This has nothing to with the health care debate. It's a hypothetical solution involving a form of eugenics and health care.

It seems to me that the fitness of the human race is going to gradually drift (in a necessarily negative direction), since we can keep almost everyone alive. We will, of course, respond to this problem by creating better and better technology to keep even sicker people alive. And people will continue to become less and less fit on their own. Ultimately, this will lead to extremely expensive health care (worse than the present state of affairs) and very sick, frail humans.

Obviously, straight up eugenics is horribly unethical: cue Godwin's Law. You can't go around sterilizing people against their will or throwing them in gas chambers. Other than the fact that it's a terribly unpleasant thing to do, the state shouldn't have the right to tell you whether or not you are fit enough to reproduce...


So here's my idea. Take a hypothetical country: USoC, "United States of Canada."

Citizens of USoC are provided with world class, universal health care, but with one stipulation: once they elect to receive this health care, they must voluntarily undergo sterilization. The voluntary sterilization part is not too important; alternatively, it could just be illegal for them to have children after that point (with a hefty fine) or to simply make any children they have non-citizens of USoC.

So if you want to have children in USoC, you have to forgo any state sponsored health care (besides yearly check ups) until you're done having all your children. You have to make the decision yourself if you're fit enough. If you're fairly healthy, it's not a big deal. Once, you're old enough where you wouldn't want more children anyway, you can relax on some excellent care. If you know you're not going to make it to 20 without help, the state of course is willing to support you for life. And you don't create more suffering. This totally avoids the stigma eugenics has with not valuing human life. Potentially expensive at first, this would become vastly cheaper and cheaper over time. And people would end up healthier too.

So how evil am I for thinking this?

12/5/2009 3:15:53 PM

Evil, or stupid?

12/5/2009 3:20:00 PM

100 years

12/5/2009 3:24:08 PM

^^Sure, please explain how I am stupid.

^I was unaware. I was under the impression that forced sterilization was about 100 years old and I've never heard this specific idea suggested.


[Edited on December 5, 2009 at 3:26 PM. Reason : asdfasdf]

12/5/2009 3:24:28 PM

Well it would help if you were clear about what problem you think will occur, and how preventing breeding of people on .gov care solves the problem.

12/5/2009 3:57:18 PM

All your plan seems to do is make sure there will be a smaller next generation, not a more fit next generation. Also, what is your definition of 'fit'? While it is true that normal natural forces no longer dictate individual survival, this just means it was replaced with cultural preferences, and it is unclear that human cultural preferences are prone to unfit outcomes.

If I had to guess the future, it seems the difficulty with defining 'fitness' should encourage proliferation in the face of uncertainty. That's right, the more people we have right now the more fit the species will be in the face of future calamity. Name any possible future problem, and it would be better dealt with by a more populous planet than a less populous one.

12/5/2009 4:17:09 PM

smc was right. The problem I'm describing has been recognized for 150 years. I didn't think it needed explanation.


Darwin ("Descent of Man"):

Quote :

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick, thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Quote :

"All your plan seems to do is make sure there will be a smaller next generation, not a more fit next generation.... Also, what is your definition of 'fit'?"

The ability to survive and reproduce. The developed world keeps people alive regardless of their ability to do so without assistance. I have no idea what you're going on about with cultural preferences.

This is dead simple: Person A doesn't need medical intervention to survive to age 30. Person B needs a cocktail of medication and several major surgeries to survive to age 30. Person A and Person B both have children. Whose children are going to be healthier and need less medical intervention?

[Edited on December 5, 2009 at 5:20 PM. Reason : ...]

12/5/2009 5:10:19 PM

Ok, so the problem is we're eliminating natural selection with better medical care, increasing the number of unhealthy people alive. Fine, although you seem to ignore the number of health people who are kept alive or unhealthy people who are made healthy by these advancements as well.

So how does stopping people from breeding if they go on .gov care solve this problem?

12/5/2009 5:20:38 PM

Quote :

"So how does stopping people from breeding if they go on .gov care solve this problem?"

It prevents very unhealthy people from having children. For healthy people, it doesn't make much difference (but they don't need .gov as much either).

Quote :

"unhealthy people who are made healthy by these advancements as well"

Sure, and this idea totally supports them being healthy. But unfortunately, you don't pass down acquired traits. You may be made healthy, but if you have children, your children stand the risk of being as (or more) unhealthy as you started out.


[Edited on December 5, 2009 at 5:28 PM. Reason : d]

12/5/2009 5:22:25 PM

Quote :

"It prevents very unhealthy people from having children. For healthy people, it doesn't make much difference (but they don't need .gov as much either). "

The very unhealthy aren't really having children anyway. It's the slightly unhealthy that you should be concerned with but a sterilization plan like this won't solve that because those people will just have kids before they sign up for .gov care.

12/5/2009 5:36:38 PM

wow, you people hate welfare so much you're willing to institute forced sterilization to try to scare people from embracing it. good thing you were born who you were and not the son of a whore!

veil of ignorance ftw.



[Edited on December 5, 2009 at 5:44 PM. Reason : go read rawls]

12/5/2009 5:44:32 PM

Quote :

"The very unhealthy aren't really having children anyway."

O rly?

Quote :

"wow, you people hate welfare so much you're willing to institute forced sterilization to try to scare people from embracing it. good thing you were born who you were and not the son of a whore!"

maybe you should read the thread...

12/5/2009 5:53:54 PM

^ Rly, presuming of course you are defining "very unhealthy" as "a debilitating or chronic condition that would prevent someone from living on their own without medical intervention and is diagnosed before the age of procreation."

Of course if you're just defining very unhealthy as fat or genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's, well thats another story.

12/5/2009 6:07:53 PM

Any eugenics, "straight up" or not, is "horribly unethical." There's no ethical way to sterilize people that society deems undesirable. Luring people into consenting to it does not make it better.

Someone who is "not going to make it to 20 without help"? So you wanna sterilize poor 18 year-olds who get injured in car accidents?

12/5/2009 7:39:57 PM

This is far more dumb that evil, because you’re trading physically fit and strong people, for potentially very intelligent people.

Some of the smarter people I know in college would have been dead 100 years ago do to weird allergies, or congenital conditions. Humanity these days is being advanced FAR more by intellect than physical strength, and someone’s ability to learn has very little correlation with their ability to survive without healthcare.

12/5/2009 7:47:17 PM

Nah we still have places where only the fit survive and the weak die off.

Just look at that bastion of humanity Africa. If only we could be more like them.

12/5/2009 8:08:20 PM

Somalia: The AynRandiest Country on the Planet

12/5/2009 11:21:55 PM

Quote :

"Name any possible future problem, and it would be better dealt with by a more populous planet than a less populous one."

Resource depletion.

12/5/2009 11:58:41 PM

Quote :

"It seems to me that the fitness of the human race is going to gradually drift (in a necessarily negative direction), since we can keep almost everyone alive."

The 'drift' is from genetic mutations, and it's not necessarily a drift in a negative direction. Evolution has a lot of counter-intuitive elements to it, and it may surprise you that permitting disadvantageous traits (for some amount of time) actually allows for the possibility of drastically more advantageous traits. It's the difference between protein pair "A" appearing giving an advantage versus "AB" appearing together.

Furthermore, you must reconsider the objective of evolution. The point of evolution in hunter-gather society was to create humans good at that niche. We occupy a different niche in the modern world. In another 1000 years, we will most likely occupy yet another niche. So does "trash collecting" at the present moment to weed out the weak really make sense? In fact, the weakest of a population are often the last ones left standing.

When the KT-extinction asteroid hit did the strongest and biggest dinosaurs remain? No, they died.

---
You might say, "this isn't relevant". After all, the kind of ailments you have in mind are those that from just about any perspective are disadvantageous. I mean, if someone has a genetic digestive problem or something like that, then it's nothing more than a problem. Granted, but...

Again, remember that all mutations are nothing more than random. Every 'unfit' human constitutes a first level perturbation from the base human genome. Remember your natural history? Humans were reduced to a population of just a few 1000 individuals just 60k or so years ago. We started out fairly homogeneous before society started allowing every unfit individual to procreate. Each one of these individuals constitutes a laboratory showing the effect of a minor tweak of the code that nature has endowed us with. Genetic engineer much? The entire discussion of "weak" humans is likely to be irrelevant in 100 years, and on top of that, this explosion of humans into the billions is the perfect database for the first step into engineering our genetic code.

If you want to "trash collect" the crappy genes, then do so after we figure out what the hell we're talking about. And by that time the private sector will already be offering automatic corrections. Health care itself could be obsolete in 100 years.

12/6/2009 9:43:58 AM

The more people you have, the more you will have working on the problem.

12/6/2009 9:45:17 AM

Another point:

A lot of the stuff that evolution spends its time on is plain stupid and irrelevant for our society. If you're arguing that we should still be going through an evolutionary process, then what about skin color? The people at higher latitudes should be getting paler and those at lower latitudes should be getting darker. Where does international travel fit into this picture? It doesn't! The "problem" that evolution was trying to solve with skin color doesn't even really exist anymore. So skin cancer and vitamin D deficiency related medical issues should only really be considered to make someone ineligible for reproduction if their offspring are planning to live in a place that gets the same amount of sunlight.

And what if I plan for my descendants to live in space colonies? I should be permitted genetic "disorders" so long as they stand a credible potential for it to be advantageous in a different environment that we may someday live in. Expect to hear a lot of those ridiculous arguments with the suggestion from the OP.

[Edited on December 6, 2009 at 10:23 AM. Reason : ]

12/6/2009 10:22:50 AM

Say no to breeding fatties

12/6/2009 1:27:40 PM

in famine only the fatties survive

12/6/2009 1:34:03 PM

Quote :

"The 'drift' is from genetic mutations, and it's not necessarily a drift in a negative direction."

I know that the drift is from mutations (and also of course from recombination), but I completely disagree that the drift is anything but negative.

Let me give an analogy (perhaps the same one used by Dawkins in "Climbing Mount Improbable", though I haven't read it): imagine a landscape stretching out in all directions. Upon this landscape are mountains of "fitness". Getting to the top of a mountain means you are perfectly adapted to your environment (a local maximum at least). You are the archetype of fitness, health, and reproductive ability. Getting close to the top means you're pretty well off. Being down near sea level is just plain bad; you are sickly and frail.

Now, natural selection is like a game of Hot & Cold while blindfolded. As you move away from the mountain, someone shouts "colder, colder...". As you move closer to the peak, they shout "warmer...". It doesn't take a long time for you to get to the top and stay near there, even if you occasionally overshoot the peak.

Our society, on the other hand, is like billions people playing the game at once but with no one shouting. Everyone drifts (genetically and figuratively) away from optimal fitness. Remember, they are all blindfolded; there is no guide at all. We all start out near the top of the mountain (after adapting for millions of years) and then begin to wander aimlessly. Now tell me: where are they going to end up?

-At the peak? No, astronomically unlikely.
-Near the peak? No, increasingly unlikely over time as people wander in random directions.
-On another, possibly higher peak? Even more astronomically unlikely. The landscape is 99.99999% flat land. Simply put, there are only a handful of ways to successfully put together a functioning human and an infinite number of ways to fuck it up. Your hypothesis of some "AB" combination is indeed attractive, but there is no pressure to get there or stay at "AB" once we arrive. People would cross by the peak without noticing.
-On flat land? Yes, with increasing certainty over time.

There is still a faint shouting of course: go veeeery far away (a bad enough genetic disorder) and you have no chance of surviving. But for the purposes of the discussion, the drift is (statistically) going to be negative. And you're allowed to go further away each time technology advances

Quote :

"The point of evolution in hunter-gather society was to create humans good at that niche. We occupy a different niche in the modern world. In another 1000 years, we will most likely occupy yet another niche."

And for the most part we still are (besides drifting in random, negative directions) adapted to the hunter-gather niche. Without selective pressure, we aren't adapting very much to modern society and we won't adapt very much to any future one.

Quote :

"When the KT-extinction asteroid hit did the strongest and biggest dinosaurs remain? No, they died."

I'm really glad that you think humanity's most pressing concern is some kind of Roland Emmerich movie.


[Edited on December 6, 2009 at 3:20 PM. Reason : GODZILLA]

12/6/2009 3:12:52 PM

Quote :

"Our society, on the other hand, is like billions people playing the game at once but with no one shouting. Everyone drifts (genetically and figuratively) away from optimal fitness. Remember, they are all blindfolded; there is no guide at all. We all start out near the top of the mountain (after adapting for millions of years) and then begin to wander aimlessly. Now tell me: where are they going to end up?"

Not true. There are people shouting, it is called cultural reproductive preference. People that want to have lots of kids tend to like a certain type of mate. As such, there are voices shouting, they just don't care about your fitness mountains (only paying attention to their preference mountains). It is not obvious that these preference mountains do not align with your fitness mountains.

Which brings us back to question an important assumption you are making: your fitness mountains don't matter. Why should they? The human brain is infinitely adaptable. We learn how to live with our environment, be that our unfit selves or our unfit environment. We as an animal are unfit for the vast majority of this planet, yet we manage to survive on all of it and even in outer space. The concept of fitness is being ignored because it is now completely irrelevant to us as a species. What matters to our survival is the artificial, our social and technological networks. And in this sense, evolution cannot help, as what would actually help the human race is not an inherited trait, but the learned traits of voluntary cooperation and peaceful coexistence.

Preventing WW3 would help far more than reducing our genetic disease rate to zero.

12/6/2009 3:46:37 PM

Quote :

"-On another, possibly higher peak? Even more astronomically unlikely. The landscape is 99.99999% flat land. Simply put, there are only a handful of ways to successfully put together a functioning human and an infinite number of ways to fuck it up. Your hypothesis of some "AB" combination is indeed attractive, but there is no pressure to get there or stay at "AB" once we arrive. People would cross by the peak without noticing."

In the case of natural equilibrium you posture would be the most correct. But answer this: when did we break from the frequent selection we evolved in? Was it when the pyramids built? Oh heck no, they were dying like flies. Was it during the European Renaissance? Think surfs - no. Only after the industrial revolution was it possible to lower the birth rate to 2 or 3 per family, which did not include a high rate of natural selection.

Humans have 3 billion DNA base pairs.

Assume only point mutations occur.

I've heard conflicting numbers for the rate of mutations per person, ranging from 4 to 100s.

When did the unrestrained breeding of humans start again?



No longer than 100 years ago. That means 3 or 4 generations.

We'll say every human has 100 mutations. That's 100 / 3 billion = 1/3*10^-7 as a fraction of the genome that changes every generation. Over 3 generations, that's 10^-7 as a fraction of the genome has changed since we were on the top of the hill.

We're "wandering in the dark" as per your analogy, but we've traveled such a short distance that it doesn't matter.

Quote :

"There is still a faint shouting of course: go veeeery far away (a bad enough genetic disorder) and you have no chance of surviving."

This will be common no matter how good health care is. Imagine a mutation that kills an organism in the fetus stage. In fact, that would be one of the first thing you could learn by doing a comprehensive genome mapping project. That sequences that NEVER get changed by nature are... probably kind of important.

----
I understand the perspective that both you and Dawkins tend to advocate. However, it's completely irrelevant. We're still the same species we were 100 or 1000 years ago, that's the simple bottom line. On TOP of that, in the next 100 years, there is a good chance that either:

1. We will become "post-evolution" by altering our own genetic code or
2. Some limits to growth or societal collapse will cause us to go back to natural selection as many people die

Only after both of those possibilities passes us by do we actually see a chance that we will continue in the direction we're going giving some validity to your point. And then it'll take another 1000 or 10,000 years for the number of mutations to actually validly start increasing the costs of health care. Even at that point, people will be carrying only 10^-6 or 10^-5 of their genome as blunt mutations.

[Edited on December 6, 2009 at 4:00 PM. Reason : ]

12/6/2009 3:58:16 PM

Quote :

"1. We will become "post-evolution" by altering our own genetic code or"

I certainly concede that this makes the discussion moot. But I don't know if it's that likely.

I get your focus on mutations too. Aren't you completely ignoring recombination though?


Anyway, the overwhelming response I'm getting here is that genes never factor into anybody's health, longevity, or quality of life. And we already have an infinitely powerful, zero cost, universally provided, unlimited supply of technology to deal with the genetic problems we don't have.

I give up.


[Edited on December 6, 2009 at 4:10 PM. Reason : d]

12/6/2009 4:03:52 PM

The 99.999993 % of our genome that we inherit from our parents plays a very large role in our health.

If mutations never happened, then why would be be expecting any 'drift' in the health of humans?

12/6/2009 4:08:00 PM

^I dunno. Recombination maybe? Lots of shitty genetic disorders already exist. You don't need to bring mutations into the picture.

12/6/2009 4:12:38 PM

Quote :

"Anyway, the overwhelming response I'm getting here is that genes never factor into anybody's health, longevity, or quality of life. "

It does, and you as an individual might should confront your parents with it. But we as a species only benefited from your existence, even if it was only by making your parents work harder to pay your medical bills, so setting societal rules to prevent your existence would be counterproductive.

[Edited on December 6, 2009 at 4:26 PM. Reason : But you give up. Congrats. ]

12/6/2009 4:25:38 PM