[Lady Sidhe]

I think that the Jewish folks are more interested in marrying within the Jewish community. I think it's more of a faith thing. The interfaith marriage isn't as big of a deal among Protestants, but I know that strict Catholics tend to marry the same; they have to get a special dispensation to marry a non-catholic. People who place a high value on orthodoxy tend to marry those who also place a high value on orthodoxy. I wouldn't doubt that another part of it is racial pride. The fact that Jewish men tend to gravitate towards jobs that make an assload of money is just lagniappe.

I see no problem in breeding for good genes. It seems the logical thing to do. Look at what not considering genetics has done for hemophilia in England's royal family. Look at what it did to the Egyptian Pharoahs. These are just examples of what being more concerned with maintaining the blueness of the blood than with introducing new blood into the gene pool can result in.

This is why we don't marry within our own families (many royal families throughout history did this, because one had to marry within one's own station, and extended family was the "logical" choice if one was to be sure of bloodline, ancestry, and breeding). It strengthens the recessive genes, therefore making it more likely for the negatives to reappear. If we do that long enough, then even when one does marry outside of the family group, they have more of a chance of passing on a larger and stronger set of recessive genes.

That's fine if you code for blue eyes and blonde hair, but not if you code for hemophilia. Men either have it or they don't, becaue it's carried on the X. Women, who have two X's, can carry it, but don't have it unless it's on both. So that means if a female carrier marries a male who is sick, then any male children they have will be sick, and end up passing it to their own children. Any girls they have will be carriers. So, hemophilia becomes more and more widespread as the children grow up and marry and have children of their own.

I don't think there's anything wrong with breeding with genetics in mind. Several traits are genetic, one of which is intelligence. Research has found that children of two highly intelligent people can, due to environment, not measure up to the intelligence of their parents, but that children of parents with lower intelligence can only advance so far intellectually, again depending on the environment (Disclaimer: NO, I am NOT saying that stupid people should not be allowed to breed, despite any personal feelings I may have concerning said breeding).

The more research we do with genetics (the church needs to keep the hell out of it, IMO. All they're doing is impeding progress) the better off our future offspring will be.

Think about when we can use cloning to grow a hand or a foot or an eye. Think about being able to look at genetic profiles of parents so that any problems with the fetus can be corrected in utero (as they're doing with some congenital illnesses now, like spina bifida. A friend of mine and his wife had their child's spine worked on while the wife was pregnant, and the child is doing fine now.)



Sidhe