>>465117No eugenics is fundamentally unscientific bullshit, even if you remove all the historic fascistic crap.
There is no scientific basis for the concept of "a better organism"
Science can only describe how things work and make predictive models.
For example if you look at an organism and consider it's ability to survive, than cockroaches are a better design than humans. Eugenics has to be binned, it's going to produce stupid results no matter how you string it.
>eugenics is nothing more than favoring certain biological characteristics over othersWhat you are proposing sounds like political interference into medical treatments.
Just don't, leave the medical decisions to doctors and the people they treat, and stay out of it.
>couldn't this be used to improve our species?Not really, how do you know which direction is up ?
You'll get a bunch of idealists with conflicting visions for what human biology should be, fighting against each other with really advanced bio-tech. Again it will lead to stupid results.
>Couldn't dozens if not hundreds of genetic diseases be exterminated? Genetic diseases are very rare, but yes that can be done, however public health will only improve a little bit at the margins, don't expect this to have any effect on society.
>Couldn't we design childrenNo human biology is to complicated to make good enough predictions.
Keep in mind that you are not only looking at genetics, you are looking at genetics within an environment.
In order to design a human you have to know what it's environment is going to be, because the same genetic blueprint is going to produce radically different people depending on the environment they end up in. This is very far beyond our abilities. Perhaps harder than other scifi stuff like faster than light travel.
There is a very important point.
You can edit genetics in ways that it only affects the one organism that you are applying a medical procedure to and any changes you make die off with the one specimen you tinkered with. That's what you might want to consider. There also is the possibility that you make changes that can be passed down to new generations, and thus making heritable changes. There is strong statistical evidence that suggests making heritable changes is the path towards making a species infertile. My recommendation is to ban heritable genetic manipulation, and enforce it vigorously.
>who grow up to be healthier, stronger and more intelligent?It might be important to know that you can edit your genes at any time in live, you don't have to do this before you are born. You can also reverse genetic changes, up to a point.
There is a reasonably good chance that genetic medicine will lead to a great reduction in per-person health care costs, and result in significant societal improvement in health. I would support genetic medicine, but you can only apply it if somebody is sick and it is demonstrable that altering their genes leads to better health outcomes, in the same way that giving people medicine is tested against improved health outcomes. And like before these genetic changes should not be applied to the heritable track. So that you are only applying a medical treatment to a single patient and not fuck with future generations.
We don't know what makes people intelligent, genetically, there still are a lot of low hanging fruits in the realm of environmental improvements.
ensuring access to nutritious food
living within low-stress life-circumstances and having beneficial mental stimulation.
Ending economic precarity will lead to a massive increase in cognitive abilities within society.
>I believe that eventually it is inevitable that genetic modification of embryos will become commonplace, and therefore it is important that the idea of public eugenics be promoted, otherwise only people with enough money to pay for these programs could access to them, and that would eventually lead to a much more evident caste system than the current one, where the rich are practically supermen with advantages that allow them to dominate the labor and scientific market while the poorest classes would be relegated to occupying a position increasingly irrelevant in society.This is a little bit idealist, ruling classes are not better than the classes they subjugate. It's unlikely that they would be able to make them self's into Ubermenschen. It's likely that they will just replicate inbreeding problems that existed with feudal ruling circles. Because if they settle on some kind of metric for Uber-genes, and they all get those Uber-genes, making it a biological cast-differentiator, that means that objectively they make them selves more genetically similar. If those Uber-genes have a critical flaw, then it becomes just a very elaborate way to commit group-suicide. But even if the Uber-genes are good quality, they still make them selves into partial clones that will be targeted by viruses bacteria and who know what else and eventually the Ubermenschen will just keel over because they became food for some micro-critter that specialized on eating Ubermenshen. We're just no where near the level where we can fuck with natur an get away with it.
It's risky fucking around with genetics while still living in class society, because all ruling classes tend to screw with the perception of reality and if those distortions seep into the sciences, shit can break badly, and the more advanced the technology the worse the breakage is going to be.
One thing you should also consider is inverting the premise.Instead of changing people, you change their environment.
You could try to read human genes and figure out what the optimal environment for those genes would be.
That's probably less complicated and would lead to more immediately achievable improvements.