Eugenics and the future of the human species

Eugenics and the future of the human species 'It is clear that mode medicine has a serious dilemma ... In the past there have been many children who do not have survived - have yielded to the various diseases ... But in a sense, mode medicine is the natural selection of the Commission. Something has contributed to the fact that a person has a serious illness in the long term may help to decrease the strength of the whole human race to certain diseases. If you pay absolutely no attention to the so-called hereditary hygiene, we could content ourselves with a degeneration of humanity. The humanity of the potential for serious hereditary disease resistance will be weakened. "Jostein Gaarder in" Sophie's World ", a textbook best philosophy for adolescents in Oslo, Norway, Austria, in 1991, and thereafter throughout the world, which has been translated into dozens of languages. The Nazis, the killing of the weak open, mentally insane - that the race to clean and maintain hereditary hygiene - as a form of euthanasia. German doctors were enthusiastic proponents of the eugenics movements rooted in 19th century Sozialdarwinismus. Luke Gormally writes, in his essay "Walton, Davies, and Boyd" (published in "Euthanasia examined - ethical, clinical and legal perspectives", ed. John Keown, Cambridge University Press, 1995): "When the lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche stretch their permission to destroy life, not worth living in 1920 ... their motivation was to rid society of the 'human ballast and enormous economic burden' of care for the mentally ill, disabled, handicapped and deformed children and the incurably ill. But the reason used to justify the killing of people who fell into these categories was that the lives of these people were "not worth living", the "value" and 'this connection with the monstrous Nazi regime was that eugenics - a term coined by a relative of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in 1883 - its bad reputation. Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster, Northe Ireland, thinks that this recoil at Dysgenics - the genetic deterioration of mode (human) population ", as the title of his controversial book places. The core thesis of eugenics is that a variety of technological, cultural and social developments conspired to give rise to negative selection of the weakest, least intelligent, sick, or his habitual criminal, the sexually deviant, the mentally ill, and the least adapted. Contraception is more distant from the rich and well educated that the poor and dull. Birth control, as practiced in countries like China distorted both the sex distribution in the city - and the increase in weight of the rural population (rural couples in China are allowed two children, rather than one urban). Mode medicine and the welfare state, in collaboration conservation alive individuals - mainly the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the sick and genetically defective - who would otherwise have been killed by natural selection to improve the entire species. Eugenics may be based on a literal understanding of Darwin metaphor. The 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say: "Darwin's description of the process of natural selection as the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life is a metaphor." Fight "is not necessarily in conflict, controversy, or fight "survival" does not mean that the harm of death are needed to ensure the selection of an effective and "fit" is almost never a single optimal genotype but rather a series of genotypes, that the survival of the population, rather than extinction. All these considerations are more appropriate to examine natural selection in man. Reduce child mortality rates and childhood do not necessarily mean that natural selection of the human species is no longer operational. In theory, natural selection could be very effective if the children bo reached maturity. Two conditions are necessary to make this theoretical possibility realized: first, differences in the number of children per family, and other differences are correlated with the genetic characteristics of parents. None of these conditions is arbitrary. "The eugenics debate is only the tip of a man to the mystery natural. We really won the nature and extracted ourselves from its determinism? We graduated natural cultural evolution, natural selection artificial memes and genes? If the evolutionary process that will culminate in a being that has its genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future, and allows its weakest and sick to survive? The need to shift to the survival of the fittest with a culturally-sensitive principle may be the hallmark of a positive development, but as the beginning of an inexorable decline. The eugenics movement in this argument on its head. They accept the premise that the contribution of natural selection for the composition of future human generations is glacial and negligible. But reject the conclusion that we are ridden of tyranny, we can now let the weak and sick among us survive and proliferate. Rather, it is proposed to replace natural selection with eugenics. But who, with the authority and under what guidelines manages killing this man and decide who should live and who must die to race and who can not? Why choose to be understanding and not by courtesy or altruism or church in progress - or a whole? And 'here that eugenics is not pathetic. If the criterion is physical, as in ancient Sparta? Should be mental? If IQ determine the fate - or social status and wealth? Different answers yield eugenic programs and targets different groups of the population. Are not eugenic criteria, the wrong fashion and cultural bias? Can we agree on an agenda for universal eugenic, in a world as ethnically and culturally like ours? If you are wrong - and the chances are overwhelming - not irreparably damage our genetic heritage, and with him the future of our species? And even though many of them to avoid Schlitterkurs leader eugenics active extermination of "inferior" groups of the population - to ensure that all? How to prevent eugenics to be assigned by an intrusive, authoritarian, or even murderous state? Mode eugenicists distance from the dirty solution, at the beginning of the last century by 29 countries, including Germany, United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Estonia, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden (until 1976), Brazil, Italy , Greece and Spain. They talk about free distribution of contraceptives to low-IQ women, vasectomies or tubal ligation for criminals, sperm banks with the help of high performance, and incentives for students to play. Mode genetic engineering and biotechnology are easy to eugenic projects. Cloning can be taken by the genes of the fittest. Embryo selection and prenatal diagnosis of genetically diseased embryos, the number of inappropriate. But even these innocuous variants of eugenics fly in the face of liberalism. Inequality, argue the proponents of hereditary genetic improvement, not environmental. All persons are equal and so far under the natural laws of succession, as the cows and bees. Less people to make life less progeny and thus propagate their inferiority. While this is true - that is questionable at best - the question is whether the model bottom of our species possess the inalienable right to reproduce? If the cost to society of over-population - social welfare, medical care centers, child care - then society has the right to regulate procreation. But he has the right to act discriminately this? Another dilemma is whether we have the moral right - let alone the necessary knowledge - to deal with natural and social development and population. Eugenicists counter that contraception and indiscriminate medicine already do. But studies show that the rich and educated of the population - the less fertile. Birth rates throughout the world have already dramatically. Instead of culling the great unwashed and the unworthy - would not be a better idea to educate them (or their off spring) and provide them with economic opportunities (euthenics rather than eugenics)? Human populations seem to self-regulate. A sweet and persistent steer in the right direction - an increase of wealth and better schooling - perhaps more than a hundred eugenic programs, voluntary or compulsory. That eugenics is not just as a biological-social, but as a panacea, it should raise suspicions. The typical eugenics text reads more like a catechism of a reasoned argument. Previous all-encompassing and omnicompetent plans tended to end traumatically - especially when compared with those of a human being with an elite redundant subclass of people. Above all, eugenics is about human hubris. Presume to know more about the lottery of life is very proud. Mode medicine largely eliminates the need for eugenics in the fact that even genetically defective people to lead a fairly normal life. Sure, the man himself - as a part of nature - can be seen as nothing more than an agent of natural selection. Yet many of the arguments in favor of eugenics can be against it with embarrassing ease. Consider the children sick. It is true, are a burden to society and a possible threat to the genetic heritage of the art, but also have a second reproduction within the family by having the financial and mental resources of the parents. Their genes - however flawed - contribute to genetic diversity. Even a badly mutated phenotype sometimes valuable scientific knowledge and an interesting genotype. The implicit Weltbild of eugenics is static - but the real world is dynamic. There is no such thing as a "right" genetic make-up, which we all aspire. A combination of genes that can be perfectly adapted to an environment - but in another totally inadequate. Therefore, genetic diversity or polymorphism. The more the world is changing rapidly, the greater the value of mutations of any kind you never know if today is not wrong to be showing the winners of tomorrow. Ecosystems are invariably from niches and different genes - have also changed - they can have different niches. In 18th Century most peppered moths in Britain were silvery gray, not covered by lichens, the trunks of silver birches - their habitat. Darker moths are eaten by predatory birds. Their mutant genes, has proved fatal. As soot from sprouting factories blackened these trunks - the same genes, hitherto fatal, was a fundamental blessings. The model Blacker survived while their hitherto perfectly adapted fairer brethren lost ( "industrial melanism"). This type of natural selection is directions. Moreover, "bad" genes are often associated with "desirable genes" (pleitropy). Sickle cell anemia protects certain African tribes against malaria. This is called "diversifying or disruptive natural selection". Artificial selection may worsen quickly antiselection from ignorance. Mode eugenics relies on statistics. No longer causes - but with phenomena and the likely impact of intervention. If the negative off-spring and the parents are strong - then preventing parents with certain qualities from multiplying certainly reduce the impact of provisions in the general population. But correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The handling of a parameter correlation is not necessarily change - or the frequency of results. Eugenicists often retu to the collected wisdom of generations of breeders and farmers. But the unequivocal lesson of thousands of years of artificial selection that is crossing (hybridization) - even of two lines of inferior genetic stock - yields valuable genotypes. Inter-marriage between races, groups of the population, ethnic groups, clans, and thus to improve the species' chances of survival more than any eugenic scheme.