Actually though that sort of incest breeding and close mating is how all domestic species became recognizable breeds. The fastest way to determine if a bull or ram has undesirable recessive genes is to breed him to a cohort of his daughters. Many of the larger bull studs collecting and selling frozen semen will only take a bull on after he's been used on a group of daughters to identify any unknown recessive genes with bad effects.
Now with genomics and DNA sampling it’s much easier to do before producing a bunch lamb chops or steaks.
If you are trying to concentrate and preserve a recessive trait and there is no DNA test for carriers you will, of necessity, be doing LOTS of close breeding. The problem happens if you refuse to cull appropriately from the resulting offspring.
In poultry breeding there are typically inbred lines from which the males of the breed are kept and inbred lines from which the females are kept and the show birds are the crosses of those 2 lines. It’s particularly noticeable in some color variants in poultry because of the weird sex linked color genes in chickens.
So in the larger sense Heinlein is absolutely correct. With known genetics and “clean” genome you can breed as close as you like.
As to Farnham’s Freehold. The beginning of the book is a good description of a decent emergency setup. Similar options are discussed in Friday, Tunnel in the Sky, Farmer in the Sky and other books of his.
Friday is one of my favorite Heinlein books -- I particularly liked the emphasis at the end on it being very important for Friday to settle off-planet with normal people, not somewhere catering toward hardcore egoist supermen.
You're right about the overall practicality of it -- and certainly some ancient dynasties did inbreeding to better effect than the Hapsburg family -- but I think there's something "off" about thinking about sex with offspring SOLELY from the "well if the genetics work out fine it's fine" perspective, which Heinlein seemed to push for. The number of times a Heinlein character wound up marrying someone he practically raised was ... not great :/
I'm a farmer, raising livestock and have all my life. I approach the whole thing differently. I also do not have any human children. I know too much about genetics to consider myself acceptable brood stock. I am sure that colors my view a lot. :-)
Huh. I always thought Mrs. Grundy was a reference to the teacher in Archie comics. Only now do I learn that she's named for the classic reference. I read a bunch of Heinlein why I was young, too. I found it unreadable when I picked it up again in my thirties.
I never read Farnham's Freehold, but it's gotta be awful it if's worse than Number of the Beast. I'd love to know how Heinlein got from the hierarchal structure of Starship Troopers to the Randian libertarianism of Time Enough for Love. All I know is that Stranger in a Strange Land was along the way.
Would calling tech bros to account really have such a significant impact on progress? Is the ability to hoard money the only motivation? Seems like we were making plenty of progress before the income gap reached brobdingnagian proportions.
And what kind of progress have we actually the seen the past few years? I don't know how heartbroken I'd be if the stream of LLMs, Cybertrucks, NFTs, and enshittified media slowed down.
Number of the Beast is a lot more fun if you've read the Oz books (which I'm lucky that my 4 year old adores). Stranger was super weird.
As for 'calling tech bros to account' -- I think it depends on how you think of it. The legislation I linked to was, I think, definitively bad for keeping innovation happening in the startup space. I think that EU legislation about stuff like VAT and GPDR and AI may or may not be *worthwhile* but to pretend there are no *consequences* to it would be silly; those sorts of additional rules certainly slow down business growth in those regions, same as calling genetics researchers to account is going to do things like slow down the development of cloning or whatever. There are tradeoffs, same as how Scott Alexander talks[1] about how the FDA makes tradeoffs between things like "allowing unfettered medical research to get us access to amazing drugs faster" and "making sure unfettered access to new drugs doesn't lead to a bunch of dead babies." Reasonable people can disagree about the best practice, but yeah, it has an impact.
Cybertrucks, NFTs, and enshittification suck, but there have been some useful drugs, useful apps (most "tools for thought" like Obsidian are quite new, for example), and even useful foods (modern brussels sprouts are WAY better than the old ones).
For myself, I try to remember that the income gap isn't the only important thing -- so is "how bad are things at the bottom." And my understanding is that worldwide starvation is a LOT less common than it used to be, for example.
"Farnham's Freehold" is better than "Number of the Beast" in that it's far more readable, but it's got far more unfortunate implications in terms of racial and sexual politics. I'm convinced Heinlein didn't intend the racial implications given the rest of his books, but they're hard to avoid given that the sexual implications (which, given the rest of his books, he absolutely did intend) make you start thinking about it.
I actually liked Number of the Beast way more -- I enjoyed the fun romp through various fantasy worlds, I really enjoyed Deety, and the characters were very fun. Farnham's Freehold by contrast felt like a TOTAL bait-and-switch. I wanted a fun homesteading piece and I got ... really weird slavery politics.
I loved Heinlein as a kid and read nearly everything as soon as it was available. I also found it pretty unreadable in my mid to late 30's but by about 50 they become really interesting again. Now many of them are on my list of re-read regularly books.
"Still, the ways in which western society might have to change in order to punish the tech elite for insufficient sharing would, I believe, have very real implications for the project of progress"
I think "project of progress" itself needs to be collectively redefined and adjusted. In many ways we are in a period of such rapid "progress" that we are unable to actually adapt broadly as a society, culture, and civilization. Progress is also uneven across cultures and regions. While the potential benefits of progress may never cease, we have come so far as a civilization that I think it makes sense to pull back on the sharp and fast end of it a bit, to devote more time and overall resources to bringing everyone up to a similar level of quality of life. As long as we're rushing headlong into the future and prioritizing "the project of progress", that may not be possible.
Actually though that sort of incest breeding and close mating is how all domestic species became recognizable breeds. The fastest way to determine if a bull or ram has undesirable recessive genes is to breed him to a cohort of his daughters. Many of the larger bull studs collecting and selling frozen semen will only take a bull on after he's been used on a group of daughters to identify any unknown recessive genes with bad effects.
Now with genomics and DNA sampling it’s much easier to do before producing a bunch lamb chops or steaks.
If you are trying to concentrate and preserve a recessive trait and there is no DNA test for carriers you will, of necessity, be doing LOTS of close breeding. The problem happens if you refuse to cull appropriately from the resulting offspring.
In poultry breeding there are typically inbred lines from which the males of the breed are kept and inbred lines from which the females are kept and the show birds are the crosses of those 2 lines. It’s particularly noticeable in some color variants in poultry because of the weird sex linked color genes in chickens.
So in the larger sense Heinlein is absolutely correct. With known genetics and “clean” genome you can breed as close as you like.
As to Farnham’s Freehold. The beginning of the book is a good description of a decent emergency setup. Similar options are discussed in Friday, Tunnel in the Sky, Farmer in the Sky and other books of his.
Friday is one of my favorite Heinlein books -- I particularly liked the emphasis at the end on it being very important for Friday to settle off-planet with normal people, not somewhere catering toward hardcore egoist supermen.
You're right about the overall practicality of it -- and certainly some ancient dynasties did inbreeding to better effect than the Hapsburg family -- but I think there's something "off" about thinking about sex with offspring SOLELY from the "well if the genetics work out fine it's fine" perspective, which Heinlein seemed to push for. The number of times a Heinlein character wound up marrying someone he practically raised was ... not great :/
I'm a farmer, raising livestock and have all my life. I approach the whole thing differently. I also do not have any human children. I know too much about genetics to consider myself acceptable brood stock. I am sure that colors my view a lot. :-)
Yah I'm sure my perspective is colored a lot from a decade as an educator and almost half that as a parent. 😅
Huh. I always thought Mrs. Grundy was a reference to the teacher in Archie comics. Only now do I learn that she's named for the classic reference. I read a bunch of Heinlein why I was young, too. I found it unreadable when I picked it up again in my thirties.
I never read Farnham's Freehold, but it's gotta be awful it if's worse than Number of the Beast. I'd love to know how Heinlein got from the hierarchal structure of Starship Troopers to the Randian libertarianism of Time Enough for Love. All I know is that Stranger in a Strange Land was along the way.
Would calling tech bros to account really have such a significant impact on progress? Is the ability to hoard money the only motivation? Seems like we were making plenty of progress before the income gap reached brobdingnagian proportions.
And what kind of progress have we actually the seen the past few years? I don't know how heartbroken I'd be if the stream of LLMs, Cybertrucks, NFTs, and enshittified media slowed down.
Number of the Beast is a lot more fun if you've read the Oz books (which I'm lucky that my 4 year old adores). Stranger was super weird.
As for 'calling tech bros to account' -- I think it depends on how you think of it. The legislation I linked to was, I think, definitively bad for keeping innovation happening in the startup space. I think that EU legislation about stuff like VAT and GPDR and AI may or may not be *worthwhile* but to pretend there are no *consequences* to it would be silly; those sorts of additional rules certainly slow down business growth in those regions, same as calling genetics researchers to account is going to do things like slow down the development of cloning or whatever. There are tradeoffs, same as how Scott Alexander talks[1] about how the FDA makes tradeoffs between things like "allowing unfettered medical research to get us access to amazing drugs faster" and "making sure unfettered access to new drugs doesn't lead to a bunch of dead babies." Reasonable people can disagree about the best practice, but yeah, it has an impact.
Cybertrucks, NFTs, and enshittification suck, but there have been some useful drugs, useful apps (most "tools for thought" like Obsidian are quite new, for example), and even useful foods (modern brussels sprouts are WAY better than the old ones).
For myself, I try to remember that the income gap isn't the only important thing -- so is "how bad are things at the bottom." And my understanding is that worldwide starvation is a LOT less common than it used to be, for example.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/beyond-abolish-the-fda
"Farnham's Freehold" is better than "Number of the Beast" in that it's far more readable, but it's got far more unfortunate implications in terms of racial and sexual politics. I'm convinced Heinlein didn't intend the racial implications given the rest of his books, but they're hard to avoid given that the sexual implications (which, given the rest of his books, he absolutely did intend) make you start thinking about it.
I actually liked Number of the Beast way more -- I enjoyed the fun romp through various fantasy worlds, I really enjoyed Deety, and the characters were very fun. Farnham's Freehold by contrast felt like a TOTAL bait-and-switch. I wanted a fun homesteading piece and I got ... really weird slavery politics.
I loved Heinlein as a kid and read nearly everything as soon as it was available. I also found it pretty unreadable in my mid to late 30's but by about 50 they become really interesting again. Now many of them are on my list of re-read regularly books.
"Still, the ways in which western society might have to change in order to punish the tech elite for insufficient sharing would, I believe, have very real implications for the project of progress"
I think "project of progress" itself needs to be collectively redefined and adjusted. In many ways we are in a period of such rapid "progress" that we are unable to actually adapt broadly as a society, culture, and civilization. Progress is also uneven across cultures and regions. While the potential benefits of progress may never cease, we have come so far as a civilization that I think it makes sense to pull back on the sharp and fast end of it a bit, to devote more time and overall resources to bringing everyone up to a similar level of quality of life. As long as we're rushing headlong into the future and prioritizing "the project of progress", that may not be possible.