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Originally Posted by Diode
Ah yes, royal blood purity, aka sister-fucking.
That's how you got Richard III and Charles II.
Let's not bring that back.
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The states are guilty of it, too.
David Koresh forbade the men in his cult from having sex, but rutted at will with the female members.
Polygamist sects in Utah have the system rigged so the male elders get their pick of nubile teenaged girls. Millenarian sects in 19th Century US all originally had similar arrangements.
Few of these lasted more than the first generation.
Dr. William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and co-winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for said achievement, also believed in IQ as a measurement of intelligence (of the useful sort), in its genetic determination, and in racial differences thereof. He advocated, funded and even participated in (with sperm donation) eugenics programs to encourage more reproduction from high-IQ whites, to suppress fertility of minorities and to encourage paid voluntary sterilization of anyone with IQs below 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willia...s_and_genetics
Specifically to answer the OP: the organization with the "breeding program" that he participated in was called the Repository for Germinal Choice.
With the implication, I suppose, that if they ever hooked up with the right people who then got in power, the word "Choice" could simply be replaced with "Policy" and "Repository" with "Bureau"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reposi...erminal_Choice
The parents of Yao Ming, the tallest-ever NBA basketball star, were introduced to each other by the government and strongly encouraged to marry and have kid(s). Both of them were tall and were former professional basketball players themselves.
Which reminds me, there's reference to eugenics and selective breeding both in Star Trek (Khan and the Eugenics War etc.) @
veritas to confirm and Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye (the "Sauron supermen").
The stories of Niven and Pournelle from "The Mote In GOd's Eye" also form the basis for the "War World" series of books which have much more detail on the Sauron SUpermen. It seems to be more likely a genetic modification program. (Including hints of animal DNA mixed in). Of course, all that genetic material was turned into people using the old-fashioned gestational apparatus.
The excellent short story from that mix, "Brenda" by Larry Niven, has a quick dissertation about breeding and superhuman traits - IIRC "doubling the gene for night-vision gave daytime blindness, doubled fast-clot genes so warriors did not bleed to death meant heart attacks and strokes by age 45..."
The problem is finding cooperative participants in breeding programs; most of humanity has found it difficult to tell others when and with whom to breed and not breed, no matter what the incentives. And if they do have such control, as I mentioned before, I would think they often take the temptation to add some genetic material of their own, even if it does not meet the program goals.
There were the Oneidans (yes, the same ones who made the tableware). There's a separate article for Oneida "stirpiculture", which was the word coined by the founder for his selective breeding program. As is usual with such cults, the leader was mighty proud of his own genetics and sought to spread them far and wide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community
Jimmy the Greek, a sports commentator, publicly claimed that American slaveowners bred their African slaves for strength, which (Jimmy claimed) accounted for the disproportionate representation of African-Americans in the elite levels of American sports.
Jimmy was subsequently fired for making this statement, and I know of no reputable academic who supports Jimmy's thesis.
The Raëlian cult (no, they are not Classic Genesis fans) literally is a cult and literally is, or claims to be, working on the genetic engineering of humans.
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Raëlians seek to both genetically clone individuals, rapidly accelerate growth of the clone to adulthood through a process like guided self-assembly of rapidly expanded cells or even nanotechnology and then transfer the mind and personality of the donor into the clone. Raëlians believe humanity can attain eternal life through the science of cloning.
In the final stages of development, hitherto unknown information contained within undamaged DNA would be enough to bring others back from the dead including their memories and personality. This would be done by taking a small sample from someone's body and preserving it at the time when the level of the brain's efficiency and knowledge is highest. On the day of death, a cell would be taken from the sample for the cloning to take place, and the memories and personality would be restored to their peak level.
Claude Vorilhon told lawmakers that banning the development of human cloning was comparable to outlawing medical advances such "antibiotics, blood transfusions, and vaccines."
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