. I'm nowhere near that level of performance; the bar for "most people on Earth" just isn't very high for most sports, in fact it's pathetically low. Most people are laughably bad at any sport.
Historically eugenics has included some mistreatment of those with undesired traits, upto and including genocide.
Eugenics… well, we can see the theoretical benefits of things like ending sickle cell anaemia outside malarial regions, but we're starting from really huge negative points because it turned out that racist people found it to be a really convenient justification for genocide, and sadly genocides get attempted so often[0] that it's probably not going to be possible to dissociate the two.