Talk:Prevention of autosomal recessive disorders

About the split

WP:SPLIT from Eugenics because:

• Keeping it as a section there had issues with Wikipedia:Out of scope and WP:UNDUE, in light of the fact that most sources do not consider this stuff to be eugenics.
• But deleting the section entirely was unacceptable because Eugenics#Ethics needs to refer to this set of practices in relation to this goal.

I'm hopeful we will also be able to maintain this page as an important topic in its own right -- and maybe one less controversial than the article from which it was split. Jruderman (talk) 11:42, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

What does your second bullet point mean? Are you saying you started this article with the main purpose of avoiding controversy at some other article? If not, I don't understand. There is currently no 'Ethics' subsection at the Eugenics article. As with any article, this article needs is to summarize reliable sources about the main topic, which is 'prevention of autosomal recessive disorders'. Any sources which are not about that topic are going to be of very limited use. Specifically, much of this will need WP:MEDRS sources. Please review WP:BACKWARDS. Look at what reliable sources say about this topic instead of looking for sources to support prior knowledge. Grayfell (talk) 01:23, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

The controversy about whether to include this information in the Eugenics article arose in Talk:Eugenics#Thalassemia. I agree with the point you made there about WP:UNDUE, which was my primary impetus for wanting to remove it from the eugenics article in a way that would be acceptable to all parties. Secondary concerns included article length, flow, and repetition. Jruderman (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

The idea is that being able to link here will allow for a clarity and concision in the eugenics article (important for UNDUE), if and when sources about eugenics make a point connecting the two. I know that it comes up in disputes about the scope of the term "eugenics", as well as in ethical-consistency arguments. Jruderman (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for correcting the lead to link to hereditary disease. Due to redirects, the article now contains two links to the same page (the other one is genetic disorders at the beginning of the Background section). Maybe this is fine. Jruderman (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

The section on carrier testing absolutely needs WP:MEDRS for many of its statements, and most importantly for the choices of which populations (or other Indications) to include in the list. There may be important omissions. Other parts of this article are better served by reliable sources in other fields (such as genetics and lawmaking). WP:MEDRS allows this. Jruderman (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree with some but not all of your SYNTH/OR tags and removals. I have reviewed WP:SYNTH and Wikipedia:What SYNTH is not, and ask that you do the same. I'll let you know if I actually contest anything. Jruderman (talk) 06:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I have already reviewed those guidelines. There are some subtle problems with using U.S. legal codes as primary sources for editor-selected examples. Part of the problem is that choosing only U.S. states as examples is arbitrary. This article is not "Prevention of autosomal recessive disorders in the United States", after all. Why are Maine and Arizona the only examples? I assume the answer is that you chose them as examples to explain the topic. That is a form of editorializing. This is why reliable secondary sources should be used here. If Maine and Arizona are examples, cite a reliable source which presents them as examples, and we can use those sources to decide how to present this without editorializing. Another issue is that asking editors to interpret complicated legal statutes has been historically a major headache for Wikipedia. A third issues is that neither of those primary sources mention diseases or disorders, nor would they be expected to. It may be obvious us as editors that this is a motivation for the law, but if it's so obvious that we don't need a source, than why does it need to be in the article at all? This is why a reliable source should be cited that explains this connection directly. So WP:PSTS applies: "All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors." Grayfell (talk) 04:51, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Regarding this edit: It doesn't appear that this source is being summarized here. It appears that you attached this source onto what you had already written. This doesn't address my concerns about WP:OR, nor my concerns about arbitrary examples. Please look at what the source is saying and rewriting the paragraph to match that source. Please keep in mind that this article is not cousin marriage (nor Prohibited degree of kinship, nor Consanguine marriage, etc.). the source should only be summarized as it relates to this specific topic. Grayfell (talk) 08:57, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

The law review article makes the connection using slightly different terms ("recessive disorders", "close tailoring").

I don't understand what else you're asking me to do here. Switch out my arbitrary example to match the law review article's arbitrary example? Add that a law clerk thinks all states should allow cousin marriage on the theory that the low amount of extra risk doesn't create a compelling government interest? (And then presumably bring in a MEDRS since now it's touching on risk levels.) I think the narrow tailoring bit relates to this topic slightly more than opinions on how laws should change. Jruderman (talk) 10:12, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I left the primary sources in (along with the secondary), on the theory that the secondary supports analysis, while the primaries support the fact that the laws still exist so the sentence can use present tense. Jruderman (talk) 09:53, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I understand that you don't understand what I am asking of you. The law review article is relevant, but it is not being properly summarized.

The secondary sources you have found need to be summarized as-is, not to fit into any prior assumptions about what the article is expected to look like. So from that, the article shouldn't have any arbitrary examples. The law review provides examples for a specific reason to support a specific perspective. That is not arbitrary.

Likewise, the Wolf source in the previous paragraph says a lot about the recent history of the scientific understanding of incest, but I do not see anywhere on p.3 that supports the claim that "avoiding the genetic disorders caused by inbreeding [is] one of the major motivations." My (admittedly brief) reading of both sources in that paragraph suggests that it is much, much more complicated than that.

As I said, adding sources for information you personally know to be true leads to a lot of problems, even if you are correct about the topic itself. WP:BACKWARDS is just an essay, but in my opinion, it's a very good one that describes the problems with this approach very well.

Right now I'm starting to think this article should be merged to genetic counseling. If most of the article's cited sources are not about this topic as separate from other topics, that seems like the simplest way to prevent original research and redundancy. Grayfell (talk) 19:54, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Link building

Wouldn't want to leave this page an almost-WP:ORPHAN!

• Genetic disorder
• Autosomal recessive disorder (if it ever stops being just a redirect to Dominance)
• Prevention of Tay–Sachs disease
• Carrier testing
• Dor Yeshorim
• Autosome#Autosomal_genetic_disorders

Jruderman (talk) 11:42, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Awfully specific

How about we re-write this in order to just be another heading next to e.g. "treatment" in the much more notable Genetic disorder article? Biohistorian15 (talk) 09:41, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Could work. We'd need info about each broad category with unique considerations (at least autosomal recessive and x-linked recessive), right? And we'd need to determine what level of detail is appropriate for that article, such as a paragraph or subsection per category.

Another way to slice it would be to create an Autosomal recessive disorder article with a list, notable prevalences in populations, and a prevention section. It would make a nice sibling article for X-linked recessive inheritance, which contains such a list. Jruderman (talk) 10:20, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

I would include the following paragraph for this purpose:

In the case of X-linked recessive disorders, some version of genetic screening, commonly prior to implanting the respective embryo may be indicated.

Biohistorian15 (talk) 16:29, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

I would also include:

• Churbanov, Alexander; Abrahamyan, Levon (2018). "Preventing Common Hereditary Disorders through Time-Separated Twinning" BioNanoScience 8:344–366 doi:10.1007/s12668-017-0488-x
• Bobrow, Martin (1988). "The Prevention and Avoidance of Genetic Disease: Summing Up." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 319(1194), 361–367. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2396687 Biohistorian15 (talk) 05:46, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

References