It’s still eugenics, you just used more words to describe it.
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Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 months agoNo they acknowledge that the technology could be used that way. But there’s a lot of actual medical problems we can catch this way. Imagine you carry the Huntington’s gene. How much would you pay to make sure you don’t pass that down to your kids?
scutiger@lemmy.world 5 months ago
pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 5 months ago
Eugenics isn’t inherently bad, but humans suck and will make it bad.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No. Eugenics is race theory as much as it’s anything scientific. It was about making sure the “correct” races had children. I don’t know what the name this is in science but Eugenics isn’t about making kids healthier, it’s about making them whiter.
Patches@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
No that’s literally what it means:
The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition
Science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
But this isn’t selective breeding, unless you twist the definition to the point where it means something wholly different. If I understand right, this is just screening embryos for potential health problems.
billwashere@lemmy.world 5 months ago
If this is indeed like GATTACA selecting specific embryos after fertilization is not really selective breeding. Selective breeding is picking the parents. This is picking the children. You could do both but it didn’t seem like that is what was happening. I could still see this likely leading to problems genetically not dissimilar to problems with inbreeding. Genetic diversity requires the randomness of life to be useful long term.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Did you miss where they do that by sterilization? And qualities of a race or breed?
Do you speak English? Is this a translation error?
sepulcher@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
You specifically left out the “a science” part, which is also part of the “kids’” definition for eugenics.
eugenics noun eu·gen·ics yu̇-ˈjen-iks : a science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
Removing the “a” from the beginning completely changes the meaning of the word, which is why you did it.
Shame.
barsoap@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, but nobody here is suggesting racial criteria. This article is specifically about screening for health issues. Reading more into it, it seems like they’ve paired big data with genetic screening to lay odds on health problems that aren’t just a single gene going the wrong way.
barsoap@lemm.ee 5 months ago
There’s a debate about that ongoing, whether the word and basic idea can be divorced from its start in scientific racism. I don’t really have a skin in the game but would like to point out that psychiatry didn’t cease to be called psychiatry when we stopped physically abusing inmates, showing them off to gawkers, whatnot, got rid of phrenology, etc. You can make arguments both for “we must start from a clean slate” as well as “let’s own the bullshit of the past to have something to teach students to not do”.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s because phrenoloy and the other theories are under Psychiatry and Psychology. You don’t throw out Astronomy because of Heliocentrism. Eugenics was specifically developed to produce racial outcomes. It’s a theory, not a field of science.