Eugenics. Cleansing. Betterment. Inhumane. Wrong. The greater good.
For those of us who are unfamiliar with the term “eugenics”, it refers to the improvement of the human race as a whole, using genetics. I myself was unsure of the meaning of this word until very recently, when an interesting post of Sleepywood Forums about genetic discrimination caught my eye.
The Wikipedian definition of eugenics is “a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier and more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering.”
Eugenics has been in practice for centuries. In the past, when all people knew about genetics was that healthy parents produce healthy babies, eugenics was crude and would have been against today's moral standards. In Sparta, all newborns are screened for defects, abnormalities. If they suffered from any sort of deformity, they were killed. Left on the slopes of Mount Taygetus to die. It wasn't just Sparta that practised customary infanticide. Ancient Rome had laws that said made the slaying of unhealthy children obligatory.
In a somewhat less gruesome manifestation of artificial selection amongst humans, several countries practice forced sterilisation. In Japan, the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 allowed for the forced sterilisation of those “with a genetic predisposition to commit crime”, along with patients with genetic diseases such as total colour blindness, haemophilia, and albinism. Not excluded were also mental defects such as schizophrenia and epilepsy. In 1928, the Sexual Sterilisation Act of Alberta was implemented in Canada, which focused on the mentally deficient individuals. People were assessed by IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet, which favoured those who were proficient in the English language. This posed a large problem to immigrants and ended up with many people being unfairly sterilised.
All over the rest of the world, similar policies have been enforced and repealed many times. It was not until the Christianisation of Rome did the practice of customary infanticide cease.
Even today, forms of eugenics are in practice. There are laws that prohibit individuals with genetic diseases from childbearing. Similarly, there are laws that disallow marriage between blood relatives(in most parts of the world), unless they are more distant than first cousins, and have been proven to be sterile. The logic is clear: Inbreeding causes an accumulation of recessive alleles, and thus increasing the occurrence of genetic diseases.
So far, I have only covered incidences of negative eugenics; where people with genetic defects are prevented from breeding. The other side of eugenics, positive eugenics, involves having those of “higher genetic status” to procreate more, thus increasing the percentage of “good genes” in the population.
In the late 19th Century, Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's half cousin English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, inventor, proto-geneticist, psychometrician and statistician, had developed an opinion after reading Origin of Species that human civilisation potentially thwarted the process of natural selection. He hypothesised that since the majority of the earth's civilised populations sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, the process where less desirable genes are normally removed from the pool was stopped almost entirely. This would inevitably lead towards “regression towards mediocrity”, as Galton himself put it.
Part of Galton's idea involved the way traits such as health, intelligence, and personalities ran within families. At the time, it seemed apparent that this was largely due to heredity. His basic argument was that “genius” and “talent” were hereditary traits in humans. He believed that these traits could be exaggerated within a population in the same way various traits can be brought to be more common in animals through artificial selection.
In the introduction to his book Hereditary Genius, he wrote
“I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. “
And that is also pretty much the same mentality that several other societies had... Including Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Scientifically, of course, he is right. But our world doesn't run on science alone.
In the film Gattaca, which is a science fiction story set in a dystopian future, where genetic engineering is commonplace and almost considered obligatory. At the birth of a child, its parents have the choice to engineer the baby to become an ideal, genetically perfect child, or to have a “faith birth”.
While this may merely be an interesting sci-fi, I think it may represent our future.
Eventually, along our timeline, we are going to experience the first real gene editing processes. It could remove any form of congenital disease from people from the moment they are born, thus eliminating the ailment from the population altogether. Perhaps we may even live to see the first prototype. That is, if Christian conservatives don't assault the genetics lab first.
Still, I probably have to thank them for their original ideas. If customary infanticide was never eradicated, I probably wouldn't be here to discuss it.
What do you think? Is it worth “perfecting” the human genome? After all, even a population full of fit, smart, and considerate people are going to face problems. Amongst them, a lack of genetic diversity, which could be catastrophic in the event of a highly lethal and contagious viral outbreak, or some similar occurrence.
Maybe you don't care, but it's something to think about. I hope you found this post insightful... Or at least maybe gave you something to puzzle your friends with.
That is all. Thank you.
-Joe
*Gattaca is actually composed of the first for letters representing our happy nucleotides. ATCG.