tronvillain

No, I can't say that strikes me as an especially good idea - I am not in favour of any government involvement in human reproduction. In addition, I doubt such a system would have any significant impact on the human gene/meme pool, at least not without being so expensive as to be impractical. The money would be better spent on attempting to modify culture and conditions directly.

Primal

How would this direct improvement then come about? I think eugenics is very direct and can be very effective. Also I think such a system would have a huge effect on the meme pool, imagine if all abusers stopped having kids, the cycles of abuse would then stop in that lineage. Genetic engineering can take this farther by creating individuals with a stronger conscience, more intelligence etc. One would avoid having people with bad childhoods etc. Imagine if for example the Xians stopped having kids, eventually atheists then would breed out Xians.

Conventional social mechanisms can only get one so far, because it demands cooperation from parents and is somewhat run by the backwards people one is trying to remove. Also they must handle cultural inertia, and certain cycles. Ending a lineage ends negative cultural inertia for at least one group. Also traditional institutions are limited by one thing,current human nature. This can be got around by imrpoving human genes.

Sarpedon

Eu = ideal Genics = genes

As long as you were talking about a private, consentual project to improve genes, I thought the idea had some merit, albiet your methodology seemed flawed. Now however, you say your primary goal is to remove certain "cultural practices"-- a thought that I find chilling. Now, we would all like to see certain cultural ideas pass away, but to say that the cultural practices of the poor are flawed and worthy of being erased is disturbing. This sounds like some kind of paranoid rich kid snobbery. As an intellectual snob myself, I must say that I often find the shenanigans of the poor disturbing, and often humorous. But the fact is that given the current rules of economics, there must always be a poorer class. A better way to eliminate those "cultural practices" would be through improving public education and so forth. Your system is even more disturbing than I first thought. If it confined itself to providing an incentive for people who carry genes for incurable genetic diseases not to reproduce, or better yet some kind of genetic screening and artificial insemination to allow that person to reproduce without passing on those particular genes, I would probably be all for your project, as it would rely on quantifiable improvements and the elimination of actual physical objects that all people would agree are negative things. If you move to the area of "cultural practices," you start to rely on opinion rather than fact, and, frankly your opinion is biased.

tronvillain

Primal:
Education, intervention, counseling, economic development, financial assistance, and so on.

Imagine the immense cost of such a voluntary eugenics program. Imagine the catastrophic effects on population if it was successful. Imagine betraying the ideals of freedom of religion and seperation of church and state.

Primal

Actually I am not a rich "snob", but more like poorer-middle class. Which if anything makes my opinion less biased then a self-admitted snob like yourself.

In any case I never, ever said "poor people's culture" as a negative cultural practice and it's not true that every economic system demands poor people exist. Just take some of Gate's 4 billion, and problem solved.

In any event, you may say that my "opinion" concerning culture is "chilling" or "biased" but I imagine many would say the same thing about abortion. I am not a cultural relativist so I do not see all cultural practices as evil. What I mean by negative cultural practices does not include the culture of any class but tendencies towards abuse,religious fanaticism, racism,drug abuse,homophobia,etc.

I in fact would be against seeing a classes practice as "negative" just because there is so much cultural variation within social classes that such a practice is meaningless. The only rationale for such targeting of the poor, in this case the homeless, is that maybe children growing up with no proper food,shelter or medical care may develope psychological problems as a result.

The fact is 50 percent of behavior comes from enviroment, and much of this comes from within the family. Hence to really change human behavior you have to do more then change genes, but family conditions as well.

Primal

Yes, but as the technology is psychology and genetics progresses the costs would get cheaper and cheaper. The average cost of a student per year already ranges in the thousands, the average prisoner costs us 30,000 per year. I imagine any working neo-eugenics program that reduced crime significantly would more then make up for it's cost if even partially sucessful.


In any case I see the improvement of humanity and promotion of humanist values by the strongest means at our disposal as worth a huge financial cost.

All of which are very expensive and becoming less practical as the population shoots up out of control.

These things will continue to be only partly successful, while two of the most important facets of personality; family life and genes, remain untouched. I imagine an advanced neo-eugenics program for the same cost can have a much greater impact then these institutions ever could. And even a much greater impact if it works with these institutions. The effect of neo-eugenics would improve how all these programs perform.

More advanced cultural practices promoted by psychology and genes effecting behavior would improve these institutions greatly, We'd have smarter, better behaved teachers and smarter,better behaved students. We can program for innovation, making people more open to novel ideas, as well as critical thinking skills. We could have better economists to improve the economic system.

BTW I know utopia is impossible and am not utopian. I just think such programs would do wonders and do not think they should be neglected for the reasons above.