It'd be nice to remember original meanings. The "eu" of eugenics means "good" (and how this good is accomplished "positively" or "negatively" doesn't matter), humans have been practicing it for ages though on a much less sophisticated scale (and not as much on our own selves) than things like CRISPR allows for. The thing we should be worried about is dysgenics, "dys" meaning "bad".
Depends on who you ask, right?
Therein lies the slippery slope, and why the word eugenics is uttered in hushed tones among polite people. That and it is typically attributed as a misnomer - human eugenics is more often just oppressive, authoritarian, xenophobic, evil,madness dressed up in pseudo-scientific rationalizations to treat the persecuted underclasses as cattle.
The real question is whether or not we, as a species, can be trusted with the unprecedented power and responsibility of direct control over our own evolution.
Modern medicine is fundamentally dysgenic. My line alone has tendencies towards bipolar disorder, poor vision, asthma, and crippling congenital foot defects. I was fortunate to have escaped most of them. However, the mere fact that I was born carrying these traits can be credited to the fact that my grandparents were treated for them (club feet in the case of my grandmother) and survived to pass them on. Great for the individual, but in the cold calculus of survival, it can only be said that the more serious genetic maladies that we can correct for with medicine and surgery, the more they will build up in the gene pool.
The promise of these new gene modification techniques is that we can put the hands on the wheel of our own genetic destiny rather than leaving it to the Ouija-board control of whatever god one would choose to cede them to. One might well expect this thought to make a great many people very uncomfortable. This is entirely justified given the human track record.
However, another ethical standpoint to take might be this:
If I am told that my child, in utero, has a 100% chance of being born with cystic fibrosis, but that a reasonably priced (hey, it could happen) treatment could apply a patch to that nasty little mutation, would that somehow be less ethically sound than abortion, abstaining from childbearing, or allowing the child to come to term to a life of certain, now trivially preventable, suffering?
Contrarily, if the burden depressive moodiness is 'cured' from our genetic makeup, what cost do we pay in losing the creative pearls built up around the pain of the melancholic soul? A world without Poe, van Gogh, or even Morrissey?
> The real question is whether or not we, as a species, can be trusted with the unprecedented power and responsibility of direct control over our own evolution.
Hmm I'm not sure that's accurate. At least, I've seen some claims of gender being linked to genotype in some capacity.
More to the point, talking about sex and gender in the same breath is quite often absurd. Gender theory is a sociological theory, not a scientific one, and while sociology is a useful tool for certain problems, it's hardly reproducible, or falsifiable.
Sure, there may be genetic links, but sex is 100% genetic. Why bring in gender at all when its hard to apply eugenics to it when the link is so poorly understood?
That was my point, so we're in agreement. (I've edited my post to make it clearer).
Edit: on second thought, we're not so much in agreement as nothing is fully genetic or environmental. There are, for instance, cases of XY females. I'd agree if you said the genetic link was orders of magnitude stronger between genes and sex, but the "100%" perpetuates a common misunderstanding of genetics.
Generally, individuals with the XY genotype but the female phenotype have an additional genetic anomaly which renders them androgen insensitive. Therefore, I would say that, in most cases, the sex of an individual is fully, or at least a fully as possible, genetic. It's just not as dependent on the presence of an X or Y chromosome as one would think.
I suppose you could induce something like that by treating an embryo with finasteride or another SARM but there's a reason such drugs are in pregnancy category X. They tend to produce wider ranging and more severe defects than just changing the sex of the embryo. Hormones are complicated.
Fair enough, but then it should also be possible to environmentally affect gene expression. I'm clearly nitpicking insofar as sex is overwhelmingly determined by genetics, but I feel it's important to hammer in the point that "everything is nature and everything is nurture".
Medicine is dysgenic - I would be dead a few times over without modern treatments for asthma, which runs in my family. My children now have the opportunity to be born with the same bad genes that otherwise would have been selected out of the gene pool. Cumulatively over time, genetic fitness will decline to the minimum level needed for survivability in the environment. Medicine makes the environment much more survivable. Not to mention the more recent habits of agriculture and enough wide-spread cooperation that our tribes aren't constantly murdering eachother. (arguably)
The interesting case, is that our long-term survival is now more a question of information, culture, and knowledge than it is of our biological capacities. Our most interesting evolution is happening in the rapid and ephemeral'software' of shared knowledge and technology, and not the fleshy hardware ruled by genes.
So a gene goes from a huge handicap to a small handicap. That's not ruining the gene pool. Medicine doesn't even remove the selection pressure, let alone apply pressure in the wrong direction.
And you're probably wrong about saying you'd be dead; why did your ancestors survive it?
I wouldn't say that it has an acute immediate negative effect the gene pool by any measure, but it does certainly have an effect on the slow stochastic process shaping the gene pool. It would make intuitive sense that preventable, fecundity decreasing maladies will increase in frequency over time over many generations. Maybe that's not so much a pejorative effect as a beneficial adaptation to a new, more forgiving environment, if you look at it from the right perspective. Still I think that most people would agree that robust health in a low-tech environment is a nice trait to have in a population. Still, we're arguably pretty irreversibly reliant on fire and cooking.
Cave dwelling fish don't lose their eyes because of any immediate selection counter pressure, but from the slow reversion to the mean from no pressure either way. Or maybe the small pressure of nutrients spent on maintaining a useless organ.
Perhaps my example of my own case was misguided - I was turning blue and rushed to the emergency room as an infant, though. It was a single case provided to demonstrate a point where no single case matters that much.
