Eugenics. Past, present, and future. What it is, where and why it went wrong, and the ethical arguments in favor of its return.

Hitler raped people. Now everyone thinks sex is bad.

Eugenics is not Hitler. Eugenics is not genocide. Eugenics is not forced sterilization. Eugenics is not a boogeyman. Eugenics is to those things as sex is to rape.

Eugenics is an important branch of science that is vital to a well functioning society and ethical childbearing. Treating it like a boogeyman has left us on the edge of an irreversible Idiocracy. Just because some people abused something doesn’t make that thing evil or equivalent to the people who abused it. The most dangerous thing about eugenics is the ease of which people in power can distort and abuse it. Just like with sex.

There was a recent article listing the best science books of 2018. Carl Zimmer’s — She Has Her Mother’s Laugh — The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (2018) was one of them. It’s essentially a longer version of this article — https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/human-testing-the-eugenics-movement-and-irbs-724 — which explains that eugenics largely went wrong due to scientific malfeasance and missing the epigenetic/microbiome factor.

From what I’ve seen, most people seem to have a very poor understanding of what eugenics is and why many people still think of it as taboo. Most people seem to be stuck in the gene-centered, forced sterilization, view of eugenics that brought it down in the first place. I’ve seen people with biology degrees having emotional reactions to eugenics that are based on this complete lack of understanding. Thus it seems eugenics is not covered in any level of science education or this would not be the case.

What is eugenics?

from Greek εὐ- ‘good’ and γενής ‘come into being, growing’

Eugenics is quite a broad term and includes methods that are simply education and contraception — things that are widely already in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Implementation_methods

Human health, development, and function is multifactorial: Genetics, epigenetics, microbiome, diet, environmental/industrial pollution, socioeconomic influences, etc..

Eugenics goes awry when all of these factors are not taken into account together. Historically it’s been the “gene” factor that has been separated from the others and been the sole focus. On the various “chan” boards, this mentality is very much alive. However, eugenics itself is still very much valid, and humans have implemented it in animals for thousands of years.

Some quotes from wikipedia:

“Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from many sources”

“The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. By the end of World War II, many discriminatory eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany”

“In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements”

Some quotes from Carl Zimmer’s book:

“It’s a mistake to use Hitler as a label for all of eugenics.”

Hermann Muller shocked his audience by condemning the idea that poverty and crime in the United States were due to heredity. Only in a society where people’s needs were met — where children could grow up in the same environments — could eugenicists ever hope to improve humanity. In a country as rife with inequality as the United States, eugenics could do nothing of the sort. Instead, Muller said, it simply fostered “the naive doctrine that the economically dominant classes, races and individuals are genetically superior.”

But Muller also used his newfound megaphone to call for a different kind of eugenics. “Eugenics, in the better sense of the term, ‘the social direction of human evolution,’ is a most profound and important subject,” he said.

In his research on mutations, Muller had made an important discovery: From one generation to the next, a species can become burdened with a growing load of mutations. Every new offspring may spontaneously gain new mutations, most of which will be fairly harmless. But added together, they could create diseases and lower fertility. In the wild, natural selection eliminated many of these new mutations. In our own species, Muller worried that our mutation load would become dangerously large. Thanks to medicine and other advances, natural selection had grown weak in humans, unable to strip out many harmful mutations from the gene pool.

It was naive to deny the existence of humanity’s mutational load, Muller argued, but it was even more naive to try to blame it on some despised race, or on people with some form of intellectual disability.

Consent & ethics:

Within this narrow focus, a lot of the ethical concerns that have been raised about CRISPR seem less like dystopian nightmares than the everyday challenges that conventional medicine already poses. If CRISPR turns out to work reliably, we might well face a world where hereditary diseases are a bigger burden on those who can’t afford it. But the cost of medicine has been a grave problem for generations, and many recent advances have made this inequality more dire. As gene therapy has inched its way to the clinic, companies have begun floating astonishing price tags for the treatment. A single shot of gene-carrying viruses might cost a million dollars or more. Yet no one has responded to this figure by demanding that gene therapy be banned. There’s nothing wrong with gene therapy in itself, only with the ability of some people to get it while many others can’t. That’s a problem of politics, of economics, of regulations. If we are worried some people can’t get CRISPR, then the solution is obvious: CRISPR for everyone.

The question of consent isn’t new to germ line engineering either. We don’t require that children give their consent in order to get vaccines or antibiotics. That’s what parents are for. If conventional medicine fails to help sick children, their parents may give their consent to experimental treatments, knowing full well their children may not be cured and may even suffer as a result. Early in the history of gene therapy research, parents started enrolling their children in studies. It was a profound decision for the parents to make, weighing the grave diseases their children suffered against the possibility that some side effect would emerge. It was especially serious for gene therapy studies, since the children would be carrying genes in their cells possibly for the rest of their lives. Yet no one has responded to these difficult ethical choices by calling for all gene therapy to be banned.

As for the ethics of enhancements, we already live in a world in which parents try to enhance their own children’s prospects. And many of those enhancements are already spread out unfairly.

A few cases have been brought by children against their parents for allowing them to be born with congenital diseases. According to these “wrongful birth” lawsuits, the parents were negligent for ignoring tests on the fetus before birth and going ahead with it anyway. Some ethicists now wonder if children in the future may sue their parents for not using mitochondrial replacement therapy to cure Leigh syndrome or some other devastating mitochondrial disease. If parents have the genome of an embryo sequenced and choose not to edit out a variant that puts people at a high risk of dementia, their children might hold them accountable.

Chronic disease has been drastically increasing globally: https://archive.ph/6o755

It’s extremely alarming to me in the US to see the vast majority of the population in extremely poor health. It goes way beyond 1 generation of simply being overweight because they’ve been eating too much. So many people are structurally deformed, poorly developed, and poorly functioning due to multiple generations of horrible diets, antibiotic abuse killing off their host-native microbiomes and damaging their immune systems, lack of breastfeeding, extremely unhealthy people continuing to use their bodies to create other people (examples: 1, 2, 3), etc..

“Survival of the fittest” is brutal and uncivilized, but nature and natural selection also perform the vital function of keeping populations healthy. What we’ve done is myopically & indiscriminately overrule it without replacing it with intelligent and ethical alternatives.

This article lays out some ethical arguments in favor of eugenics, as well as suggested approaches.

“In what scenarios should eugenics be practiced” is an excellent question that needs to be studied. And one of the reasons we need a return of academic research on eugenics. Likely there will be much disagreement, so the best case scenario is to have statistics for medical professionals and patients so they can make informed decisions. Much like this example from Iceland:

“What kind of society do you want to live in?”: Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing (2017): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/

“When baby John Bollinger was born with various deformities in 1915, surgeon Harry Haiselden refused to operate to save the boy’s life. Instead, he told the boy’s parents that their “defective” child should be allowed to die”

“Linus Pauling was a scientist and peace advocate who was so widely admired that he’s the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. In all his pursuits, he appeared to have an overriding philosophy to minimize human suffering. He believed that abortion caused less suffering than a hereditary disease. To reduce human suffering, he believed it was necessary to legally intervene to wipe out the factors that caused genetic diseases. The next step would be to restrict marriage and reproduction for carriers of the disease.”

“Epidemiologists have tried to quantify this sort of loss with something they call the disability-adjusted life year. Simply put, this unit measures the estimated value of the years of healthy life lost to a disease.”

Moral case against procreation. Having children is not life-affirming, it’s immoral. https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral

India man to sue parents for giving birth to him https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

There are many things that have to be weighed when deciding the fate of an infant/fetus.

• “Saving a life” vs condemning a person to a life time of chronic disease or general poor health/function/quality of life.
• The fact that an infant/fetus is not a developed human being with adult-like intelligence, cognition, complex emotions, and will to live. Generally it is intelligence and cognition that are what humans value and use to differentiate between “ok to kill and eat fish but not ok to kill and eat a dolphin”.
• Creating a society where the vast majority of people are in poor health, poorly developed, and poorly functioning due to “being saved” by modern medicine, and due to other health impact factors previously listed. Those people then go on to use their damaged bodies to create even more unhealthy people, and you get where we are now with the vast majority of US citizens in poor health and poorly functioning.

Weston A Price’s book “Nutrition and physical degeneration” excellently covers the diet portion of the puzzle. In my opinion this book should be mandatory reading as part of a high school or primary school nationwide health class curriculum. I would urge people to contact their legislators about this. Here is a template/example.

Please contact your political representatives and urge them to take action on the prevention front in order to address the major health crisis we’re experiencing. But additionally, for them to take action they will need public support, and public support requires that people understand the nature of the problem and the required remedies.