Well, things seem to be looking a little one-sided at the moment, with the general consensus being summed up by the logorrheic
annie1.
So here comes the devil's advocacy bit:
- With the greatest respect to
JadziaDax [I'll be the sychophantic quote at the bottom of her posts any day] the Hitler argument is bunkum. Firstly, we are all aware of many factors contributed to the Holocaust and a "master race" was but one tiny one of them. Secondly, the Nazis were the first to publish the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1943 and their scientists were employed by the US post-war to help with the technology that would place a man on the moon. Are we also to condemn these advances because they have the hand of Adolf Hitler upon them?
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In theory, you would be creating mutations even more undesirable than what already exists in society.
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- Why so, in theory? Would a mutation that prevented Cystic Fibrosis be undesirable?
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Haven't people learned from what happens in animals when they breed them for certain characteristics?
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- Yes they have. The result is the agricultural system we have today, that allows us to farm the high-yield animals that we do and keep our food at the quality and price that we have come to appreciate. And that is without even considering GM foods, which hold out the possibility of creating crops that will produce higher, more certain yields not only in the West, but also in third world countries.
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We've come this far without cloning and breeding "super humans". I think it only spells trouble.
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- At one time we had also come this far without electricity, the automobile, the vaccine and well, everything! And quite a few of those looked like trouble at the time.
"All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to life but doomed to failure from an engineering standpoint."
(Editor, 'The Times' of London, 1905)
To
JStrider: Yep, it was
Gattaca [spelling corrected], a great film. But cinema speaks both ways. In Gatica the super-humans rule over the normal-humans, but in Blade Runner the super-humans are the slaves of normal-humans. You may think neither is particularly desirable, but films about the quiet progress of science are rarely box office hits.
My devil's advocate conclusion:
Eugenics holds out the promise of a better world, where the science to pre-emptively cure people of many debilitating conditions is funded/fuelled by the desire of a rich minority who want to have beautiful, brainy kids. I believe that such cures would be wonderful things and that whilst the funding source is not ideal, the rich will always have beautiful and brainy kids because they are able to attract beautiful partners and fund expensive college educations.