From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos   
   From Address: jsavard@ecn.ab.ca   
   Subject: Re: Shatner sick of Star Trek feuds   
      
   On Dec 6, 1:13apm, "Karl Johanson"  wrote:   
   > But preventing siblings from marrying, as you and your   
   > church supports, is a form of eugenics as sure as preventing people of   
   > different races from breeding is eugenics.   
   Actually, it's dysgenic, because it ensures that recessive genes are   
   less likely to manifest bad consequences, and get their carriers   
   selected out.   
   Laws which prohibit incest, as well, are not primarily targeted at   
   preventing genetic disorders. Instead, they largely function as   
   *statutory rape* laws, prohibiting women and girls from being   
   exploited by men who have power over them, like their fathers.   
   While I would tend to agree that eugenic measures are not bad in   
   _themselves_, the historical experience is that eugenic measures, when   
   enacted, have not been scientifically sound. The example of Hitler's   
   Germany has rightly cast a pall of suspicion over the field of   
   eugenics.   
   Of course, this has led to some nonsense. For example, I've read a   
   claim that eugenics is inherently unsound, even if the goal was not to   
   breed smarter people, but simply to prevent serious genetic disorders.   
   Why?   
   In the case of Huntingdon's chorea (which is caused by a dominant   
   gene) - preventing everyone who had a parent who succumbed to it from   
   having children, so as to eliminate this disorder, would prevent three   
   healthy children from being born for every sufferer it prevents!   
   So what? Preventing a child from being conceived, while it deprives   
   parents of the chance to raise a child of their own, is a minor thing   
   in comparison to someone being subjected to the symptoms of   
   Huntingdon's. So the price is quite reasonable to prevent anyone from   
   ever again suffering that awful fate.   
   In the case of most genetic disorders, caused by recessive genes - as   
   I noted above, each person carries hundreds of genes for serious   
   disorders! So how could you have eugenics against them except by   
   abolishing the human race?   
   Seems like a good argument, but it's made without thinking. Each   
   person might have a hundred bad recessives out of a pool of 100,000.   
   To avoid sterilizing the whole human race, we just pick *one*   
   recessive we want to get rid of in the first generation of the   
   program. In the second generation, we add a second recessive. Since   
   the first recessive has now been eliminated, except for new mutations,   
   it stays on the list of genes which it is prohibited to attempt to   
   transmit.   
   After 100,000 generations, the recessive genes have been eliminated,   
   except for a small number of new mutations, and the human race is   
   still there.   
   (Actually, it would probably be possible to eliminate from 10 to 100   
   genes in each generation to make this go a bit faster, but I want to   
   argue the principle, not the details.)   
   So scientifically-sound negative eugenics is possible. But adopting a   
   program of that nature would be a frightening intrusion on individual   
   liberty and privacy, at least under the present climate. Many more   
   important issues need to be addressed.   
   John Savard   
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