Poll: Genes and children Or why some should not have kids

[orangeban]

Hey guys, let's lay off on this "DON'T BREED IF YOU'RE UGLY WHAT A NAZI" circlejerk. Nobody gives a damn about that. Let's talk about something else, like Huntington's. A person with Huntington's has a 50% chance to give it to each offspring. The two choices you can offer this person are "Do you want to exercise your God-given right to have a child, knowing that a celestial coin toss will determine whether his life is going to be ruined before it starts" and "How about you fucking adopt?". I don't mean disrespect to people who live with their hereditary disorders; but if you have a bad hand, don't make a bet.

The problem with trying to breed out mental/physical disabilities is it strikes me as the lazy option. Instead of trying to fix the problems and making life easy for people who are sufferers, we're just sweeping it under the carpet.

 

[FreakSheet]

She likely thinks she is perfect, and only those like her may reproduce.

Who in history did that again... OH RIGHT THE NAZI'S!

 

[intheweeds]

Wow this woman is a horrible person, is she a eugenicist by any chance? She honestly thinks people who have hereditary baldness shouldn't be allowed to breed? What the fuck man.

I was glad it was some stupid woman and not the OP. I came into this thread thinking "Okay, lets hear this 16 year old's 'revolutionary' idea which will turn out to be a worn out argument for eugenics that he/she had never heard before". I figured the post would start with something like "Okay, hear me out...". Thanks for not being an idiot OP!

 

[The Stonker]

So only people whit great hair and skin whitout any inherited desices as astma and so on are going to make the world a better place???
Getting rid of superficial defectes and maby the next Einstein just so the world can be filled whit supermodels isnt realy a great way to form the world.
looks isnt everything some of us dont give a crap

Wasn't there loads of crap that was wrong with Einstein?
Just asking.

But people should be allowed to fuck if they want, who cares really?
Because you gain more from a one "giant" genepool then one very exclusive one.
Also, who says that mutation can't pop up in the children that were "allowed" to be born?

 

[Vivi22]

Genes aren't always active in your children and even someone with bad genetic features can have good features. If someone has congenital deafness but a heightened immune system which wins?

In addition a genetic mutation isn't necessarily normal but may well be beneficial in a roundabout way, or if not it may 'stack' with other mutations to produce a beneficial feature. By policing our own genetic purity instead of allowing natural selection to occur we risk stagnation.

In addition this is a very real slippery slope, what constitutes inferior genetics is largely subjective. Imagine if you will the possible outcomes of a eugenics programme combined with our research that suggests that IQ is partially influenced by race. Oh yeah, that's a thing, it's just that the difference is so small and all within the normal range that it doesn't really matter and that we don't like to talk about it. But imagine we lived in a society where we bred purely for optimal offspring.

This pretty much. Here's the thing, I think at this point we should have learned that we don't do anything better than nature. Let alone selecting for desirable and undesirable traits. As soon as you start selectively breeding people, you're running the risk of losing genetic diversity, which may come back to do such fun things as wipe out the entire human race some day. And why? Because you thought baldness was undesirable and accidentally weeded out a genetic lineage that might be resistant to, and one day become immune to AIDS or some other nasty disease.

Sure that might not actually happen, but it's certainly a possibility when you start pretending that you can do a better job at guiding evolution than nature has done for billions of years. Personally, if slightly less attractive humans were the trade off for not being wiped from the face of the Earth entirely, I'll happily accept that.

 

[Matthew Kjonaas]

NO
(50+ paragon)
Just because you do not have perfect DNA does not mean you are not worth the time of day and if they were only people with perfect DNA how long until the inbreeding which would defeat the propose of it in the first place?

 

[Eleima]

This is a very dangerous line of thinking, in my mind. For one thing, we don't have any control on how the genes are rearranged when the sperm and the ovum meet, and very good genes can very well be rearranged into a complete mess. Genes aren't exactly an exact science, the environment the child is brought in also plays a role.

Also... Gattaca, anyone??

 

[maddness666]

You know there was a group in the thirties and early fourties who had similar ideas. I can't quite recall how that ended though. I think some communists spoiled their world changing work.

On a more serious note. Surely it should be the choice of the parent. If you have some genetic flaw, and you deem your bad skin or baldness to be such an issue that it outweighs all the joys of life, don't have kids. If you have some genuinely terrible genetic condition and feel that life is still worth living, have kids.

On the otherhand, you'd be disgusted with any parent who did something which had any chance of causing their child to develop a disease like Huntington's after they were born.

On a more evolutionary basis, if you want to eliminate a characteristic from the human gene pool, vote with your wallet. And by wallet, I mean reproductive organs.

 

[RuralGamer]

If people with bad genes shouldn't breed, then nobody should have children; everyone has flaws in their genetic code to some degree, so where do you draw the line?
If we stopped 'ugly' people from breeding, then the definition of ugliness would change.

 

[Hoplon]

I got into an interesting debate with a woman today over children. She believes that if you don?t have a good gene code Parsons, Baldness, Bad skin, Ect. You should not have children because with the vanity of most third world countries it will do more harm to them in the long run. Using that fact people spend millions on Rogan or cosmetic surgery every year to try and feel better about them self. Then if you have a high chance to give them medical problems. You?re being selfish to have children who you can pass it down to. She truly believes that only those with a good Genetic makeup should be allowed to breed and if other want children they should be required to adopt from those who can have children. Plus this could also cut down on bad parent since you'd have to be screened to have children.

At first I thought little of it but as I?ve dwelled on it. Well I?m losing my hair at 26 and it does have an effect on me. It took me a long time to come to grips with it. Even now I hate thinking about it. It started me wondering can anyone think of a reason why people with bad gene should have children?

The forum ate the poll it seems.

Makes me think she doesn't know what the word "recombinant" means. As long as the gene pool isn't limited by blood relationship any couple can produce almost any child with in certain perimeters.

Though anyone that expresses such an opinion might be a candidate for sterilisation.

 

[Choppaduel]

That said we live in times where eugenics are more often than not considered a valid point of view. In decades to come perhaps humanity will be able to chose to the smallest detail how their progeny will be "constructed".

On a related note, have you seen [a href=http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gattaca/]Gattaca?[/a]

[hr]

on topic. this is impossible to execute, because there is no and can be no consensus on what exactly are "good genes."

 

[Killertje]

If you think you shouldn't have children because you have a bad gene you are a superficial idiot (which is actually a pretty good reason not to have children IMO). I'm also balding but I have plenty of good genes compared to the average human being. Also if having a little less hair than others makes you think your potential children don't deserve to live, why haven't you committed suicide yet? Apparently you have already decided that life without hair isn't worth living, so why are you living it anyway?

BTW I'm not a pro life weirdo. I just think people can handle a lot more crap than a few inconvenient genes. Hell, I'd still thank my parents for making me even if I had huntingtons or something like that. If the disease gets so bad I don't want to live anymore I'm sure I can find a way to end my life, and I'd still have lived a nice life for however long it lasted.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

swap "bad genes" for "chavs" and i'm onboard

 

[Pandabearparade]

We shouldn't manipulate who can and cannot breed at all, period. We aren't the ones who determine what a 'good' genetic makeup is, evolution does that. Let nature make those decisions.

Also, artificially narrowing genetic diversity is a very, very, -VERY- bad idea.

 

[The Lugz]

I suggest you all go watch this:

http://www.allstepisodes.com/googlevideodatabase.php?n=2513

( seriously, it's even used in collage lectures... for realsies. )

the more you engineer society the more dependant we become on our environment,
and 'the machine' of society eventually we would get to the point demonstrated in the video and become more crippled than cripples because we cannot function as individuals, no new ideas come about because everyone is a programmed robot designed to fill a role and violating that role will make you 'defective' and everyone will shun you, or just kill you in your sleep

social engineering, is possibly the most complicated thing on the planet because someone is always going to end up feeling oppressed and causing problems

on the whole, it's not really worth it right now but overcrowding is going to become a massive issue in the coming years and some kind of population capping system will have to be in effect or we will simply 'bacteria bottle' the planet and all die a horrible polluted death
so it makes sense in the next 200 years or so, to engineer some population controls but right now? that would just cause MASSIVE uproar on-top of the financial balls the world is in
personally i think it's a bad idea for the moment but it will be necessary some time down the line so some prevision would be a good idea

 

[Korolev]

If you start going down this path, you'll end up at a nasty place. Who gets to define which genes are bad and which are good? If we find a gene which will pre-disposition people to be a little more violent, do we add that to the list of "bad" genes?

Don't get me wrong, there are bad genes out there - ones which increase the likelihood of being afflicted with breast cancer, for example. There are genes which are just plain broken - they don't produce the protein they should and the person with that gene suffers from it. Huntington's disease is genetic, and that's a nasty, nasty disease.

But if you start saying "You can reproduce and you can't", that's when all the trouble starts. Who makes the decision? How do they enforce it? In my opinion, what little good you'll get from banning people from having children will be outweighed by the abuse and sheer misery that will come along with this sort of system.

Now, I'm all in favour of curing genetic diseases. But instead of going down the negative path of suppression, why don't we instead embrace the positive path of gene therapy or corrective medicine? Instead of banning people from having kids, why not find ways to fix or replace the genes? You could give people the voluntary option of eliminating the bad genes while not eroding anyone's rights.

I can sympathize with what the Eugenics crowd wanted. But there's a BETTER way of going about it than banning people from having kids. Let's cure the person (if they want to be cured, they have a right to refuse medication), instead of taking away their rights to have kids. Let's fix, instead of break. Let's find a solution that will make everyone happy. With science.

 

[Reman Khaar]

I personally know plenty of people that should never, ever, ever be allowed to breed, but that's due to extreme stupidity on their part, not any physical conditions. Just because a person has one or two physical features that may not be optimal doesn't mean that they shouldn't be able to reproduce. Stupid people, though... Let's just say that there are quite a few people I know who I think should be euthanized for the good of the world's population.

 

[LuckyClover95]

At first I thought little of it but as I?ve dwelled on it. Well I?m losing my hair at 26 and it does have an effect on me. It took me a long time to come to grips with it. Even now I hate thinking about it. It started me wondering can anyone think of a reason why people with bad gene should have children?

However, if your parents hadn't been allowed to have children because of a baldness gene, you wouldn't be here to complain about it. So it's a good thing they had children