If any of you believe natural selection is good, that it keeps a species strong and good,
it is a road of death. One idea is this:
There are good and bad genes. Through selective breeding, animals have been made either larger or smaller, and now with genetic engineering, many more qualities, both mental and physical, could be altered, in good or bad ways. Natural selection favors the strongest, healthiest, smartest and most sensitive adaptable species.
I wish eugenics existed in some ways, but in other ways i think it’s wrong and misapplied and F—ed.
Humanity doesn’t want to evolve itself. However, it does want to evolve its economy and its technology.
I suspect many years from now we may have very advanced tools used by very foolish people.
On my other computer I had read about something which sounded like “The Methusela Mouse”.
They found a gene which gave like doube life span but made the body a bit smaller.
Hopefully someone remembers that subject i don’t remember the perfect details.
It made me think if we actually had guys working on human genes they could make someone live longer or be stronger or be smarter.
It’s sad that we aren’t accelerating our biological evolution. We could even find the genes responsible for hate or aggression then
turn them off. We need to work on the people whom control technology and the future super weapons. We need these people
to not be crazy assholes.
Unfit organisms die. Fit organisms live. Natural selection is ‘good’ for those that are alive, it’s like a compliment. “Keep up the good work!”. The process of natural selection has been undermined by humans, however. The strong help the weak survive. This isn’t how it was in the past. We let everyone live and procreate, regardless of their ‘competence’ or ‘fitness’.
Ideally we genetically engineer special breeds.
We try to promote general equal rights for each breed.
The breeds would be specially made for whatever was most reasonable and possible at the time.
Even with equal rights it may be some of the special breeds are more suited for either sciences, or combat, or leadership.
Then they would be assigned to whichever was their best calling, hopefully.
In my fantasy we would find the benevolence gene then make it stronger.
Then these people would be assigned as governers and judges.
I feel like you would lose a lot of what it is to be human in such a world. That is a very loose concept, I suppose, but my gut feeling is that its a concept in which a lot of my ethical thinking is rooted.
You also have, with genetically engineered humans, problems similar to the problems with Asimov’s robots. If, for example, the compassion gene is overclocked - there is a potential for someone to decide that the most compassionate thing to do is to continue to manipulate genes until we are all happy and completely conflict free, like perfectly synchronized, unquestioning robots. We seem to have an instinctual emotion that tells us that there is something wrong with this view of the world, but what is that emotion? On the other hand, if you amplify the effects of a/the gene that stops us from wanting to hurt other people, and make it dominant, then the people who controlled the weapons would never use them at all. Finally, if you boost or create genes that make people adverse to other people being hurt too strongly, these people might logically will the destruction of the whole populace through some quick and painless means.
The real problem here is - ‘compassion’ is not just one thing that is controlled by a single factor. It is a blend of factors, and exactly what those factors are and how they interact is obscure. Say that, for example, we are able to engineer any traits we want in to someone so that we know exactly how they would react in any given situation. And then, we had the task of making it so that this person was as compassionate as possible. Would everyone agree on exactly how he/she should be programed? I don’t think they would.
The same is true of benevolence, and just about any other positive virtue. It’s not just a case of ‘increasing’ them - until you are perfectly clear on what they actually mean, it is impossible to say exactly how someone could be engineered so that they are ‘increased’.
If I somehow became sole ruler of the planet AND if I had some power/technology that allowed me to live a ridiculously long life, say long enough to see 20+ generations, I’d probably implement a eugenics program just to see what happens.
I would say this. I believe man in natural. Therefore, I say that all man’s actions are natural. We make a distinction between man-made and natural for the sake of clarity, but man-made to me is a subcategory of natural.
I would make the metaphor of a beaver building a bridge. This occurs naturally, but as the result of an organism constructing it.
Given this, I would say if Homo-Sapiens implemented eugenics, it wouldn’t be unnatural. Therefore, our selection would be a natural selection.
Genuine social darwinism or natural selection does not exist in civilization as it is impeded by the artificial socialism of government therefore the modern eugenics movement is a joke by a bunch of assholes who describe themselves as superior human beings yet do not really earn the title because they have never had to fight a day in their lives to survive.
