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JGWeissman comments on Blues, Greens and abortion - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Snowyowl 05 March 2011 07:15PM

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Comment author: JGWeissman 07 March 2011 02:41:00AM 7 points [-]

For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can't afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it's horrible and cruel to someone who's already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it's still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.

How genetically heritable is the property of being a rapist? This seems like an important empirical fact to nail down before advocating this sort of policy.

Comment author: Pavitra 07 March 2011 02:46:19AM -2 points [-]

I wasn't aware that things like that could vary in heritability. Rape is not specific to humans, so it can't be purely cultural; where else would it come from, if not genes?

Comment author: wedrifid 07 March 2011 03:54:38AM 4 points [-]

I wasn't aware that things like that could vary in heritability.

Not just can. Almost everything with any degree of complexity varies in heritability, especially things that are behavioural.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 11 March 2011 08:30:33AM *  1 point [-]

Rape is not specific to humans, so it can't be purely cultural; where else would it come from, if not genes?

It only "comes from genes" in the same sense that eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen "come from genes".

Eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen are inherited, but have zero heritability (since they do not vary). They cannot be selected for or against.

Even something that does vary from one person to another (some people commit rape and some do not) and "comes from genes" in this trivial sense may have zero heritability. If it is not heritable, your suggested policy of killing the offspring of rape will have no eugenic effect, and nor will any other policy of trying to breed the behaviour out of the population.

Comment author: DanArmak 08 March 2011 10:22:33PM 0 points [-]

Precisely! And more than that, even if propensity to rape is both heritable and highly variable in the population (I've no idea if this is true), it doesn't follow that by culling some children of rapes the total number of rapists will go down.

Rapists can have children in normal marriages, like everyone else. And I've read somewhere that most rapists commit more than one rape; if true, then the mandatory abortion policy must be enforced in almost 100% of all rapes to drive the numbers of rapists below replacement rates.

Also, since the postulated rapist genes haven't been selected out of existence, there is probably some balance of rapist vs. none-rapist genes in the population. If we cull some but not all rapists, then we might create incentives for the remaining rapists to breed more to make up. And we'll be selecting for more successful rapists, resistant to our methods of catching or of punishing them.

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