Do you think eugenics is a good thing or a bad thing?

[MCheetah]

Eugenics is the study of bettering humanity through genes and healthy people having kids with each other, leading to taller, healthier, stronger human beings and eliminating disease, illness, disabilities, and genetic mutations. It gets a bad rap because Nazis believed in it, and people like to assume all eugenics is sheer racism and genocide, even though that's not true. What do you think about eugenics?

It can be a good thing.

It's a bad thing, because Nazis.

It's a bad thing, but not because of Nazis.

No opinion / Other.

[Lliam]

We've had eugenics all along. It's called natural selection.

When I think of the goals of eugenicists, I think of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. No thanks. And fuck the self important elites who want to engineer humans and society to their specifications. If anything, it is people like that who should be eliminated from the gene pool.

[GoldenAxer]

I lean towards bad since I don't really trust central authorities to be able to select my mate better than I can. When in doubt about the consequences, I favor the ability for us to freely choose.

[GoldenAxer]

by the way, have you seen the film, Gattaca? It's a sci-fi revolving around questioning eugenics. I love that film.

[GoldenAxer]

From my most ruthless perspective, I think one of the problems with eugenics is that humans are far, far from being able to accurately predict the genetic factors that cause someone to contribute positively or negatively to society. If they were to assume they can with present-day tech or even possibly quite futuristic tech, it is likely that their prejudices would seep into their selection criteria... as with the Nazis.

[GoldenAxer]

... and as with the citizens in Gattaca despite their futuristic technology and advanced understanding of genetic traits.

[MCheetah]

@goldenaxer
Yes I have seen Gattaca before. I can certainly relate to the protagonist more than most, but I think the movie overall is kinda pretentious.

[GoldenAxer]

I thought it was such a nice movie with the swimming scene: "I never saved for the trip back." But I think that might highlight a plausible problem with eugenics where we become too confident in believing we understand the ideal traits of what makes the most productive human beings, only to overlook some of the greatest.

[GoldenAxer]

... kind of like love as a new thought that just popped up and cheers for MHO! If we spend too much time searching for some ideal dream lover based on preconceived notions of what is ideal for us, we might miss out on the one who truly is about as ideal as it gets who could be nothing like those preconceptions.

[purplepoppy]

People of different shapes and sizes naturally gravitate to different sports, even different jobs. Do we create the right sized people for each role? As for removing genetic defects I think that's a good thing but we shouldn't be trying to making the world corporate with us all made in the same mold.

[karaspara]

I don't like it sounds like something a James Bond villain would come up with

[Snakeyes7]

It's a bad thing because I think everyone deserves a shot at life as a typical inhabitant of the area.