Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

I'm thinking about how a secret society practicing classical positive eugenics in a low-tech world might function. The aim is to get something somewhat like the Bene Gesserit; an organization that uses normal breeding, that focuses on (in their view) producing superior specimens rather than eliminating inferior ones, whose methods involve results that may not be ideal for the people involved in their breeding program but aren't deliberately malicious and who, while capable of making mistakes, still approach their goal as rationally as they can rather than letting their methods be clouded by ideology. Significant differences would be that they don't need to be a single sex organization and that they are limiting themselves to normal breeding because of limited technology rather than religious beliefs.

Appearing as a religious organization to the outside world is probably a good idea. That gives a good excuse to keeping secrets about the organization that are revealed as people reach greater levels of initiation. It also helps with the funding situation through tithes, fees for priestly services or whatever depending on which is more common in the regions the organization has influence in. The rest of the funding could come from owned lands, selling high quality education, donations from those on the inside and investments. It would probably be useful to have a small sacred island that they can operate out of.

The inside organization might be led by adopted children who do not show promise as breeding members made eunuchs and educated in the importance of their mission and how to lead so that they owe the organization and can maintain neutrality in regards to other members and do not have a dynasty to consider. The rest of the organization would probably be composed of hereditary members, promising orphans and the occasional carefully selected member of the laity.

They have a dedication to understanding heredity and will try to amass a lot of records but the also have no understanding of anything like DNA perse which will make their job hard. I imagine that they will come up with a set of traits they aim to improve and which they at least attempt to test for which will probably get revised as they accumulate more data. Then they will try to improve each trait in parallel slowly raising the bar with each generation with any above average but below bar individuals or bloodlines that haven't shown improvement in a while bred with counterparts in the other trait breeding programs.

They will want access to as much genetic stock as possible. Measuring those on the outside won't be easy. Perhaps they can use a combination of their educational services for mental abilities, regular religious festivals for physical abilities and if nothing else very limited guesswork by members nearby. When a useful addition to the program is found they might be selected to join the organization, a member might use seduction, they might try to set up a generous arranged marriage or if a member is trusted they might try to play matchmaker with another useful addition to the program. Dabbling in politics might even be useful occasionally.

Any ideas or comments?

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The success of any such program is going to be heavily dependent on how it intersects with the open rules of the host society: political power, economics, inheritance, etc. Manipulating the lower classes (however defined) won't be hard in most hierarchical societies, but that presumes the ruling class sees some benefit in it for themselves. The ruling class itself will be difficult to manipulate unless the eugenicists are (say) arbiters of marriage or succession, or power passes primarily through non-hereditary means.

Examples from fiction (Bradley's Darkover novels and Stross' Corporate Wars series come to mind) usually focus on one specific, beneficial trait that confers a significant advantage to its inheritors: usually some form of psychic aptitude.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The real challenge here is that breeding programs need to do lots of breeding. Hard to keep that secret.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The organization has social power through it's role as a religion though I don't see it as having managed to gain full control over marriage or succession. However when you want to keep your aims a secret manipulating members of the upper class is only slightly more difficult than manipulating members of the lower classes as long as you actually have members of the upper class to work with.

Well you don't necessarily have to keep that breeding is going on a secret for your aims as a society to remain secret.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Indeed: being a religion of matchmaking and families could work well, especially if they produce more successful families, on the average.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Or even if you just get a rep as the best geneologists, the better to support claims to land and title.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The British spent centuries breeding for enormous tracts of land, and eventually it worked quite well.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

I think you underestimate the difficulty. There are a number of examples of that sort of thing. Feminine examples would include Imperial concubinage contests, and male examples the Janisaries. Nor do they have to be involuntary; if the group has enough prestige, common folk would actually compete for places. Examples of that would be Chinese Mandarins, Medieval low level Churchmen, Lamas, and court eunechs in some empires. The concept of the ruling class combing the lower for useful servants for various tasks is well known.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Sorry, posted on a phone from work, so I couldn't elaborate. Obvious, selection works and was known in ancient times for the breeding of beasts, even if you don't know about DNA. (On the other hand, you run a real risk of breeding in flaws you can't see with the traits you want, for instance, larger beasts without correspondingly larger hearts.)

Selection takes time, though, multiple generations, and involves a lot of guesswork. Every newborn has a chance to be a step toward what you're looking for, but if it's a trait that involves multiple genes, the chance can be very low. Even if the chance of success for any attempt is low, you can make it a virtual certainty with a large enough number of attempts. You get a large number of attempts by having women have babies as fast as they can, as young as the can, in combination with different candidate fathers. If you get a hit, you require her to have more babies with the same father. This leads to first, a lot of babies, which is to say expense. You can't dispose of the rejects unttil you can be sure there are rejects. And there's the moral dilemma of disposing of people or turning women into factories in the first place. Assume that they don't go so far as murder, that they want to find a productive role for all the misses, it's still a lot of kids. Say a hundred candidate females (with maybe 30 candidate males), you get 500 kids age 0 to 5 over 5 years.
This church will have to control a heckuvalotta resources; if it has them, how are they not an utterly dominant political force? And what better use for all the rejects than war?

Take that cohort of 500 kids. If the trait you want is single-gene recessive, and if each candidate parent is 50% likely to have it, then you'd have about 70 kids who manifest that trait. If it requires two recessive genes, then you get less than 20 successes. If it requires unknown special environmental characteristics to manifest, you may only get 1.

Say you get 20 successes, though. On a trait that's not sex-linked, that means 10 are girls. So, you can start churning out 10 special kids a year, right, by breeding them with the 10 males? All partners involved have two copies each of the required recessive genes, no possibility of contamination. The problem is that a breeding pool of 20 is not near enough genetic diversity. They might not call it that, but they'd know of the danger from animal breeding.

Do I gather that there's no magic/psi to sidestep the issues of low tech?

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The Habsburgs are more famous for that. "What Mars gives to others, Venus gives to thee."

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The group could be on a separate power track from the nobility. Indeed it sounds like they would have to. Much of their breeding would be endogamous, and marriages with nobility would be negotiated carefully to avoid geneological confusion and to prevent connecting them to the nobility's power games. Promoted commoners would not be a problem in that regard, they would just be dumped into the gene pool and would not have a large mess of inheirited problems coming with them. The result would be something like the difference between Brahmins and Kshitriya.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

The ones who don't make the cut could be outbred into the nobility or the new rich. They would have enough prestige behind them to be high on the matchmaker market even if not as high as the members. There is no need to eliminate them.

As for turning women into baby factories, that is the sort of thing a low-tech culture would be doing anyway. Most men would be bread factories too so it is not as if it was totally uneven.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Does anyone have advice on what sort of set of physical and mental aptitudes they might start with before they start getting data? Did any ancient philosophers describe something like a theory of multiple intelligences?

It occurs to me that they probably make some of their funds by doing conventional animal and plant breeding.

I think it would be significantly challenging to produce quality observations for eugenics purposes starting with just observable genetics in animals and plants.

Mentally you don't want just a test that vaguely correlates to how well someone will do at a job like the Chinese imperial examination, you need to basically invent a set of ways in which someone can be mentally gifted, find ways to test a person for each of them (even ones that aren't traditionally valued by the culture) and hope that your set of mental aptitudes was good enough to be improvable when you start to get actual data instead of being fundamentally unworkable. In addition to tests you can probably have some of the competitions at the festivals have to do with mental aptitudes. Memory is probably a good example.

Physical aptitudes are easier to break up into different traits to test and you can both test people for jobs (perhaps for temple guards) and at the festivals but you have to ensure that you are getting data from all levels of society which might mean careful social engineering to make the same festivals acceptable for the lower and upper classes (even if they don't directly compete against each other) or different competitions for each that you can compare against each other. You also need to develop the anatomical knowledge to know what morphological features you even want.

For both of them you need to develop methods of describing the results that allow an analyst at the sacred isle to take the reports from two different village priests and compare them against each other. Hopefully you can also find a way to weight results to control for observable non-genetic factors that can influence the results.

So what am I missing that makes it harder than I'm thinking?

Well a too small heart is observable if you think to look for it. The point of doing multiple bloodlines in parallel though is so you can ignore flaws you have bred in until it comes time to breed them out against other bloodlines.

They're supposed to be somewhat morally challenged. They aren't cruel or wasteful and they're very good at not thinking of the upper class as intrinsically better but they're also not terribly bothered by having women have babies as soon as it is (relatively) safe and regularly after that. I don't see them as disposing of anyone rejected for breeding purposes, those people could be making them money farming or doing whatever. They're a significant political force but they also take pains to maintain neutrality with other forces and take the understated route to power instead of going for glamorous empire. Plus they end up funneling a fair amount of resources into a project with dubious results from a political point of view.

They also know that animal breeding involves deliberate inbreeding to achieve results and then later diversity strengthening.

There is magic, but it's not really particularly useful for sidestepping genetics issues.

Yes, this is a good description of what I was thinking of.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Either you missed my point or I missed yours. I wasn't commenting on the technical difficulty of a low tech eugenics program but on the specific problem of getting breeding stock.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

Did you mean to say overestimate? What I said "won't be easy" originally was measuring those on the outside. Just acquiring people once you've measured their abilities won't be hard. Specific members of the upper class may require finesse to incorporate in the breeding program. Likewise it's worth being careful and disguising your actual intentions instead of revealing your organization's aims for most people of any class you are incorporating into the program. Although just attracting a bunch of people with impressive scores from a region to nearby your temples and letting them marry each other normally can't hurt either.

Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society
 

I must have meant overestimate. Or meant "underestimating the ability to do so." Which comes to the same thing. I think you probably could provide a steady enough vetted influx to avoid over inbreeding as long as you know what you are vetting them for.