Is there any actual argument against eugenics other than muh feels?

Yeah the main problem with eugenics is most people who want to do it have pretty retarded notions on it. Most who supported it seemed to just want to make pretty humans which is the equivalent of trying to breed human versions of chihuahuas. What you should be trying to do is create smarter or stronger humans, looks shouldnt matter so much for that.

But even you are mistaking. You shouldn't only go for stronger or smarter humans.

What about humans with great immune systems or other health related stuff? Those with genes that make you live longer, make you less likely to get cancer etc.

What about creative humans? Etc.

Let's say gene A confers immunity to a disease. If someone does not have gene A, epigenetics cannot active or inactivate the gene, neither can they pass on the gene.

>It seems that sperm quality is declining in the West and I wonder about the implications. It is a kind of sexual selection if you will.
And? Are you saying women are selecting men with poor sperm counts? Or are you saying some supernatural force has decided western men should have low sperm counts and go extinct? I don't think you understand what evolution is.

It's a workable idea but I simply don't trust the government, the academic establishment, or whatever to make any big decisions on the human genome. Maybe some obvious stuff like giving grants to intelligent couples so they have children earlier or designing an app that warns you if your live interest carries recessive deleterious alleles that could interact with alleles you are a carrier for. Anything more than that would be playing with fire, I think.

>What you should be trying to do is create smarter or stronger humans
which result in higher calorical intake to maintain that, which would kill them off if a nasty famine comes around.
Just one possibility.

>And? Are you saying women are selecting men with poor sperm counts?
NO.
>Or are you saying some supernatural force has decided western men should have low sperm counts and go extinct? I don't think you understand what evolution is.
Lol no. I am saying that the environment is selecting on sperm, whatever it is food, plastics, pesticides or air pollution. Low quality sperm could have effects on offspring (I dunno really how and what).

I actually know quite a lot about evolution when it comes to plebs but I am not well-read on the workings of genes and biochemistry.

Good user. Cost-benefit is important in this discussion.

Well yeah, thats another problem, we barely have any idea what we even need to become better.
In one of my spergy ideas i was wondering why not just use eugenics to breed everyone into midgets. If everyone is smaller then they need less food.

self determination

Being smaller also decreases the changes of getting cancer.

>If everyone is smaller then they need less food.
Not exactly that, but N. Korea is going in that direction.
blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2010/06/15/north-koreans-shorter-than-south-koreans/

In addition to previous responses it would be very destabilizing for society precisely because people don't like it. If you tell 50%+ of the population that they can't have kids they won't like it and you will either have to prove to them that it is somehow to their personal benefit or suppress them by force.

we could create a race of miner dwarves

How do you plan on enforcing eugenics of only 5-10% of society is allowed to breed? Is the overwhelming majority of the population supposed to just abstain from sex and instead work, toil and spend the rest of their lives enforcing rules that only punish them, all while going against their innate desire to pass along their genes?

but you have less money or success in life.

So, yeah, min-maxing doesn't work IRL.

robots & nukes

in other words you can't

There is no moral argument, but there is a biological one. Eugenics radically alters the allele frequency enough to make most of the population downright inbred. Think of what happened to dogs when it comes to trait selective breeding, this is very much a "engineer's syndrome" mentality when you think you can engineer mankind without seeing all the possible negative consequences.

The only eugenics I can approve of is aborting retards / other birth defects.

TELL THAT TO THE NIPS

Literally inbreeding

Because it will end up in a King Of The Hill match where in the end the ones with few genetic defects rule over the others.
Imagine a world where everyone is objectively beautiful, strong and intelligent, there will always be some slight variations so the ones slightly more strong will win over the slightly less stronger, likewise for beauty and intelligence.

Also, current imperfections might become useful someday, Turks for example might survive the Nuclear Winter.

1. Sickle cell exhibits certain benefits when that allele is heterozygous in an individual (when there is one copy of it in the person and the other copy of the same gene is a different allele). This heterezygous advantage is noted in a number of disease-causing alleles, but far from all of them. There are genuinely so many fucked up genetic disorders with no known heterozygous advantage .

>what about gene expression?
what about it?
2. planned economies are normally characterised by big interventions and restrictions such as in the soviet union, but in reality countries with successful economies do still plan their economies to some degree and don't do absolutely nothing. One might claim that those successful economies would be even more successful if they planned less and didn't adjust the monetary supply, interest rates, government spending, trade agreements and so on, but that's quite a fringe view in economics. I agree that making a drastic big decision like "let's repopulate the world with 1 out of every 100 people who we deam as ubermensch" would be bad, so it's certainly possible to come up with eugenics ventures that are bad ideas, but not all eugenics would necessarily be worse than leaving things as they are.

3. it would be faster and would probably select for different things than sexual selection (i.e. leaving things as they are). For example IQ isn't really selected for currently. high IQ people in western countries are having less kids on average than low IQ people.

Yes.

We don't have enough knowledge about genetics to perform them.

You may create a race of physically wonderful and intellectually stunning superhumans but don't come back to me crying because your population got wiped out when superhumans of 14th generation started all having troubles from some genetic defect that was present ever since the thing has started.

If we'd have full knowledge about how does our DNA influence things like intelligence, various genetic defects, immunity etc. etc. etc. then eugenics has a point. Otherwise all you'll get is hit-and-miss breeding. As in - if we can "read" DNA properly then nothing really stops you. Otherwise your eugenics will be glorified breeding.

Because It requires inhuman-like objectiveness, lack of national bias, constant surveillance and who's to say that bribery won't be present?Don't get me wrong, bribery s very much present in the world of science, but bribing someone to add a pinch more heroin in Bayer pills is not the same thing as deciding on whether someone should be bred out of the gene pool or not.

Good answers.
I only feel you confuse intervention with planning.

It goes against every enlightenment ideal, which are the foundations of Western society.
Maybe in China.

genetic diversity will be really helpful when we get to gene engineering, particularly if we've got a variety of people on who to actually study the effects of things during the course of a life.

>The person/group that ends up is only human, and humans are flawed. Therefore, we should all vegetate unto death.

those that claim to not be eugenicists have never made an effort to date the mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or people uglier or poorer than them

those that claim to not be eugenicists tend to not ask their neighbors how much of a strain the addition of each children will be on their livlihood

One of the main arguments for eugenics is the fact that natural selection isn't working properly anymore. Natural selection isn't survival of the fittest, merely the survival of those who reproduce as much as possible. In nature and before modern society things like strength and intelligence amongst others allowed organisms to reproduce more as they were better able to survive to reproductive age and acquire a mate. In modern society this is no longer really the case. Food is abundant and the ability to survive is not really important anymore as a result because society will take care of you. The ability to find a mate and reproduce with them has also lessened in importance, as a lot of people perfectly capable of reproducing choose not to. Also most people eventually end up with one mate. Intelligence causes a lot of people not to reproduce in modern society, while historically it has. Therefore intelligence might decline.

see >you're thinking about eugenics the wrong way. When someone is creating a stock portfolio, they don't ONLY buy the one stock that they predict will go up. They obviously diversify their portfolio so that they won't get wiped out by any particular market movement. At the same time they don't include any stock options that they have a very strong idea will be almost always be garbage. This is what rational eugenics would be like.

Natural selection hasn't stopped, the pressures have just shifted. Instead of physical fitness and number of sexual partners it is now about how many kids you have and if those kids will have kids. This is why the Amish and their ilk will inherit the earth. When we all go post human / why have kids instead of partying and vacations for the rest of my life.

We already practice a form of eugenics through the abortion of defective pregnancies.

Ultimately though the biggest so far unmentioned argument against eugenics is you don't know which people will turn out having immense positive impacts while still having negative traits. Stephan Hawking is a good example of this.