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Eugenics, Disability, and Bioethics
Published in Joel Michael Reynolds, Christine Wieseler, The Disability Bioethics Reader, 2022
Galton’s eugenics arose within a broader context in which evolutionary thinking had been adapted to social transformation and change, with forms of artificial selection occupying centre stage in the opening chapters of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Darwin’s classic “one long argument” for natural selection begins with an extended analogy between the power of artificial selection, directed by human agency and applied to farming animal stocks and plant species, and the idea of selection without such direction: natural selection.
Philosophical Basis for Moral Analysis
Published in Howard Winet, Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
Social Darwinism was not the only social movement inspired by Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton proposed, in the late 1800s, that society had created an artificial protection for Homo sapiens such that individuals who were otherwise “unfit” could multiply without natural controls and thereby dilute the “germ plasm” of Great Britain. To prevent this from happening, society had to conduct some form of artificial selection ruled by criteria deemed selective for its “improvement”. The proposed social engineering movement was called “eugenics” and it spread from the United Kingdom to Europe; and the U.S. Eugenicists, in contradistinction from Social Darwinists, favored intellectuals and professionals over industrialists. It was also anti-aristocratic to the extent that the aristocrats in question did not achieve their status by intellectual pursuits.
Evolution, Natural Selection, and Behavior
Published in Gail S. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, 2019
Humans frequently enter into this process and produce unnatural selection or artificial selection. For example, we have made pets from many animals that were originally wild. Wolves were artificially selected by humans to make their descendants into dogs. Humans chose the friendliest wolf cubs and bred them to other friendly cubs to eventually produce early dogs. They then selected specific traits within the dogs to produce dogs with different functions, such as fighting, hunting, and shepherding. If pet dogs go back to the wild, natural selection takes over after a few generations and produces a wolf-/shepherd-type dog, which is obviously the best type to survive in the wild. However, because we want pet dogs and can provide things that the wild environment does not, such as protection and food, a large variety of dog breeds survive in our society just fine, usually on someone’s bed.
Personhood, Welfare, and Enhancement
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
The first problem is that liberal principles are not necessarily respected when selecting persons with highest expected welfare. Think of how eugenicists justified measures such as forcible sterilization with reference to a utilitarian calculation where the short-term pains of administering cruel treatments and of suppressing instincts of sympathy were outweighed by the long-term benefit to the human stock. Similarly, if we stipulate that some type of trait, such as “intelligence,” is an intrinsic good because it raises the welfare of the person involved, one could use utilitarian reasoning to justify the genetic enhancement of such a trait through methods that are equivalent to improving human stock. Of course, there is a significant moral difference between the artificial selection on embryos and the artificial selection on fully developed human beings. Nonetheless, there is nothing in this line of reasoning that should preclude the endorsement of widespread social programs to improve human stock at the embryonic stage.
The CRISPR revolution and its potential impact on global health security
Published in Pathogens and Global Health, 2021
Kyle E. Watters, Jesse Kirkpatrick, Megan J. Palmer, Gregory D. Koblentz
Second, another challenge with genome-editing technology for treatments of biothreat agents is the high propensity of those agents to mutate. Indeed, directly targeting a pathogen creates the possibility of stimulating its intrinsic mutation rate [110]. As previously stated, many of the agents identified by the CDC as biosecurity threats are RNA viruses, which as a group tend to rapidly mutate, making vaccine and traditional drug development difficult. Targeting specific strains, or incomplete clearing of virus from the host, could result in an artificial selection for viruses with mutations or sequences that avoid CRISPR targeting. The same would be true for other pathogens as well. The mutation of bases that are critical for CRISPR targeting, such as those in the seed region of the target sequence, or bases in the protospacer adjacent motif [111] could potentially lead to inactive treatments. Care must be taken to choose guide RNAs that target the most conserved regions of a gene to avoid mutation issues, while working within the restrictions placed by the PAM sequence required by each effector. Similarly, the appearance of single nucleotide polymorphisms within the human population presents a challenge when designing prophylactic genome-editing treatments, as certain guide sequences many only result in proper targeting in a subset of the global population.
An ethical investigation into the microbiome: the intersection of agriculture, genetics, and the obesity epidemic
Published in Gut Microbes, 2020
We are ethically obligated to investigate and mitigate harms to human health, and the argument supporting this follows. We create metabolically efficient livestock animals in order to satiate our meat consumption desires. This artificial selection for metabolically efficient livestock animals may be indirectly linked to obesity in humans. Obesity is an epidemic in the U.S. and globally and is associated with an extensive list of serious and debilitating disease conditions. These diseases, in turn, would be of our own making, and disease is a harm. We have an ethical responsibility to appropriately address and curtail diseases that cause harm and suffering not only on an individual patient basis, but on public health and societal levels as well. Thus, we are ethically obligated to investigate the appropriateness of selecting livestock animals for obesity as it relates to human health.