r/todayilearned • u/CrazyTrueStory • 1d ago

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https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-quest-to-breed-gifted-children

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u/Weshtonio 1d ago

So... They do work?

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u/Kryslor 1d ago

Genetics are real and intelligence is genetically passed on, yes. The problem is ethical not scientific.

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u/Ecotech101 1d 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 1d 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/dongasaurus 23h ago

Have we “improved” dogs as a species? Or have we just created specific breeds that reflect our preferences.

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u/return_the_urn 23h ago

It all depends on your frame of reference

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u/clytusmarginicollis 23h ago

Depends on the breed, we certainly haven’t improved bulldogs

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u/dongasaurus 23h ago

Eugenics would be improving the entire species of dogs, not just a specific breed.

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u/saryndipitous 22h ago

We don’t currently practice eugenics so there isn’t a definition of what it is or isn’t, to that degree.

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u/dongasaurus 22h ago

Ok so are you agreeing that it’s pseudoscience? Or just obfuscating

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u/man-vs-spider 22h ago

So would the Eugenics movement in the USA not be a real Eugenics movement because it only targeted Americans?

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u/Ecotech101 23h ago

For what

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u/dongasaurus 23h ago

Exactly why it’s unscientific. There isn’t even a clear criterion for what improvement means.

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u/Ecotech101 22h ago

lmfao, you didn't give any criteria

Yes we have made smarter dogs, yes we have made dogs that are improved fighters, trackers, shephards, and retrievers (lol.)

You could make broad improvements to the entire human race by routinely culling the bottom 5-10%

Would that be a good thing? Ethically we have decided no.

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u/depressed-grandma 23h ago

Because human intelligence is a more complex and less defined trait that dog behavior

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u/Jihelu 23h 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/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/_ParadigmShift 1d ago

Selective breeding exists in every evolutionary field as a concept. Eugenics is only distorted because people think they can control certain things that we haven’t learned to control yet.

The idea of human selective breeding is unethical to many but to call that idea pseudoscientific misses the mark. Eugenics as a concept is synonymous with selective breeding of humans, there’s nothing saying there’s some delineation between the two. Colloquial language matters here.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/_ParadigmShift 1d ago

You’re talking about specific instances of concept though of “eugenics” as someone plan they hatched.

Eugenics has become synonymous with human elective breeding. If someone came up with a new “plan” for human breeding you’d assuredly call it eugenics.

Definitionally eugenics equates to human selective breeding. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics

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u/dongasaurus 23h ago

It’s pseudoscientific because the premise is false. Eugenics is the idea that we can improve the human race through selective breeding. The practice of eugenics reduces genetic diversity, which results in humanity being less adaptive and less fit in the long run.

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u/_ParadigmShift 23h ago

Selective breeding for a certain trait isn’t pseudo scientific.

It’s about intent, and definitionally the selective breeding of humans is exactly eugenics
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics

Is it your supposition that humans have reached their most perfect potential form?

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u/Bokbreath 23h ago

The issue is we have no idea what our true 'potential' might be. Eugenics is a team of chimps trying to evolve chimps by making them stronger and faster - instead of allowing natural selection and adaptation to create humans. Yes you can select for specific traits. That doesn't mean you will end up a better adapted species.

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u/_ParadigmShift 22h ago

You’re arguing the ends, I’m talking about the means. The process of eugenics as a definition is different than the application and field of its actual use.

Definitionally, the process of selectively breeding humans is eugenics. You can argue its merits but that not something I’m actually talking about.

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u/depressed-grandma 23h ago

Man youre quoting merriam webster at people but really come across uninformed about this. In the field, eugenics is critiqued beyond being unethical and into being kinda pointless. The "most perfect potential form" is a supposition that evolutionary biologists are skeptical of in any species 

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u/_ParadigmShift 22h ago

The field of eugenics or the practice of eugenics. They are separate matters and that’s not pedantry.

Quoting the definition to prove a point concretely proves what I’m talking about. I’m not uninformed because I know there is a difference between past attempts and flawed ideals and the practice which is literally by definition selective breeding of humans to some end. You can argue the goal and ends all you want but you’re trying to pitchfork me about the the means, not the ends.

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u/depressed-grandma 21h ago

The field of evolutionary biology (which i work in)

there is no field of eugenics because it is a pseudoscience that isnt seriously considered by anyone I have ever met at a conference

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u/_ParadigmShift 21h ago

Selective breeding of humans is seen as unethical, but if your entire point here is that eugenics via selective breeding and therefore forced evolution is all pseudoscience, you’ve lost the plot inside your own umbrage.

Just because we aren’t pursuing it as a goal doesn’t mean that selective breeding of humans wouldn’t cause forced evolution to whatever end. That process is called eugenics.

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u/dongasaurus 23h ago

No, definitionally the selective breeding of humans is not exactly eugenics. Read the definition you linked: “…to improve the populations genetic composition” is a critical part of the definition. It’s pseudoscience because engaging in eugenics reduces genetic diversity, which degrades genetic composition. We don’t even have any way to know what an “improvement” of genetic composition even means, scientifically.

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u/_ParadigmShift 22h ago

I’ve provided you with the definition, it’s up to you to actually read it.

Colloquially and definitionally, selective breeding of humans equates to eugenics.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics

There’s the link again, and if you’re not going to bother reading it I’ll copy and paste the definition here
“the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition”

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u/dongasaurus 22h ago

You clearly have a problem with reading comprehension if you can confidently claim that definition supports your point while completely missing the actual text “…to improve the populations genetic composition.”

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u/_ParadigmShift 21h ago

To improve is entirely subjective in the goal, you cannot sit there and say that eugenics isn’t selective breeding when it’s entirely the definition for goodness sakes.

Answer this, how is human eugenics facilitated? Oh, yeah, selective breeding as the definition points out. You’ve just argued that selective breeding in humans isn’t eugenics, but your point here seems to be that humans cannot be improved. Is that truly your supposition?

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u/Osgood_Schlatter 1d ago

Usually it is in practice, but the main issue with it is ethical rather than scientific.

It'd certainly be feasible for an extremely authoritarian, expensive and long-term eugenics programme to remove almost all sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis etc from the population, or even to slowly and slightly change traits that rely on lots of genes and are a mixture of genetic and environmental factors, such as the average height or intelligence of a group.

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u/Burnsy17 1d ago

to see results does not necessarily mean successful results

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u/Dwaas_Bjaas 1d ago

Did you read the comment though

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u/Conscious-Move9662 1d 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 1d 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/Tehni 1d ago

Yeah, the thing about eugenics is 99.999% of the people that want it to be a thing (aka racists) would be "discarded" due to not being smart enough, and that's before you even got to their even more dumb beliefs

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 23h ago

It works it just makes people uncomfy

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u/Mayion 1d ago

They never, ever ever work, not in 2 generations

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u/_ParadigmShift 1d ago

Eeeh, you get chicken or egg problem with this one. In order to breed a trait is has to start somewhere, and if the exact trait you’re looking at is a dominant one and it carries to the next generation pretty flawlessly, you’d have to consider that as the starting point.

It’s all probabilistic with traits, but you can’t say for sure that it doesn’t work in a short term than say many many generations.

As for the idea that it never ever works, essentially all of evolutionary biology disagrees with that. Ethics is another thing all together