this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
167 points (85.5% liked)
Technology
57997 readers
2851 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, but nobody here is suggesting racial criteria. This article is specifically about screening for health issues. Reading more into it, it seems like they've paired big data with genetic screening to lay odds on health problems that aren't just a single gene going the wrong way.
Edit to add, there's no such thing as an ethical Eugenicist. The theory was based on racism and sterilizing "undesirables". This isn't Eugenics.
There's a debate about that ongoing, whether the word and basic idea can be divorced from its history with scientific racism. I don't really have a skin in the game but would like to point out that psychiatry didn't cease to be called psychiatry when we stopped physically abusing inmates, showing them off to gawkers, whatnot, got rid of phrenology, etc. You can make arguments both for "we must start from a clean slate" as well as "let's own the bullshit of the past to have something to teach students to not do".
That's because phrenoloy and the other theories are under Psychiatry and Psychology. You don't throw out Astronomy because of Heliocentrism. Eugenics was specifically developed to produce racial outcomes. It's a theory, not a field of science.
It's first and foremost a word meaning as much as "good stock", or, more modern, "good genes". Nazis didn't actually use it, at least not prominently, they were all about "racial hygiene" -- very different implications.
As to "specifically developed" I'm not so sure I don't know enough about Galton. What I do know is that he first did e.g. twin studies to figure out the relative importance of nature vs. nurture and stuff. People motivated by hate don't tend to be that thorough meaning if he had more information he might've ended up on the other side of the fence but as said I don't know nearly enough about his work to actually draw conclusions, ask a literary critic or such.
His base assumption was something called genetic determinism. Which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as debunked as you would think. He also tried to link body build and head measurements to genetic determinism.
And No. The Nazis absolutely loved Eugenics. The entire Western world did. The Nazis literally made it a required subject in grade school.
Eugenics needs to go die in a fire. There's no need to resurrect the name or practices when we're talking about actual genetic science.
I was talking about words. Said required subject was called Rassenlehre, very much not a calque of eugenics.
If anti-racist biologists want to reclaim the word, or even appropriate it as the case may be, I'm not going to call them racists over it. That needs to be judged by the practices.
Yeah that's not whose arguing we should put call genetic modification eugenics. And the Germans didn't use an English word? Shocking. Truly shocking.
I'm sorry but that sentence doesn't parse for me.
It's not an English but Greek word and yes it exists in German. Nazis (unsurprisingly) weren't big on loan words but it doesn't end there: The non-racially charged German word would be Erbgesundheitslehre, erm, "erf health lore". Just as neutral as a term as "genome health theory" would be. But that's not what the Nazis used, they specifically used a term that included "race".
One factor that comes to mind which would make me, if I were a geneticist, argue in favour of the term would be people using the term "eugenics" to smear things like screening and IFV to get rid of Hutchinson's. Sure the field has plenty of ethical question marks but much of it is perfectly kosher, yet there's people who are opposed on principle and are fighting hella dirty. Re-claiming, even appropriating the term then gets you out of the defensive.
But, as said: I don't have a skin in the game. As said, there's arguments for and against.
You really should read your own sources.
(my apologies for the quite literal translation I can't be arsed but an AI will do much, much worse on that kind of dense language).
Note the completely neutral actual definition, nothing about race after "denotes". If you scroll past all the racist history to the section 'modern form of eugenics" you see a brief section about abortion, of pre-implantation diagnostics being considered (by some at least) to be eugenics, then next short section on trans- and post-humanist ethics also containing eugenics as a major theme.
I'm not deep into that area either but I don't think racial themes are common among transhumanists.
I don't have access to the book wikipedia cites, but, well:
So not only does wikipedia misquote the source, the source shouldn't be bloody cited in the first place because it contradicts itself within the span of two sentences: If there's a distinction, they aren't synonymous. Mostly that stuff is just not talked about at all in the public discourse, I'd be very sceptical about inferring any distinctions from practically non-existent use of those terms.
"respectively in Germany mostly synonymous with" also doesn't make any sense, really. Semantically speaking: Respectively to what? German uses the word all the time this is a very very sloppy use I can't make heads and tails of what it's actually intended to mean.
Are we actually arguing about the use of the word in Germany, though. All, literally all I actually said about my opinion on the issue is, I quote:
That's all. Literally all. That's my opinion on the matter. If you want to criticise something, criticise that, don't go off on tangents.
So now you're saying your source is useless and not to be trusted? I mean, it's Wikipedia, I'm not surprised. But your original assertion that the Nazis weren't into Eugenics is still dead in the water. It formed the basis of their racial theories.
I was citing that article for a particular reason: To show that the Greek word exists in the German language. Here, have another source.
I NEVER FUCKING SAID THAT. And you're taking that baseless libel back, right fucking now. Don't you fucking dare call me a Nazi fucking apologist I wouldn't even be alive had my grandfather had a single Jewish grandparent more.
I said they weren't into the word, but preferred ones that were a) not Greek b) German and c) included "race" in some way.