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I was reading this post apocalyptic book, where the women were expected (but not required) to at some point make lots of babies, because they needed more babies to prevent from becoming extinct. That seemed sort of reasonable, especially because the author made a point of stating it wasn’t required. He made a point that the women did all the things the men did and would not be forced to make babies if they didn’t want to, but everyone saw it as a good thing if women did have babies. However it was also full of remarks like: Wow you’re a good fighter, you must have children so we can have more good fighters. Which was kinda annoying.
Then there was a whole separate group of people, who had to limit their population size due to constrained resources. But they had access to a whole stock of frozen eggs and sperm and would use IVF to have children when they needed to. Also reasonable, with some caveats, but I’ll allow it. But then they would look at the parents and select which eggs and sperm to use, in order to get the most useful additions to their population. So they would take good mathematicians and combine those if they wanted to have new good mathematicians. The main character was the child (via IVF) of one of the most famous and important generals and of course also very good at being in the air force. This is when my eugenics alarm was going off.
There was also this whole other group of human like aliens, and wouldn’t you know it, genetics played a big role in their story as well. With eugenic themes all over.
I don’t know if the author actually believed in eugenics or just didn’t understand how genes work at all and went with his flawed understanding. But holy shit this book rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t finish it obviously and will probably avoid that author in the future.
“went with his flawed understanding”? I think it’s safe to say that this is the level of everyone’s understanding.
Authors generally research something before they write about it, even for fictional works.
You can research all you want but the bottom line is that we don’t understand nearly enough about any topic to make correct conclusions. Even those that are “obviously” correct, are based on humanity’s limited understanding of the world around us. I know this sound dismissive of the research you speak of but it is not intended as such. I think research and the collection of data from which to draw conclusions is critical to our survival. My point is only that not being constantly open to new ideas and espousing “one truth” is not productive.
I’m very much on the side of genetics being the main determinate. I also believe that we should be doing everything we can to implement genetic alteration of our species in order to save us from ourselves.
So you’re a eugenicist?
Went to check the definition to make sure I spoke correctly and given that it refers mainly to selective breeding I would say no. I am for genetic alteration using tools that will specifically target known genetic sequences to facilitate the removal of disease and other improvements that can make humans more resilient, better able to cope with the challenges of the future. An example of something often done in the past would be to breed to make larger and stronger humans for war. I would take the approach to make humans smaller to require fewer resources. Another one that would freak everyone out would be the enlargement of the medula oblongata to improve empathy (I’m not sure of the details or if I identified the right body part but you get the gist. I am very aware we don’t currently have the knowledge to accomplish these things safely but we should move faster and with less indignation to provide this knowledge.
That’s not what they said.
How is this not eugenicist? They want to implement the genetic alteration of our species to save us from ourselves because genetics is the most important part. Even if they don’t mean forced sterilization and want to do genetic engineering on everyone or something that is still eugenics. Who gets to determine what the “bad” genes are that are ruining the species?
How about we just focus on the cancer genes and other genetic disease diseases?