Smith, John Maynard 1965. Eugenics and Utopia. Daedalus 94(2): 487-505. [JSTOR]
There is no field of application of science to human affairs more calculated to arouse our prejudices than eugenics. I cannot hope to be free from these prejudices, but in this essay I will try to separate what we ought to do from what we can now do and from what we may in the future be able to do. These problems should be thought about because our ability to alter the future course of human evolution is likely to increase dramatically during the next hundred years. (Smith 1965: 487)
See Down syndrome in Iceland (and dozen other countries that perform prenatal screening).
At present, if we wish to eliminate an undesirable gene from a population, our only method of doing so is to reduce the breeding chances of those individuals carrying the gene; but now that we know something of the chemistry of heredity, it is possible to think of the direct alteration or transformation of particular genes. Today, this can be done only in micro-organisms, and then in only a very small proportion of the cells exposed to the transforming agent. But it will be surprising if direct gene transformation does not become possible in man and higher animals during the next hundred years. If so, it will increase by many orders of magnitude the speed and economy with which the genetic properties of populations can be changed. (Smith 1965: 488)
What is CRISPR?
In earlier discussions of eugenics, suggested measures of positive eugenics took the form of legislation designed to encourage particular classes of persons to have more children. Two examples of such [|] suggestions are increased family allowances for university teachers and a tax on children, the logic behind the latter suggestion being that only the rich would be able to afford children and that wealth is at least an approximate measure of genetic worth. (Smith 1965: 492-493)
Someone who teaches at a university thought up that one, for sure. And wealth being an approximate measure of genetic worth is disproved in the person of Donald Trump Jr.
But in recent years increasing attention has been paid to the possibility of artificial insemination. H. J. Muller and, more recently, Julian Huxley have suggested that we should try to persuade married women who have had one child by their husbands to have a second child by a donor of their choice. In view of the sources from which it emanates, if for no other reason, this suggestion merits careful examination. (Smith 1965: 493)
Just close your eyes and think of the genetic diversity of the population, dear.
I do not believe that a larger proportion of the world's population will ever adopt such a system, using either artificial or natural insemination, but this belief may only reveal my prejudices. But it does seem possible that a small racial or religious group might adopt such a practice. If such a group could maintain a fair degree of genetic isolation from the rest of the population and if the great majority of women in the group bore at least one child by a donor of high I.Q. (the argument, of course, will apply to any character), then after a century the mean I.Q. of the group might have risen by one standard deviation, or fifteen points. In other words, a group might arise with an average intelligence similar to that of a group of students selected for a university. This seems hardly sufficient to justify the establishment of a new religion. (Smith 1965: 494)
Is that how those ubermensch, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison came to be?
Second, if the husbands agreed - and the results if they did not would hardly be desirable - they would presumably be above average in humility and unselfishness. It is at least possible to argue that these qualities are more desirable socially than the qualities for which the donors would be chosen. (Smith 1965: 496)
Almost synonymous with Stapledon's desirable qualities (the Jesus and Socrates ones).
Olaf Stapledon, in his book Last and and First Men, imagined the use of biological engineering to produce super-intelligences. Human neural tissue was permitted to grow and ramify through the corridors of a building and was supplied with sensory information and a motor output. In Sirius the same author imagined a dog whose intelligence, by surgical and other means, had been made equal to that of a man. These feats are not at present technically possible, but there is no reason that it should not eventually be possible to bring about a dramatic increase in the size of certain parts of a human or animal brain by influencing development. It is, of course, by no means certain that such a simple procedure would lead to an equivalent increase in intelligence; it might equally well lead to idiocy. (Smith 1965: 501)
Stapledon was weirdly fascinated by the possibility of producing superintelligence. (Just as he was with flight. I wonder if there's a connection even between these two fascinations.)
On balance, it seems quite likely that within a hundred years or so it will be technically feasible to do the kinds of things imagined in Stapledon's books. But even if it is, it is not clear what the consequences would be. [.|.] One way of putting the problem is this: What questions could be asked or answered by a "super-intelligence" composed of neurons which could not be asked and answered by teams of investigators given time and the assistance of computers? It is quite possible that the answer to this question is "none." But I suspect that if our species survives, someone will try it and see. (Smith 1965: 501-502)
A pretty significant if, considering the looming collapse.
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