No I’m not a fascist (at least I hope not…)
I’m trying to understand why we’ve normalised the idea of eugenics in dogs (e.g. golden retrievers are friendly and smart, chihuahas are aggressive, etc.)¹ but find the idea of racial classification in humans abhorrent.
I can sort of see it from the idea that Nurture (culture and upbringing) would have a greater effect on a human’s characteristics than Nature would.
At the same time, my family tree has many twins and I’ve noticed that the identical ones have similar outcomes in life, whereas the fraternal ones (even the ones that look very similar) don’t really (N=3).
Maybe dog culture is not a thing, and that’s why people are happy to make these sweeping generalizations on dog characterics?
I’m lost a little
1: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/df/74/f7/df74f716c3a70f59aeb468152e4be927.png
You’re confusing genetics with eugenics.
Genetics is heritable traits and no one finds that objectionable. Eugenics is asserting that certain heritable traits are superior to others, and selectively breeding people, killing or sterilizing them to control the propagation of traits.
Eugenics is Hitler and sterilizing native American women. Genetics is having the same color eyes as your father.
We don’t like eugenics because it treats people like animals.
There’s an argument to be made that we went a little far treating animals like animals when we aggressively bread them for appearance to the detriment of health.
And, for a small note: “race” is not a stand in for genetics. Race is a social construct.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t genetic differences between people, or that what we call race isn’t genetic, but rather where we draw the lines between races has little to do with significant genetic differences. Two random Americans, one black one white, with long family histories in North America are more likely to be genetically similar despite a difference in skin coloration, especially compared to an eastern European and a central African.
Visible traits are a poor indicator of broad genetic traits.
So it’s less that racial classification is abhorrent, and more that it’s inaccurate, antiquated, and too intermingled with complex social and economic forces to be useful for the topic you were discussing.
For a dog example, a black lab (with dark skin) is more genetically similar to a yellow lab (with light skin) than a black pomeranian (with dark skin).
It’s also worth noting that much of the selective breeding applied to cats and dogs, is actually through the INBREEDING of parents and grandparents with children, and should be illegal. It’s frankly disgusting, and not much better than eugenics. We allow them to be inbred for visual traits we find cute, even though it causes a range of health issues that reduce their quality of life, and lifespan. Many pure breeds have 20-30% shorter average lifespans than mixed/mongrels.
Applying our own filtering to animals, and hence taking them away from the path of natural selection, produces horrific suffering.
If you think about it, by mapping “God” to “evolution by natural selection”, ie “the force that made our world”, it becomes apparent that “God is merciful” in that way.
Pugs for example are abominations, forced to live outside “God’s” kingdom, and hence living in hell.
You sound like a hate pastor when you say stuff like that.
Humans mostly pick their partners so it’s all selective breeding for us. Hell, arranged marriages are STILL a norm in some cultures.
Saying one path or the other is god’s plan is assuming you know what god’s plan even is.
Don’t cats and dogs freely mate with their kin, even in the wild?
Yes, but not very often at all, I believe most species have evolved to not mate with their relatives. Interbreeding causes significant problems if done for long enough.
The fun fact why inbreeding causes issues is because rare mutations which on their own are harmless and have a cosmologically small chance of ever being expressed as a trait. Inbreeding ups the chance of these mutations meeting up and actually getting to run their garbage code.
This is true. As far as I know there is no scientific basis for the set of race categories we use culturally.
As an aside, I normally abhor attempts to engineer language, but I really think we need to retire “black” and “white” as skin color descriptors. I’ve never met a human who didn’t have brown skin. There’s lighter and darker for sure but it’s a spectrum not a binary.
Have never met a person with black skin, nor white skin.
Black is the name African Americans gave to themselves. Black Power. Black Panthers.
Great. I think they should stop doing that along with the rest of us.
Crackers don’t get to tell black people anything, shit the fuck down.
It’s worth noting that eugenics doesn’t HAVE to be the crazy barbaric “murder the r-tards” kind of eugenics. Even doing something like selectively offering free contraceptives to poor people could be considered eugenics.
Hell, it’d still technically be eugenics to teach people not to breed if they have certain genetic diseases, even if it’s just a doctor going, “yea that’d be a bad idea. They have a very high chance of X disease.”
Yep, this one here. I disagree with others here that feel selective breeding of animals is objectively wrong. If I have a dog who was an especially wonderful pet, I might want to breed it with another that has a great disposition, and if I have one that was overtly aggressive, I might not want to breed it at all. That in itself isn’t bad.
But people shouldn’t get to decide which other people get to breed, or with who, as unfortunately was done by slave owners with their slaves. A person with a terrible generic disorder deciding not to have kids in order to prevent passing along those genes is very different from forcing two people to have sex and have children because they have traits that are useful to you.