We’re more qualified than pure random mutation culled by catastrophic failure.
So we engineer people who are qualified to choose wisely. Problem solved.
What would be wrong with give Australopithecines sharper teeth and thicker fur? There’s nothing sacred about them evolving into us. They might have outlasted us if they hadn’t evolved into us.
I’m not a geneticist and maybe someone can point out the flaw with this analogy, but… The Irish Potato Famine and similar (peanut?) famines in Africa were the result of someone culling variety in the product, and the consequences ruined crops and indirectly caused starvation and economic ruin. Editing human DNA cuts out the middleman and invites some unforeseeable blight in people. Hell, dog breeders have ravaged almost every pure breed they’ve tinkered with, why would humans fare any better?
We’ve mapped the human genome, but still don’t know what very much of it means, certainly not enough to start dicking around with the code. The fact that wiser, more knowledgeable people than myself are willing to give it a shot fills me with less relief than you’d think it might.
I guess that the flaw in your logic is that we didn’t actually stop growing potatoes just out of fear of the unknown.
Well, for one thing, only slightly better than average intelligence is associated with better outcomes (wealth, good job, whatever). Super intelligent people are more likely to have “issues”, or don’t seem to value wealth (think Albert Einstein) and so may not be seen as “successful” by those making the genetic editing decisions.
It could be that concentrating “intelligence genes” in a person isn’t a good thing or too much of a good thing.
I don’t have a problem with it provided there are checks and balances. For instance, I think genotypic discrimination in hiring and academic admissions should be a prohibited, the same way that racial and gender discrimination is. People should only be evaluated on their phenotype. I don’t want us to turn into Gattaca.
Barring that, splice away.
The arguments against human genetic engineering are indeed compelling, but, c’mon, cut some slack, some people are impatient. It would take forever to get my world-conquering army of supersoldier-slaves by selective breeding!
That’s impossible. We fuck up and we’re going to fuck up with designed babies too.
A problem with desginer babies is that humans are characterized by not being made for any external purpose. If you start to design babies to some pre-existing template you imbue the baby with a pre-existing purpose. This may be anything so trivial as a beauty, sex or racial preferences, but it might also be something a lot more encompassing, like humans made to serve functions in specific industries, or with specific handicaps making them good at begging, or with characteristics making them good prostitutes, with physical anormalities making for superiour sportsmen, etc. or with an increased ability for faith making them more religious, reduced intelligence making for better servants, higher patience making for good nannies, etc.
When given the choice at a sperm bank, proxies for good genes are chosen over proxies for crappy ones. Was Dad considered handsome? Well-educated? Athletic?
We already get the best genes we can, when given a choice. So there may be a reason of some kind to choose babies with crappy genes on purpose, but I don’t think it would be an average choice.
The problem with your logic is that this would be equivalent to having no more children. Optimizing for a small set of characteristics causes problems when the environment changes.
Even of all men wanted to have babies with super models, there aren’t enough super models to go around, and so the impact on the genome will be nil.
Modification for genetic disorders is fine and will probably save tons of medical expenses not to mention suffering.
Modification for other reasons is going to create clusters of characteristics due to fads - look at the distribution of first names. If we had this now, a year from now we’d be stuck with lots of babies with really awful hair - do you want that?
I would also worry that massive changes would lead to a lot of unexpected side effects. We’ve found that there is not a simple mapping from genes to expressed characteristics. People have mentioned that DNA is like code - yeah, it has hundreds of millions of years of spaghetti code with all sorts of patches. I’m okay with fixing bugs, but not much more, since it will take a long time to find we screwed something important up.
BTW, Designer Babies, as you may know, is a theme much explored in SF. E.g., in David Weber’s Honorverse, Honor Harrington herself is a “Genie” – of a line genetically engineered – in her case, to live on high-gravity planets such as her homeworld of Sphinx. But there is some social prejudice against Genies, because Old Earth’s Final War involved genetically-engineered supersoldiers. The scientists of the planet Beowulf (homeworld of Honor’s mother) specialize in applied biology, and will do genetic engineering to correct hereditary defects, or for environmental adaptation such as in the case of Honor’s line, but have an interstellarly-accepted code of ethics that expressly forbids any manipulation of the human genome for the sake of “improvement.” That code was adopted centuries before the main series of novels begins, and when it was adopted, one dissident scientist, Leonard Detweiler, who was in love with the prospects of “improvement,” and regarded hostility to it as narrow-minded prejudice left over from the Final War, left Beowulf with his followers and colonized a new world, Mesa.
By the time of the main series, Mesa has a genetically-enhanced citizen population, but it is mainly known for the production and export of slaves genetically engineered for particular functions, made by the Manpower Corporation (a practice Beowulf, Manticore and Haven, and even the Solarian League in theory, all agree on banning, so many of the stories involve the navies/forces of some of these nations putting down the interstellar slave trade and freeing slaves and killing slavers; and there is also the Audubon Ballroom, a “terrorist” organization of escaped slaves aimed at overthrowing Mesa and Manpower and freeing slaves). However, it turns out that both Manpower and the Mesa System government are but fronts controlled by the Mesan Alignment, a secret society founded by Leonard Detweiler at the same time he founded Mesa. All but a few Mesans are completely unaware of its existence. It plans in terms of centuries, it uses deep-cover agents to manipulate the politics of star nations – even to the point of overthrowing the old Republic of Haven and putting in the military-expansionist Legislaturalist regime, and whipping up war between Haven and Manticore, and, later, between Manticore and the Solarian Leage – and its long-term goal is to conquer the whole human universe and subject everybody to genetic engineering, and to sap and impurify all of our precious . . . never mind. All “inside the onion” (it has layers, like ogres and parfait) members of the Alignment are genetically engineered supergeniuses, with various other talents.
I mean, considering the stock I’m working with now . . . you would be surprised at how not genetically superior are most professional mercenary soldiers and professional prostitutes! Is it really so monstrous to want a shortcut?! 
Which would be better than leaving those side effects to appear out of random natural chaos because…?
Why every innovation needs to end in the most pulp novel-ish, ridiculous nightmare scenario? Why this Frankenstein Syndrome? Nature screws things over all the time. You heard about the Zica virus? That wasn’t scientists, that’s just the latest present from our beloved mother nature.
No, computers will not take over, cellphones will not eliminate human contact, and genetic tampering will not create a race of mutant cannibals. It may eliminate Huntingtons, but the rest is just medieval superstition.
I note that most of the discussion has been focusing on physical abnormalities and such, and those are a concern, but for me, the societal reaction (especially the rich getting an even bigger jump on everyone else) are just as concerning.
That’s probably not going to be much of a concern. The technology will evolve with lighting speed and soon enough become dirt cheap and available to everybody.
There were the same concerns with IT technology a few years ago (Digital Divide). But not many are talking about this anymore because development made such concerns all but obsolete. These days everybody can afford enough computer power to participate.
Because unfavorable mutations will affect a handful of people. These people can be studied and genetic treatment of them can be done if bad enough. If we cause the side effects it will affect a lot of people, and we probably won’t even know about them for decades. Then it will be too late.
From the point of view of the Zica virus, it is very successful. Until we invent a vaccine for it, that is. The Zica virus cares nothing about its host assuming the host lives long enough to spread it.
Nothing I say should give you the impression that Nature is wonderful. I live in California, so I worry about earthquakes. But the fact that earthquakes happen naturally here is no reason to support making them happen in Oklahoma.
Do try to read what I wrote. Fixing genetic bugs is fine. Meddling for the purpose of improvement is not fine.
I think the difference is that we have brains and should “do our homework” or due diligence to ensure that our outcomes are better than random nature. It’s very sad when a child naturally mutates to get Down’s Syndrome for example. It was heinous and abominable that nobody did the proper research before giving pregnant women Thalidomide. We claim to be the most intelligence species on the planet but we don’t always act that way.
And then of course there are other extenuating circumstances that cause us to be stupid. For example, we’ve know for how many centuries now what lead consumption does to children? And in which year was it that a city in Michigan was in the news for chasing money when making the decision to switch the city water supply to one known to be contaminated? (trick question)
This is actually untrue.
Testing was performed on rodents prior to dispensing to people, at least in the US (I am less clear about its history elsewhere and since it’s been awhile since I did my research I don’t have on-line references to cite). As it happens, thalidomide doesn’t cause the sort of birth defects in rats and mice that it does in people. It does cause smaller litters, but that’s not immediately obvious though, if I recall, one researcher did notice and was largely ignored when he mentioned that as a concern. Well, ignored for awhile, eventually other people became concerned, too, but by then thousands were dead and thousands of people were disabled for life.
We do considerably more testing these days before releasing a drug to the general public, in large part because of thalidomide (and people scream about delays and so forth - well, you can’t win, can you?). The point is, though, that thalidomide WAS tested and for the time that testing was believed adequate. It wasn’t.
Which is an excellent illustration of how we have can unforeseen problems with a technology.