Selective Breeding of Humans

Eugenics invented by the English, put into action by the Americans and ruined by the Germans.

If you take away the Nazi legacy on Eugenics then it would still be in place today.

I believe its called family planning these days. Its still around but not called eugenics, but the principles and goals are the same.
 
And a single example is statistically significant because?

Because it's not a single example.

Human intelligence isn't like hybridizing flower colors. It's a highly complex combination of genes that are not terribly predictable. And even then, final intelligence is a function of upbringing, so even a clone of Einstein raised differently would have a different effective intelligence.

And plus, there is research to suggest that kids who are identified as "gifted" early on and coddled as such end up not taking any risks, and thus doing worse than those of equal intelligence who had prove themselves...
 
Things We Wouldn't Have.

I was thinking that. I mean, I don't imagine

But smart athletes are going to be better than dumb athletes, so maybe it could just raise the basic fitness level. There are going to be smart and fit people, I'm sure not every great scientist couldn't run very far.

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eu·gen·ics (y-jnks)
n. (used with a sing. verb)
The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.


Yup, Eugenics. That's what I mean.
A lot of things we have today were invented by people it wouldn't be popular to breed toward. We wouldn't have an internet for example.
 
Concequences

In a few generations you get lots of beautiful but dumb athletes. Remember all technological advances come from the weedy spotty nerds. Without weedy spotty nerds we wouldnt have the internet.
I agree. Life would be much less convienent because the people who make it so might have, I say would have, been bread out.
 
Birthrate

Isn't this basically just... "real life" or "OTL"? I guess it depends on what you mean by "mutilated", but while there are obviously a few exceptions, charity always existing of a sort, if you were not capable of sufficient labour to feed yourself you are likely to starve to death. Especially whenever there are periodical bad harvests.

As I see it it the only difference would be breeding your "best" males with your physically "best" females, except women in the period were, unsurprisingly given the dangers of childbirth and children generally, valued for their capacity in having children at all rather than passing on specific genes.

Hmmm. Interesting. I wonder if the attraction of eugenics has something to do with the significant reduction of child mortality in the late nineteenth century.
I agree about infant and mother mortality. Possibly goverenmet intervention or coersion ?
 
I don't think a single polity or agenda could last long enough to have guided eugenics in human societies. There is no reason other than this that humans wouldn't have the kind of variation as dogs, over a time scale that is around ten times longer, dog generations versus human generations.

If we had a 'hydraulic' empire, isolated for thousands of years and by thousands of miles. who got it in their heads to try some eugenics, it could succeed.
 

Graehame

Banned
Interesting idea. First, lets debunk the errors.
JAKEWILSON-- "It's been attempted many times and failed just as many."
Selective breeding over thousands of years? No, what RMcD94 is proposing has never been tried. By anyone. Ever.
"This is because people a.) aren't very good at selecting traits that are actually relevant to survival."
Tell that to the Spartans.
"b.) a state or tribe doing this sort of thing won't survive long as the effort put into it is mostly a waste of resources."
THINGYMEBOB-- "Never going to last for long. Basically, the tribe that pratices this will be pretty small and will find their hunting land/farm land appropriated by the larger, hungrier tribe next door."
Two other things you can explain to the Spartans. While their society is extinct now, it lasted from c. 750 BC down to around 371 BC-- a period of over 400 years. The Golden Age of Thebes, by comparison, lasted for about a single human generation.
MALICE-- "If eugenics had any validity then why hasn't anyone heard of Albert Einstein's parents or any of his children?"
Simple. Because Einstein wasn't the product of eugenics. His phenotype contained a lot of random genes that just happened to combine in a pattern that, with his unique upbringing, resulted in genius-level intelligence. But genius isn't just a matter of genes. Upbringing & random chance each play an important role. The goal of eugenics is, over time, to bring the phenotype-- the exhibited characteristics-- into conformity with the genotype-- the inherited characteristics. The minimum amount of time involved, depending on species, is on the scale of hundreds to thousands of years.
"One other example worth considering was the Lebensborn programme... End result? Children...had higher rates of infant mortality, physical handicaps, intellectual disabilities..."
Possibly because of a lack of nurture. Possibly because the selection criteria used by the Nazis was, to put it mildly, unscientific.
WINNER-- "Depends on what kind of things would these people find desirable. If it was just physical strength and other factors commonly associated with male dominance, the society might actually lose a lot of geniuses."
The Spartans, who are probably the people who've tried this the longest, found that they had more highly competent generals-- a few of whom were certifiable military geniuses-- than they could use, so that they ended up exporting generals all over the Mediterranean world. And they weren't selecting for intelligence-- merely physical fitness.
SIMONBP-- "Human intelligence is...a highly complex combination of genes that are not terribly predictable. ...final intelligence is a function of upbringing..."
Precisely correct.
However, the Spartans had some problems with their program. One huge one was the extreme conservatism that their society engendered, which rendered them unable to adapt to the light infantry tactics practiced by Iphicrates at the Battle of Leuctra, which annihilated an entire Spartan battalion (1 out of 7 in the whole Spartan Army); or the oblique-order tactics practiced by Epaminondas at the Battle of Leuctra, in which the entire Spartan Army in full battle array suffered its first-ever defeat. These 2 defeats tore the heart out of the Spartans, rendering them unwilling to accept the extreme hardships mandated by the Code of Lycurgus that had given them their unique way of life, & the decline of Sparta set in. So we're left with a question: "Does a eugenic breeding program engender in a society that practices it such extreme conservatism that it renders the society inflexible, & unable to adapt to changing circumstances?" Maybe it does, because the only way to establish & manage a eugenics program would be by establishing regulations strong enough to survive all challenges for hundreds of years-- a truly inflexible system.
...but let's assume that it doesn't. And further, let's establish the Spartan system farther back in history. Say, about a hundred years prior to the Trojan War, c. 1300 BC. Now the Spartan system has just enough time to get entrenched so that Sparta can displace Mycenae as the center of Greek civilization. Absent the vindictiveness of Agamemnon, the King of Sparta (who attacks Troy for economic reasons having nothing to do with the fair Helen) conquers the place & colonizes it (something that historical Sparta, for reasons of conservatism, never did-- but we're assuming that such extreme conservatism isn't a necessary feature of eugenics). Having conquered Troy, Sparta then proceeds to conquer the rest of Greece, the Balkans, the Aegean, & the nearer parts of Asia Minor. Again, something the historical Spartans never did, but there was nothing stopping them except their own inclinations.
At this point Sparta stops expanding & sets down to defend its empire while continuing to practice eugenics. Defending its empire requires an expansion of the army, which in turn requires an expansion of the citizen class (which is something the historical Spartans actually did, just once in their history, but never repeated). Adapting to changes in military tactics (because this Sparta isn't handicapped by extreme conservatism), & aided by the strength & fitness of its large professional army, it fights off the Persians, the Illyrians, & eventually even the Romans, preserving the integrity of its empire without further expansion. The urgent needs of defense are imprinted on Spartan society in a way that can never be eradicated.
Why no further expansion? Because the Spartans will have learned in assimilating the Greeks of their existing empire the difficulty of expanding the citizen class by getting non-Spartans to accept the Lycurgan Laws necessary to qualify them for membership in the army. Things like having their children examined, & if found unfit then exposed to die. Things like taking the children away from their parents at the age of 7 to be raised in barracks, to be soldiers. Because the Spartans would know that expanding the empire without expanding the army is suicide.
So the conquests of Alexander the Great never happen. The entire Hellenistic Period, with its virtual explosion of progressive innovation, never happens. Rome, when it finally rises, is cut off from the East, forced to expand into barbarian Europe, with a virtual wall separating it from Asia. So even if a city-state like Sparta can avoid extreme conservatism in its own polity, it still fosters by its very existence-- & by its ability to defend itself & to maintain its customs-- parochialism, conservatism, & anti-progressive tendencies in the world at large. Either that, or like any other culture it gets overrun & ceases to exist.
What form the Spartan Empire might take by the 21st Century is wide-open to imagination, but with its roots buried so deep in the past it would be likely to be a reactionary, imitative culture rather than a pro-active or inventive one. The needs of defense would dictate a culture with little art or culture as such. Slavery, helotry, or something very like it would likely persist-- unable to be changed by a world that was unable to conquer Sparta; & thus its production base would be formidable, but geared primarily towards the defense industries.
 
Human natural selection on an had hoc unguided basis has taken place over tens of thousands, and thousands of years and produced various ethnic groups, with different hair colours, skin tones, body fat and build indexes, that are somewhat distinctive and recogniseable.

The deliberate artificial selective breeding of humans is theoretically possible, but hasn't ever really taken place for a number of reasons.

1) For much of history, issues of heritability were very poorly understood, or understood not at all. Its impossible to run a breeding program if you don't have some basic understanding. It's easy enough to breed for height, for instance, but overall that trait doesn't have a lot of huge cultural utility. On the other hand, breeding for bravery or religious correctness? That would appeal, but it would be meaningless. Most potential breeding goals would be for cultural factors which aren't truly heritable. Even breeding for theoretical qualities, like strength or intelligence would be nigh impossible given the complexities.

2) Humans just live too long. Dogs reach physical and sexual maturity in less than a year. Cats in five to ten months. That means in a twenty or thirty year span you can run ten generations in a tightly focused breeding program, which would start to produce tangible results to let you know if you're on a right triack. In a hundred years, fifty dog generations, which will get you some very specific breeds. Humans, on the other hand, don't really begin breeding until 15 or 16 (barring fluke young pregs), to as late as 18 or 20. So roughly, eight times as long. This means that in a twenty or thirty year span, you might get three human generations. Thats not long enough to start particularising results, which makes really long term breeding a hell of a lot harder. Also, the long period of maturation makes it very difficult to determine if a hoped for heritable trait has manifested in your subject.

3) Humans don't breed enough. Dogs, cats, rabbits produce litters of ranging roughly from four to eight. Which means that in every breeding cycle, you've got a lot of individuals with expressed traits to select from. Cats can have two to three litters per year, producing over 150 offspring in the course of a lifetime. Dogs can go even better. A rabbit can have 800 offspring and descendants in the course of a year. A human, you're lucky to have a single offspring a year, twenty over the course of a fertile female's lifetime is more or less the best you'll get. That means that there's pretty limited expression and selection opportunities.

4) Sexual dimorphism is a wild card. In part, this relates back to non-scientific approaches and poorly understood concepts of heritability. But basically, men and women are very different physically, and these differences are expressed in extreme ways culturally. Look at it this way, if you're trying to breed for hyper-masculine qualities, then 50% of your breeding stock may not be expressing these qualities in a way that you can track and manipulate. There are very few culture-neutral, gender-neutral qualities. And if you are trying to select culture/gender positive traits, even if heritable, dimorphism is going to be throwing you all sorts of curve balls.

5) Humans just don't have a lot of genetic diversity compared to dogs, cats, pigeons, rabbits, horse, goldfish etc. We have more diversity than Cheetahs, who are all essentially clones of each other. But we passed through some harsh genetic bottlenecks, there's very little diversity, and without diversity, its hard to prune out specifics.

6) There have not been, in human history, a lot of cultures which have had long enough histories, with suficient extended periods of stability, that would have allowed a breeding program to emerge and sustain itself. Not Rome. Not modern Europe. Maybe Egypt. Maybe periods of Persia. Or China or Japan. Basically you could count them on the fingers of one hand. Not the Spartans who were essentially violent semi-literate dicks.

7) The few human cultures which, through isolation and luck, managed to be long lived and stable enough to have been able to manage such a thing started off with very homogenous populations, not fertile ground for diversification. Also, most of them didn't really have a grasp of genetics and heredity. And even if they did proceed in that direction, most of them fell or got overrun centuries or millenia ago, so any hypothetical results that got produced either got wiped out or merged back into the general population.

Bottom line, its very possible to do selective breeding of humans, but the timelines are so long and cultural obstacles so profound its never really been done.
 
Informal eugenics has been practiced since time immemorial by such peoples as the Jews and the Indians. Arguably, some of their traditions have borne fruit, while simultaneously demonstrating one of my favorite, favorite terms that I wish everyone in the world knew. Antagonistic plieotropy.

Antagonistic Pleiotropy is when one gene controls for more than one trait where at least one of these traits is beneficial to the organism's fitness and at least one is detrimental to the organism's fitness. You wanna select for awesome traits but do it in as few generations as possible? Well, you might end up with a tempermental, fragile prototype instead of a durable model capable on all aspects.

I dunno if it counts as antagonistic plieotropy (it would if you count defective offspring as a drawback), but there are also countless cases of genes with heterozygote advantage, that will be a genetic diseases when you have two copies.

5) Humans just don't have a lot of genetic diversity compared to dogs, cats, pigeons, rabbits, horse, goldfish etc. We have more diversity than Cheetahs, who are all essentially clones of each other. But we passed through some harsh genetic bottlenecks, there's very little diversity, and without diversity, its hard to prune out specifics.

7) The few human cultures which, through isolation and luck, managed to be long lived and stable enough to have been able to manage such a thing started off with very homogenous populations, not fertile ground for diversification.
Human genetic diversity is by definition great enough to give rise to the variety of traits that we observe. And if that library isn't enough, just wait a few generations and take advantage of our higher than normal mutation rate.

6) There have not been, in human history, a lot of cultures which have had long enough histories, with suficient extended periods of stability, that would have allowed a breeding program to emerge and sustain itself. Not Rome. Not modern Europe. Maybe Egypt. Maybe periods of Persia. Or China or Japan. Basically you could count them on the fingers of one hand. Not the Spartans who were essentially violent semi-literate dicks.
I agree that most versions of a formal eugenics project would require the support of a nation-state or empire. If you went with something less strict, like perhaps a more formal version of certain OTL breeding practices which were sustained over thousands of years among peoples whose associated states were obliterated multiple times.

Also, I'd like to take the opportunity to shamelessly promote Saturn's timeline on this very subject (yes I've written some....).

Cyrus the Great sponsors a Greek eugenics cult.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=157935

Read it, comment on it, :D
 
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Also, Dvaldron, human genetic diversity is by definition great enough to give rise to the variety of traits that we observe. And if that library isn't enough, just wait a few generations and take advantage of our higher than normal mutation rate.

Well, we see a lot of diversity in humans because we're human and we're looking for it. I imagine Cheetahs feel pretty diverse.

But let's face it, we exist in a very narrow set of ranges. Height, weight, build, skin tones, hair colours and textures, hair patterns.

Compare humans to the diversity in dogs, cats, horse breeds, pigeons, rabbits, etc., we're all stamped out by a cookie cutter.

We all really do look alike.
 
I agree that most versions of a formal eugenics project would require the support of a nation-state or empire. If you went with something less strict, like perhaps a more formal version of certain OTL breeding practices which were sustained over thousands of years among peoples whose associated states were obliterated multiple times.

Well, too points there. First, lots of exogamous inbreeding and outbreeding, so your population might carry a handful of traits, but they're going to be pretty similar to the background population. That's why there were so many blonde aryan jews.

Second, this isn't really artificial selection per se, as specific heritable characteristics are not really being selected for generation after generation. Rather, cultural pressures are driving selection, which has a side effect of dragging some heritable traits.

Basically, one approach gets you the famous jewish nose (which my dad had), and the other approach turns a wolf into a bulldog, poodle or chihuahua.

Also, I'd like to take the opportunity to shamelessly promote Saturn's timeline on this very subject.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=157935

That was very classy of you.
 

Michael Busch

And plus, there is research to suggest that kids who are identified as "gifted" early on and coddled as such end up not taking any risks, and thus doing worse than those of equal intelligence who had prove themselves...

Care to provide the citations on that? And what do you mean by coddled?
 
There's no inherent reason that people couldn't be bred for smarts, looks, athleticism, endurance, or whatever, though probably not most all at once. There are, however, severe practical obstacles.

1. Breeding projects usually require animals with relatively short generation times compared to the human lifespan. By definition, people don't fit the bill.

2. Biologically, anyone powerful enough to enforce a eugenics program is going to prefer to use that power to enhance his and his kin's breeding opportunities. In short, why breed the the handsome slave to the beautiful slave when you can sleep with her yourself?

3. Humans are smart and difficult to control.

Completely ASB?

I give you a POD after 10000 BC, but it's in here because I really want to talk about when it kicks in.

Basically something like Sparta, mutilated children are killed, or not allowed to breed, their parents are also, not allowed to breed.

What would such a world look like, how advanced in tech would they be? What would their reaction be to genetics when they come about? Tiny population, or you could see forced breeding of alphas to generate more alphas?

When societies begin becoming top heavy do we see culling, or at least a completely halt of benefits, etc?

Perhaps there never is such a thing as benefits, socialism would probably not be a major part of this world, though totalitarianism might be.

Thoughts?
 
5) Humans just don't have a lot of genetic diversity compared to dogs, cats, pigeons, rabbits, horse, goldfish etc. We have more diversity than Cheetahs, who are all essentially clones of each other. But we passed through some harsh genetic bottlenecks, there's very little diversity, and without diversity, its hard to prune out specifics.

I wonder what humans would look on the inside and out if they're wasn't one and how our cultures would have differed.
 
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