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Old 01-09-2015, 06:43 PM   #11
jason taylor
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
Default Re: Designing a Secret Eugenics Society

Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash View Post
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.
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.
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