Pre-Implantation artificial selection is already a reality.
Notice that it mentions that there is no genetic manipulation.
San Diego Union Tribune 10/09/00
That is what I started describing about 1975.
Artificial selection must refer to a number of things. There is gene therapy, pre-implantation selection, enhanced traites, created genes and other things. All have their own moral consequences. This essay mostly refers to pre-implantation selection (preimplantation selection). This is when eggs are fertilized, genetically analyzed and then implanted in the womb. It is commonly referred to as Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).
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This is a list to examine what humans should most focus on when practicing artificial selection. It is obviously an incomplete list and is not meant to be in order of importance. Since it is about selecting for health, beauty and brains, the list will start with the physical attributes of health and beauty. This list is also based on incomplete knowledge. Also, while it lists the traits that are considered here to be the most important for humans to artificially select for, there is no consideration about which traits may be harder or easier to artificially select for. That and so many other things are just not known. Still, this is a start and is basically correct. More importantly, it is meant to illustrate some of the issues that will be involved in artificial selection.
Health:
The first things that humans are going to have to artificially select for have to do with the immune system. It is a fundamental assumption of this book that due to medical advancements, increased population density and other factors, humans are going to have more problems with disease than we have in the past. We are going to require a better immune system.
Some groups and individuals are going to naturally have superior immune systems. Some
hybrids of these individuals and groups are going to have very superior immune systems.
If the genetics responsible for this can be identified, they could be husbanded. Some variations of traits will be identified as more functional, but harder to preserve in the genetics. Some forms of the traits will be more or less functional, but will become superior when in concert with other genes provided by hybridization.
This illustrates an extremely interesting and important issue. Artificial selection is frequently going to involve trade-offs. It well may be that increasing the efficiency of the human immune system could cause an increase in immune system related diseases such as arthritis, allergies and others. It can be pretty well predicted that some improvements can be made to the immune system without causing potential problems. It can also be pretty well predicted that other improvements or potential improvements may be problematic because they have drawbacks. At the same time, these may be required. It could end up that for humans to develop an adequate immune system to survive the diseases in high-density populations, the average humans life span might initially decrease. That is called a moral decision.
The second thing that humans might want to artificially select for has to do with the structure of the women's pelvis and the birth canal. It is also related to the phenomenally high mortality rate associated with birth in a natural human environment. Often times in the past, one in four women died during childbirth. This has to do with the large head size of a human child at birth. The human brain has grown in size greatly in recent evolution. The size of the woman's birth canal has lagged behind that and is a fundamental limitation on human development. It is not correspondingly developed to the development of larger brain size in humans.
This illustrates a few points. The first is issue of trade-offs again. A larger pelvis means less efficient walking and running for the women, but it could allow for safer easier childbirth. That may be an acceptable trade-off if necessary. The second point is more interesting and important. It illustrates that it may not be so obvious what is important to select for. One might think that it would be more important to select for intelligence or physical stamina, but many things will be important to artificially select for are going to be subtle limitations that come from our recent rapid developments. Humans have changed a great deal in recent past. We must try to adapt ourselves to those changes that have already occurred. This is one of them. A third point that this illustrates very interestingly is the process of actual artificial selection in this case. It was stated earlier that a larger pelvis might be a solution to this problem. There might be a drawback to this, but it might be an acceptable trade-off. Another possibility though has to do with a more subtle solution. Rather than to simply select for a larger pelvis, examination of women's physiology would almost certainly show that in some tribes the women didn't necessarily have larger pelvis's. Instead, the mechanical and structural design of their pelvis allows for easier childbirth. In mechanical terms, that would be a more efficient design and than just increasing the size of the pelvis. Efficient solutions are very often superior to brute force solutions.
In all human traits, there will be different forms related to individual and tribal variation. All these different forms will have different advantages and disadvantages. Some forms of traits will be more stable, some will have limitations, some will not hybridize as well, some will be easier to select for. It will make for a complicated problem that extends well beyond the technical difficulties of artificial selection. Again, these issues will have to be solved in a moral context and hopefully with a lot more knowledge than we presently have.
While this should be obvious, it may not be. Consider height. Many people would consider greater height to be superior and might want to artificially select for greater stature in their children. This asks the question of how much is too much. There are mechanical and other disadvantages to height, especially extreme height. Medical technology should be able to describe what ideal heights for different human skeleton. Most parents would not choose to have their children much taller than that. There is no compelling reason for humans to blindly select for height, but there are reasons that humans make stupid decisions such as fashion. As a general rule you could figure that artificially selecting for any extreme is likely to be a bad idea. Humans are generalists, but often operate as specialists. At the same time, there is no compelling reason to select against extremes. These extremes may be what give humans some variability at a time when it is needed. In the long run, human destiny will almost certainly move into space. Then who knows what physical, let alone mental potentials we will need.
Beauty:
Beauty is an odd one. Mr. Darwin might have called it secondary sexual characteristics. It gets more complicated than that and can illustrate some interesting points. In terms of artificial selection, beauty represents a form of genetic wealth, it just is so dramatically visible compared to most human traits that make up an individuals genetic wealth. It makes sense to select for physical beauty so people will. There is no guarantee that your child will inherit your best features. Why not insure it? In a relatively short span of generations, every man and woman would be beautiful. A few more generations and it would be fixed in the genes. It could get very interesting one day if everyone were physically beautiful. So what happens then if everyone is physically beautiful? Presently, there are many other forms of beauty. There are many kinds of beauty and in a time when physical beauty becomes common, other kinds of beauty will become the focus of artificial selection. It can be grace, agility, singing ability, the ability to make music, you name it. This is the genetic wealth of the family and of humanity. This illustrates one reason why traits must be husbanded. What is important is going to change over time and so human genetic diversity must not be destroyed by carelessness.
Brains:
Another extremely important issue that humans are going to have to address is mental stability. We are not mentally adapted to the results of the massive changes which we have undergone recently. In many regards, the human brain has only recently evolved this capability and is still a design plagued by mental health problems. Our society is extremely stressful and demanding. This may reduce some, but there's a lot of reason to believe it won't. We will be able to improve general mental health to some degree, with improvements in our knowledge of what is important to mental health, but we also certainly need to improve natural human mental health and stability. Mental health is composed of many things, most of which we currently only have a rudimentary understanding of. Human knowledge of the subtleties of human psychology, especially in terms of evolution and genetics, is extremely limited. Yet at the same time, it appears that many common mental pathologies such as schizophrenia, are based on minor and identifiable genetic traits. It would seem that this is the natural focus of artificial selection.
By now, you should have all kinds of alarms going off in your head. Those are controversial, highly corruptible and important issues, not to be carelessly talked about. Those topics relate to important ethical questions you can’t convincingly show you have answers to. Do you know the potential for the abuse of what you are talking about?
This issue again illustrates incredible limitations on our knowledge that extend far beyond the technical aspects of artificial selection. Human knowledge is going to require advances in philosophy, wisdom and even perhaps into sciences that don’t exist yet, such as memetics.
Memes is a concept that is currently not well understood. That is going to take many years if not centuries. Yet it seems clear that memes (if they exist at all and it seems that they do) are fundamental to human survival. The question is what of our genetics make us adapted to be able to use memes? It seems likely that will be an important focus for artificial selection.
I think that makes my point. We can probably fix some things, like schizophrenia or other gross mental health problems, but what human mental health and balance really are, is still not known.
A corollary of this would be related to aggressive behavior. It well illustrates another hazard that we will have to avoid. This I would refer to as the disaster of good intentions. That are going to the traits in humans, like aggressiveness, territoriality, insecurity, wanderlust, desire for newness and other characteristics that one might think are not desirable in the ecologies that are developing. Don't do it. To not try to select to remove traits that make up human nature. That is an incredibly dangerous path to follow. The word aggressive has a number of connotations, including the individuals active nature. One might think that it would be a good idea to reduce the violent aggressiveness of human nature. The problem is that if you were to reduce aggressiveness at all you might be reducing innovation, natural motivation and other subtle drives that are all bundled together. Perhaps this can be done. Perhaps reducing human genetic potential for violence would be a good thing. Looking at human history one must wonder. Still, changing human drives without a great deal of reason and a great deal more knowledge than we currently have, could be suicidal. Also, a general rule is that one should never select against a functioning trait that nature created. Sometimes it will happen. There will be documented cases where a gene is more of a problem than another version of the trait that works better, but all natural traits should be retained until their disadvantage is described and understood. Can that traite be modified by training? This is an issue of trade-offs, but the trade-off may relate to survival.
In terms of recent changes and how humans must adjust, there is a trait that has been a primary focus of evolution during much of the time of the cities. It is a basic and powerful survival instinct that develops like other behaviors, but originates on a firm genetic base. This is faith. The word faith is likely to bring up all kinds of connotations to the reader. It is a term very widely used by religion. Some religion's claim that they created faith, but it was faith that created religion. Forget those connotations. Faith is like other behaviors. It can flower suddenly or it can grow slowly. You can sense faith in another person just as you can sense anger or love. One of the meanings of the word faith is a belief in something without proof. That is a very powerful and important ability. Faith is likely to become even more important to survival in the future.
Brains - Most of what humans need to survive and adapt in the next ecologies will have to do with behavior. A superficial look will not lead to survival and frankly we do not even currently have the knowledge to know what we will require. Still a number of points and principles can be laid out.
Balance - The most important thing that humans are going to require to survive into the future is a balance and adaptability. Currently, humans have a very high rate of mental disease, based on imbalances in the complicated machine that is our brain and its consciousness.
Manic - This is a good case of describing the need for subtle balances that we don't even currently have an understanding of. The natural manic state leads to the greatest potentials of the intellect, but in that state, judgment is limited. There must be a non-manic state to balance the manic state when judgment is exercised to evaluate what is created during the manic state.
Another important balance is understood enough to make some commentary on the biochemistry of the mind. There is the natural state of happiness of any individual, that seems to be largely controlled by that natural dopamine (and other hormones) level of the individual. While this is important in a philosophical sense, it is also quite important in the modern world with all it’s kinetic distractions. It seems that lower dopamine levels makes a person less happy and perhaps more susceptible to distraction by chemical and non-chemical (gambling, thrill seeking) drugs. Too much dopamine is likely to lead to a mental pathology. There will be other trade offs as well that are not currently understood.
In biology, intelligence is defined as the ability to remember, understand and manipulate the behaviors of others. This is a useful definition, but in so many ways, intelligence is really not understood. There is going to be more than one correct meaning to intelligence, but the primary meaning must start with social intelligence.
Sometimes social intelligence has been referred to as Machiavellian Intelligence which describes the problem that intelligence presents. There is a lot to be said for the survival benefits of manipulation of ones social group. There is a lot to be said about the problems of one using this potential for ones self benefit.
That same social intelligence is what allows humans to work as a team. It is the essence of what allows the understandings that is the basis of cooperation. It allows people to understand one another and anticipate the other person’s actions so that they can efficiently work with them towards an objective as a single unit.
Social intelligence is the most important aspect of intelligence, but presently, the available understanding of it is not adequate. The general rule though is to increase potentials. if there is a problem from a potential, select for another potential or belief to manage it. This suggests that humans should select for increased intelligence even in its most important and risky facet. Remember that many parts of social interaction relate to deception of the deceiver and deceived (who may be the same person). Changing that and related issues will be risky, but almost certainly manageable.
There are other aspects of intelligence, even if social intelligence is probably the basis of the rest of human intelligence. There as occupational or technical intelligence. This is partly an artificial distinction as categories often are, but it serves here as categories do. Occupational intelligence corresponds to technical abilities. It is about understanding artifacts rather than people. Occupational intelligence is extremely important and can probably be selected for with no negative consequence.
There are other aspects of intellect that are basically not understood at all yet. The speech center of the brain is almost miraculous in its function. There are other traites like it.
There are going to be other forms of intelligence like occupational intelligence such as mathematical or artistic ability, that do not relate to social interaction. These should be selected for as a general principle. Occupation refers mostly to caste specialization which is a fairly recent thing, but long before the societies that had castes there were skills like those required to make tools, shelter, clothing and food as well as other skills that do not relate to social interaction.
It should be mentioned here, that contrary to popular belief, you can’t teach any person to do just any skill. Most technical skills have a strong genetic basis, while coping with changing circumstances is a more general skill.
Newness is another problematic balance that makes us what we are and is essential to survival. It is just something that is part of human behavior. We seek what will work, but we may then reject that in search of something new. If we reject what works, there is a potential huge cost. If we do not, there is a halt to progress. This is probably an example of something that should be left to natural selection, at least until we are much wiser.
Learning ability is an aspect of intelligence that illustrates an overwhelmingly important factor, cost of human life. While learning ability is an aspect of intelligence and will certainly be important in an ecology with far more information to learn, this touches on a basic part of the human equation. The basic equation of current human survival is dominated by the high cost of raising children, especially educating them. If you change that cost, you make a change to the basis of the equation that describes humans. As mentioned elsewhere, if you do this with an “education pill”, there would be a huge risk to survival. It could cheapen human life. Done genetically, the risk would be much less because there would be a natural buffering effect. Competition would focus elsewhere.
Another topic that must be considered if not currently understood is the multi-mind model of human psychology. Humans have a mind that is not singular. It contains multiple, sometimes contradictory, beliefs and viewpoints. A human can believe in more than one thing at the same time. Not only is this an illustration of the complexity of human psychology that we do not currently understand, but it is of extreme importance for other reasons.
If there is any intrinsic aspect of adaptation that humans could achieve, it might be for a longer foresight. Animals tend to use very limited foresight, humans not excluded. It seems likely that no other species than humans plan ahead any more than one year in advance. E. O. Wilson had an excellent discussion of this in terms of humans. Our adaptation to the neolithic ecology gave us various degrees of foresight and more than any other animal, but it was still very limited. The time period of our foresight can be very short or as long as perhaps a generation, depending on the issue. Humans live longer now and may well live longer in the future. This is a significant change. Also, some human strateges, in terms of institutions and group strategies, can be multi-generational. On the surface, it would seem benificial if humans were capable of responding to longer term issues, though this may be another one of those issues that relate to human nature. As with many other traites, humans can adapt their genetic nature by learning and we certainly will have to, but it may well be a good idea to try to promote selection of a longer point of view than is common to most, if not all, current human races.
There are numerous other features of psychology already recognized that are based on specialized, genetically based neural structures that are either critical to survival or basic potentials of human evolution. The speech center is a good example, but there are many others and it will take a lot of work and time to understand what they are and their importance, but these are the raw materials from which humans must make their future.
This section on artificial selection, especially factors effecting psychological factors is meant to be as brief as possible. There are more factors that describe and determine what a human is than is going to ever be put in a paper book. It is a description of the present potentials of human variation and that is an awful lot. I will end this section with another unknown, but an important unknown. This is meme interpretation. Memes are not yet understood, but they seem fundamental to how we handle information. Part of intelligence relates to what memes we can use. They are a limit and potential to what we can potentially understand. Much of our ability to understand and use memes relate to structures in the brain that are determined by genetics. In ways, structurally, there may be an analogy here to smell. Smell is not specific, it is made of component parts to make aggregates, but its structures are genetically determined. This is likely to be the same for memes. Just as we are limited in what we can smell, we are probably limited in what memes humans can understand. It is hard presently to say what variation in humans is. It is also currently impossible to say what the potentials are, but you can be sure that they are great.
Artificial Selection and Morality
Independent of any religious connotations of morality, other questions must be asked about the morality of artificial selection. Morality is about survival. Artificial Selection is a powerful tool with the potential to be used for good or bad, but because of disease (and other things) it is a necessary strategy for survival. The human equation is now that it is far more costly to raise and socialize a human to live in a technological society as opposed to the mostly farming societies of the past. It is too expensive to raise and educate children if a majority of them will die of disease. There is also the human issue of who wants to watch their children die? That is another philosophy. Beyond surviving diseases, artificial selection offers great potentials for improving what a human is. A question is, will that lead to increased survival or be a danger to human survival? What would be an improvement? These answers need input from science and other philosophies. These answers must be viewed in terms of the family.
Artificial selection not only offers some incredible potentials, it raises many important questions such as why, how, what it should be used for and what potential dangers are there.
If someone asks me why would we do artificial selection, I ask them if they had heart disease of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, what would they do to insure that their children did not inherit the diseases. That usually clears up the question. That is the first level of artificial selection, selection against broken or ineffective genes. There are more reasons why. What is it that you respect the most about yourself or your mate? There is no guarantee that your children will inherit that trait. The second level of artificial selection is to make sure that the children inherit the best potentials of the parents brains, health and beauty. The third level of artificial selection is going to partly be a consequence of the second. Just selecting for the best traites of the parents will cause mixing of the tribes. Still, the potentials for intentional hybridization, planned over generations, is to make the human specie something different. Something more. Some potentials and considerations of this are discussed in other chapters.
There are many other features of artificial selection that might increase or risk survival potential, but they too are discussed in detail elsewhere. Suffice to say, that the answer to the initial moral question asked here, is artificial selection moral, will it help human survival beyond the issue of disease, is that it can. It will help if we have adaquate moralities to use it correctly. That point is a bit of scientific philosophy. Another philosophy is that artificial selection can lead to healthy individuals, families and societies. That is moral in very basic terms. There are other moral questions about selecting for hybridization and human potentials, but they are considered in other chapters. Really, there is no alternative but to use artificial selection.
This should all lead to happiness of some sort, very like happiness has always been in humans. Still, happy isn't everything and happy people aren't always the best survivors.
If a lot of what this is about is morality and genetics, the question arises whether there is a genetic basis to the use of morality? Is there a genetic based behavior in humans the provides an inclination to use moralities or even particular moral systems? It appears so and it has been a focus of human natural selection for at least the last 1000 years. It is a basic survival strategy in humans. It is like other behaviors and can grow slowly or flower suddenly. Understand it like other emotions and you can recognize it in another person like you can sense anger or love in a person. It is faith... Now don't react to what you think of that word. It is a word commonly claimed by religion, but it is far more and created religion more than religion created faith, though a primary purpose of religion is to teach faith. Faith is an inheritable behavior that makes humans look for and use moral systems. An interesting comment made in the Bible is that faith is a gift from God that not all people have. That makes for an interesting comment on genetic variation. Its real meaning and ultimate implications are actually pretty incredible.
Faith is associated with powerful memes. One must not become intoxicated or overwhelmed by any meme.
Human Genetics
There is another interesting point about the morality of artificial selection. It is often compared to jingoistic or racist eugenics. It is very different, in fact, quite the opposite.
At this point, some other problems in human ecology show themselves. Even if humans had limitless resources, other problems would predictably arise. One is disease, another is excessive population growth and another is in the genes themselves. Much of this book is about solving those problems.
The problem with disease in humans is that it used to be the most important limiting factor (called a selective effect). Before modern medicine and antibiotics, it used to often be that three out of five people died of diseases before they ever had children. That is a huge and important natural selective effect. It also acted as a uniquely general selective effect on those with weaknesses. Also, the more humans there are, the easier the disease can be transmitted through the population. Today, there are an awful lot more people on earth than there ever were before. That is a huge change.
The other problems are with humans themselves. We are very far from perfect. We have been undergoing rapid evolution in the past many thousands of years and while we have adapted a lot, there is still a long way to go. There are many people born that really are sickly, weak or have other genetic based problems. It used to be that disease and other selective effects removed these people from the population so that generally, only the strongest and healthiest from any family survived. Now it is far from that way. Not only that, but as things are now, people are having much smaller families. In ecology, there are simple descriptions of this. The equation of a human is determined by the long and costly requirements of raising children. With the rise of technology, this cost has become higher and longer. Parents tend to have less children and use medicine to keep them alive and healthy. Humans have sort of gone from a quantity strategy of many children, where only a few survived, to a quality strategy of having less children, more of whom survive. The problem is that the human genome has a number of problems. Genes naturally deteriorate from generation to generation. In natural circumstances, the weak die and the strong survive so that the children from each generation that reproduce are as healthy and adapted as the parents, or perhaps even more so as natural selection drives evolution. Humans have removed disease and many other natural selective effects. That is going to lead to a huge disaster as something effectively the opposite of normal evolution occurs. So the middle part of this book describing how humans can survive is based on how we can survive this problem with our genes. Solving that problem will solve a lot of other problems humans already face and will encounter in the future.
Realize that theoretically we could reintroduce natural selective effects like disease and let them run their course to solve this problem, but there are at least two reasons not to. The first is the issue of the basis of ecology, energetics. It takes a lot of resources to raise and educate children. Too much to waste by allowing disease to kill them off almost randomly. The second reason is that who wants to see their children get sick and die. If the selective effects that drive evolution are removed, something the opposite of evolution will occur and the best genes that humans have developed over millions of years will break down and disappear. In ecology this is referred to as Genetic Load. It is caused by a number of factors. One factor that acts slowly is mutation. A more important factor that will act much more quickly is natural genetic damage that occurs during recombination in the cell during reproduction. The only way to solve this problem is to introduce a selective effect. A selective effect must be introduced naturally or artificially, or humans will not survive. This book is based on the potentials and consequences of using what is commonly called pre-implantation selection. That is artificial selection before implantation in the womb.
Artificial selection has basically three overlapping potentials. The first is reduction of broken or ineffective traits. The second is to increase the frequency of good traits. The third potential is hybridization and is a bit more complicated. It is the main way that humans have progressed since the start of the cities. It is the mixing of the tribes so that their descendants have the genetic potentials of both their parental tribes. It is where the greatest potentials for humans have and will come from.
Consider Western culture. Three tribes came together to create the first city dwellers in the Fertile Crescent, the Sumerians. Over time the three tribes genetically hybridized to become one people. Thousands of years later, they were conquered by the Semites led by Sargon The Great. Over time, these people became one and spread in their cities. Their descendants included the Phoenicians and other city dwellers. Then, another peoples arrived, Indo-Europeans descended from horse herders in Southern Russia. These were known as the Greeks, the Eutustrians and the Romans. They replaced the Semites as the military rulers of the society, but by then the Sumerians and Semites were hybridized into one people. In all societies, social class and caste structures worked to prevent the mixing of the tribes. At the same time various factors, especially war and slavery, caused genetic hybridization. This also happened with the Indo-Europeans. While these were well known historical events and peoples leading to modern Western culture, there were many other tribes that were absorbed, most notably the Celts. Some tribes thrived. Some did not. The Celts were conquored politically and socially by the Romans, but they still existed as a people and over time, hybridized with the peoples of the ancient city societies. They contributed an incredible dynamic that has led to our current modern society. Individually, these tribes did not have the potentials they had when combined.
As already said, human ecology is rapidly changing and we do not exist yet in a relatively stable ecology. No current single tribe or race is going to have the genetic potentials to adapt to the changes that are creating the human future.
When parents from different tribes have children, the children tend to be “stronger” than the parents. They have the best traits of both parents. This is well known in domestic plants and animals, but is true for all species including humans. There is a downside to natural hybridization though. The next generations are generally not as strong as the first generation or even the parental generation. In human history, natural selection has selected for the strong hybrid at the cost of the weaker hybrids and the old tribal groups. It all gets pretty complicated and is explained in a later chapter, but suffice to say that artificial selection could allow humans to take great advantage of the potentials of the hybridization of the tribes, without the drawbacks of natural hybridization. It should give us the potentials to adapt to the ecology that we create. That raises the question of what this ecology will look like and what the people of that ecology will look like as well.
A related issue is racism. Racism is a more localized issue than most of the general survival issues that this book usually focuses on, but it is an important issue. Racism exists for a lot of reasons and is a real problem, but so much of the problem is how it is looked at. One reason is the real issue that hybridization can cause problems, but that problem can be removed by artificial selection. Another problem is about superiority and inferiority. Races tend to perceive each other that way. It is a win-lose situation. It looks like evolution would select one superior race to survive and the other races to go extinct. Even in a natural situation, that is not how it works. The genes of each race are very similar to the genes of other races and there is gene flow between the races as well. But in a situation of artificial selection, most of the more important the genes, such
as many of the the ones that effect behavior and immunity, are additive. The potentials of the races can be additively combined into one race. Each race will look too different races for genetic potentials that it does not have. Racism becomes a very different issue and the racial issues become win-win. This point offers long term hope for humans, a great variety of genetic potentials held by the different races, as well as a short term hope in the current problems that the races have of getting along now.
It’s sort of like an automobile. They were most developed in the United States and Europe. Then the Japanese started adding their expertise to producing cars and revolutionized the automobile and how they were produced. Different strengths added together. Not everything will go together. That will represent a new selective pressure. Desirable traites that hybridize well, may be more successful than perhaps a better form of the same trait that does not hybridize well. Still, at present, it would be far wiser for humans to try to preserve what traites they can until we have a bit more wisdom about how to use the sum of human genetic wealth. So many tribes and so much human variability has already been lost.
Another interesting moral point in this is that artificial selection will offer more to the genetically weaker members of the society than to the genetically stronger members of the society.
Note that according to C.D. Darlington, this description of "Western"civil society developing based upon ongoing hybridization of different tribes has also occured in the Red River Vally of China, the Indus River Valley of India and in Meso-America where agricultural based civilizations have independantly arisen. There are a lot of known "superior" tribes and room for a lot more hybridization based human development. Who knows what the long term potentials of obscure tribes will be.
Religious Connotations of the Morality of Artificial Selection
Whether you believe in God or not, pre-implantation artificial selection is moral. Humans
cannot survive as more than animals without it.
There are two views one can take on this controvercial subject. If you believe in God or if you don't. In any case, a fertilized egg in a petri dish is not a child.
If you don't believe in God, then it is a simple question of survival and quality of life. Humans have a fantastic potential that will only be realized by artificial selection. If we developed technology to provide every resource required. If we solved the problems of pollution, destruction of natural resources and over population. If we discovered revolutionarily advanced social, political and economic systems. None of these would change the problems we would face. We would still have to deal with the problem of the imperfection of humans and human genes. There is only one solution and that is artificial selection.
If you believe God determines morality, there is more to the problem. Is artificial selection God's will? You can answer that by asking if science, knowledge and technology are part of God's will. More to the point, is human progress according to God's will? A life of primitive barbarism, ignorance, warfare and the struggle for every day existence is our past. It is not a life of love, forgiveness and peace. Progress has led to what God taught. Progress will reverse without artificial selection. Progress continues with it.
On occasion, I have stated that Jesus is responsible for modern technology. I did it to make a point. It is the cooperative potentials of western philosophy, largely based on Christian teachings, that have led to the cooperative efforts that have led to modern technology as well as democracy.
There is another point, whether you believe in God or not. We are entering a radically new and different ecology. To survive, humans must make a great jump in adaptation to this new ecology in order to survive. Well, either by design or serendipity, there is an amazing genetic potential available to humans that can probably provide the requirements to make this jump. If one believes in God or not, one would have to be amazed at the potentials available.
Besides, there are other, better reasons why I believe that artificial selection is quite moral in terms of God and religion. They are described elsewhere.
The topic of morality is discussed in depth elsewhere.
Next Chapter: Morality Summary
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