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My argument is that atheists don't lose their religious inclination just because they are on the bandwagon of rejecting Christianity. Their rejection of Christianity doesn't change their genes. Their religious impulse is just directed towards other expressions of religious devotion and cult-like behavior. Many atheists are more "religious" in these terms than Christians- think the die-hard trans activist vs the average Joe who goes to church on Christmas and Easter because that's his family's tradition. There is arguably now greater social pressure for people to be atheist than to be Christian. I am speaking of religiosity as a behavior, not adherence to a specific traditional religion.
You are just willfully blind then. You think those caste systems which have persisted for thousands of years were just put in place and persisted for shits and giggles?
The Indian caste system was established 3,000 years ago, after the Aryan invasion, and Brahmins in India to this day have more Aryan DNA than the lower castes:
They are unambiguous proof of eugenic thinking in ancient time, and society was almost entirely organized around these systems in many cases. They didn't understand genes but they clearly understood the importance of inheritance. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Jews, Indians, all of them attributed spiritual quality to what we understand as the science of inheritance, and they organized their religion and society around that understanding. The United States is likely less eugenically minded than any of these other civilizations at their height, as eugenic thinking is taboo today whereas it was the center of their religions and civic societies.
You are just using a "magic wand" to dismiss the issue. We don't know exactly how or when this "magic wand" will be sufficiently developed and integrated into society to have what impacts. We don't know if there will be political will to use these tools properly, for all we know AI will be used to suppress eugenically-minded behavior. Even rationalists are extremely fearful of eugenic thinking, judging by the EA forum, so how are the powers that be going to use AI on this front? It's a total unknown. I obviously do not oppose the involvement of AI in these initiatives, but to take it for granted that the theoretical advancements are already a substitute for culture, a substitute for evolution, is not at all certain and would far more likely complement such cultural changes along these lines.
Cultural changes towards eugenically-minded thinking would assist the development of AI towards these ends and reduce the risk of "AI alignment" being deployed against it.
The last absurdity with you and other posters saying "whatever AI will solve it" is you are still acknowledging the importance of the issue! You are just saying that culture and mate selection and breeding habits are already deprecated by theoretical advancements in AI. That is just completely absurd. We are already seeing geopolitical implications of a couple generations of assortative mating habits in Israel. It would not take 8 generations for other movements like this to make major political and geopolitical impacts.
I'm not sure that the Indian caste system is the best argument for eugenics or even a central example of it. Sure, the maintenance of genetically distinct Jati over thousands of years of close contact is impressive in its own way, but the end result seems to me more dystopian than anything else, with a tiny population of highly successful Brahmins lording it over a majority living in worse squalor than most of Africa. Meanwhile China, where there was to my knowledge no intentional eugenics of the sort you attribute to other ancient societies, has today a much more uniformly successful population than India by nearly any metric you care to use. Even if the average Brahmin is smarter than the average Chinese person, which I could believe (are there any IQ statistics on Indian subgroups?), I can't say I think it was worth it.
I did not bring it up as an argument for eugenics, I am citing it to prove eugenic thinking in ancient time. I am not familiar with Chinese history except that it's a long history of being conquered and subjugated, making their genetic lineage not very straightforward. I seriously doubt there were no elements of eugenic societal organizations there, i.e. inherited priestly or chieftain function, but I don't know nearly as much about that ancient history and there is already a huge wealth of examples in ancient Aryan civilizations to prove the point I was making.
Saying that the Indian caste system is not a central example of eugenic thinking... again, I just have to scratch my head wondering what you are smoking to not see this tradition as a central example of eugenic thinking. Not necessarily something to emulate, but to disprove the point he was making "oh, it's better the ancients invented writing than eugenics." They did invent eugenics, and it was central to their religions and civic society.
We could do much better with technology and knowledge of the biology of inheritance. But eugenic thinking is at least as old as writing.
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