Posts Tagged ‘eugenics’
Digitizing Human Memory: any Problems?
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 13, 2009
Digitizing Human Memory: any Problems? (February 11, 2009)
Do you know that a foundation in California called “Repository for Germinal Choice” had already generated over 200 babies by artificial insemination of “exceptional parents” in sciences, sports, and successful private entrepreneurial?
The mother recipient has to undergo test of intelligence and score high IQ. The billionaire Robert Graham had this lube of storing sperms of Nobel Laureates in order “to improve human intelligence by eugenics selection“.
The Nobel Laureates declined the temptation and the foundation went after second choices for successful and smart people in all fields.
Daniel Plotz published in 2005 “The Genius Factory: Unraveling the Mystery of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank“. Plotz managed to locate 15 out of the 200 “super intelligent” kids, but so far only one family agreed to come out publicly.
One of the new breed is Doron Blake with an IQ of 180 and born in 1982. This adolescent stated in a TV interview:
“Having a high IQ does not make me a good or a happy person. Being intelligent is not enough to define an individual. What kids need is not to be pressured by over motivated parents for solely education purposes. What I appreciate most in me is my capacity for loving others; I don’t think it is feasible to select genetically good and loving individual; nurturing is the key factor here.
On another front, it seems that researchers in cognition are attempting to transfer electrical impulses from human memory into digital signals.
This phase of the endeavor might be possible with the nanotechnology where microscopic elements are infused in the blood reaching specific sections of the brain.
The first problem would be what hard or soft storage technology would be appropriate to transfer that much information and at what speed.
The second difficulty is the hardest: Given that the headaches in the first stage are ironed out then how to interpret the stored data?
I have taken many courses in human memory and what I recall is that it is not reliable.
The critical problem would be the interpretation of the data.
I am inclined to believe that most of the research would not be geared to emulating human intelligence or its problem solving capability or how man transfer its information to the “dust bin” and then how he recovers the needed information to survive and go on living.
What the zealot researchers don’t know is how the data would “benefit” other objectives.
The providers of funds and decision makers surely have different agendas that researchers are not supposed to know at this stage.
One agenda is probably to transfer the memory of one person to another person or to a robot and test and evaluate and eliminate and improve and then scrap projects after sinking in billions of scarce resources.
State Laws on Eugenics (killing): premises (February, 8, 2009)
The West might have been familiar with the Greek manuscript “The Republic” of Plato since it staunchly decided that the genesis of civilization began with the Greeks of Athens. Plato said “Permitting random marriages constitute impiety in a happy City. We will legalize sane unions that are more advantageous to the aristocratic class. We want sane offspring of the elite men and women to render high quality services to the Republic”
Since time immemorial, and mostly during Patriarchal social structures, a female baby life depended on the father’s decision to survive birth. It is argued that this kind of Eugenics was due to lack of resources to feed useless mouths that have no physical capabilities to defend the tribe. That is the rational cause that sociologist and politicians want us to believe, but I strongly doubt that is the main and deeper reason for selective decision on life and death. Under harsh survival conditions, communities much prefer the association and communion with same sex: The same process was applicable during matriarchal institutions when girls were given preferential treatments. We hate to say the truth that genders in mankind, when resources are scarce, select the “undesired sex” for elimination.
Today, millions of female fetuses are aborted each year in China and India. Even after birth, Indian baby girls are left to die of famine and negligence. Minority ethnic groups in China are experiencing State Eugenics Laws since 1995; the Chinese genetic physician has simply to state that the expected baby of the minority parents is found to be physically or mentally handicapped to sterilize the parents; reactions are lukewarm; as they say “it is economics, stupid”.
Mothers in India are cutting stones with stones (no stronger equipment are offered to facilitate their tasks) sitting by the new highways (the babies huddled in a makeshift tent by the roadside), so that cars, and particularly the inexpensive cars that India is ready to flood its market with, would have luxurious infrastructure to drive on.
In the second half of the 19th century, the British scientist Galton, a cousin of Darwin, loathed the charity associations because they cared for the “degenerates” and thus were an obstacle for the normal functioning of “natural selection”. Darwin had stated a fact that “Among the savages sick people, physically or mentally, were quickly eliminated. Civilized nations build sanatorium for these handicapped citizens. In the breeding business of animals they comprehend perfectly the concept of natural selection”
Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize of medicine in 1912 for organ transplants, and who lived in New York, wrote in 1935 “A Euthanasia institution should use appropriate gas to dispose of assassins in an economical manner. We should not hesitate to organize modern societies around sane individuals.”
Politics have their own agenda to interpret statements delivered my famous scientists. The French author Rabelais in the 16th century said “Science without conscious is the ruin of the soul”. State Eugenics practices, in militaristic and dictatorial States, are rampant in this century. But what about eugenics practiced in civilized and democratic Sweden? Up to 1975, Sweden would not allocate family support for the disadvantaged unless the parents “voluntarily” agreed to be sterilized. Women who wanted permit to abort were asked to sign a form agreeing to be sterilized. The Swedish Alva Myrdal, Nobel Peace Prize of 1982, wrote in 1946 “Sterilization is necessary in order to avoid State aid encouraging births that harm the collective interest”
Modern DNA analysis of potential handicaps of the fetus offers parents preventive choices from a single drop of the mother’s blood. We should know that all these tests for intelligence IQ or SAT or psychological tests abounding in universities are basically eugenics instruments: They were proven to have no validity or power to forecast anything in people’s potentials and capability; still, they are used as a big business and misleading excuses to selecting students and hiring people in companies. In the US, a prisoner with IQ lower than 70 is not sent to death raw: He has to improve his score to be elligible to die!
You may read my article “Free-will Eugenics: Finally you have Choices” and https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/digitizing-human-memory-any-problems/
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