Guest Post by Fred Reed
Mention of eugenics inevitably results in whoops of horror, gnashing of hair, rending of teeth, and discussion of Hitler. Occasionally, however, matters of importance merit discussion even if they lead to Hitler. If by “eugenics” is meant both the selective breeding of humans and genetic manipulation of ourselves, we will shortly have to discuss it, Fuehrer or no Fuehrer. Google on “Designer babies.”
To the gnashers and renders, eugenics always involves the killing of genetically inferior children, preferably by uniformed Nazis. A better term for this might be “first-degree murder.” Usually it would be.
On the other hand, medical ambiguities exist. What does one do in the case of genetically-related anencephaly? These babies, literally having no brain, can perhaps be kept alive forever at enormous expense, but nobody is there. What is the correct policy?
Eugenics can mean many things other than the killing of defective babies. Many of us already practice an informal, jackleg, shade-tree eugenics. If kids at CalTech, who are very highly selected for intelligence, marry each other partly in hopes of having intelligent children, this is eugenics. How terrible is it? (Oh god,I shouldn’t have said that. We’ll end up with federally mandated genetic affirmative action.)
In a sense, the concentration of high intelligence in good universities and elsewhere, where marriage almost certainly will occur, amounts to inadvertent eugenics. In general, the bright seek each other out. Eugenics.
Other examples can be found. If a couple discover that they are genetically likely to have hemophiliac children,, and to adopt or use a sperm bank, they engage in eugenics. Should they be prevented from doing this?
A woman who goes to a sperm bank and asks for an intelligent donor is practicing eugenics. Is this not completely her business?
All of the foregoing are informal and pretty much under the radar. However, anyone who even casually follows the technical literature knows that we are rapidly approaching the point of being able to manipulate human genetics at the level of DNA. The thing to watch is what is being done with animals, such as the production of super-strong dogs in China by excising the gene for myostatin.
(CNN)”In a medical breakthrough that is as terrifying as it is extraordinary, scientists in China say they have created dogs that are twice as strong as they would be naturally, through genetic engineering.”
The pooches above are proof of principle. What can be done sometimes, sort of, and riskily in animals today will one day be possible with humans, safely. It is a classic case of not whether but when, and “when” is “real soon.” When “when” arrives, what then? (If you like technoglop, this on CRISPR research at CalBerkeley.)
The progression can be guessed. The advocates (who will not call it “eugenics”) will first argue for the elimination of genetic diseases. It will be hard to argue against the idea. Such things as sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia have limited charm.
Next (I think) will come calls for the elimination of genes correlated with cancer, macular degeneration, atherosclerosis, and so on at great length. These too could go away without generating torrents of nostalgia.
Eliminating genetic errors will quickly be accompanied by calls for re-engineering the genome for desirable traits: athleticism, superb vision, and….
Intelligence. Uh-oh.
Here is where things will get sticky. Or begin to. There will be worse.
Intelligence beyond question is largely genetic. Yes, I know: The politically correct argue that intelligence doesn’t exist, and they are themselves compelling evidence for the thesis. Most people who actually have brains think that intelligence is a good thing.
Here uneasiness at Playing God enters the picture. Preventing disease seems pretty much like a vaccination. Nothing wrong with that. Editng ourselves for better hearing or athleticism? Maybe a bit creepy but, well, what’s wrong with having a better jump shot? Intelligence, though….
If increased intelligence meant ten or fifteen points of additional IQ, maybe not too much would happen. But if we designed people with IQs of 300, or mean IQs of 300, they would presumably regard the rest of us as little more than pets. I do not know where the upper bound of genetically engineered intelligence might lie. I don’t think anyone else knows either. It is certain that IQs extreme by our standards would instantly dominate the race. Given humanity’s instinctive immersion in corruption, egotism, psychopathy, war, slaughter, totalitarianism, torture, murder and thievery, caution might be advisable in producing people better than we are at these things. It could be a case of finding out what you asked for after getting it.
Here we encounter other thorny problems. A great deal of evidence suggests that behavior is substantially genetic in origin: twin studies, the ease of breeding dogs to be aggressive or pacific, similarities of neural responses in conservatives and other responses in liberals. This would explain why blacks, whites, Jews and the Chinese have exhibited their characteristic personalities over milennia and most of the planet.
Would we then design people to have desirable behavior? Who would decide what was desirable? The virtuous at NPR would want nice, sensitive people with an appreciation of diversity, safe spaces, and opposition to guns, along with an inability to recognize reality. Conservatives would want stern, wary people yearning to fight to the death against nonexistent threats.
Predictably, militaries already are salivating at the thought of phenomenally strong soldiers with Terminator characteristics: (Daily Mail) supertroops who could run over large distances while carrying extremely heavy loads, go for days without sleep, and so on.
Militaries attract men who seem to be genetically disposed to war and to subclinical paranoia, much in the manner of dogs who are alarmed by every passing stranger. The said genetically-modified soldiers would of course need the pugnacity of pit-bulls, and the Pentagon, which sees existential threats in pretty much everything, will warn that we have to develop such myrmidons as otherwise the Chinese will do it first. A psychopathy gap will loom.
For the thoughtful, the question of playing God is…unnerving. Are we to be modeling clay, shaped by whatever shapers to be whatever they want us to be? Will the State control the design? To what ends? Idealists may dream of brilliant, pacific philosophers living as one with nature and thinking deep thoughts. Is that what (See? We are back to Hitler) the Fuehrer would create? Do we have any foggy idea of what we apparently are about to get into?
No.
Does this sound ridiculous? Alarmist? Wait ten years.
KHAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we ARE to head off down the “Superhuman-via-Breeding” pathway, I’d suggest early goals would be to breed (or engineer) – in radiation resistance / tolerance, and the ability to physiologically cope with low-G or zero-G environments long term (i.e. maintenance of skeletal mineralisation). Maybe add in a reduced oxygen demand, or more efficient oxygen utilisation (difficult to impossible).
Why? If we ARE to go forth into the Cosmos, these are the traits we will NEED. Otherwise our species will forever remain stuck on a planet with dwindling resources, orbiting a star which is well-past middle-age. In less than two million years, life (as we currently know it) will be very difficult – assuming there are no “unexpected surprises” in the meantime (unlikely).
Ashkenazi Jews are arguably the smartest group in the world. I believe they came to be this way by strongly encouraging the smartest among them to have many children, and strongly discouraging the dumbest among them from having children. After a millenia of this type of selection, you have a very high IQ population. I think this is why there is a LOT of irrational hatred towards jews. Most of these people who blame “da jewz” for everything are rather stupid, literally. Their IQs are below average. They are from countries with below average IQ. In other words, they is dumb. Stupidity fights to survive just like anything else. For stupidity, intelligence is the enemy. Therefore, stupid people must hate teh jewz.
@Icon,
I’ve noticed a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment lately – I see it at Zero Hedge and sometimes here on TBP. I just assumed some if must come from the financial crisis and the assumption a lot of people have that most bankers are Jews?
I don’t really understand the whole anti-Jew thing. To me they seem like a lot of doctors and scientists and Nobel Prize winners. Einstein was a Jew. Why would any sane person hate on a group of smart people who contribute? If you’re going to hate on a group, hate on the ones who are always riding in the wagon and never helping to pull it.
Some of it has to be envy of success.
Genetic engineering for intelligence would be the end of sports as we know it. Athletes of unimagineable intellectual ability who decided wasting their lives chasing & playing with their balls was passe? Heavily tattooed musclebound dreadlocked Morlock wannabe’s who wanted nothing more than to compete in the world championship of chess or Scrabble? We’re playing with fire here…
@PirateJo,
Much as I wish it were otherwise, there does seem to be a problem for Jews and non-Jews of finding a way of living together. They are highly intelligent and often successful, but also very outnumbered, which makes them envied, clannish, and hypervigilant. Most bankers are not Jews, but they do dominate the banking profession, and also the media/entertainment profession. Also a lot of superficially plausible but dangerous intellectual glop comes from Jews, such as Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Post-modernism, and I’m sure I could go on. The problem is, what are their ethical obligations towards non-Jews, and equally important, what do THEY think are their ethical obligations towards non-Jews?
There have been many sci-fi novels written on this subject. A really good series was written by Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain) that started with those “enhanced” to not need to sleep, and progressed to super-brainiacs. Highly recommended.
With a bit of luck it will all go wrong resulting in the demise of the human race!
Gattaca here we come!
I’ll take living next to a Jew over living next to a Negro or Hispanic any day.
Ha, the end to this article reminds me of Dr. Strangelove.
421 on Jews and your inferiority complex. The problem is when Jews get control of your whole banking system.Google who owns the Federal Reserve and the other central banks of the world. You’ll see mostly one tribe. Once they control the currency of a country they then begin printing money to buy the real resources of that country. They use this new money to buy control of the Media and buy influence in government. One they feel secure that they are safe they begin attacking the country in which they live .This has been repeated over and over. This is one reason they have been kicked off / out of so many different countries throughout history.
421 and other Meatheads , do you understand this ? The History of Jewish dealing in other countries throughout history is there on the internet for the whole world to view. In this country so much of the anti white shit coming across the media is because the Jewish elites approve of bashing western civilization. They are the one constantly calling for more diversity , multiculturalism and socialism. Read your history Meathead and you will see why the Jewish elites are disliked.
@ Pirate Jo- The hatred for the Jews has nothing to do with their purported success in society, but rather they way in which the achieve it and their utter contempt for White Europeans/Christians. They achieve “success” through blatant fraud, deception, and nepotism.
The Jew has been a problem since the beginning of time, hence their expulsion from over 100 countries during their existence. They dominate a country through usury, fiat banking, and taking over all facets of society, then they corrupt the governmental structure of that country to the detriment of all others. In short, they are a parasite that feeds off its host (White civilization) while ultimately destroying the host itself.
Who is responsible for massive immigration into White countries? Who is responsible for the degenerate filth shown on TV/Hollywood and the brain-washing conducted by the mass media? Who controls the US political process and uses the US military for its own purposes? Who is responsible for the majority of wars and profiteering exorbitantly from it?
THE JEW.
To quote Benjamin Franklin (who vehemently opposed Jews being allowed to settle in the USA): “The Jew is a vampire, vampires do not live on vampires. They cannot live only among themselves. They must subsist on Christians and other people not of their race.”
Fred must be unaware of current medical science.
TODAY a pregnant woman can, with a sample of HER blood, have a variety of genetic tests performed on her baby. A few fetal cells make it into her circulation and can be isolated.
Selective abortion of trisomy 21 can now eliminate Downs Syndrome if people desire. As the codes for intelligence (low or high) or propensity to violence are identified, it will become possible to abort the stupid or dangerous.
That’s the Brave New World in which we now live.
@pirate Jo there are indeed anti Semites in this forum. Generally they equate Jews with elite bankers. Their beliefs rest on false logic and incredible conspiracies.
Some of you fail to understand that a whole group can be a problem when it consists of a small fraction of capable sociopaths and a large balance of blindly obedient enablers, useful idiots who cannot see the evil of the sociopaths within the group, and will protect and support them even when they are obviously doing evil.
Overthecliff is you calling mees an antiseptic ?.Everything I told you is a Google search away.Some of the most harsh criticism of Jewish elite behaviour comes from Jews themselves. Dumb Dumb.Go do your own research.
Apart from the “bioengineering” ideas for “improvement”, there is also the equally interesting idea of “transference of consciousness to machine” – the idea of being able to upload everything that makes “you” into a glorified USB thumb drive.
There is a LOT of interest and pretty heavy-duty scientific discussion relating to this particular “hot potato”, with those in the fields of AI and “bulk” computing having very strong opinions (as you’d expect!)
Personally I think this idea still very much science fiction (but not science fantasy), at his stage. I do not have access (or the time) to read all the relevant publications, but from the few Professional journals / editorials I have read of late, it does seem that steady progress is being made.
A decade ago I’d have dismissed all this as fantasy – of the worst kind. Now, being aware that the Wife’s “Smart Phone” has four times the computing power of the machine that beat Kasparov, and my cheap, off-the-shelf in the local Supermarket USB 3 drive has more, and faster, memory than the top-of-the-range laptop computer I bought just four years ago, I can no longer dismiss this as even unlikely.
Progress WILL be made, since the demand is there for this progress, and those in the field are highly motivated, often for personal, rather than financial, reasons. Being the first person to upload the “mind” of even a very simple lifeform will guarantee a permanent place in the Science Hall of Fame. Once this first step is accomplished, it will be a VERY short time before more, and more complex entities are “duplicated”.
Would anyone here “volunteer” to be uploaded? Would the “upload” be a simple snapshot, or would the “upload” see itself as “also you”? How would the “real you” deal with the “copy”? Would the “copy” decide to replicate, so creating more “you”s, or will your copy merge with others to immediately create an entity that could very rapidly become hyper-intelligent by any human measure?
All these ideas are dealt with in the many publications I have read, and the overall picture is, shall we say, “not too rosy” for us Humans . . . . . .
“As monstrous as this sounds, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the nations–and it can only be genocidal and total because it is about our and their identities.”
–Yitzhak Attia, 2003.
“Norway is too white.”
–Ervin Kohn
“I want them (white people) to be the lost species in a hundred years.”
–Yasmin brown
“The German people must be destroyed.”
–Stephanie drese
I could quote dozens of Jews that mirror the above sentiment, that whites must perish, and have actually done so in this forum in the past. This is not “irrational” or “anti-Semitic”. I am merely recording what Jews say regarding Gentiles. Idiots like pirate Jo and overthecliff (421 is obviously a troll, perhaps of the cass sunstein variety) will not absorb the facts that I present.
The Jews have promoted, by virtue of their near monopoly of media, in this broken ass of a country, among other things, miscegenation, abortion, radical feminism, gay rights, divorce, faggotry, kneegrow rights, massive immigration, all with aim to destroy the family, the white family, a central tenet of the communist manifesto, written by the Jew Karl Marx. They have succeeded magnificently. Whites, already a tiny minority worldwide, will become a minority in their own countries within our lifetimes. Do you fully realize what a hellhole this place will be when this happens?
Don’t believe me? I beg you to just Google Noel ignatiev, Barbara Spectre, earl raab, Miriam faine, Robin Morgan, Ruth driefus, Alan shatter, ronit lentin, Anetta Kahane, mark lieblet, Arno klarsfield, among others. They are all Jews who advocate mud people immigration into white countries. Notice that they never advocate the same regarding Israel. The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
I will not pretend that logic, reason, and facts, will change your mind, so I will not post as your entertainment further. Enjoy your own funerals.
But never forget that Jews despise you. They hate Christian culture. They look upon the magnificent cathedrals, the cobblestone streets of old Europe, the beautiful art and music, the wondrous and diverse food, the beautiful women, of Christian society and culture, with awe and disgust for these are things they could never accomplish or be, despite their supposed high IQs, which in actuality do not surpass Northern European and certain Asian peoples, and seethe with resentment and hatred.
For shits and giggles, look at the Jew “Si” Newhouse ( not too long though!) He owns a publishing empire in Jew York. Is he one of god’s chosen? Really? To me he looks like a medieval troll, a hideous creature. The elite Jews can bite me. I leave you with a final quote:
“The (Jews are) fomenters of a universal plague”.
Claudius, 41 AD
( I guess he was an anti-Semite, too, right?)
For those who might be interested in AI – the following short article was written 2 1/2 years ago (when my “high-performance” laptop was relegated to “sub-middle-of-the-range” performance and capability!)
It is interesting and maybe a little daunting, to see just how many domestic appliances use “fuzzy logic” – a very basic form of AI. Our white goods are far from the very latest, but both the washing machine and dishwasher have AI elements; I recent saw an ad. for a toaster with “intelligence” – able to “learn” how you like your toast done, i.e. you can “program” your selection, and it’ll produce just the right colour – irrespective of what is put in (bread old and fresh, crumpets, buns – whatever), and there are plenty of Internet sites where the adventurous have modified domestic appliances (popular choice is the automatic room vacuum), to do “other” things.
The fact that progress is being made officially, and at the hobbyist / experimenter level suggests the “predicted” timescales may not be very meaningful; just one “big” improvement in operation / design may well result in a deluge of rapid innovation, possibly invisible to the non-inquisitive.
Would you rather leave the human evolution totally in the hands of nature or be able to direct it including having future children born more intelligent, healthier and in other ways better than would otherwise be the case. Why is it “playing God” if we tinker without our genome but quite ok that we have done selective breeding on countless species of plant and animal throughout our history? Today of course we have much sharper and much more precise tools. As long as no one is initiating force or killing off people as “undesirables” where exactly is the problem?
Nor is such genetic manipulation limited to future generations. To some degree we can cure many maladies of people now alive with genetic therapies.
Phil from Oz says: …being able to upload everything that makes “you” into a glorified USB thumb drive.
Good one, Phil. Big brother is one step ahead, filing all pertinent data about you into the super-files.
What ego does your thumb drive self have that is different from you?
You live in a sentient form called a body. When this body is eliminated and your ‘soul’ is uploaded onto a machine, can you still vote or exercise a set of civil rights?
If this machine is for all intents ‘heaven’ where you live forever, can anybody continue to deny the keeper of heaven?
Fred likes to mind fuck his readers. He baits the hook with fear mongering about Hitler and ‘playing God’ then proposes that eugenics is the wave of the future.
I truth, no matter how high man attempts to build his genetic tower of Babel, he can never reach perfection and that is even after he achieves immortality. Immortality is predicted in the bible. We are closing in on that holy grail lost in the garden of Eden. The bible also notes that man will seek death and not find it. Because in a fucked up world, it won’t be just I-S wishing to be roadkill.