this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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[–] gun@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

What you are describing is gene therapy, not eugenics. When eugenics was a thing, it was mostly voluntary in liberal countries. Propaganda was used to convince "inferior" people to sterilize themselves, including black people. How is that different than reinforcing the idea that "dysgenic" people are doing the right thing by not having kids?

My genes aren’t unique and my traits don’t need to be passed on

I never said they did. Some people will never have kids and that's fine. That's not the issue at hand with eugenics. Eugenics is treating people like chinchillas actually, animals that must be bred and selected for the best traits.

If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder...

That's the thing, you can't. Not synthetically at least. The current gene framework is a house of cards and it will be replaced by a better system of understanding. Look into Denis Noble's work. Also look into epigenetics. The genes you pass on to your children are not the genes you inherit from your parents, they change, and they are changed by your body in response to your environment for the better. No organism is doomed to the fate of inferior genes, they are naturally mutable. But perhaps your environment and lifestyle is not serving you well, and that may be your real problem.