Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names

When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.

But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.

And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.

Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.

It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.

Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.

You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....

* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .

It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.