Richard Dawkins has posted an open reply to a letter from a Jew deceived by Expelled, who believed the propaganda movie’s absurd claims without any fact checking. I suggest you read Dawkins’ reply in full, of course, but the subject of this post is this part in particular:
Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin’s great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realize that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: “natural selection”, the “survival of the fittest”. Hitler didn’t apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler’s eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
This, in retrospect, is obvious, but I hadn’t seen it explained so succinctly and clearly before. Eugenics has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution! Animal (and even plant) breeders have known about selective breeding for millennia (indeed, I think it’s even mentioned in the Christian Bible), ages before Darwin or the concept of the evolution of species. Anyone who breeds dogs, horses, birds, etc. knows perfectly well that you can cross specimens with particular characteristics to achieve desired results (say, a new hair or plumage color, or a bigger or smaller animal, or one with other specific characteristics). This can be seen as artificial selection.
Darwin’s new idea was: what if something like this also happens in nature, without intervention? And what if that is how the species in the world today have came to be? In other words: evolution, by natural selection.
Eugenics (the attempt to “perfect” the human race according to one’s beliefs or preferences) has nothing to do with natural selection. It’s simply an attempt to apply the ages old selective breeding of animals to humans.
Of course, I’m not even considering blaming animal breeders from thousands of years ago for the Holocaust. That would simply be ridiculous. But blaming something completely unrelated (Darwinian evolution) for it is even more ridiculous. Eugenics is a disgusting distortion of selective breeding (which is itself blameless for eugenics); it’s completely unrelated to evolution / natural selection.
And, when you should know better than to say such an absurdity (as some filmmakers do), it’s also a dangerous, evil lie.
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Tags: artificial selection, eugenics, evolution, expelled, natural selection, richard-dawkins
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Yes – the agrarians of the past saw what selective breeding could achieve. As did the Spartans with their attempt to breed a warrior breed. Eugenics in the 19th and 20th century was spurred by a total misunderstanding of what Darwin posited.
I’m sure that the large majority of people who object to Evolution think that they are objecting to Galton’s and Hofstadter’s take on it.
Finally. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. Just because something may happen in nature, does not mean that we have to force it upon ourselves.
(PS – your blog often seems to translate spaces into multiple tabs – strange)
So could say that Hilter’s eugenics was a spin-off of Intelligent Design (granted Hitler is not really intelligent as God would be). But the theme seems to be that Hitler’s experiment didn’t happen naturally, rather is was ‘guided’ by another force. Designed.
I see the point that was missed, though. Evolution is survived of the fittest by natural causes. Eugenics is survival of the fittest by intentional intervention and design.
I fully believe that what Hitler did WAS Eugenics. And Darwinism is a direct link to this and other things. By eliminating a GOd and a creator, you really do eliminate the value of human life. If one belive that firstly, he was out on this earth by some cosmic accident, that his life is nothing more than to live and to die, and that after he does there is nothing left, no after life, what value does it have? So of course people are going to look at the “evolution” of people from mud or apes or whatever the case, and they are going to try to “perfect” it. If human life is NO more valuable that the life of an animal, which why would if be if we were once animals, and we have no soul, then what is the harm in picking and choosing and killing??
It has also led to other things, such as euthenasia and abortion. If life is as valuless as Darwinism suggests, then why not just kill of the ones who are “useless”?
What we need to realize is that Yes! We were created by an Intelligent Designer. Look at what trying to prove this wrong has done??? Resulted in the death of Millions of innocent people, people with a purpose in life.
yeh.. what she said..
Ashlea: reply here.
Ashlea, please read Matthew 7, Jesus says not to throw your pearls before swine, and that a bad tree will not yield good fruit, and should be chopped up and burned.
First off Darwin was a Eugenicist himself and attempted as Eugenics program with his own family, the only problem was that the gene pool that he was using was too small, otherwise it might have been of greater benefit.
I do not understand this negative attitude towards Eugenics. Good genes are the greatest gift that we can give future generations. Lets face it, we are not all equals, and most of the suffering of the human condition is the result of bad genes. Today we have the knowledge and the technology to really run a top flight Eugenics program, and the reason that God made us intelligent creatures was to use that intelligence to make the world a better place.
One needs to do no more than watch 5 minutes of Maury or Springer to understand that we are currently living in a dysgenic society which is producing idiots in far greater numbers than its producing brilliant and productive members of society. We know that intelligence is the most important factor determining an individuals success in an advanced society, and the society itself depends on a critical mass of intelligent people to keep is free and prosperous.
The more intelligent a society the more liberty can be afforded its citizens, while a dumber society is going to require more oversight and more rules. Currently, we are encouraging our brightest young ladies to pursue a career instead of a family, while we subsidize the dumbest piles of human trash to smoke dope and make as many babies as possible.
There is no longer natural selection in a civilization, and certainly natural selection would be far more brutal and inhumane than anything that man could ever dream up. Without civilization the world simply can not support the number of people that it does now, and the higher the average IQ of a society the better quality of life afforded its people.
If its immoral and unethical to allow people to starve to death then certainly its also immoral to allow people who otherwise would not survive without the benefits of society to reproduce and bring more unfit people who will never be anything but a burden on society into the world, right? What morality has serving the starving had on the people of Africa had, where they go from cycle of starvation to genocide to starvation, or perhaps just as ugly the people of Haiti who have become so over populated that they have destroyed the an Island that Columbus described as a paradise on Earth.
Many of the more primitive people of the world have low IQs and high birthrates far in excess of more evolved humans, and if blindly fed they too will soon become over populated and lack the societal intelligence to even feed themselves. Soon the burden of the stupid will over whelm all of society, and we will have to let them all starve or face mass extinction ourselves.
Providence has seen fit to provide us tools, which if used consistently over generations could greatly benefit all of mankind and greatly ease our the burden of caring for the children of the stupid. We have with in our power the ability to accurately measure IQ, we know how to tie a woman’s tubes, or give a man a vasectomy, and we also know how to collect excess ova from a brilliant woman and sperm from brilliant men, and fertilize eggs in a lab. Its possible to gift the stupid with intelligent children, or use their wombs to create a better species of man.
Who in their right mind could be against a Eugenics program? Who would want to pass on the weakness of their own character, should their character be weak and unhappy? How is it moral or ethical to pass on bad genes to the next generation?
In deed, I think that both Jesus and Darwin would agree that Eugenics is the only moral and ethical way to approach human reproduction. WW2 was a long time ago, and I might remind you all that Hitler’s genocide of the Jews had nothing to do with Eugenics, but rather the destruction of an enemy in his mind. His actual eugenic program was no different than the eugenics program co-current here in the US. As a result, the Germans now have an IQ 3 points higher than the European average, and that is the result 80 years after the short lived program began.
The only other option is to allow nature to run its course until the average IQ of Americans has fallen to the same level of savage nations, and we have a culture and society to match.
JohnnyB: You are a liar and a poor excuse for a human, let alone one who seems to profess some affinity with religious myths. I really don’t know where to start, but how about Darwin did not practice eugenics. Also, there is no such thing as a “more evolved” human. We are all eqaully evolved.
Nah – you are a despicable lying racist who is really not worth the effort of replying beyond the above. If there was any good that could come out of a human Eugenics program it would be to breed people like *you* out. Thinking people don’t want your sort.
Darwin certainly did practice Eugenics. You see Darwin kept kennels, what do you think dog breeding is but an exercise in Eugenics. We practice Eugenics with every species that we have found useful to mankind. All of the grains that we grow in our fields have been genetically modified over thousands of years to best fit our purpose. All of our domestic livestock is the product of Eugenics, certainly you do not think that ancient people started out with the variety that we currently enjoy do you? I’ve even heard that with some species of plants like corn, if we lost our domestic stock it would be impossible for it to even grow in the wild because it has become so genetically modified.
Nothing that I said was racist, but if you agree with natural selection then you should understand that different population groups have certainly acclimated to different environments in both the physical world and their own social societies. Consider the brutal life of a Roman, a civilization that we do not think of as being Eugenicists, but certain attributes in Rome would increase your potential of reproduction, while other attributes would get you killed, thus bringing your change for passing on your genes down to zero.
Every early civilization that developed, did so in an extreme climate requiring a high degree of organization, thus increasing the potential of passing on the genes of the more intelligent, while increasing the potential that idiots or barbarians would either be left to starve or killed, at the very least the unfortunate fool would have less opportunity to breed than an advisor to a king. There are plenty of examples in the Bible, or in the contemporary middle east of Big Men taking multiple wives. Certainly a big man had a higher potential of being intelligent than a little man, and its likely that Royal courts were seldom monogamous, thus greatly increasing the breeding potential of intelligent men.
Up until the last 30 years or so, female fertility was limited by nature, but with the innovation of in vitro fertilization a whole new potential of in the course of human evolution has made itself available, at the same time that our most intelligent young women began postponing child birth in favor of a career. Since its a known fact that intelligent is almost entirely a product of genetics, as well as many other behavioral traits, the loss of our most intelligent women from the breeding populations has been a great genetic loss for mankind, Just like the Holocaust was a great genetic loss, but now there is the potential to have smart women be able to spread their seed just like the wise men of ancient times, and by multiple father to insure the greatest amount of genetic diversity.
I mentioned earlier that the Holocaust was a great Genetic loss, and that is true, but not all genocides are great genetic losses for example Darfur or anyone of the countless genocides that regularly occur in Africa. This is because the Jewish people are the smartest people on Earth, and while composing a very small fraction of humanity they are way over represented in terms of human achievements. Losing blacks on the other hand is not much of a loss because blacks have never made a single contribution to mankind or civilization after they innovated the mud hut and the spear. Many people wrongly associate the Holocaust with Hitler’s Eugenic program for the mentally deficient, this has been used to condemn Eugenics in general, but is based on a wrong understand of history which always wants to paint Hitler as wrong about everything. In Hitler’s mind, the Jew’s were the enemy of the German people, and this belief was made up out of some idea of mysticism and occult conspiracies, which I do not fully understand, but none the less he was not killing the Jews because he thought that Jews were stupid people.
Another goofy thing that Hitler was doing was trying to breed people to conform to a physical standard, which might have made sense to him but I do not see how being a certain physical form would be of any benefit to society, so long as you are healthy and not prone to handicap due to physical defect. No the only things that really matters to society is intelligence, and an individual’s character to the extent that he or she is not a violent criminal, or rapist. Naturally Alcoholism, drug addiction and Mental Illness are undesirable, but difficult to screen for.
None the less, it is now possible to set up both a positive and negative Eugenics programs based solely on IQ, and not have to revert to that goofy none sense about blue eyes, blond hair, 6 feet tall, blah blah blah. Certainly it would be possible to breed on the basis of beauty, but breeding for beauty is already happening naturally as beautiful people have the most opportunities to breed. For better or Worse this would be nothing more than an exercise in futility, because beautiful people offer no greater benefit to society as anyone else, but the intelligent do.
If we were to selectively breed through an artificial in vitro program women with IQs over 120, only to men with IQs over 160 the resulting add mixture would be expected to have an average IQ of around 140, giving the mean unlimited career options and increasing the supply of high demand professionals like Doctors who would benefit the entire community while lowering health care costs through increased competition. Not to mention the occasional genius would would invent God knows what and improve the human condition beyond our current comprehension.
On the tail end of the Bell Curve, we could sterilize criminals and welfare queens who are currently breeding at a greatly disproportionate rate lowing the average IQ of the entire nation. The resulting offspring of these welfare queens are a drain on society and will increase the burden on society, draining our financial capital and making everyone’s lives worse.
Perhaps its this idea of negative Eugenics that Andrew finds to be racist, as he might be aware that Negros have much lower IQs than the general population. This is true, initially a greater percentage of Negros would be sterilized, but after a couple of generations of a good eugenics program negro offspring will be performing on par with their white and Asian counterparts, and the rest of society would no longer have to suffer negro crime and incompetence, which burdens the able members of the negro race through persistent stereotypes of the negro race which result from the fact that they are generally true.
In the case of positive Eugenics, the case is very different for the Jews and the Asians, as they tend to have much higher IQs in the case of the Jews to slightly higher IQs in the case of the Asians which would cause them to be selectively breed more frequently than the White majority. An IQ based Eugenics program would not give preference to any race, only to individuals who have superior IQs, the fact that superior IQs occur more frequently in some populations and less frequently in other is not racist but a result of natural selection gifted from the historic civilizations from which they came.
What would be racist is making exceptions for population groups on the basis of race instead of the basis of a standard measure, like IQ. If we were breeding for height, certainly we would not make an exception for the Japanese just because we like Japanese people, because they would be racist, not to mention it would make negate the breeding results and the average would become shorter not taller. The same would be true with adding a negro into a Eugenics program for intelligence, without merit, because the resulting add mixture would be dumber not smarter. Still, some Negros would fit the high IQ requirements and I’m certain that they would make fine specimens, although the majority of Negros would not.
Why are Negros less evolved than the rest of humanity, and is this racist to suggest such a thing? No! Its not at all racist but an observation of fact that makes sense given the social and geographic climate in which a negro lives. Negro’s were the first humans to evolve to be considered distinctively modern, however the negro retains the most features of primitive homo most distinctively a protruding upper jaw, a vestigial remnant of an animal past from an era when the mouth was an important tool for catching food rather than just sticking food in. The Negro has a smaller brain, not much bigger than the homo erectus that he replaced, and their skulls can be immediate distinguished by a rounded hole for the nose as opposed to a triangular opening for most other people. Further, the negro hips are at a shallower angle decreasing the curvature of the lumbar, giving him a straighter back, more like a chimp or a gorilla. His arms are longer in proportion to his height, the ratio between his humerus and ulna, and femur and tibial are closer to great apes than other humans are, so there is plenty of physical evidence to suggest that the negro is the least evolved in terms of divergence from apes.
The Negro as I have mentioned is adapted to living in a climate in wild tropical Africa, where his social environment was very different was well. Unlike people who evolved in civilized Kingdoms where the most intelligent elite would have the most opportunities at reproduction, in Africa food was abundant so an organized society and abstract thought were unimportant for his survival. Then as now, the black African increased his breeding potential through violence and rape in men, and a high fertility rate in women. The women who could have the most children, had the greatest advantage of having her off spring survive into adulthood, and the men who were the best warriors and rapists had the best chances of creating offspring and defending them from other tribes. Its for these evolutionary reasons that the negro is less intelligent and more prone to rape, murder and theft while displaying a heightened sex drive and excessive fertility compared to civilized people. While some people might say that this analysis is racist, it does bear itself out to statistical facts concerning both IQ and crime rates compared to the general population.
At some point in the past, Caucasian people broke off from this evolutionary branch, and might be the result of an admixture of other extinct bipedal apes such as sub species of homo erectus, homo neanderthalis, or Cro Magnon, or he might simple be an evolution from the negro race. Its speculated that Asians split off from Caucasians about 40,000 years ago and became a distinct race. Both Asians and Caucasians had to develop civilizations for their survival which required higher degrees of organization and placed intelligence at a greater premium for survival, happily out of lust the most successful members of the society kept the most wives spreading the most intelligent genes to as many women as possible. American Indians separated from Asians, and had interjections of Asian and Caucasian admixtures throughout their history. While most American Indians existed as hunter gatherers, the harshness of the climate and the fact of seasonal variations required them to make better use of intelligence compared to Negros, and as a result of their earlier evolution retained intelligence in their genes, as they made their trip from Alaska to South America, where they developed civilizations nearly as advanced as those found in Europe and Asia, despite their tropical climate and earlier tribal existence.
If the future of the World is going to be a civilized one, the negro is ill adapted to the task, and offers no comparative benefit to mankind in a World where mankind has the ability to control disease through medicine and climate through air conditioning. By reducing the natural pressures on the negro, through the benefits of civilization, the excess fertility rate of the negro will cause them to reproduce much faster than civilized people, lower the Global Average IQ and creating a great deal of human suffering if past performance is any indication of future results. The obvious solution to the negro problem is to use that excess fertility rate to promote the next evolutionary leap for the entire species, instead of allowing his there fertility rate to overwhelm civilization to the point where it is either destroyed, or forced to commit a genocide.
I am more than a bit perplexed by your opposition to the idea of Eugenics, as the current state of Dysgenics in the our Welfare State World, will certainly result in the greatest human suffering over the long run and the eventual destruction of civilization itself. Mind you that the point of a positive Eugenics program is not to create people “like me”, but to maximize the genes responsible for genius more common as it is the people of great genius who afford the average their lifestyle and truly improve the human condition, as well as increasing the frequency of the more common highly intelligent who organize our society and without whom society would not work at all, and we would all fall into a state of anarchy, as well as decreasing the frequency of the criminal and the bum who contribute nothing from society and only take. By doing this the over all quality of life for everyone in between will be very much improved.
I encourage you to not be so vain in your remedial ideology to presuppose that its truth is universal and applicable to all men without exception. Overlooking the scientific facts on which I base my opinion, is already causing greater human misery, as a result of wrong minded altruism and egalitarian ideals, than if no charity had been offered, and the full brutality of natural selection was realized before the current crop of starving Africans was ever born. Perhaps you misplace your faith in democracy and the belief that all men were created equals, but I might remind that Jefferson was man of great contradiction despite his obvious genius, and the same man who the Declaration of Independence, was at the same time an ardent abolitionist and a slave holder, and while he wrote that “all men were created equals,” in other writings he stated that he believed that a “natural hierarchy exists amongst men.”
None-the-less our highest liberal ideals and finest technological achievements turn to into despotism and useless junk when left the the Africans absent of civilized leadership in both the greatest cities of our own continent and the pre-built civilizations handed to them in Africa. Nothing ever matters, because all ends the same, and its entirely the result of the African mind, nothing more.
You may not like my opinion, but if that is so, then you are obviously not a thinking person but rather an ideologue unwilling to alter your preconceived notion of truth to fit relevant facts when they are hard and sad. I assure you if I had any choice in the matter, we would already live in a perfect world of equals, but living the lie of equality will do no good and only create harm and discontent. Courage is always accepting the truth, however unpleasant and dealing with it. Honor is dealing with the truth in the most fair and beneficial way to all. Being politically correct is both a supreme act of cowardice and a malice act of dishonor, and if what I have written here offends you, I could not careless.
When you so dilute a word such as Eugenics through application to any selective breeding activity it becomes worthless. By your measure, anyone who has ever plucked a weed from their garden is a Eugenicist. And there could be an argument for that except for the fact that eugenics has come to mean a specific thing. Selective breeding of humans by an authoritarian guide. You stated quite explicitly that Darwin practiced eugenics on his family, and I called you a liar, because that is what you did.
Negros are *not* less evolved. They do *not* have smaller brains. Any features you mention are purely external characteristics. We have mingled genes for 10’s of 1000’s of years and are one species. What you talk about is a socialtal manifestation only. Some people are give more opportunity than others, and hence at the moment, Caucasians have a shot at better education, health-care and career.
You talk about Africans not having a civilisation, except one handed to them by imperialist colonisers. Do I have to remind you that the Egyptians and Nubidians had a very high civilisation long before being “saved” by the English. What about in Asia-Minor? The birthplace of civilisation (Mespotamia etc). What about the Chinese? Nah – we caucasians are just upstarts. Try reading Jared Diamonds ‘Guns Germs and Steel’ to get an idea of how this came to be. It certainly has nothing to do with intelligence differentials. .
Finally, even if I accepted your nonsence, and agreed that a forced breeding programme was a good thing, we can’t do it. One, we do not yet know enough about how certain genes are expressed phenotypically (or even what is responsible for increased intelligence). Secondly, short of forcibly sterilising everyone globally at birth and then invitro-fertilising those deemed breedworthy stock, you could never achieve the type of control you are after.
In short I think you are full of it, and I do not wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Johnny I respect what you are saying. However, there are a few problems.
1) IQ tests are not near perfect, and only test intelligence in one way.
2) Environmental factors are very important, not just genetic. Blacks and such may be at an IQ disadvantage due to environmental factors and not their innate genetic material.
3) Human rights are important. There are ethical consideration to consider before you can tell people who to breed with, if they can breed at all. Even if all your other ideas worked, the ends might not justify the means
Those are a few problems I see off the top of my head.
Ross,
Thank you for your balanced critique of my post, and I understand your misgivings, but please allow me to respond.
1. No IQ tests are not perfect, aside from weather, I have never seen anything that is perfect and cannot be improved. IQ testing studings have found remarkable correlations in economics and criminal behavior, as well as parenting skills. It should be considered that all of society is effected by the average IQ of that society, and since the intelligence of an individual effects society as a whole, and the fact that IQ is largely an heriditary trait then its entirely plausible that reproduction and Eugenics are a function of civics.
2. It is true that environment does effect IQ, but environmental effects of IQ are almost entirely limited to nutrition. Just like nutrition and exercise alone is not going to gift everyone with equal atheletic abilities, a good diet and education are not going to gift everyone with equal intelligence. This has been seen in cases of adopted children as well as siblings with different IQs who were brought up in identical environments. In large measure the environmentalist argument in this debate has been throughly debunked.
3. Human Rights are important, but reproduction itself should not be considered a universal or natural right because no human can reproduce on their own, and the offspring are largely a responsiblity of society which funds at least its education, and in the event that it is criminal or possessing an abnormally low IQ, then society must provide for either the incarceration or the welfare of the child, and under all circumstances must provide for the child’s education. Reproduction is a civic responsiblity, which might need to be curtailed depending on the circumstances. No one should be forced to have children, and no one should be told with whom they must mate, but even today we limit who people are legally allowed to mate with. I do not know of a single state which has not outlawed incest by a first degree relative, and certainly this has a Eugenic effect.
Then we have the issue of the technological advances that have never existed before in history, and no historical debate on its ethics can be referenced. Certainly, its the premise of the current environmental debate, that we should leave our children the world in a better state than we found it. It’s our intention to use our science and technology to improve the world for the future, and I personally find it very easy to equate a quality Eugenics program with a quality environmental program. What greater gift can we give the future other than good health and high intelligence so that they can better themselves and this World. Why not, for those willing, provide a program through positive Eugenics to insure that the best and brightest amongst us have the greatest possiblity at reproduction? Certainly, the world in which we exist today would not be possible without highly intelligent people working as doctors, scientitists and engineers and various other good and useful professions which are beyond the ken of the common man. Maximizing the number of these people should increase their supply, which in theory should reduce the demand and the expense of hiring well qualified people. By collecting sperm from the most gifted men, and ova from the healthiest of the top 2-3% of women we could created millions of gifted people, who could spread their natural intelligence into the herd. This plan alone is not unethical, because no one is forced to do anything against their will, and society as a whole benefits, it could become unethical over future generations, only if the same techniques that we use on our pure breed animals, becomes common place in humans, ie. crossing cousins and other closely related offsprings to bring out a specific trait, but only then if it results in unhealthy children. None the less, given that it will take at least 40 years for cousins to be spawned, this is an ethical debate for future generations to be having.
None the less Ross, I do appreciate you fair criticism and want to let you know that I have considered both sides of the debate, and can honestly find no logical case against Eugenics. The only case against Eugenics is a political and an emotional, which is why I find it so frustrating to find so many articles and mainstream public oppinion pretending as though Eugenics has somehow been discredited. After observing all of the suffering in the World caused entirely by human stupidity and lack of intelligent leadership it seems most cruel to me to not be practicing Eugenics in some form or another.
JohnnyB. IQ tests are notoriously skewed by culture and language. There have been attempts to create on non-biased IQ test but these have been less than successful. If your only criteria for breeding rights is IQ, then there are major issues on the horizon (aside from my ethical concerns).
So you try to side-step this by saying that we could collect sperm from only the most gifted men and the healthiest women (why the different criteria by the way?) What is gifted exactly? Intelligence manifests itself in so many ways. There are those who can manipulate conceptual landscapes (e.g. mathematicians) and those who can build new things (e.g. engineers). There are so many other manifestations of intelligence that I can’t list them all here, but I would hope you get the idea. See, if I was a Eugenicist dictator, I would exclude *you* from reproductive rights because by my criteria you have not demonstrated intelligence of the type that I value. And for all I know, you may get Parkinsons at a later age. Plus I don’t like the way your fathers ears jut out. Who is going to decide? Look at dog breeding. How many varieties do we have? 1000? Each variety has been carefully selected for by people with different ideals of a perfect companion animal. How would a similar exercise even work with humans?
Furthermore, when do you decide that someone is gifted? When they are 5 years old, or when they are 30? How about healthy? Many diseases only arise later in life (post natural breeding period). Are you proposing genetic filtering and raising those children in some sort of creche that controls their learning environment?