Eugenics: Nazi Grandfather to Chinese Grandson

Eugenics had many advocates: the Americans practiced forced sterilization of the “dumb” ones; Winston Churchill supported it; Scandinavian countries passed laws on compulsory sterilization. Others supported sterilization of those with heritable diseases, even though the understanding of which diseases were heritable was pathetic back then. The view on eugenics didn’t change for a long time, as Philippa Levine, said in a Five Books interview:

“It doesn’t really become a dirty word until the Nazis get involved.”

After which, everyone else insisted, “No, no, no, we’re nothing like the Nazis.” Indira Gandhi’s sterilization drive was part-coercive, part-incentive driven.

But all that was “your Nazi grandfather’s eugenics”, to quote Siddhartha Mukherjee from The Gene. Levine points out that there is also “Latin eugenics”, as practiced in South America, Spain and Italy:

“It is generally what we call ‘positive’ eugenics, which — rather than stopping people from having children — is encouraging the fit to have children and giving them incentives … to have children.”

With the rise of genetics, you even get a chance to increase the odds of “inheriting” certain qualities:

“It is also interesting to look at the way sperm banks advertise their products: you pay more for donors who are athletic, or highly intelligent, or highly musical.”

If you feel that Latin eugenics is relatively acceptable, consider where it might be headed with modern technologies. In his book, Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom talks of how such breeding could be accelerated:

-         From the embryos of “fit” people, extract stem cells.

-         Convert those into sperm and ova.

-         Cross the new sperm and ova to produce new embryos.

-         Repeat until desired level of the characteristic is achieved.

The difference from good old natural selection? Bostrom again:

“In this manner, it would be possible to accomplish ten or more generations of selection in just a few years.”

From here on, Bostrom says the momentum may be unstoppable. Why?

“Lower health care costs and higher expected lifetime earnings would also argue in favor of genetic selection… Many of the initially reluctant may join the bandwagon in order to have a child that is not at a disadvantage relative to the enhanced children (of others around them).”

While a Germany may be ultra-reluctant to go down that road, and Western democracies may have some qualms (this time around), as Bostrom says:

“Perhaps China or Singapore… might not only permit but actively promote the use of genetic selection and genetic engineering to enhance the intelligence of their populations.”

The eugenics genie is well and truly out of the bottle.