Issues in Population and Bioethics | Page 5

the greater the value of mutations
of all sorts. One never knows whether today's maladaptation will not
prove to be tomorrow's winner. Ecosystems are invariably comprised of
niches and different genes - even mutated ones - may fit different
niches.
In the 18th century most peppered moths in Britain were silvery gray,
indistinguishable from lichen-covered trunks of silver birches - their
habitat. Darker moths were gobbled up by rapacious birds. Their
mutated genes proved to be lethal. As soot from sprouting factories
blackened these trunks - the very same genes, hitherto fatal, became an
unmitigated blessing. The blacker specimen survived while their
hitherto perfectly adapted fairer brethren perished ("industrial
melanism"). This mode of natural selection is called directional.
Moreover, "bad" genes are often connected to "desirable genes"
(pleitropy). Sickle cell anemia protects certain African tribes against
malaria. This is called "diversifying or disruptive natural selection".
Artificial selection can thus fast deteriorate into adverse selection due
to ignorance.
Modern eugenics relies on statistics. It is no longer concerned with
causes - but with phenomena and the likely effects of intervention. If
the adverse traits of off-spring and parents are strongly correlated - then

preventing parents with certain undesirable qualities from multiplying
will surely reduce the incidence of said dispositions in the general
population. Yet, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The
manipulation of one parameter of the correlation does not inevitably
alter it - or the incidence of the outcome.
Eugenicists often hark back to wisdom garnered by generations of
breeders and farmers. But the unequivocal lesson of thousands of years
of artificial selection is that cross-breeding (hybridization) - even of
two lines of inferior genetic stock - yields valuable genotypes.
Inter-marriage between races, groups in the population, ethnic groups,
and clans is thus bound to improve the species' chances of survival
more than any eugenic scheme.
The Myth of the Right to Life
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
I. The Right to Life
Generations of malleable Israeli children are brought up on the story of
the misnamed Jewish settlement Tel-Hai ("Mount of Life"), Israel's
Alamo. There, among the picturesque valleys of the Galilee, a
one-armed hero named Joseph Trumpeldor is said to have died, eight
decades ago, from an Arab stray bullet, mumbling: "It is good to die for
our country." Judaism is dubbed "A Teaching of Life" - but it would
seem that the sanctity of life can and does take a back seat to some
overriding values.
The right to life - at least of human beings - is a rarely questioned
fundamental moral principle. In Western cultures, it is assumed to be
inalienable and indivisible (i.e., monolithic). Yet, it is neither. Even if
we accept the axiomatic - and therefore arbitrary - source of this right,
we are still faced with intractable dilemmas. All said, the right to life
may be nothing more than a cultural construct, dependent on social
mores, historical contexts, and exegetic systems.
Rights - whether moral or legal - impose obligations or duties on third
parties towards the right-holder. One has a right AGAINST other
people and thus can prescribe to them certain obligatory behaviors and
proscribe certain acts or omissions. Rights and duties are two sides of
the same Janus-like ethical coin.
This duality confuses people. They often erroneously identify rights
with their attendant duties or obligations, with the morally decent, or

even with the morally permissible. One's rights inform other people
how they MUST behave towards one - not how they SHOULD or
OUGHT to act morally. Moral behavior is not dependent on the
existence of a right. Obligations are.
To complicate matters further, many apparently simple and
straightforward rights are amalgams of more basic moral or legal
principles. To treat such rights as unities is to mistreat them.
Take the right to life. It is a compendium of no less than eight distinct
rights: the right to be brought to life, the right to be born, the right to
have one's life maintained, the right not to be killed, the right to have
one's life saved, the right to save one's life (wrongly reduced to the
right to self-defense), the right to terminate one's life, and the right to
have one's life terminated.
None of these rights is self-evident, or unambiguous, or universal, or
immutable, or automatically applicable. It is safe to say, therefore, that
these rights are not primary as hitherto believed - but derivative.
The Right to be Brought to Life
In most moral systems - including all major religions and Western legal
methodologies - it is life that gives rise to rights. The dead have rights
only because of the existence of the living. Where there is no life -
there are no rights. Stones have no rights (though many animists would
find this statement abhorrent).
Hence the vitriolic debate