The program that I suggested would have the key elements of choice and
reward. No threat whatever - although of course, the economic cost and
possible damages that the state (if forced to provide care to
offspring), offspring (if competent) or court (if offspring are
incompetent) could claim from people who are so uncaring as to continue
to spread defective genes and condemn their children to uneccessary
suffering and shortened lives might act as an additional persuasion to
people to join the program. You do realise that the suggested plan would
potentially reduce health costs by over 70% if 80% of the population
participated in such a program. That is far less fascist, than "forcing"
children to be innoculated against smallpox? Yet the "forcing" of the
smallpox vaccine improved the quality of life for 100's of millions of
people. Do you believe that was wrong?
The benefit to people whose parents adopted such a plan would be
enormous. It would probably add an average of 20 years of healthy
productive life to people in countries that adopted it, while
practically guaranteeing a decline in births. Which would put any
country that did not adopt such a plan at an immense disadvantage.
Medicine and other fruits of scientific and technological development
have caused average lifespans to double in the last four centuries...
unfortunately, this has a cost associated with it. The same advances
have removed much of the cost penalty of genetically flawed material and
made it possible for defective genes to be propagated at far higher
levels than ever before. Hopefully the fruits of the Human Genome
Project will allow us to correct this tragic state of affairs.
TheHermit
>From WWWebster
Fascism, n: 1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or
regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above
the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government
headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social
regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or
dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality -- J.
W. Aldridge>
PS Please explain how you see the plan as fascist? Or were you just not
thinking? Or are you a Christian and believe, as your book of myths
claims that your gods do, that illness, pain and suffering are things
that should be encouraged and thus should not be cured?
P.P.S. I have tried to demonstrate how serious the problem is below.
Sorry for the lousy format, but it is the best I can do with ASCII...
In the following, assume that X is a healthy gamete and F is a faulty
one. Assume that F is recessive, i.e. it is not so faulty as to cause
death when a single F is received, but is fatal with an F from both
parents. Assume that each couple has all the permutations possible with
a normal distribution. This is not necessary, it doesn't change the
percentages, but this exhaustion by enumeration of the possibilities
will show that there is nothing up my sleeve :-)
Assume a couple with one healthy partner and one partner with the faulty
gene
Parent generation | XX x XF |
filial generation | xx xf fx xx |
So each child has a 2/4 chance of receiving F (i.e. 50% chance of being
a carrier of the faulty gene, 50% chance of being healthy). Prior to
modern medicine, the chances of this offspring surviving to breed were
low and problems were self correcting. Today these children are likely
to survive and may well breed with others having the same faulty
gametes.
If we assume that the faulty gamete is widely present in the population
based on the above distribution i.e. each child has the chance of
meeting a partner with the same distribution of the faulty gamete, lets
see what happens.
| 1 XX x XX |2 XX x XF |3 XX x FX |4 XX x XX |5 XF x XX |6 XF x XF |7 XF
x FX |8 XF x XX |9 FX x XX |10 FX x XF |11 FX x FX |12 FX x XX |13 XX x
XX |14 XX x XF |15 XX x FX |16 XX x XX |
|1 xx xx xx xx |2 xx xf xx fx |3 xf xx fx xx |4 xx xx xx xx |5 xx fx xx
xf |6 xx ff xf fx |7 xf fx ff xx |8 xx fx xf xx |9 fx xx xf xx |10 fx
xf xx ff |11 ff xx fx xf |12 fx xx xx xf |13 xx xx xx xx |14 xx xf xx fx
|15 xf xx fx xx |16 xx xx xx xx |
So now the offspring have a 4/64 chance of dying. A 24/64 chance of
being a carrier and a 36/64 chance of being born normally.
Today this situation is quite likely. And you can see how faulty
material can distribute extremely rapidly. And it is exactly this very
rapid distribution of faulty material through societies that implies
that we need to start working on the problem quite urgently as the
initial distribution phase of faulty material is fast, and remains fast
so long as the faulty gamete is present in only a small percentage of
the population.
It is only when we realize that for example, lung, cervical and breast
cancers, which are relatively modern diseases, are passed on in this way
that we realize exactly how disastrous this distribution really is in
terms of health care. And while lung cancer distribution is affected by
other factors, e.g. Radon and other environmental factors, it maps
extremely well to population genetic distributions. Breast and cervical
cancers are influenced by sexual and child bearing patterns but the
correlation with genetic groupings are inescapable. As are cardiac and
vascular diseases to say nothing of the "obvious" genetically determined
diseases such as sicle cell anemia. Or why your life insurance policy
will be weighted if you have family members who have died of cancer or
cardiovascular events...