Originally Posted by Drifter (Post 1944467)

Close emotional relationships would be the antithesis of such a breeding program, and the dispersal of an Imperial wide culture, as such ties would tend to keep families together. Such familial bonding would lead to the rise of regional family powers, concentrating power at the expense of wider, Imperial goals.

I won't say that such regional power groups are unknown, or not part of a possible Traveller universe. I don't see a breeding program with the (side effect?) of emotionally stable, family oriented people leading to those people giving their overall efforts to the government/society rather than their own family.

I see a breeding program more along the lines of the one in Dune. Whatever the goal might be in a TU, such a program would likely be accomplished as in that book, with concubines, illicit trysts, and emotional manipulation in order to get the right parents to produce the right children.

A program to breed stable people (and presumably stable families) would be self defeating. Once you achieved a family that cared about the well being of its children, probably the first thing they would do is protect them from the manipulation of a breeding program. Even one that doesn't resort to Dunesque shenanigans.

And just a minor quibble but I don't see a Ministry of Culture in anything close to the OTU. Of course anything is possible in your own setting, but the 3I that I know promotes local power, especially culturally, rather than a centralized model. Remember that Dulinor was upset that Strephron's support of local culture was not going fast or far enough, implying that it was a somewhat recent phenomenon that an Imperium-standard culture was arising/promoted. The Solomani certainly promoted their own culture, and we know how the 3I reacted to that. I'm sure the Vilani would love a 3I-wide ministry of culture, promoting their culture and supressing that of Sylea and the Solomani, not to mention local or alien culture.

Originally Posted by jason taylor (Post 1946138)

Wouldn't the classic considerations of kinship strategy, and inheiritance manipulation tend to outweigh genetics in matchmaking the way they have always done? There are few examples in history of a serious attempt at human selective breeding, though nominal adherence to such would be as good a way as any to justify ancestor totemism in TTU. And while genetics as such is new it is absurd to say that pastoral and agricultural peoples of the past would be to ignorant to come up with the idea of human selective breeding; they just very seldom took it seriously. However there are plenty of examples of using kinship as a means of building power. The Habsburgs knew perfectly well they had ugly chins but they also got an empire out of it.

Originally Posted by jason taylor (Post 1946337)

Emotional stability never was notable in those kinds of families was it anyway? Not in the sense of what middle class suburbanite would consider sense of family anyway. They were certainly often dysfunctional and could be counted as doing well if they had no worse problems then chronic adultery. But those sorts seemed to use their family more as an abstract loyalty rather like a nationalism. The Habsburgs were perfectly willing to see their daughter in the bed of a Corsican mobster with messianic delusions that happened to be their blood enemy if it bought them time to shaft said Corsican mobster later.