My mother claimed that she once taught my father a song well enough so that he could tell if a tune was that song or wasn't; he denied it. The purpose of this post is to report on a three generation project to breed musical ability back into my father's descendants.
My father married a musical wife. I married, in succession, two musical wives. My son by my first marriage married a musical wife. A few days ago, I observed the success of the project when my visiting grandchildren sang a song in tune—Frère Jacques as it happened. As the product of the first generation of the program I can recognize a tune although I cannot carry one.
Eugenics has a bad reputation because it is usually seen as the attempt of some people to control what children other people produce. I like to use "libertarian eugenics" to describe ways in which people control what children they themselves produce. Selecting one's mate in part on the basis of the children she will produce has been used to do it for a very long time.
That is, however, a primitive technology for the purpose; unless you are very lucky, you may have to sacrifice other desiderata to do it. Modern reproductive technology is beginning to provide better ways, ways of selecting, among the children you and your mate could produce, the ones you do produce. Carry the technology a little further, along lines suggested by Robert Heinlein in Beyond This Horizon, one of his less successful novels but one with several very interesting ideas in it, and we will be able to pick and choose among the parents' heritable characteristics, producing a child with my memory for poetry and my wife's musical ability but without her poor circulation or my genetics for a bad heart.
The results should be interesting.
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