roseweird posted:

natural selection, eugenics, and genetic modification are not easily distinguished from each other, however i think modifying astronauts to have high bone density sounds awful btw

Those are all completely different. What are you having trouble distinguishing.

Good lord this thread is bad. Now I know how y'all must feel when I talk about Marxism

Edited by Squalid (July 12, 2013 19:38:10)

Fifteen years ago, a strange-looking child suffering from severe physical maladies and acute retardation was brought into the office of Dr. Theodore Tarby.

The pediatric neurologist regularly deals with a wide range of serious childhood diseases as a doctor with the state-funded Children's Rehabilitative Services in Phoenix. Tarby says he quickly realized he was dealing with a very unusual condition that he could not diagnose.

He prepared urine samples and sent them to the University of Colorado Science Center's Dr. Steve Goodman, a professor of pediatrics who runs a laboratory that detects rare genetic diseases.

Goodman soon made a startling discovery: Tarby's young patient was afflicted with an extremely rare disease called fumarase deficiency.
...
Nearly everyone in Colorado City, Arizona, and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, was a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practices polygamy and had long encouraged multiple marriages between close relatives.

By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.

Fast-forward to the present: About half of the 8,000 people living in the towns are blood relatives of two of the founding families that settled in the 1930s on the desolate high desert plateau against the base of the Vermillion Cliffs.
...
For more than 70 years, all marriages in the isolated towns have been arranged by the leader of the FLDS, a breakaway sect of the Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church.

Marriages among first and second cousins have been common for decades in the community, where religious doctrine requires men to have at least three wives to gain eternal salvation. Only the FLDS prophet can arrange and perform polygamous marriages, and those marriages are taking place in a community in which almost everybody is related.
...
FLDS marriages, Wyler and other community experts say, are an extension of a breeding program that began with Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith in the 1830s. The early Mormon Church practiced polygamy until 1890, when leaders abandoned the practice as a condition for Utah to gain statehood. The FLDS was formed by Mormons who refused to give up polygamy.

Warren Jeffs, like Joseph Smith before him, has emphasized the importance of obedience among members of the church. Jeffs is following a long-established practice -- started by Smith 170 years ago -- of excommunicating those who do not strictly adhere to church leaders' commands.

"The 'gene' that Warren is really selecting for," Wyler says, "is the 'obedience gene.'

"Joseph Smith was also selecting for the 'obedience gene.' He was kicking people out, too, who weren't obedient.

"I hate to talk like this about my own genealogy," Wyler says, "but, literally, they are keeping all the breeding stock -- the women, the men -- and weeding out the disobedient men."

The ultimate goal of the breeding program, Wyler says, is to create the perfect race.

"Remember how Hitler was trying to breed a perfect race?" he says. "Warren Jeffs is also trying to breed a perfect race."

Squalid posted:

"Remember how Hitler was trying to breed a perfect race?" he says. "Warren Jeffs is also trying to breed a perfect race."

Warren Jeffs was breeding slaves. Hitler was breeding slave owners.

Superabound posted:

i mean yeah, youre going to run into significant moral issues with Eugenics if you let what is considered a "desirable trait" be determined by class position and various political factions rather than what actually confers the best survival benefits to the organism/species. But engineering astronauts to have higher natural bone densities is not even nearly the same thing as say, instituting a One Child Policy for all nonwhites

Some might say "desirable traits" will necessarily be determined by class position, like everything else. The history of Eugenics would seem to support such am assertion.

slumlord posted:

jargon abuse is a good subtle sign that someone doesn't have any idea what they're talking about, but when they start actually trying to unpack and deconstruct jargon that's when it's just embarrassing for everyone involved

define "titty sprinkles"

Squalid posted:

Some might say "desirable traits" will necessarily be determined by class position, like everything else. The history of Eugenics would seem to support such am assertion.

yes im sure the complete and slanderous political invalidation Eugenics has received in the western media is based entirely on an honest and objective weighing and accounting of its various positive and negative consequences. i mean why else would a soceity indoctrinated by the forces of Capital, which relies entirely on the continued disadvantageous disparity of vast underclasses, find the forced normalization and ensured equality of health and opportunity that Eugenics universally affords so inherently distasteful??

elemennop posted:

anytime someone who's not a research scientist says some technology or something is inevitable or bases social decisions on technology that hasn't even been invented, i just throw whatever books on math problems that have been open for hundreds of years i'm carrying at them and yell "THEN YOU INVENT IT"

books are easier to carry when closed

xipe posted:

whatsit matter the Opinions of posters here; if ruling classes want Eugenics they will have it, & seems to me that they do

Hold onto your hat because im about to blow the top off your mind: the posters here are members of The Ruling Classes

Keven posted:

xipe posted:

whatsit matter the Opinions of posters here; if ruling classes want Eugenics they will have it, & seems to me that they do

Hold onto your hat because im about to blow the top off your mind: the posters here are members of The Ruling Classes

then it'll take more than downvotes to stop em!

are there any sci-fi books or movies on the theme of the rich turning themselves into a super race & abandoning humanity to barbarity?
i'd like to think about this scenario a bit