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Eugenics

Matt Ridley's opinions that the practice of personal eugenics should not be discouraged and is not dangerous are correct. As Ridley states, personal eugenics is a private matter. Modern eugenics is about individuals applying private criteria to improve their own offspring by screening their genes.

Mothers can prevent a child from suffering by aborting fetuses that would be born with Down syndrome or inherited disorders. And, people who carry the Tay- Sachs mutation can avoid marrying each other through blood testing. The use of personal eugenics if for a cosmetic purpose is perhaps more controversial, but once again it's really the parent's decision. As Ridley points out, women can choose to abort their child if they want to, so why shouldn't they be allowed to have the kind of child that they want?

Eugenics' bad rap stems from societal genetics. Many of its advocates were socialists, who saw eugenics as a means to achieve state planning of reproduction. But, unfortunately, policies turned into a human-rights catastrophe: the rejection of many immigrants, the sterilization of many people whose only crime was to have below-average intelligence, and eventually, in Germany, the extermination of millions of people. Societal genetics are impossible to prevent because of the social norms and harsh governments that exist in many countries. Ridley appears to be too optimistic on this topic, stating that China is the only country that still preaches eugenics for the good of society. However, as population levels swell, poor and desperate countries could easily be inclined to turn to societal eugenics as a solution. Other countries can exert only so much influence on foreign governments and it's easy to imagine the unconstrained increase in societal eugenics, particularly as technology advances make it easier to implement.