On 12/07/2006, at 10:00 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Charlie Bell wrote:
Isn't the real danger of ending up with an unbalanced population,
making it difficult for a generation to find a mate, worth noting?
It's self-correcting - if there is an imbalance in gender one way,
it is selectively advantage drives the ratio back to near 50-50.
Unless there's a way to eliminate the need of one gender for
reproduction. If a large enough number of lesbians chose to
have girls by this method, the population could drift towards
the "Glory Season" equilibrium: a huge majority of lesbians
with a minority of males.
You can only maintain that disequilibrium through a serious
manipulation of the way diploid organisms breed. Eusociality is one
way, where kin relations make sisters more important than daughters
(haploid creatures like bees, wasps and ants have this bias built
in). Manipulation of the breeding patterns, as in Glory Season, is
another. But even in the scenario in which you describe, the
selective advantage would be towards women who have sons, and as
homosexuality isn't genetic (although it may have a genetic
component) straight daughters would also have selective advantage.
Plus I think it unlikely that it will ever be a common enough
procedure to risk affecting the overall gender ratios (especially
as I think unlikely that there'll be a significant bias in gender
chosen).
Don't be so sure about this. Having babies is a huge investment
in a human's lifetime, so spending lots of money to have the
baby of your dreams is the most likely scenario. Gattaca comes
to mind - with the risk of being banned from the List, for
mentioning _two_ sf stories, one by Himself.
Even if it does become a common procedure, the selective balance
prevails. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium models can be used to show how
this happens.
Is eugenics itself *inherently* a bad thing? I say not. But it's
definitely, like pharmacology, nuclear physics, and chemistry, able
to be corrupted to bad ends and misused.
Eugenics is evil when it's done by murder - but then it should
not be called Eugenics but simply Mass-Murder.
Therein lies the issue. Some among us regard discarding unimplanted
blastocysts as murder. I don't, and I'm guessing from your tone that
you don't either.
Charlie
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