Eugenics

[idobox]

First of all, the Godwin point should be reached quite quickly.

Despite it's horrible reputation, eugenics comes from a noble idea, improving the human race. The bad stuff usually comes because people don't agree on what is better, and how to get it, and now, the idea has a terrible stigma. But I'm thinking that improvements of modern medecine might cause long term problems for the species, that eugenics could solve.

The biggest example is infertility.
Evolutionary speaking, infertility is pretty much the worst trait you can get, and genes causing or promoting it are strongly selected against, leading to low numbers of infertile individuals. With the progress of medecine, people who couldn't have kids, now can, and can transmit genes causing infertility. The result, in a few generations, should be a significant increase of people with genetic predisposition to infertility, and consequently, a larger part of the population suffering from it. As new mutations emerge, they wouldn't be eradicated, and would accumulate in the gene pool.
This would mean that at some point, our species would largely be dependent on technology, and on the people who control it, to simply reproduce. And this doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Of course, I understand that people that could have a kid with current technology would consider it a terrible deprivation of freedom to be refused it, and probably be insulted (no one likes the idea of being banned of transmitting his/her genes)

Similarly, we have the ability to detect healthy carriers of genetic diseases, and when a kid is born with it, the family is often tested. But the common practice is to check both putative parents to make at least one of them isn't a carrier, allowing kids that are healthy carriers to be born. We have the means to extinguish silent genes that cause terrible diseases, by either forbidding healthy carriers to have children, or by selecting embryos that don't have the allele, but both these solutions are quite aggressive, and ethically questionable.

So, am I the only one to think about this kind of things? Should eugenics (maybe with a different name) be discussed in the context of bioethics laws? Or is the taboo too strong?
I have the feeling my society is receptive to the idea of killing criminals (although death sentence have been abolished in my country), but horrified at the idea of neutering people to avoid kids being born with terrible diseases.

[ahammel]

First of all: infertile people cannot have children by definition. Assuming you meant people who are less fertile than wild-type: it's still way the hell more difficult for such individuals to have kids (again by definition), so there's still a significant selective penalty attached. And even if there's none, that doesn't mean that reduced-fertility alleles will automatically accumulate to the level where our species is "largely dependent on technology". The probability that a new allele goes to fixation in a population is still very small even in the absence of selection either way¹.

Same objection applies to genetic disorders: just because a particular disorder sucks less due to medical technology, it doesn't mean that it's now selectively neutral, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's going to go to fixation (or anywhere near it) all of the sudden.

Finally: you have to deal with the original objection²: people aren't going to volunteer to not breed, and forcing them to not breed is a really bad idea.

1. It's 1/2N, where N is the effective population size.
2. First raised by Darwin in a letter to Francis Galton, I think.

[idobox]

I thought infertile meant incapable to have children without medical help, as opposed to sterile. So I meant the first.

And natural selection isn't totally absent of the human species. A gene that reduces fertility, but has other positive effects is possible, and would propagate if technology solves the fertility issues. It would still take many generations before any significant effects appears even a gene propagates quickly.

About the other diseases, I wasn't implying they will become more frequent, but that we could extinguish them much faster.

Your last point is the most relevant. Whether eugenics is useful or not, it is very difficult to implement, more so if you try to be humane.

[sam_i_am]

What would probably be the least intrusive way to keep the gene pool strong is to make birth control ubiquitous and easily obtainable(anonymously at that) to the point where you practically have to make the conscious decision to have a child in order to have one.

[ahammel]

A gene ['allele', actually] that reduces fertility, but has other positive effects is possible, and would propagate if technology solves the fertility issues.

It's possible, but do any actually exist? And if not, who cares?

[PeteP]

If something has positive effects which outweighs the need to use technology against it's negative effects, then I would say that it's a positive trait. Technology is a part of our world which won't suddenly go away. It only matters in a catastrophe so horrible that we lose our technology and there will probably be enough left without the trait. If there aren't, if the trait is so positive that it spreads to everyone, I would be willing to take the chance of being screwed without technology. Well you also mentioned people controlling the technology but what will they do, implement eugenics?
Anyway that is one reason, I don't actually trust people to be competent enough to produce a significant positive effect.
But honestly personal freedom is the only important argument. Clumsy attempts to change genetics with stopping selected people from breeding don't have a big enough benefit to justify such drastic measure (and a decent chance of introducing unintended selection pressures). You need very strong reasons to limit people so drastically and I don't see them.
Though I do expect that parents will sooner or later start making use of genetic screening to at least prevent severe genetic diseases. (And I don't have a problem with that.)

[idobox]

What would probably be the least intrusive way to keep the gene pool strong is to make birth control ubiquitous and easily obtainable(anonymously at that) to the point where you practically have to make the conscious decision to have a child in order to have one.

You need a form of birth control that is semi permanent, meaning that you have to do something for it to stop being effective. It exists, but it's not popular.

Technology is a part of our world which won't suddenly go away. It only matters in a catastrophe so horrible that we lose our technology and there will probably be enough left without the trait. If there aren't, if the trait is so positive that it spreads to everyone, I would be willing to take the chance of being screwed without technology. Well you also mentioned people controlling the technology but what will they do, implement eugenics?

If fertility drops, which appears not to be evident, to the point where technology is necessary to reproduce for most humans, we would put ourselves in a very vulnerable position. Those who control the technology would have immense power, they could charge a lot, eradicate certain traits or promote others, without anyone being able to resist them.

Though I do expect that parents will sooner or later start making use of genetic screening to at least prevent severe genetic diseases. (And I don't have a problem with that.)

Screening for every single known genetic disease is long and expensive, and requires a FIV and discarding some embryos. It is not trivial at all.
On the other hand, testing a handful of relatives every time a sick child is born, and avoiding they transmit it could make them much more rare in a few generations only.

Another form of eugenics that is bound to be developed is transgenics. On one hand, it will allow parents to have children without the risk of transmitting diseases, on the other hand it will allow much faster and stronger tampering with the gene pool.

Anyway, my goal is not to convince anyone that eugenics should be implemented, but rather to measure its advantages and disadvantages.

[EMTP]

Most of my work is with screwed up people (SUP).

There are a small number of elements that go into creating a screwed up person.

One is what physicians like to call "bad protoplasm" -- a poor genetic hand.

Another is general life stress; ill health, unemployment, etc.

Another is social stress. The family is the most important element of this. SUPs tend to come from screwed up families. Screwed up families come from screwed up parents, who again come from bad protoplasm and environmental stressors.

Another is the consequences of the first two things. SUPs tend to smoke, drink more than is good for them, eat more than is good for them, get into fights with people, not go to the doctor.

It would be better if we could have fewer SUPs. I am not overly concerned about their cost to society. But personally they suffer a whole lot (so do their neighbors, so do their kids). They have depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, substance abuse, chronic pain.

There are a lot of issues with modifying the genetic side of SUPs. But it's far easier to modify the environmental side, and that is what most rich countries chose to do to a far greater extent than America does.

If people have good healthcare, right from the beginning; if they have good food, safe housing, vacinnations and well baby visits; smoking detectors and nicotine patches for Mom and Dad; if they have good schools, good playgrounds, chess clubs and after-school sports; if they have jobs and doctors and day care for their own kids, then you end up with fewer SUPs.

Until we optimize the environmental side, I don't want to hear about messing with the genetic code, which we have a piss-poor understanding of anyway. We can make people smarter, healthier, happier and more protective. It's called the welfare state. It really works. When everyone or almost everyone has a safe and healthy environment, we will be better able to gauge the purely genetic component of human misery, and address it accordingly.

[jseah]

So, am I the only one to think about this kind of things? Should eugenics (maybe with a different name) be discussed in the context of bioethics laws? Or is the taboo too strong?
I have the feeling my society is receptive to the idea of killing criminals (although death sentence have been abolished in my country), but horrified at the idea of neutering people to avoid kids being born with terrible diseases.

Technology ought to obsolete the practice soon. We can do genetic screening now and can thus do better than chance in deciding what traits we want to pass on.

It might not be cheap now, but it can be given enough development. Alot more people would support that one.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

The result, in a few generations, should be a significant increase of people with genetic predisposition to infertility, and consequently, a larger part of the population suffering from it. As new mutations emerge, they wouldn't be eradicated, and would accumulate in the gene pool.

Why would you expect the rate of infertility to have anything to do with whether mutations are eradicated?

[idobox]

Technology ought to obsolete the practice soon. We can do genetic screening now and can thus do better than chance in deciding what traits we want to pass on.

You're right, given the time scales involved, technology will have advanced greatly when the first effects of this kind of eugenics appear.

Why would you expect the rate of infertility to have anything to do with whether mutations are eradicated?

If existing alleles causing infertility are not selected against, their frequency should remain stable. But every mutation that causes infertility will also be stable, making the total frequency of such alleles grow.

[yurell]

I'm not entirely convinced that infertility is 'the worst' trait that can be gotten. For example, an infertile individual may be able to dedicate their time to help protect the young instead of wasting their energy in mating, which could help improve the survival rate of the group as a whole (which is one of the theories put forward for the propagation of homosexuality). For the survival of the genes that you bear, yes it's bad, but for the survival of the gene pool, not necessarily so.

[bigglesworth]

I pretty much agree with EMTP, with the caveat that I think that there are some relatively simple low hanging fruit for horrific genetic diseases that could be tackled relatively simply.

I'm personally comfortable with (for example) the UK's abortion rate after in-utero tests for some of the major genetic illnesses. Choice of the mother, no coercion required, and often having another child without the illness is possible.

[sam_i_am]

What would probably be the least intrusive way to keep the gene pool strong is to make birth control ubiquitous and easily obtainable(anonymously at that) to the point where you practically have to make the conscious decision to have a child in order to have one.

You need a form of birth control that is semi permanent, meaning that you have to do something for it to stop being effective. It exists, but it's not popular.

No you don't So long as you have something that's easy to acquire, fast acting, and doesn't interfere with the sex, you can make birth control extremely prevalently used. Imagine if you could buy a container of 100 birth control pills that you could take immediately before intercourse and be confident that you wouldn't get pregnant.

[ahammel]

If existing alleles causing infertility are not selected against, their frequency should remain stable.

This is absolutely false. The frequency of a neutral allele is guaranteed not to remain stable until it is fixed (i.e., until everybody in the population has it) or lost (much more likely in the case of a rare allele). You need balancing selection for the frequency of an allele to remain stable between 0 and 1.

[idobox]

No you don't So long as you have something that's easy to acquire, fast acting, and doesn't interfere with the sex, you can make birth control extremely prevalently used. Imagine if you could buy a container of 100 birth control pills that you could take immediately before intercourse and be confident that you wouldn't get pregnant.

We have had that since the 50's, it's called the pill, and it is far from being perfect. People forget, are drunk, cheat to have kids without the other's consent, etc... Sure, it dramatically reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies, but I think for birth control to be effective, especially in the context of eugenics, you need an active action to remove it. And if it needs a medical practitioner, like with the hormone implant or vasectomy, it becomes much harder to do it without control.

This is absolutely false. The frequency of a neutral allele is guaranteed not to remain stable until it is fixed (i.e., until everybody in the population has it) or lost (much more likely in the case of a rare allele). You need balancing selection for the frequency of an allele to remain stable between 0 and 1.

I don't understand why. If an allele has absolutely no selection pressure, why would its frequency vary in the gene pool? Of course, real alleles never have exactly 0 selection pressure, but if it is small enough, it could remain stable over many generations.

[AvatarIII]

This is absolutely false. The frequency of a neutral allele is guaranteed not to remain stable until it is fixed (i.e., until everybody in the population has it) or lost (much more likely in the case of a rare allele). You need balancing selection for the frequency of an allele to remain stable between 0 and 1.

I don't understand why. If an allele has absolutely no selection pressure, why would its frequency vary in the gene pool? Of course, real alleles never have exactly 0 selection pressure, but if it is small enough, it could remain stable over many generations.

I assume, randomness.

[sam_i_am]

No you don't So long as you have something that's easy to acquire, fast acting, and doesn't interfere with the sex, you can make birth control extremely prevalently used. Imagine if you could buy a container of 100 birth control pills that you could take immediately before intercourse and be confident that you wouldn't get pregnant.

We have had that since the 50's, it's called the pill, and it is far from being perfect. People forget, are drunk, cheat to have kids without the other's consent, etc... Sure, it dramatically reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies, but I think for birth control to be effective, especially in the context of eugenics, you need an active action to remove it. And if it needs a medical practitioner, like with the hormone implant or vasectomy, it becomes much harder to do it without control.

Correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, but Can you just buy the current birth control pill like you would aspirin? or do you have to go through the pharmacy?
Does the current birth control pill require a consistent regiment of some sort? or can you just take it when you feel like having intercourse?
Is the current birth control pill cheap? or is it expensive enough to warrant controversies over whether certain insurance plans will cover it?

Something tells me that it's not quite as easy to use as you're making it out to be. Sure, the technology might not quite be there yet, but that's something that you have to work towards

[ahammel]

This is absolutely false. The frequency of a neutral allele is guaranteed not to remain stable until it is fixed (i.e., until everybody in the population has it) or lost (much more likely in the case of a rare allele). You need balancing selection for the frequency of an allele to remain stable between 0 and 1.

I don't understand why. If an allele has absolutely no selection pressure, why would its frequency vary in the gene pool? Of course, real alleles never have exactly 0 selection pressure, but if it is small enough, it could remain stable over many generations.

If there's zero selection pressure on an allele (which can happen, by the way), members of the population will mate randomly with respect to who has the allele, which means that genetic drift will make the allele frequency take a random walk until it runs into 0 or 1. This takes longer if the population is larger, but the random walk still happens in large populations. Selection can drive an allele towards fixation or loss faster than the neutral expectation, or keep it at some intermediate frequency if there's heterozygote advantage or something like that.

As for the birth control thing: better birth control is a good idea and all, but what does that have to do with genetic disorders and infertility?

[idobox]

I don't know about other countries, but in France, but the older ones are payed by the national health insurance, and without it, it is usually around 10€ a month. And teenagers can get it free and without papers from the school nurse to avoid teenage pregnancies (this might not be true anymore, as the more conservative people didn't like it).
Women need to take every day, as the mechanism is to screw with the hormonal regulation system, and forgetting to take it even one day can result in ovulation (pretty rare though).

There is also a pill you can take after intercourse. I don't know the price, but the dose of hormones is pretty high, and the effects are quite disagreeable, so it is used as an emergency solution.

The implant works like the pill, diffusing hormones continuously for a long time. You need a doctor, or maybe a nurse, to implant it, and remove old ones.

There is a new solution from India, where they inject a polymer in the same tubes, that blocks the sperms, stays for 10years, and can be removed with an injection of salt water. They are still doing tests before authorizing it.

If there's zero selection pressure on an allele (which can happen, by the way), members of the population will mate randomly with respect to who has the allele, which means that genetic drift will make the allele frequency take a random walk until it runs into 0 or 1. This takes longer if the population is larger, but the random walk still happens in large populations. Selection can drive an allele towards fixation or loss faster than the neutral expectation, or keep it at some intermediate frequency if there's heterozygote advantage or something like that.

As for the birth control thing: better birth control is a good idea and all, but what does that have to do with genetic disorders and infertility?

if an allele is present in .1% of the human population, that's still more than 7million people. The probability of that frequency changing significantly by random walk only is staggeringly low.

My point about contraception is that if you need to go see a doctor to remove the contraception, it would be easy to perform a mandatory genetic screening of would be parents or some other form of eugenics.
You can't have a eugenics program with people having kids without some kind of supervision, and this form appears to be less invasive and libertycide than others.

[sam_i_am]

This is absolutely false. The frequency of a neutral allele is guaranteed not to remain stable until it is fixed (i.e., until everybody in the population has it) or lost (much more likely in the case of a rare allele). You need balancing selection for the frequency of an allele to remain stable between 0 and 1.

I don't understand why. If an allele has absolutely no selection pressure, why would its frequency vary in the gene pool? Of course, real alleles never have exactly 0 selection pressure, but if it is small enough, it could remain stable over many generations.

If there's zero selection pressure on an allele (which can happen, by the way), members of the population will mate randomly with respect to who has the allele, which means that genetic drift will make the allele frequency take a random walk until it runs into 0 or 1. This takes longer if the population is larger, but the random walk still happens in large populations. Selection can drive an allele towards fixation or loss faster than the neutral expectation, or keep it at some intermediate frequency if there's heterozygote advantage or something like that.

As for the birth control thing: better birth control is a good idea and all, but what does that have to do with genetic disorders and infertility?

My understanding of this thread was about how in a modern society, it is easier for undesirable traits to propagate and remain in the overall gene pool.

My reasoning was that people who are successful are more likely to make a conscious decision to have a child, and therefore accident babies are more likely to be the product of unsuccessful people than non-accident babies are.

[ahammel]

if an allele is present in .1% of the human population, that's still more than 7million people. The probability of that frequency changing significantly by random walk only is staggeringly low.

No, if it's neutral than the allele frequency will change via a random walk because that's what 'neutral' means. The probability that the allele in question will go to fixation is 0.1%¹ (same as its frequency, Kimura proved that in the fifties), so it will probably be lost eventually, although this will take a long time because of the large human population.

So, if there's a hypothetical allele at p=0.001 floating around which cause infertility in the absence of modern medicine, but is neutral in its presence, nothing particularly bad will happen if we introduce that technology and then take it away many generations later. In the absence of medical technology, that allele will still almost certainly be lost, it will just happen more slowly. There is therefore absolutely no need for a eugenics program to remove it.

1. Here I'm assuming that you meant that 99.9% of the population does not carry the allele at all. That makes a difference.