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[wierd]

I would be more afraid of depressed immune responses.  Industrial nations have lower exposure rates to pathogens, and industrial nations are the ones with the resources to attempt eugenics.  Because they would not be controlling for vigor in immune response to novel pathogens in their "neo aryan master race aesthetic" designer babies/eugenically enforced pressures, the potential for immune response to be one of the tradeoffs of the process is quite high. (there is a reason why engineered lifeforms are less hardy than wild-types. It is because the total energy budget of a lifeform is more or less zero sum, and where you poke to improve, something else has to be diminished. Pareto-optimal is usually not a design goal for eugenics. It is usually some philosophical or cultural aesthetic, not robustness.)

This then leads to situations where "Oh noes, a hurricane hit Florida, and the water everywhere is contaminated with fecal bacteria, roads are impassable, and we cant air lift because the weather is still bad. Oh yeah, all those eugenic people in Malibu have depressed immune systems. We expect 40% higher mortality. Hooray Eugenics! They will die horribly, but they will look good doing it!" and the like happens.  It is hubris to think you can always control the environment. As such, it is hubris to think you can reliably modify organisms that have natural pressure for pareto-optimal expression of traits.

This is above and beyond just the "We must exterminate the Jews, the Blacks, the mentally deficient, and other undesirables!!" type history of eugenics. (Which as Trekkin points out, ALONE is more than sufficient to abandon the practice.)

[Trekkin]

I bet if people tried eugenics right now, they'd be breeding for muscles and height and completely neglect intelligence.

Well, they've tried for intelligence historically time and time again, in fact almost exclusively, but usually with tests that didn't measure anything close to it (like Canada did, exceptionally blatantly) or just sterilizing people in mental institutions. People like improving intelligence so long as they get to define intelligence as whatever aptitude best separates them from everyone they don't like; it's usefully vague and subjective that way, and people tend to tack it on to whatever other they've decided to hate.

One of the horrors of eugenics is that it sounds like it will help in aggregate all the people it's hurting in specific, and it invites us to act based on our ideas of "what's wrong with people." Lots of people have plenty of those, and given what sounds like a good reason they'll happily put them in the form of a list of kinds of people.

The other, of course, is just how cheap and easy it would be to do it effectively now without any messy sterilizations of actual, specific people. I'm glad it still looks difficult and uncertain and failure-prone, because we're about one biohacker away from there not being gingers anymore or something. Maybe not intentionally, but it's one of those things that fails big.

[redwallzyl]

Ya, eugenics ends up being a lot more about the arbitrary preferences of groups in power and perpetuating it then it is anything else. It's a very attractive idea if you don't know the details and just give a vague sciencey description but add humans and power dynamics and it get really awful really fast.

[Reelya]

There are also a lot of non-linear things in genetics. e.g. the sickle cell genes in Africans. Some genes are bad only in some cases or some combinations. If a gene persists in the population it almost by definition can't be bad all the time.

For example, genes which convey benefits, but at a cost. e.g. you could have some gene that creates genius when combined with certain genes and quirks of development, but risks madness in other individuals. By wiping out the gene in people who got the "negative" consequence you also wipe out the gene's positive expressions. e.g. eugenics might breed things to the point that you have no more madmen, but no more Mozarts either: everyone with nice "safe" genomes without all those pesky outliers such as personality types, strengths and weaknesses.

The only time eugenics would be good is when you use it to enforce the spreading of a gene choice that's always better than the alternative. But, such genes don't need our help to spread, because that's how evolution already works.

Merely stopping some people from breeding has one effect, to reduce diversity in the gene pool.

[NJW2000]

I bet if people tried eugenics right now, they'd be breeding for muscles and height and completely neglect intelligence.

This could potentially be successful, unlike attempts to improve the intellectual or moral standards of society that historically eugenic programs have been involved in. Fairly pointless endeavour though: it would be better to make people smaller and wirier, conserving resources, if anything.

Of course, as always there's an easier option, which in this case involves feeding people more and better, and making them work out. I believe the height thing is already happening naturally in many well-developed countries.

[wierd]

You would have good reason to suspect that.

There are large pay gaps between "tall" and "short" people, which presents a significant reproductive advantage to the taller people-- at least in terms of the social hierarchy of human society. (There are caveats-- more successful people tend to have fewer children, due to better education. It needs investigation, but being suspicious is good.)

However, the foods people eat (and prefer to eat) is not based on "Sensible and good for you."  If so, people would munch down on high fiber leafy greens all the time.

Usually, the foods that are most popular lie at the intersection of "Inexpensive to produce/obtain" and "Has lots of calories, or salt."

Things like-- Bread.  Pasta. Potato chips. Candy. Soda. etc.

People LIKE these things, because in the not so distant past, high calorie yield foods were rare, and consuming them helped you put on fat, which helped you survive naturally occurring food shortages. (or because they contain substances that are uncommon in concentrated forms, like salt.)

People buy these more often than other foods because they are cheaper to produce (due to economies of scale and other factors, such as shelf life) than other foods.
The combination of "Tasty" + "Cheap" produces a routine diet that then becomes culturally reinforced.

Before you know it, you have the Supersize Me! generation.

Sure, Eugenics could help fix this by making high fat, high carb foods taste bad, causing people to preferentially reach for that fresh kale instead of that bag of chips... but that is not the kind of thing I would expect from a eugenics proponent.  Rather, I would expect them to introduce new variants that alter the way you put on weight--- and as such, make it so that people will starve to death if they dont binge on the calorie rich foods, due to defective fat storage genes. They would market this as "Your kids can eat whatever they want and will never be obese! Isn't that GREAT!?"

[Reelya]

Yeah I was actually thinking about something related recently. Fries and soda and other ultra-cheap calories get a bad rap because the people who eat them, usually poor people, are unhealthy. So we blame the fast food / fries / soda for that. However, when was this golden age when all the poor people had bellies full of healthy food? It didn't really exist. Things have progressed from subsistence level near-starvation to "eat unhealthy but cheap food". The existence of the cheap but unhealthy food therefore isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The backlash gets a bit silly e.g. the green groups who slammed Golden Rice, and said that instead of trying to develop low-cost foods with healthy nutrients, we should be feeding the world's poor on a steady diet of fresh fruit and leafy greens. That's first-world "let them eat cake" logic if there ever was any. A completely impractical "solution" which would devastate the environment - one of the reasons we don't just roll out fresh fruit and leafy greens for everyone is that they need a massive amount of land and water, resource usage, which is one of the reasons they're so expensive in the first place.

[Kagus]

Not to mention the massive waste rate when trying to distribute them anywhere other than where they were grown, or eat them at a time other than natural harvest.

There's a stigma against frozen vegetables too, but they can be better at maintaining nutrient content while reducing organic waste. But even beyond the stigma and the occasional texture issues, not everyone has a freezer to store it in, meaning you either thaw and eat it right after the store visit or you're back to wasting it again. And who wants to go to the store every day?

[Hanslanda]

Speaking of food, I propose we rename French toast to American toast. Reason?

You take a piece of bread, batter it with egg and milk, cook it, then put butter, syrup AND powdered sugar on it. Like how much fat, sugar, carbs, and cholesterol need to be in one food? Was the powdered sugar necessary?

"Alright we drenched the fatty bread monstrosity in liquefied sugar. What else does it need? Something is missing... Oh! I know! SUGAR!"

[George_Chickens]

It can't be American toast because it's not oily enough and nobody gets shot in the process of making it.

[Rolan7]

Heh, because French food is famously lean and healthy, right...

[Jopax]

Fairly sure french toast is just bread in egg batter and fried up on some butter/oil. What you put on it afterwards is entirely up to you.

[scriver]

Heh, because French food is famously lean and healthy, right...

* scriveur throws chocolate croissants and Rouland

[Kagus]

And also culturally influenced. Not everyone puts sugar on  'em.

And let's not forget that Canada came out with poutine, while Scotland's jiggling happily in the corner with their deep-fried mars bars, deep-fried butter and deep-fried deep-fried. America doesn't have a monopoly on American food, y'know.

[KittyTac]

I read that as: "And let's not forget that Canada came out with Putin".