Re: Eugenics
Intelligence definitely has its drawbacks.
Not that I disagree with you: intelligence and creativity are what make us human. It's what we do, and it's the only way I can see for us to become more powerful than we are now.
So in theory I agree with the intellect-based eugenics, even using an imperfect metric (you might get some people from the 30th percentile, and lose some people from the 70th percentile, if you took the top 50% IQ scores. But it's pretty clear that there's some correlation, and at least the extreme outliers (which I think are most important) will be obvious).
Of course, the question of implementing a eugenics program, and the ethics of such a program... Well, as you said, that's a whole different subject.
Personally I wouldn't mind a (100% voluntary) eugenics program operating in isolation with a few generations of highly intelligent subjects. Personally I don't want to have kids, but even so I'd probably be willing to participate in the experiment myself. It would be exciting to help breed a new race of geniuses. The major problem I can see with that is controlling the offspring (who would obviously have the choice to leave the program).
Still, that's not likely to happen, and it's possible our control over the genome itself will reach such a point that we can "create" any changes we want through cloning/etc.
|