"Paul E. Schoen" wrote in message
...

"diddy" none wrote in message
. ..
Ted Mittelstaedt spoke these words of wisdom in
:

[snip]
I am not completely inexperienced - as I was myself exactly the same way
with my own parents. And, while the majority of things that my parents
told me I did eventually discover were right, I also discovered that
many of the things that they tried teaching me when I was growing up
turned out to be utter bullshit.

Ted


Please get your children spayed and neutered!

You might be on the right track there. As I said before, animals
(including humans) are a combination of genetics and environment, and
Ted's comments on his own behavior indicate that those tendencies may have
been passed on to his children and they may well continue the legacy.
Perhaps with meticulous training and discipline, children with such
propensities might be well enough behaved, but otherwise will likely
become brats and monsters. I believe in eugenics, even though it might not
be PC. There are genetic factors that really should be culled from the
population. I would not go so far as to require sterilization, but I
really think it should be rewarded with a monetary grant.


You need to read Dune.

You might have been kidding. But I am serious, and people with
problematical genetic traits should be discouraged from procreating, and
instead be given incentives to adopt children who are being raised in bad
environments.


Setting aside the morality it just isn't that simple. The desirable traits
in
human beings are complex traits. Humanity wants it's Mozarts, it's
Einsteins,
it's Vanna Whites. There is no single gene that controls those traits, and
even when the right combination of genes are present the environmental
factors must be right for it also.

For example, take Eminem. He's one of the highest selling artists in the
business - but his best work took place during the late 90's early 00's
when at the time he was involved in a very bad personal relationship.
Well, time passed, he got rich, divorced and threw out the trailer trash
bitch he was married to, pulled his life together and concentrated on being
a good father to his kids - and as a result he hasn't produced any decent
music
in the last 5 years. It's a case of the correct genetic mix being present
but
the environment required by that mix to produce greatness only existed for
a short time.

The same thing happend with George Lucas. When he was young, and
single, we got a series of great films out of him, even getting rich didn't
change that. When he had kids and started raising them - work output
dropped into the toilet. Now the kids are grown and out of the house and
we got a spurt of work out of him that wasn't near the genius level of
his earlier work - followed by nothing. Once more, the genetic mix is
a constant - but the environment that produced genius-level work only
existed
for certain time period.

By contrast Mozart had the right genetic mix - but even though his
environment
radically changed thoughout his life, it didn't affect his output.

Look also at the children of Mozart and Lucas - nowhere near genius level
output from them. Same for children of many, many other spectacular people.

In short, there's really no way to breed out an undesirable trait in
a human and not also affect the kind of complex, desirable traits that
humanity wants.
Nor is there any way to breed for a complex, desirable trait and not
get some undesirable ones that come along as part of the package.
Eugenics only has meaning when you are talking about very
superficial traits. For example, if from this point on you could somehow
force all black people to have children with white mates, in a number of
centuries you probably could produce a population of humanity that was
all the same skin color - and racism would disappear as a result. But,
in a world without racisim, would we ever have a Martin Luther King? And
that is just one, very superficial trait.

The history of human advancement is really quite clear. Human advancement
only happens when there's a single person who starts agitating for change,
and
a group coalesces around that person and creates a cult of personality.
That
is how the Christian religion got started, for example - and once the Middle
Ages were over and the power of the Holy Roman Empire was broken,
Christianity started to become a very powerful force for change for the
good.
It was not athiests who were pushing Civil Rights or Womans Sufferage or
arguing against child labor or any of those movements. Stories like Erin
Brockavitch
are the norm for creating change in humanity. Those single change agent
people
are never very easy to live with on a daily basis - even Jesus annoyed the
****
out of the temple priests.

Even if you for example were willing to sacrifice most human advancement
to try and breed a population of "average" people who all got along with
each other, the world's population is so large that the genetic pot will
continue to be stirred by the random mutation due to cosmic rays. There
just isn't any such thing as genetic purity.

Ted