Darwinian baby making

Hi folks,

I was thinking about life and the future and everything (as you do when you are procrastinating on a case study due TOMORROW!!) and a thought struck me.

Like the majority of girls around the world I want to have children one day. I want them to be healthy and strong, and I want to give them the fullest life possible, staring out on the strongest foot physically.

But I had a think about my family's history of genetic diseases, and my boyfriend's as well. And it got me thinking.

My family has always had a bit of a Darwinian approach when it came to health; if you have a genetic disease, you really shouldn't have any children, or if you already do, then don't have any more. To put it a certain way, there was a sigh of relief when my aunt, who had leukaemia, didn't leave behind any children when she wanted them, who would end up not having a mother.

So I have a few questions to ask you lot, but I might split them them depending how this thread lives and dies.

The first one is, how do you find out if your child is healthy? Or is going to be healthy? Are there any tests you can do now to check your child's medical history? I heard that you can even 'design your own baby' so that your child is guarenteed to have no... side effects :/

The second one is, what would YOU do if you found out you had a genetic disease? Would you go all Darwinian on your unborn child?

The third one would be all the other options you can do. LIke adoption. Or designer babies. Or other possibilities not yet.... concieved :/

I'll think of other questions later.

I really shouldn't be thinking of this right now, but hey, if I can plan it, I will.

Back to the case study!

 

Mate with somebody of a completely different racial background.

 

Would you give me a custom avatar if I mated with her? Because I'd totally be willing to take one for the team.

 

Perfect genetics in parents are no way to judge what genes are passed on to your children. Men can fire upwards of 200 million sperm cells at the moment of ejaculation, and you have no way of choosing which egg will be selected for the impending cellular mitosis. If you want to be super-anal about your super-baby, go ahead and select which genes you want. What you need to remember is that our society is far from Darwinian. We keep our sick alive for as long as possible, we nurture those who can't fend for themselves, and they're allowed to breed. If you truly want to ensure the health of a child, then let inferior genetic codes die off! It's what nature intended, but I don't think it'll happen any time soon.
What would you say to someone who is not predisposed to hereditary illness, but has it anyway? Would you risk having a child with that person, or leave them for fear of having the same vulnerability appear in the child?

Now, I'll answer some questions.
You find out if your child is healthy by getting regular ultrasound examinations done while you're pregnant. It's that simple. To find out if your child is going to be healthy, you do the same thing, or if you're really concerned, you look into family histories (as you've done) and see how predominant the risk of disease is, and then you can possibly ask a geneticist what the chances are of certain diseases developing in your child, should you decide to conceive. The only sure way to determine a healthy child is to select the best possible egg from your ovary and match it up with the best possible sperm you can find in a partner's ejaculate. However, mutations are all part of evolution. Even with those "perfect" genes, how do you know the baby will be perfect?

If I had a disease that I was seriously worried about passing on to my children, I'd not have children. I have diabetes, but I'm the first in my family to have it. Ever. I am the family's progenitor of diabetes mellitus. However, I found out that the reason I have diabetes is because my mom and dad were given various types of vaccinations as children, and these vaccinations can really fuck up the genes you pass to your kids. The first thing I'll do when looking for that special someone is see if they have diabetes or a risk of diabetes*. Then I'll ask a doctor how high the chances are that my kids will develop diabetes or be born with it, if I ever get that close to the person. If it really ends up being an issue, I'll have my best soldiers harvested and try an artificial route.
However, I don't think I'd sacrifice a baby for the sake of superior genes. If the kid is already developing, has no chance of harming the mother or killing her, I wouldn't tell her to shut the project down because something wasn't quite right. I'd be as supportive as I could be, even if that means agreeing with her that the kid can't be.

I would not adopt a child. It's not a matter of charity, or pity, or anything like that. I just don't want to adopt a kid. Designer babies? No. It's sick. It's what Hitler was trying when he was still alive and in power, to design the penultimate human through selective breeding. True, it involves fewer microscopes and essentially no infinitesimally small glass needles, but it's the same idea. But, hey, if you want to give birth to Captain America, go ahead. It won't be my ass when he realizes just how superior he is.
Other options? Pets. Hobbies. Robots. Or, perhaps you could try for immaculate conception. Sure, it's not technically happened for about 2008 years (if then), but here's to hoping!

*Basically, I take the girl out to dinner. The food comes out, I say, "Oh, crap! I forgot to check it." She asks what I forgot to check, I say I didn't check my bloodsugar, and proceed to bleed myself under the table onto a test strip. Or go into the bathroom, or whatever.
"Sorry about that, but I've got to stay on top of my diabetes."
She'll then either say, "OH, one of my relatives has it," or say she has it (it's a first date, so I wouldn't know unless I saw her head into the bathroom and come out 30 seconds later, or check herself at the table), or she'll ask me about the disease. It's that simple.

 

I have to say, that was pretty convincing. I read this thread earlier and I was going to post something, but now I really don't have that much to add.

Gross makes a good point about selection criteria. I'd add that we don't live in a society where physical fitness is the most important part of a person. It's not the most important thing we value (especially in America...) All diseases haven't simply sprung up recently, but most have been around for thousands of years. Diseases are also on the rise in general, whether we know why or not. And, we're also probably detecting diseases more, when they might have been noticed before the beginning of the previous century. I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have ADD, or allergies, or more serious diseases like diabetes or a family history of cancer. I don't want to trivialize whatever genetic diseases are in your family, though.

Even if you could know and interpret your kid's genome, or even your own and your boyfriend's genome, it still wouldn't tell you who your kid would be. I'm not going to say that hardship builds character (even though it's true) because I don't think you should have an unhealthy kid by choice, and I don't know what hereditary diseases are in your family. All other things being equal, this is important, but we can't correct for other factors anyway.

I would probably adopt. I probably won't, but if I ever have a hard time having a kid, it won't be too difficult to make up my mind to do it. Hopefully not any time soon, though.

 

Not trying to derail this into another Right vs. Left argument, but I personally believe that diseased people have the same right to life and procreation as everyone else. While their children may have a higher chance of developing certain diseases, the fact of the matter is that all of us will at some point have health problems. How we let them affect our own happiness in life is up to us. Having a debilitating disease does not necessarily mean you have a bad life. Concordantly, having a child who has a debilitating disease does not necessarily mean you have a bad life. By and large, parents will love their children regardless of what they do, what they become, or how healthy they are, and children are always going to be a blessing and a burden regardless of how they turn out.

 

I was going all anal about it because my grandmother has this superstition about living in sin and deformed babies....

I already understand that it is the hardships that make a person, but the diseases I'm talking about are actually quite debilitating and would not see you past your 18th birthday. There are slimmer and slimmer chances as each generation goes by without prevailance of the disease, but there's a chance my boyfriend will develop it much, much later in life.

He is quite the genetic opposite to me (socially too) so there's a decent chance of healthy genes. I'm probably worrying about nothing.

I'm just tired of watching people suffer, especially those that are close to me. I'm not sure how much more hardship I can handle, or how much longer I'm going to have to be the carer. Not that I'm actually caring for someone, but I have to be extra careful about what I cook, what I bring into the home, what I know and repeat about other people, when I can see them because they've got this and that, what kind of events I can organise because they might not feel up to it, etc etc etc....

And my family being particularly Darwinian when it came to babies. My father especially was extremely worried about my brother and I, about any potential diseases. And now that my aunt had leukaemia, and since he was the cure (and the doctors were trialling a new cure without telling my father) he might come down with it too. The upside, according to him, was that he already had his children, and they're all grown up now, before this potential cancer can throw our lives out of whack.

...And I just want to have one less worry in my life. Having children would already spike my stress levels

This subject sort of came up when I tried to put myself in the parent's shoes, parents of children who cannot even feed themselves. Some parents actually give the children hormones etc to stunt their growth so that it would be easier for them to take care of them. It would be a tough decision from any parent's point of view, but I wonder if it is as moral as aborting the baby in the first place.

 

Depends on your beliefs about abortion. Personally, I'm anti-babykilling.

 

My father's point of view is that there is very little point in trying to raise a child who wouldn't be able to experience the fullest possible life, if they couldn't in any possible way. Would making them live be the same as letting them die?

 

Absolutely not. Better to have lived a rough life than never to have lived at all. When a child is in the womb, only God knows just what kind of life it will live. If you kill a child before it is born, it has exactly zero chance of living a happy life.

If you're saying that it wouldn't be worth the trouble for the parents, I think that's a pretty selfish notion.

 

In a world that is crowded by 7 billion homo sapiens, a world struggling with major pollution issues and poverty, a world obsessed with economic growth, bling bling and sex sex sex, one needs to be a humongous sadist (not to mention 'imbecile') to give birth to another hungry mouth.
But hey: go right ahead. I've seen people, intellectualy superior to me, make the same mistake everyone else does (i.e. make babies), and they were not bludgeoned for it, so it's totally okay and socially accepted to breed breed breed in a world that is already incapable to feed the 7 billion hungry mouths that inhabit it.
And hey: who knows, maybe your offspring will change the course of history and solve all the problems and riddles we are troubled with nowadays. That's what all my pregnant friends and so on always tell me: their kid will be special, it's intelligent as hell already, pissing and shitting in its pants, painting the room with it's food, that kid will one day save the earth.

:roll:

Don't let a genetic problem stop you. Breed! And if you happen to have a mongoloid for offspring, remember that mongoloids are among the most optimistic people the earth has ever seen, always laughing their heads off and drooling like lab rats and bicycling the same street for hours on end - it's wonderful. It's life. In all it beauty. Go for it.

:roll:

And when your kid is 16, buy it a car. I'm sure they'll be running on water instead of gasoline by then. I'm not kidding. I've seen it before: cars that run on water. Remember the tsunami that hit Thailand and Malaysia and Indonesia and even Africa a couple of years ago? Cars sure were running on water then, weren't they?

:roll:

They should put something in the water that prevents retards from breeding. I can already hear the whispered voices of future generations in my head: "Stop it, please..." "Why are you ruining this sad, lonely planet for us?" " and so on. I had it checked: it's not schizofrenia. It's a thing called 'conscience'. You should look for it some day, it's usually situated between 'guilt' and 'sorrow'.

:roll:

Yeah... Kids are heaps of fun.

 

The world is not overpopulated, the population is over-concentrated. This planet has the capacity to support a staggering number of people, but most people would rather live in cities than spread out and grow their own food.

And floyd, is your consience also telling you to start systematically eliminating certain 'inferior' members of society so that a master race will emerge and pave the way to utopia?

 

No, no, no: the world is overpopulated. But yes: the population is over-concentrated as well. Seeing that only 10% of the Earth's surface is actually suitable to support humanoid life, this over-concentration should come as no suprise.

The idea that Earth has the capacity to feed more than the 7 billion fools that dwell on it is completely outrun, though. That's an idea that was pretty hip and optimistic and hopeful (and what have you) during the nineties of the past century, but today it is deemed to be incorrect - to say the least. Professors from the nineties were very eager to tell everyone who wanted to hear it, that the Earth could feed up to 12 (sometimes 15) billion people if we were just willing to re-think distribution and production of food, but I'm sorry to burst your bubble: the Earth can not sustain such an overdose of fools.

If you want three meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) with an appropriate amount of energy, amino-acids, vitamins, proteins and what have you, so pretty much what Westerners can (if they want to) get on their plates each and every day, the world is capable of supporting less than a billion humans. If you want to give them 1,5 litres of water to drink each and every day, you can already halve that figure. And if you want to give the world's population easy and thus affordable access to the luxuries of the West, you'll have to be satisfied with somewhere along the lines of 250 million people.

There is absolutely nothing to say about the inefficiency of food distribution today:we drink Brazilian coffee, eat kiwis, drink spring water from some unknown mountain range in some Scandinavian country and eat noodles that were manufactured in Hong Kong. Food distribution is not the problem. Bling bling is.

If you were to give a patch of land to each and every of those 7 billion fools that roam the Earth, you would need an extra planet Earth, seeing that it is impossible to grow crops on the hills of, for instance, the Himalaya or the bottom of the ocean. I know they do it in Russia, but have you seen how big that thing is (i.e. Russia)? Try doing that in Belgium (11 million fools packed together like sardines in a tin can) or France.

Now that we are into biofuels, the problems become more clear: immediate food shortages in third world countries because we want to keep driving our cars and polluting the environment. One does not know whether to laugh or cry when one hears such news reports.

The reason why I'm so pessimistic about fools breeding new fools is because we are at a point in history where we can see it all come tumbling down and we are doing jack-shit to stop it from happening. So yeah: let's put some more retards on this planet so they can clean up our mess once we are gone.

I am pretty sure that the end is near for pretty much all of us. Sure: it'll take another ten years or so before the shit really hits the fan, but all those tornados and tsunamis and all this poverty and hunger in the world, they are not warnings. The Earth does not give out warnings. The Earth doesn't give a shit about the 7 billion fools that inhabit it. And rightfully so, I might add. What we think are warnings (ice caps melting, deserts growing, floods and so on), they are really the first steps that the Earth is taking before running the marathon that is coming our way. To quote William Shakespeare: "It is only going to get worse." The actual warings for what is bound to happen, are the writings of such fools as Thoreaux and Ford Madox Ford - people who weren't taken serious in their own time and who aren't taken serious now. Introverted prophets who were a welcome addition to the newest literary salon in town, but who were ridiculed for their beliefs once they went home to write.

Ah man, what's the point in telling this anyway. Like any of you fools give a fuck. And rightfully so: contrary to what you may think, I do not want this world to survive what the Earth has in store for it. I want humanity to fail and perish. I want more tornados and more tsunamis and more poverty and more hunger. I don't even give a damn if these things strike me as well. I want a front row seat when my neighbourhood drowns and starves to death. It's what they deserve. And so do I. I am the first one to admit that I am just as big of a hypocrit as the next guy, even though I don't drive a car or eat meat. On a planetary scale my efforts mean shit. I want people to embrace the free market, I want governments to keep fooling the fools that want to be fooled, I want each and every company on the globe to tell me that what they do is durable and environmentally healthy even though we all know it's not. And I want people to breed breed breed. Why? 'Cause an apocalyps looks like crap when it only hits a couple of million people. We need drama, man. We need action and immersion. We need casualties. The more, the merrier. The more, the better the news reports will be.

As we all know already, the only master race on Earth are cockroaches. One day they will learn how to speak English and fuck us up real good.

:roll:

I'm no Hitler fan at all, if that is what you are saying.

 

I love when people don't realize how much recessive trash are there in their own genetic code that could wreak havoc even in the distance of several generations, but bitch about trivial things for which there are already cures, or at worst are inconvenient.

Besides, genetic health doesn't guarantee that the kid or the parents won't fuck up things with improper nurture, bad examples, bad habits, laziness, improper access to education (my-beer-is-more-important-than-the-school-equipment-of-the-kid types), unwillingness to study, or just plain stupidity. Or the environment: Africa, after all, with its high child mortality rate, doesn't exactly produce clever superhumans.

Are those people who were too fucktards to use protection, even if they knew a child would be ...inconvenient, really fit for parenting? Or even clever enough to realize they can give the baby to adoptive parents, and not prone to second thoughts like "Geee, how cute, let's keep it, even though we are fucktards and can't ensure a decent environment for it"?

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... The Darwin Awards

And I believe there is a countdown somewhere about the point of no return for the earth, if anyone can find it for me.

 

The internet at your finger's tip and you want somebody else to do your Googling? I like your style.




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