Thank you. Seriously, and personally.
Autism does not equal being unable to achieve independence, among other things which are blatantly wrong with your statement.
. Worst case scenario it does.
There are a huge number of reasons for a child to fail to achieve independence as an adult (and, frankly, several different definitions of "independence"). Selective abortion -- and eugenics in general -- runs into a whole host of problems (both practical and ethical) if you allow for that sort of criteria.
Cochlear implants are voluntary. Lepers generally would prefer to not be so. Both are also ailments of the body rather than mental differences; your analogy is hollow.
Neither sort of program actually works, at least without very extreme measures which are impractical in real life.
Have you ever heard of sampling bias?
Yes still believe any advantage is outweighed by disadvantages of keeping this flaw around.
Naturally, given that you presuppose it a flaw.
Actually, it can work rather simply: pay people who have certain extreme, genetically-dominant conditions to let you sterilize them. Here is an article written by a man with osteogenesis imperfecta about how he supports eugenics to try to prevent people with his condition from breeding.
Again, that doesn't work. It prevents one person from having kids; it doesn't eliminate the condition from the gene pool.
No, it can't work. The problem is that you need:
No, it wouldn't work even then -- as I kinda illustrated in my post. About 60% of the cases of inheritable OI aren't inherited from the child's parents, so...
I'm trying to wrap my head around this idea that people would want their kids to be born with aspergers and not quite managing it. Not because it's something horrible that nobody would want mind you, I've just always been very "Eh, whatever" about being an aspie myself. I just don't really care one way or the other.
So, it can work, then - a eugenics program would decrease its prevalence by 40%. It might be a treatment rather than a cure, but that sounds like a success in my book.
... did you not read anything I wrote?
It's not that I think it's necessarily superior or anything, I'd just like to keep some of us around.
I read your post, and it was very informative, but you seem to be treating it as binary question i.e "can X condition be completely eliminated from the gene-pool yes or no?" and while the answer to that is obviously no it's not the question I was addressing, the question I was addressing is "can this program produce a significant reduction in the occurrence of X", and the point is that no, it can't.
No, it can't. There probably are genetic syndromes you could reduce the incidence of if you could make a eugenics program work...except you can't make those programs work.
Sure you can. Pay someone with a crippling, painful disease a hundred thousand dollars to let you sterilize them. The vast majority of them will say "Yes", and voila! You've reduced the prevalence of the disease in the next generation - every person sterilized is that many fewer people being born with the disease.
Well, it depends. Destroying humanity in its entirety would eliminate all genetic disorders permanently, and doomsday devices with modern and near-future technology are vaguely-plausible if incredibly expensive (foil shade, redirected asteroid(s), fluorocarbon supergreenhouse, extraordinarily-large salted nuclear weapon).
... wow, does this ever carry a shitton of assumptions.
No, I'm not. The point of a eugenics program -- as noted -- is to influence human evolutionary processes. The presence of conditions like OI isn't being driven by said processes, so a program targetted at them will do jack and shit to meaningfully influence human heredity.
It is literally the style of eugenics program that the guy in the article I linked was advocating.
Over the long term, they are, since you're reducing the population entirely to the number of individuals that suffered de novo mutations.
It's still probably cheaper than caring for a bone-shattering cripple for their entire lives.
How the heck are you going to defraud a program that requires you to be a midget in a wheelchair with bones that shatter like glass, and the twisted limbs that accompany that fact? Have you seen what an adult with Osteogenesis Imperfecta looks like? It's blatantly obvious by looking at them.
As noted, what you're describing isn't a eugenics program at all.
No. They're very much not.
Many people with OI go on to live productive and happy lives. Beyond this, you're not getting a one-sterilization, one-prevention ratio. The number needed to treat would likely be quite high, especially given that the people most likely to agree to the program would also be the ones least likely to reproduce without it.
Well, first off, I think it's rather "cute" that you somehow think that the predominant form of fraud such a program would face would be people pretending to have OI and getting sterilized to get that "sweet" $100k payout. To put this as politely as I can, I rather doubt that would be the case.
There are thought to be genetic contributions, but it's not the whole story.
Yes, it is. You're just being anal about the definition of "eugenics" which literally means "good breeding". If you're instituting a program designed to improve things by removing negative traits from the gene pool, you're using eugenics, whether that's aimed at the wholesale eradication of a trait or just the mitigation of it.
Okay, then answer me this: everyone who has the shatterbones cripple-midget genes no longer breeds. As a result, over time, the original population of the people with the gene dies out due to old age if nothing else, and which means that the only people who enter into that group are the ones who are born to it in the first generation - de novo mutations.
The "number needed to treat" is the ones that have the disease - it's genetically dominant, so everyone with the genes has the disease. There's no hidden recessive carriers.
To be frank, I fail to see any other forms of fraud that could be involved with it, unless you're talking about officials skimming off of the top, but that's a problem with any proposed government program, really.
So you target the obvious ones, then, with the worst quality-of-life (and thus the highest healthcare costs).
The population does not equal the gene pool. As noted, the program would and could have pretty much no notable effect on that.
Well, first off, it's inaccurate to refer to people with OI as having "shatterbones cripple-midget genes", as noted above. You're also assuming that every person with OI participates in the program, which I've repeatedly pointed out would not be the case.
No. The number needed to treat is the number of sterilizations you'd have to perform to prevent the birth of a single baby with OI.
You are apparently markedly naive. No, the people most likely to commit fraud here are doctors.
And those are the ones least amenable to being impacted by your program, not to mention the ones least likely to reproduce anyway. You can't pick and choose between attributes of the different types like that.
Except that it doesn't work that way, first most people would not accept, second you are assuming that you have a condition that is inherited, does not have a significant number of recessive carriers, and that you can locate and make the offer to people with the condition before they have children. I do not believe such a condition which could be described as a "crippling, painful disease" exists.
True. my point was about other conditions, such as Huntington's you mentioned or other conditions where a majority of the cases are inherited. Of course AFAIK all genetic disorders which could be affected by such programs also include a large number of A-symptomatic carriers, which is my point about such a program needing to be maintained for multiple generations.
You're serious? Off the top of my head: