Designing a Secret Eugenics Society

[Gef]

Originally Posted by Sindri

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

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?