If traits cannot be selected for, then we must all disappear in a puff of logic.

Eugenics is ethically and scientifically improper, but not because it can’t work.

I’m still insulted, in case you’re wondering, and also very disappointed in you.

If you try, you can see the obvious solution – my eye color is even less dominant than blue, and more than two genes are available (there is no such thing as “junk DNA”).  Posit a four-value system and figure it out.

Given the physics and chemistry of DNA the idea that genetic weighting is a two-value system is ludicrous – but it’s also dogma, so it’s rarely challenged.

The next thing after the milkman ad hominem is usually a patronizing mumble about polygenic traits…  I’ve spent a lot of time around geneticists so I’ve heard all the standards.  At least they admit I was right about so-called “junk” DNA these days – that was a heresy in the 1980s!

Even searching google as you suggested doesn’t support your argument. I see one result on the first page that directly relates to the holocaust and two that relate to climate change. All the dictionary-type websites list ‘denier’ as its own word, followed by holocaust/climate change/AIDS denier as an example.

I have a feeling you are looking for talking points to support your own convictions on the subject.

To say “eugenics doesn’t work” is to say that you cannot breed men for desired traits.  This flies in the face of actual physical data (as does the whole binary weighting of genes idea) and you can find plenty of historical examples of successful human breeding programs – for instance, the Samoan “big men”, or the ancient Spartans’ practice of exposure… any mammal can be bred for desired traits.

The word “denier” appears to have been in use well before 1400 and was used by Medieval Christian bigots to characterize their opponents.

We will not chisel the swastikas off the great monuments built before World War II.  We are not the taliban.

There was an article on BoingBoing recently about a bunch of guys with an SS flag http://boingboing.net/2012/02/11/us-marines-ss-flag.html . The apologist argument was that they hadn’t noticed the association, which might have been true of one or two of them, but I think people rightly felt that it can’t have been true of all of them. So it is here. There may well be people who use the word innocently, but I suggest that an awful lot more know exactly what they’re doing.

It’s more subtle than the Heartland stunt, but no different from a moral perspective. In fact, I’d say the increased subterfuge makes it worse.

Wait?  The Unabomber wiped his butt?  I’m never wiping ever again, lest I turn evil.

Really? I guess I’m just one credulity-stretching anomaly then, because the “connection” never even occurred to me until you pointed it out. Sometimes a word is just a word…

Really? Where do you see that? Last time I checked, the holocaust wasn’t the only thing that anybody ever denied the existence of. Claiming that anybody who uses the word “denier” in any context other than the holocaust is attempting to create an association with holocaust deniers is… well, it’s reprehensible!

The Koch brothers have a vendettta against the EPA (because they’ve been caught, multiple times, in gross violation of environmental law, and they’ve been forced to pay 9-digit fines).  Every time you see anti-AWG propaganda, the Kochs are funding it in some fashion.  Every time.

We reject eugenics because it is inhumane, because it is cruel, because it is a violation of human rights, because it inevitably devolves into mindless racism, and because there cannot be any certain agreement on what human traits are worthy of cultivation.

But to say “eugenics can’t work” is to deny the whole concept of natural selection, and to ignore the success humans have had in changing and improving other species by breeding them for specific traits.

Maybe you need to clarify what exactly you’re saying.

(Never mind. Somebody below points out that this is a specific kind of Ad Hominem. Still, it’s worthwhile to be specific about just how fallacious the argument is.)