I'm half sorry, but this article is great example why eugenics is wrong and why empathy and weird mutations trump it every day.
Look at it from the point of view of an eugenics proponent: this disease is a good example of a genetic condition that you don't want spreading in future generations. Once we have treatments for the 7000 rare diseases mentioned in the article, we will have removed the evolutionary pressure that was keeping these diseases rare. Some eugenics supporters are afraid we are heading towards a society where everybody has to undergo a dozen lifelong treatments due to medicine effectively undermining the process of natural selection.
I can also imagine parents suffering from this disease, not wanting to pass it on to their children. So people affected might strongly disagree with you...
Eugenics on small scales does have some advantages, though I fear it would bring advantages in a way that will only widen inequalities i.e. only people with money would have enough money for it. Rich people wouldn't just have money, but also best looks and best health.
Eugenics on large scales is on the other hand simply disastrous as it leaves monoculture and erradication of anything perceived as abnormal.
My intuition is that evolutionary pressure works against entropy. Without the pressure, the genome would evolve towards a state of maximum entropy, i.e. a particular mutation would reach a prevalence of about 50%. But of course there will always be some sort of evolutionary pressure.
Let's consider a simplified model, where there are only two different bases (A and G instead of A, T, G, C) and assume that the probabilities of mutations A->G and G->A are the same. Let's consider a single base mutation[1]. No matter what the mutation probability is, and no matter what the initial distribution is, I expect that the population will converge to about 50% A and 50% G. I guess you would agree.
Now if we make this very wrong model a bit less wrong by including the four base types A, T, G, C, we can expect that each allele will be found in about 25% of the population. And that is for single base mutations only. A mutation that depends on the precise value of 5 different bases would be displayed by a much smaller share of the population (1/4^5 = 0.1% I guess).
Of course people don't get born with fully random genomes like that, the vast majority of these mutations would not yield a living embryo. But still, the intuition we can get from this is that without evolutionary pressure, a particular mutation will eventually be found in a fraction of the population that is inversely proportional to the complexity of the mutation (in most cases that would be far from the 50% of my initial intuition).
No idea how close these layman's speculations are from the reality...
[1] Such as the gene that determines the type of ear wax: http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearwax.html
So if you get cancer and there is a cure for it, you won't forego treatment to help natural selection work? What type of twisted logic is that?
People should not be treated because it would spoil the gene pool
but rather
We certainly want to treat diseases, but this will spoil the gene pool unless we prevent the spread of bad genes
Solutions to prevent the spread of bad genes range from quite evil (forced sterilization has been used extensively before WWII but I have never heard of something as bad as denying treatment) to slightly controversial, e.g. screening of embryos [1].
By the way, I have just stumbled on the Wikipedia page on dysgenics [2], which is more specifically what this argument is about.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnos...
The question is whether a person with 'bad' genes should have children or not. My answer - it is none my business! Whether a person has good or bad genes, he/she should be free to procreate. It is their choice. Provide pre conceptional counselling and let them decide.
However the question is not if someone should have children or not. Genetic screening technologies are moving fast, as is our understanding of the human genome. The real question, that will take more and more importance in our society is Do I want to screen my sperm/ovum/embryos when I decide to have a child? and maybe Should genetic screening be mandatory in certain cases?
You find a "bad" gene, you tell the subject about it and inform them that their children might/will have it too/will have a certain condition.
If at all required, mandatory screening and advisory would be the extreme limits of what should be allowed(But what conditions would require mandatory screening and how are you going to screen two people before they have sex? Think about the logistics and the invasion of privacy!). Even in those cases, the government shouldn't have the power to sterilize the subject.
You can run educational campaigns. Teach people this stuff with sex-education or have married couples take a course(you will still miss out on a lot of people).
Eugenics takes away a basic right of a life form.
Update:
I understand that you may be speaking about people who have been diagnosed as having a certain genetic condition. If a disease has the capacity to cause public harm, there are exceptions made to the professional secrecy that a doctor is supposed to maintain. This involves informing relatives/a potential spouse about a condition that the patient may transmit. In cases of infectious diseases, quarantine and isolation procedures are well established. But most are for infectious conditions which can harm the public. So if the off-springs of individuals with bad genes can infect large number of people with some contagious condition, isolation protocols may apply. But that is still hypothetical.
If we dream up an horrendously bad genetic condition which can disrupt the human race, someone is going to come with horrendous regulations to prevent that. But the truth is most people suffering from "bad" gene induced conditions do not lead a normal life(do not have kids). If the sufferer of a genetic condition can easily have kids, then that condition may not be that "bad". Carriers of such genes could do with some pre conceptional counseling.
Not a native english speaker.
That's the question of whether genetic screening should be made mandatory in some cases... I don't think so, for the reasons you mentioned.
But I'm more interested in the other question, regarding voluntary screening of sperm/ovum/embryos... I wonder how big this will become in our lifetime, and how people will react to it.
Well, honestly, this smells national socialism from a mile.
Which genes are bad? Is it really that genes are bad? What about their mutations?
I have (not really suffer) ehlers-danlos type 2. Which is genetic disorder. Some people with it - like me - are lucky and have it really benign. It doesn't really affect my life in any way. It doesn't affect lifespan in my case. Then there are some others - with exact same gene mutations - who suffer constant pain to the point they would like to die (literally). Not to mention constant medical emergencies.
Now, I have almost no problems because of eds. And one benefit - apparently I have lower risk of colon cancer. (there is more bile in the system which is laxative which helps preventing colon cancer, plus the colon is built differently, in my case causing "stuff" to move quicker). So, how would you know my gene mutation is good or bad?
And how do you know that if you change it, something else won't be totally messed up instead? There is always the problem of unintended consequences.
Not to mention that once you would open this pandora box, you'd also need to deal with prospect parents demanding "gene therapy" for their future kid because of a gene they think is bad. Like with cosmetic surgeries. People with gene A have higher risk of being short, so please doctor, please, let's "fix" that. Our boy can't be short! Can't have red hair! Can't have 40% higher risk of being depressed or obese too.
And here we go, all blond, tall, beautiful.
Wouldn't you agree?
I imagine the modern eugenics argument is about manipulating chromosomes rather than forcing people to not reproduce. IE, once we can selectively make the perfect human from a genetic standpoint (considering only using genes that promote intelligence / stamina / longevity / etc) that it becomes unethical to continue playing the genetic lottery and having children with FOP or down syndrome or some other life destroying condition.
Which I guess says sterilize everyone and grow people in tubes (or wombs until we can get that far). At least it is fair!
However, it might also be that in the long term, the quality of the gene pool objectively deteriorates. Taking it to the extreme, imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance... I guess this is also something we should consider.
I think that way before that happens we'll have something like "virtual", "immortal" "bodies".
In other words I think that before we need all that medical care the original William Gibson's idea that we'll all end up stored somewhere in a computer memory connected to a network will happen. No body or genes really needed - we just "sit" in RAM, interact with others via network and are - immortal. Ray Kurzweil says it may even happen in our lifetimes. Heard Stephen Hawking mentioning something similar. Reaching point that we can live forever and don't really need our body for that. Or our body can be strengthened by armor, hardware of various types, to be much better and advanced than our bodies are.
This reminds me a little bit the dilema local Government in Paris had in 1890s -- what we'll do with all the horse dung if the number of horses grows at the current rate? And then cars came along and it was all irrelevant.
Seems to me it's also the same with depopulation. Who cares if there will be 20 billion of us in 50 years if we finally start colonizing other planets and the Moon?
And for eugenics to work you do not need to die, just not get any kids, which is why Sweden used to have people sterilized.
One of the strongest arguments against eugenics is that when it has been applied in practiced it has brought out some of the worst sides in humans.
Downvotes seemed to me to be designed to cut off rude remarks, not to silence valid points that someone may not be able or willing to handle.
EDIT: BTW, down voted your comment above for being offtopic. So is this one so I wont blame anyone if they downvote.