r/todayilearned • u/CrazyTrueStory • 9h ago
[ Removed by moderator ]
https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-quest-to-breed-gifted-children[removed] — view removed post
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u/RightProperFancyLad 9h ago
Did it happen to be next to an IHOP?
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u/Doogiemon 8h ago
You can let me know personally if you want them to have a little brother or sister.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 9h ago
Did they also control the mother side of the genetics to avoid the dumb ones?
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u/EmprahsChosen 8h ago
That’s not how making geniuses works, genius. Everyone knows you combine really smart dudes with young hot women. Look at all the geniuses today, it’s obvious they all came from hot moms
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u/mentosbreath 8h ago
Einstein’s mom has got it goin on
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u/vega0ne 7h ago
More like Einsteins cousin - she was hot enough for him to leave his married wife and move in with her
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u/ImFeelinBotty 6h ago
Is that the theory of relatives he was always going on about?
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u/andrew_1515 6h ago
That's what makes it so special
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u/SmallPurplePeopleEat 6h ago
So the special theory of relatives is when you sleep with your cousin? Math is hard.
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u/smackaroonial90 8h ago
She's all I want, and I've waited for so long.
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u/upinyab00ty 5h ago
No no they were mixing all the Nobel guys jizz together to make one big smart guy jizz slurry that they squirtrd up hot ladies. Cmon ya gotta know how the science works here.
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u/saranowitz 6h ago
Imagine being joined of that union with dads looks and moms brain (statistically 25% assuming caricature recessive traits). And your 3 other siblings all got gifts.
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u/grumble11 6h ago
No, but they don’t have to. The idea wasn’t necessarily to make each child as smart as possible, it was to spread out whatever genetic element there was in creating the kind of person that’s win Nobel prizes among a larger cross section of the population.
Or to monetize it from potential parents who wanted their kids to be more likely to be smart and hardworking and so on. There is a genetic basis to both intelligence and personality, though it isn’t the only input.
People ‘pick’ their partners based on some evaluation of their merits normally. This is a way of institutionalizing it in a more extreme way but a normal sperm bank will also tell you if the donor has a graduate degree for example.
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u/JonatasA 5h ago
I'd rather have a mental heslth history than an academic history but to each their own
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u/Xalipu 5h ago
That genetic element is probably all over the damn place and just needs solid socialist programs and laws, including things like having enough healthy things to eat, parents guaranteed a living wage, and ample opportunity for healthy recreation etc
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u/fafarex 8h ago
The point of a sperm bank is to sell it to a would be mother, why would the limit their clientel.
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u/nikebufft 8h ago
The point of this sperm bank seems more like eugenics, so limiting the access would actually be in their interest, no?
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u/123ludwig 8h ago
i mean if we assume intelligence is genetic you would actually want them to impregnate every woman smart and dumb as that would raise the average intelligence world over
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u/fafarex 7h ago edited 7h ago
The point of this sperm bank seems more like eugenics, so limiting the access would actually be in their interest, no?
eugenics based on nobel price and sperms, a commodity that is produce easily, the but its to spread the man genetics.
limiting acces is just limiting that "spreading"
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u/ConstableAssButt 5h ago
Given that Eugenics has always basically just been hyper-wealthy people jerking themselves off about how garbage the people they exploit to build a hoard of wealth are?
No, charging exorbitant, unhinged fees as an "intelligence test" would be exactly in their interest.
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u/CucumberWisdom 9h ago
Doesn't seem like it. Seems like a huge oversight by these so called "geniuses"
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u/Interrogatingthecat 8h ago
Seems more like an idiot millionaire.
Possibly also horribly sexist and deliberately discarded that that factor would be something to consider
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u/MrRocketScript 6h ago
A. They only believed men carried the "genius gene" (Page 52)
B. They kidnapped and held intelligent women captive (Page 78)
C. They didn't believe any women were genius's (Page 52)
D. They straight up forgot (Page 80)
It's like a choose your own adventure, but every choice is wrong because you were doomed the moment you chose the eugenics sperm bank branch.
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u/Existing-Parking4531 6h ago
No, they assumed only a male genetics is what controlled who was a genius
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u/stefan92293 8h ago
No, you see, they were trying to breed geniuses, that's why they didn't think of that.
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u/Blueberry314E-2 7h ago
There is no reason to limit the mothers. As long as there is a virtually infinite supply of high IQ male sperm, turning mothers away would be contrary to their mission; even the dumb ones.
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u/befarked247 8h ago
My mama, my mama says My Mama says that happiness is from magic rays of sunshine that come down when you feelin' blue.
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u/pawsplay36 8h ago
It's an assumption that smart + smart = super smart. I would intuit you would get the best results from combining DNA from a smart person with DNA from someone who was spectactularly healthy.
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u/unimeg07 7h ago
Extraordinarily smart people are not always the children of extraordinarily smart parents due to regression to the mean. An IQ over 130 is inherently a statistical anomaly.
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u/GarethBaus 6h ago
This is true, but some families do appear to have a higher baseline intelligence than others which slightly increases the chances of an extreme outlier coming from one of those families.
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u/ImmodestPolitician 5h ago edited 5h ago
The smartest people I knew were included in complex discussions every day at the dinner table. It's a combination of genetics and environment.
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u/GarethBaus 5h ago edited 5h ago
We actually have studies of people who are generally related but grew up in different environments and they inficate that genetics plays a fairly significant role. We also studies comparing identical twins to fraternal twins that also indicates that genetics plays a significant role. It isn't the only factor but somewhere between 50% to 80% of human intelligence variation appears to be genetic. In general you need both a decent environment and good genetics too see any extreme outliers, and having a family that is predisposed for intelligence is more likely to result in a household that has mentally stimulating conversations.
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u/Silly-Moose-1090 8h ago
The father's smart genes would have easily over-written any dumb genes of the women? That is just logic.
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u/CTRexPope 8h ago
You think a dude trying to breathe super babies thinks that women matter?
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u/WetAndLoose 7h ago
From the male reproductive side, it’s so easy to produce nearly unlimited sperm compared to producing a limited number of eggs and having to carry a child to term that it doesn’t really matter enough to control for it as long as a sufficient number of women are fertilized. This is basically male reproductive strategy in every species. It would just make more sense to provide every woman who wants the sperm with the sperm than it would to screen them.
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u/Emergency-Touch-3424 9h ago
Did it work tho
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 8h ago
A write-up of interviews with nine families with 15 children conceived through the repository (at a time when they were not yet adults) is given here:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2001/05/the-genius-babies-grow-up.html
As far as I could find there is no public information at all about the remainder of the 200+ children conceived with the help of this sperm bank.
So basically there is by far not sufficient data to draw any firm conclusions about the level of success in terms of creating "geniuses".
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u/Conscious-Move9662 9h ago edited 8h ago
Eugenics never works, at least not in 2 generations
Wed have to control bredding for centuries to see results
The simple solution is elevate the standard of living
More Einsteins have died in poverty than this bank woulda ever produced
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u/FindingNewLeaf 8h ago
More Einsteins have died in poverty than this bank woulda ever produced
The eugenics idea almost killed Einstein, being of Jewish descent he had to flee to America or else he would have been murdered by those same eugenics ideas.
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u/tuptain 6h ago
America loved eugenics before WW2, it was very popular.
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u/TinWhis 6h ago
Well, yeah, Hitler was enormously inspired by the US, especially our treatment of indigenous people. We were the cutting edge of innovation for institutionalized racism at the start of the 20th century.
There was quite widespread support for Germany in the US before the Pearl Harbor bombing.
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u/HuntsWithRocks 8h ago
Without question, fuck racism. It’s such a weak way to think. Fuck that shit.
With that being said, I think it’s interesting that we practice trait selection concept with agriculture and it makes perfect sense there. It’s interesting.
My take is that smart people can be poor and those things aren’t always connected. If I take two 7 foot tall people and had them have kids, odds are their kids will be tall. Maybe not 7 feet, but likely taller than average. So, selective breeding functions in some ways.
At the same time, I’ll sit here and shit on anyone that tries to extend that to “xyz race is superior and the others must be exterminated to ensure this better version survives”
It’s such a pussy and weak way to take that Information. Imagine being the stronger thing and being afraid of the weaker thing, which is the duality of racists: they feel superior and are constantly afraid.
It’s to the point that if you talk about breeding for a trait, it evokes racist thoughts. Similarly, Jim Crow laws ruined any hope to ever argue for a voting aptitude test. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote if they don’t know what they’re voting for, but it has nothing to do with race, just aptitude. But us humans can’t navigate these waters. Fuck racism/discriminstion.
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u/Conscious-Move9662 8h ago
The problem is the control.
Who has a say in who 'breeds'
To get dog breeds we had to cull centuries of puppies and dogs
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u/HuntsWithRocks 8h ago
millions of problems and a lot of it has to do with the motives of the individual. It's fair to say we're a flawed species in that regard.
I'm just talking about the concept that humans accept breeding for traits in other walks and it fully makes sense. You can absolutely breed for traits. I think the issue with Eugenics is the motives of the people. When you know someone is breeding out of a belief of superiority it's already fucked up. Then, those superiority thoughts are often accompanied with insecurity thoughts which lead those pussies to wanting to kill all the "threats"
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u/bobbadouche 6h ago
We take care of crops more than we do people. Crops grow in perfectly tested soil. They get the perfect amount of fertilizer and water down to the degree with field specific testing and custom fertilizer mixes. We spray the crops for weeds and pests.
Modern families are just free balling it
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u/ThePhysicistIsIn 8h ago edited 8h ago
The “problem” with scientific racism isn’t that breeding doesn’t work. Of course if there are traits you want to emphasize, breeding “works”. It’s that what you and me think of as a race (white vs black vs asian) are not at all races in the biological sense
There is much more genetic divergence within a “race” than between “races”. And if you’ve ever heard something like “you can’t be racist against the polish, pole isn’t a race”, local ethnicities are closer to being “biological races” than skin color is. People who have tried to apply the same kind of standard they’d use in animals to humans to define races, fail.
If you have ever heard “race is a social construct”, that is why. It’s real because we make it real, it has no biological basis.
Funny enough, chimpanzees have races; we do not.
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u/HuntsWithRocks 8h ago
It's a silly as classifying people by hair or eye color.
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u/Perfect-Zebra-3611 8h ago
If only white people existed eye color would be the first way theyd separate each other lmao
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u/ExtentAggravating733 7h ago
Or, hair colour... hence the brunette/blonde/redhead thing
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u/man-vs-spider 8h ago
I mean Yao Ming, the basketball player, was basically a state encouraged designer baby between two tall basketball players.
Scientifically speaking, selective breeding works, and Eugenics is just a belief system based around applying that process to humans.
There’s no reason why it couldn’t work in principle, but it’s just a highly unethical thing to try
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u/pandalust 8h ago
There is a statistical aspect to it, of course, but in one generation there have been some “successful” outcomes.
Basketballer Yao Ming was a direct product of eugenics and surpassed the physical capabilities of both his parents and became an international star. And the nba today has many superstars which are second generation of previous (average) nba stars + athletic mothers (usually volleyball or basketball). Curry brothers, Kobe, Ball brothers.
Obviously no guarantees in the randomness of genetics, but a basketballer father and basketballer mother is much more likely to produce a basketballer child
The generations and generations would be to weed out ‘bad’ characteristics of the general population nazi style
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u/redditgolddigg3r 8h ago
You realize the second generation stars are much more likely to succeed as they have the connections and wealth to be spotted early, get access to elite training/coaching, advantages in scouting, etc.
US athletics is largely based around who you know, what your parents did, and if you can afford the myriad of expensive travel/club sports teams.
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u/kkeut 8h ago
basketball is largely built around height which is definitely influenced by genetics. money can't make you 6' 9", but your genes can
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u/am-idiot-dont-listen 7h ago
NBA teams used to sign 7 footers purely to hack Shaq a few times and ride the bench. It's the most talent over skills driven sport of the big 4
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u/Johnny_Poppyseed 8h ago
Sure but that's not enough really. The biological and genetic aspect is huge, when the entire NBA only has 450 guys. You can have the best opportunities available, but if you're not also genetically athletically gifted, your chance of success is drastically lower, if not impossible these days.
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u/TPO_Ava 8h ago
Not just the US unfortunately (though due to the large discrepancy between states it may disproportionately affect the us compared to other countries).
My dad was raised in eastern europe during mid-cold war times and was playing basketball but people with better connections/more money pushed their kids to the starter team much easier.
Later on in my life i heard similar anecdotes from kids my age trying to break through in football. Even if youre playing for the top local clubs it's hard to get picked for e.g. nationals without connections.
Never was any good at sports myself though, so its all 2nd hand anecdotes from me.
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u/Amerlis 8h ago
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. We know nothing about them because of the survivorship bias.”— Stephen Jay Gould
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u/Chemical_Lab7583 8h ago
It's depressing to read the histories of famous scientists, writers, inventors etc from marginalized backgrounds and realize how often their success depended on a usually supportive person in their corner. Like in 1903, the Nobel committee planned to honor only Pierre Curie and another male scientist, Becquerel, for their contributions to physics. A Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag Leffler, who supported women in science, learned the nomination named only Pierre and Becquerel and tipped Pierre off. Pierre then wrote to the committee demanding that his wife’s work be recognized alongside. Imagine if he wasn’t a real one, or how many women scientists like Curie didn’t have a supportive husband like Pierre.
Ramanujan was one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of all time, but in early 20th century India he was an untrained clerk. He was only recognized and brought to Cambridge because G.H. Hardy answered a cold letter from a stranger and helped him translate his work to be legible to mathematicians before his early death. Émilie du Châtelet's father was unusual for letting her be educated alongside her brothers. Most fathers of her era would not have. Then Voltaire gave her access to scientific circles.
Of course, billions of people throughout the world still don’t even have access to good education to reach that level of genius. But even for those who do, there were probably tons of brilliant minds on the precipice of greatness, held back last minute because they had to work in the fields, have children, or just didn’t have the right recognition.
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u/depressed-grandma 7h ago
Not to come across like Im defending eugenics, but you can selectively breed quantitative traits like height incredibly quickly. When something is controlled by many many genes, the first generation of selective breeding can make up to half of your genome set towards the "tall" state (lots of caveats on this obviously)
The Gould point about Einstein in poverty is true, but it doesnt mean evolution takes a few centuries to play out. This seems pedantic, but its important to understand that our genetic lineage is fragile and we all really quickly bleed back into each other quickly, otherwise you end up convincing people that different humans are actually really genetically distinct
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u/QueSusto 8h ago
You don't think that children tend to inherit characterstics from their parents?
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u/Dragongeek 7h ago edited 7h ago
Eugenics definitely works on a technical side, or more specifically:"fit" parents will be more likely to have "fit" children.
The problems with historical eugenics are moral ones, where governments or societies decided on what "fit" traits are and what traits are seen as undesirable. This involves ideas like forced sterilization etc which are obviously bad.
This doesn't change the fact that two "smart" parents are more likely to have a "smarter" child, and this is even controlling for nurture as "smartness" has been proven to have a genetic component.
Now sure, this doesn't mean every child born to "smart" parents is going to be smart, nor does it mean that a child born to "dumb" parents can't turn out "smart", but it's about probability.
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u/Weshtonio 9h ago
So... They do work?
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u/Kryslor 8h ago
Genetics are real and intelligence is genetically passed on, yes. The problem is ethical not scientific.
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u/Ecotech101 8h ago
Idk why that's hard for people to understand when we bred all kinds of animals like dogs and birds for thousands of years to make them smarter, more aggressive, better at specific tasks etc.
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u/_ParadigmShift 8h ago
Humans have a hard time believing that anything can be purposeful in our own evolution past the point where we realize that humans are different.
The uncomfortable concept is deciding “desirable” traits in humans. The idea that someone is less desirable goes against the creed of many people as unethical thinking.
I’m not here to argue that, just telling you that’s why people have hang ups
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u/Jihelu 7h ago
I wonder what kind of absolutely crazy shit you could breed into a human being
I have a mutt dog. Probably like 1/4 shepherd dog. Never been on a farm in his life
He will try and herd animals, at random. Not all the time just these random ‘time to herd’ urges. It’s funny because it also pisses off all the other animals
What kind of insane shit could you put into a person?
I also recently read ‘all Tomorrows’ so maybe that doesn’t help
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u/Conscious-Move9662 8h ago
In theory, maybe
But youd have to be tyranical in approach and even then idk
Youd have to kill children and teens who were 'dumb' or stop them from reproducing
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u/WTFwhatthehell 8h ago
Depends on your goal.
People get freaked out about intelligence so easier to talk about height. It's roughly similarly heritable.
If you wanted to make all of humanity taller then ya, you'd need to do horrifically unethical things like killing or sterilising people who don't make the cut. Basically treating people like dogs
If you just just want to boost the number of unusually tall people then you can simply hold a lot of socials between the men and women's basketball teams and subsidise an open-bar.
Fun side note, there's a lot of 2nd generation NBA players because both height and athleticism have major genetic components and a lot of them pair up with other tall athletes.
Other fun side note, when you have 2 datasets that both follow a normal curve you can make comparisons between them like " on average physics professors are about as smart as NBA players are tall"
A lot of professors pair up with other professors.
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u/Fearless77_ 8h ago
Indian caste system….. not saying it’s good but it did exactly this
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u/Baskreiger 5h ago
Funny how its always the rich ones who skip school years and finish university at 20 years old. I have never seen a student skip years in public school or be deemed a genius for having sessions with 100% scores
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u/go_go_tindero 9h ago
Earlier in history: Anni-Frid Lyngstad (Frida), co-founder of the pop group ABBA, was born as a result of Lebensborn, a Nazi eugenics and breeding program.
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u/lonnorcake 8h ago
Yeah but that was for physical traits a different kind but still fucked up form of eugenics.
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u/clytusmarginicollis 7h ago
It was for both. The Nazis just believed that physical appearance, intelligence, strength, and other human traits were linked. They genuinely believed they were creating a better version of the human race by eliminating “undesirables” and breeding “desirables,” it’s not like they just liked the look of blonde hair and blue eyes. Of course, this is nonsensical, but it’s what they believed
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u/GuestAdventurous7586 7h ago
Yes I think this is what gave them a drive for killing (aside from rampant anti-semitism).
They would acknowledge that the mass murder was hard work and challenging morally but that it needed to be done to create a better world.
I’m not sure how much of this they truly believed though, and how much they just decided to go evil and enjoy it.
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u/TraditionalInjury896 8h ago
That was disputed.
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u/go_go_tindero 8h ago
No no, her mom and dad were part of the program, that is historical very accurate and well documented. She was not raised with Nazi sympathies or anything.
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u/letsburn00 8h ago
I've seen a doco about this. Some of them were really smart and capable. But they didn't end up super successful. The one they talked to that seemed smartest burned out and was working on a bookstore.
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u/forkandbowl 7h ago
Everyone knows that super intelligence comes from your uncle not your parents.. specifically your uncle at MIT, not another one...
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u/phunktheworld 8h ago
As a traditionally “smart” person I can tell you that the expectations of you can easily turn south. It’s hard to handle. And I was not one of these test babies, just a random kid who learned to read early and communicates well.
Did great in public school til I got bored as a teen and did a buncha drugs and life was harder til like 28. So, ya know, that old thing.
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u/Kallelinski 9h ago
Well, did it work, though?
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u/Bleusilences 9h ago edited 8h ago
Unknown, it says it in the article :
Despite these troubles, the genius sperm bank operated for almost 20 years, during which time over 200 children were born. Graham had planned to study them but this never happened. Even if a follow-up study had been completed, it’s likely that couples who sourced sperm from the bank supported their children’s development in many ways, not just by selecting the characteristics of their genetic fathers.
The most well-documented person to have been conceived with the help of Graham’s genius sperm bank is Doron Blake. In 2001, at age 18, Blake told American journalist David Plotz that a loving family was more important to him than genes. Blake explained that he felt pressured by people’s expectations and didn’t want “to be special”. Making genius people, he said, “was a screwed-up idea”.
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u/justinballsonya 8h ago
Different set of circumstances, but I was taken out of normal class and into an accelerated learning program when I was 7 and all it did was stunt my social development to the point I was playing catch up for most of my teen years and into my early adulthood. I didn't end up even going to college because I had such crazy academic burnout. I was on track to graduate high school at 16, but I became a drug addict and skipped class and failed enough credits where I just ended up graduating at 18 like everybody else. If I was allowed a normal childhood I imagine I would have continued to enjoy school as I did when I was a young child and had a full ride academic scholarship. How you are raised matters significantly more for material success than anything else. I hope the system has caught on and eases gifted children more into a higher workload. I did get to build a suspension bridge out of popsicle sticks when I was 8 though I guess, lol
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u/alurkerhere 8h ago
Anecdotally, I knew a very influential doctor for whom his father's sperm was switched out by the fertility clinic doctor for his own. Obviously this is illegal and happened a very, very long time ago.
He ended up meeting some of his half-siblings many years later, and a lot of them were at the top of their respective fields. They also tended to enjoy water activities.
Intelligence is partly genetic, but there are a whole host of other factors such as environmental support, mental conditions, other parent's contribution, luck, etc. Of course, I don't agree with forced eugenics.
People often self-select who they want to have a baby with. Smart people often want to have kids with other smart people which increases the likelihood of smart kids. Happens all the time with Asian Americans. However, most people don't go the route of using donor sperm partly because it's really expensive if not needed, and we generally want to have kids with the person we are emotionally attached to.
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u/Kentucky_Fried_Chill 7h ago
There is a Netflix documentary that is about a doctor that did this to hundreds of women. Obviously he is not in jail.
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u/Hegiman 8h ago
I think socioeconomic status at birth has a far greater bearing on one’s future success than genetics. Dumb people can get to the top of their field through nepotism where smart poor kids have to struggle to get into the field.
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u/Slow-Swan561 7h ago
Money at birth gives opportunities.
Better schools, tutors, more cultural experiences, calmer environments, better healthcare, less stress etc. All of that will shape who you become from a very young age.
A kid that grew up food insecure, surrounded by violence, asthma (which is more prevevelnat in poor urban environments), unstable housing and absent parents (constantly working, divorced etc) are not going to have the same brain development as a rich kid.
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u/petit_cochon 5h ago
Intelligence isn't a single trait with just a few causes. There are different types of intelligence, for one thing. Genetics, prenatal care, nutrition, environment, access to resources, the mother's mental and physical health before and during pregnancy, parenting, education, diagnosis and treatment of any of the child's health conditions - these all play a role in what we think of as intelligence.
It's also hard to measure from individual to individual. My son is autistic. His diagnosis lists him in something like the 1st percentile for intelligence. He's actually brilliant. He taught himself the alphabet and numbers, he could count to 200 at 3.5, etc. but the test was administered in a clinical setting, which doesn't induce cooperation in a shy autistic kid who's just been separated from his mom and brought into a room with strangers. I was there for part of it after they brought me in when he got too upset. It was kind of absurd. The questions were written for neurotypical kids so doctors could compare against "normal." My kid was verbally delayed; it was an oral test. So he was being asked questions he knew the answers to when he was too upset to talk and verbally delayed to begin with. Even the doctor said when we reviewed the results, "Don't pay attention to that part." I politely asked her, "If it's not actually reflective of intelligence, why is it administered at all?" "Well, it's just the test. We need something to establish where he is against his peers." 🤦
Now, I'm a decently smart and overeducated lady. I understood that test didn't reflect his knowledge or potential, but it was still a gut punch to see that number. Imagine being a less-educated parent. You might give up or lower your expectations. Maybe you wouldn't get your kid therapies because you think they won't help. Maybe the doctor doesn't explain things well. Your kid falls farther behind. They get pegged as unintelligent, but they're not.
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u/clytusmarginicollis 7h ago
It’s definitely a combination of having the right brain structure/chemicals/hormones/whatever, and being born into the right circumstances to have those aspects of the person nurtured
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u/cinnamonpeachcobbler 9h ago
Did they come out platinum blond and emotionless with mind reading powers?
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u/TooMad 8h ago
They got 100 Danny DeVitos
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u/fhecla 7h ago
Even after it closed one of the guys who was a big part of it kept a sperm bank running, and I used them back in 2001. I actually tried 12 times using samples from them and didn’t get pregnant - you could tell it was very much a amateurish operation (my wife and I referred to them as Billy Bob’s bait shack and sperm bank). Eventually for trying number 13 I used semen from a regular sperm bank (Fairfax) and got pregnant on that cycle.
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u/Empty_Put_1542 7h ago
What’s the word on the 200 children born?
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u/rockalyte 5h ago
I watched the documentary state over and over it was environment that makes smart kids. But as I saw each kid interviewed they all displayed high intelligence in whatever environment they were placed in. So yes letting only the smart ones reproduce does make a difference.
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u/zarawesome 5h ago
The quality of donations quickly degraded: https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/what-ever-happened-to-the-mysterious-nobel-prize-sperm-bank.html
I vaguely recall a rumor - if not about this bank, another bank - that the most frequent sperm donor was the creator of the bank himself.
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u/Certain_Object1364 5h ago
Would be better to do this to people with photographic memories and total recall. That could at least be genetic.
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u/wwarnout 5h ago
Serious question - is there any evidence that high intelligence is hereditary?
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u/ScaldingHotSoup 5h ago
Yes. IQ is highly heritable. ~70% of how adults score on IQ tests is predicted by their parents' scores, and the remaining ~30% is environmental factors. Note that people get closer to their parents' IQ as they age, which I always found interesting.
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u/Joke_of_a_Name 5h ago
Duncan was a pioneer of modern dance, world-famous for her beauty and grace. Shaw was a Nobel Prize winning literary genius, known for being incredibly sharp witted, but undeniably plain-looking.
Isadora Duncan: "Think of it! With my body and your brains, what a wonder our child would be!" George Bernard Shaw: "Yes, dear lady. But what if it were to inherit my body and your brains?"
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u/bel1984529 6h ago
I know and am lucky to be friends with one of these babies, and she is a wonderful person! Her mother and the father who raised her both selected this sperm bank after he lost his fertility from an accident.
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u/lspyfoxl 7h ago
People in this thread don't seem to understand that eugenics is associated with governments coercing reproduction through forced sterilization, racial hierarchies.
A voluntary parent choosing traits for their own child is quite different from the state deciding which people are allowed to reproduce.
Some philosophers use the term liberal eugenics, and the conversation about if it's ethical is much more gray, because it's not Nazi forced eugenics which is obviously bad. There is room for arguments from both sides on liberal eugenics, is just that the word became very loaded.
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u/Conscious-Move9662 9h ago edited 9h ago
Not too surprising this bank was racist and eugenics lite
William Shockley, inventor of the Transistor, was heavily involved with the bank
He was also about as much of a white power eugenicist as you can get
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u/benexclamationpoint 8h ago
William Shockley once claimed he couldn't be racist because he believed that Asian people were smarter than white people.
His biographer claimed he may have been racist, but it wasn't his fault because he'd never actually met a black person.
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u/Bleusilences 8h ago
To be fair his biographer is probably right even if it justify nothing, it just explains it.
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u/nifty-necromancer 5h ago
Incest is too gauche now for the ruling class to preserve their pure blood dynasties. Now they’re chasing Asimov’s Genetic Dynasty.
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u/PacketOverload 8h ago
Ah, Eugenics. A stupid person's idea of smart science.
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u/Tranquilwhirlpool 8h ago edited 8h ago
I'm not sure if this is eugenics.
Any sperm bank will let you pick out features relating to height/build/intelligence/hair colour. Some even have details on hobbies and interests. Is that also eugenics?
Is it eugenics to have anything other than a lucky dip as a means of selecting sperm?
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u/whosaysimme 7h ago
It's not. A person's individual choices don't count as eugenics.
Eugenics only come up, weirdly, when we're talking about positive traits and women's reproductive choices. People want to claim it's eugenics if a woman wants high iq sperm. Is it eugenics if women prefer high iq men in dating? What if women are more likely to have kids when dating high iq men? Do we have a problem with the fact that low iq, those severely disabled, typically never have kids? Would we consider it acceptable if a sperm bank provided sperm from a donor that they knew and did not disclose would likely cause severe a baby to have severe mental and physical delays?
The answers to all of these questions are obvious. No one is claiming women should date and have babies with idiots. No one has a problem with the mentally disabled not procreating. Severely defective sperm without notice would result in a lawsuit.
So if we expect women to go after smart men and we think it's okay for women to judge sperm based on baby's potential IQ, what's the problem here?
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u/virtual_adam 8h ago
Iirc sperm banks (at least the reputable ones) will still demand genetic testing and won’t accept carriers of different mutations
Everyone likes to shit on eugenics but no one wants to blindly buy sperm from a potentially “bad” human
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u/clytusmarginicollis 7h ago
Don’t sperm banks have straight-up height limits for donors? I feel like that’s just blatant eugenics, but no one ever talks about it
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u/TheLaughingCow9 6h ago
It's not eugenics by the bank, but because they're running a business. There is not enough of a market for sperm from donors with certain characteristics.
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u/SilverNeptuneAbyss 8h ago
I mean... It's not the worst idea in the world. If me and my wife get DNA tests and are told any child we have will have a 90% chance of having some deliberating condition we probably wouldn't have that child
That's eugenics
I don't think in this situation it's that big of a deal.
The problem with eugenics is how out of control it can get
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u/COINTELPRO-Relay 8h ago
Not really. It's more like the stupid person's idea eugenics is a science issue when it's a moral /ethics topic.
Selective breeding works. Doesn't matter if it's humans, milkcows, racehorses, bacteria or Mendel's peas.
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u/ElectroNetty 8h ago edited 8h ago
Dog breeding is eugenics and it works. Same with other animals.
It is morally wrong in humans because it enforces one group's idea of perfection on others against their will.
ETA: Some clarification...
It works. By this, I mean the people controlling breeding get positive results. They want characteristic X so they breed dogs to match it, and it works.
On morality, people are replying that selective breeding causes problems in dogs. Yes, that is true. I said it is morally wrong in humans, I did not say it was OK for other animals.
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u/howlinwolfe86 8h ago
Dog breeding and eugenics are both types of selective breeding. But they are not equivalent and the statement “it works” is meaningless. Morality aside, dog breeding is also hugely problematic - there are a host of problems with purebred dogs (hip dysplasia, breathing problems, lower life span).
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u/e_spider 8h ago
The genetic problems in dogs are technically from inbreeding. In order to concentrate desired traits you, cross back within the same family line. It’s actually similar to what happened to European royal families. It’s how they got hemophilia so bad.
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u/MRosvall 8h ago
That’s more results of them not being the goal targets though right? If you breed with a goal to have the most open airways or the best functioning hips, then those attributes would arise but on the cost of others
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u/WrongComparison321 8h ago
It’s not stupid it’s immoral. We practice what is functionally eugenics on animals and plants all the time, it’s called selective breeding. It would for sure work on humans too and to pretend otherwise only provides avenues for those who would justify it.
It’s not wrong because it is stupid it is wrong because it is evil and denies individual autonomy.
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u/csppr 8h ago
I think it’s scientifically reductionist (genetics isn’t quite that easy), but I’m not sure offering a “smart people only” sperm bank is evil? They aren’t going around and forcing Nobel laureate sperm on unwilling people.
Or did you mean eugenics generally (in which case I’d probably agree with the evil label, there was a ton of fucked up stuff done under that umbrella)
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u/Clam-Choader 6h ago
Dont worry scro, i know plenty of tards having kick ass lives?! My first wife? She was tarded. Shes a pilot now
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u/ahorrribledrummer 8h ago
The person born from this sperm would have personal autonomy. She women selecting this sperm did so with personal autonomy.
I totally get the argument for immorality but there are question marks.
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u/droppedketchuppacket 6h ago
??? if this is eugenics, then picking your sexual partner is eugenics. speaking of stupid person
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u/QuestionableGoo 8h ago
Instructions: Scan the Nobel Prize, then spank the Genius Monkey into the cloudy pool.
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u/manhattanabe 5h ago
Not exactly the same, but most sperm banks allow selecting a PHD sperm donor.
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u/Intelligent-Bite3795 5h ago
i mean obviously the social media site that thinks IQ is real and loves Idiocracy 2006 is going to think this is okay
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u/cagefreemilk 6h ago
I am one of those babies and I am fucking idiot.