The real life eugenicists were mostly deluding themselves They were talking about seeing real, major changes in genetics after like two or three reproductive generations, which is nonsense
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To go several generations deep you'd need a "breeding program" on the order of centuries, which no one has really achieved except maybe the ancient aristocratic families, and we see it didn't do them very much good
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(The flip side of this is people who don't work with animals don't realize how fucked up the process of creating a new animal breed is, and it relies on the fact that most animal "generations" are a year or less)
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If I get a cat with an interesting shaped face I can burn through ten generations of breeding that cat's kittens with each other (and throwing away all the incest-generated kittens with genetic diseases) and create a new breed well within the original's lifetime
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The Onion had that joke article about this, how human babies are so useless compared to any other animal A one-year-old cat, dog, horse, etc are all ready to survive on their own in the wild, a one-year-old human can't even feed itself
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It's like trying to selectively breed Galapagos tortoises (who reach maturity at 20) There's a reason there aren't breeds of domesticated elephants. It's cuz it takes like 20 years (up to 35 in some regions) to get one single baby in a new generation.
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Human keepers will get 1-3 elephant generations in their entire lives. Not exactly fruit flies.
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