Any modification made to genes is heritable – that’s what genes do.
Given that our technology (fracking) seems to be making earthquakes happen artificially in Oklahoma, this is perhaps not the best analogy you could have chosen.
My concern is in the “do we know enough” field. Item #3.
But we’ll never know if we know everything. So when the relevant experts know enough, we do our “real world” start responsibly - with genetically modifying away those diseases or conditions that are very quickly fatal, and which the doctors in question think they have a good understanding of. A riskier procedure is acceptable (to me) when there is no alternative in which a patient can survive. You know, the old “I’m going to die soon anyway, so why not take a chance on living.” That does increase the chances of long-term disability over short-term disability and early death, but if the parents choose to take that risk, that’s their decision (people should always, always be informed of the possible consequences).
Then you follow up with the less-immediately fatal or just agonizing conditions and then the very-well-understood (we think) genetic aspects that aren’t fatal or agonizing.
Beyond that, you get into less objective measures, and I’m less sure on my opinions there, but do have to acknowledge that countries have to pay attention to what other countries legalize, because what the world is interconnected and what one country does has the potential to impact another.
This specific argument doesn’t work for me - if we can eliminate the gene for sickle cell, then we can make sure only one copy is carried instead of two, therefore making sure the gene is carried for protection and yet no one has the danger of two copies. Admittedly, that means more generations would have to be tested for those things, but I assumed we were talking routine fetal testing forever.
We can only work with what we know - by your logic we’d never do anything, never modify a single crop, because in a million year we might need the original. It’s always a balance of risk v. reward. I do have a question, though. I know that genes can be inserted - can we keep a “gene vault” the way we keep “seed vaults” or smallpox viruses? It would cost, but, if possible, would it mitigate your concerns?
That is an advantage. But for most people in the developed world today the cost (arthritis or regular treatment) outweighs the benefit (quicker recoup), especially since blood transfusions are available. You can’t cover or prepare for every circumstance. You have to choose those most applicable to the environment you live it or think you will be living in. That’s why I know how to drive a car and program, but not how to make cheese or grow barley. If there’s a dramatic change where those skills become more needed, I might die, but I/my parents went with the odds and I learned what I learned.
A point.
Folks keep pointing out Mother Nature screws up and hasn’t optimized things gene wise. True enough.
However, Mother nature HAS run billions/trillions/quadrillions/some large assed number of genetic experiments. Not just on individuals, and not just on a generation. But on the effects from generation to generation.
I would not be remotely surprised that there were plenty of gene changes/mutations that at first glance would appear to offer some advantage. But mother nature ran the long experiment. Some were probably just not worth it. Some may well have been VERY bad things.
We don’t see many of those very bad things because mother nature ruled them out.
Unfortunately, mother nature hasn’t published recently. Nor has she left of a list of bad things NOT to do gene wise 101.
That’s exactly my point. Earthquakes in Oklahoma are a side effect of injecting water back into the ground as part of fracking. That Mother Nature causes earthquakes in California doesn’t mean that man-made earthquakes are any more okay. That some babies are born with genetic issues from nature doesn’t mean that it is okay to cause these issues as a side effect of making your baby look like a model.
The irony of this line of argument is that I think the exact opposite will occur. The elite ALREADY have a higher concentration of gene mixes that increase their competitiveness in life. Allowing this technology and capability to spread will open up the population sb segments that have underperformed for generations and allow them to better thrive.
Look at the Indian American population. I believe they are the most successful immigrant group in the nation. Is that because indian people are smarter generally? Generally, no, but the ones that are selected to come to the US? YES. The US indian population is NOT a random sample, it is the cream of the freaking crop, a typical thing is a doctor mother marrying a doctor father and having more mutant smart kids.
Water tends to seek its own level, so the cognitive elite do not marry down as often and so the drek does not get gifted with the gene mixes that assist in advanced cognition.
Genetic engineering and embryo selection will blast that open and for the first time allow individuals and group not so lucking to win the genetic lotto to rise up.
They would not do that, if some “random” got lucky enough to compete with the modified people, then they’d be taken just as often. What you WILL likely see is that more and more people will want their own children to be modified to increase their chances of getting ahead.
Some might say that the people already ahead will stay ahead since they got a head start. Even if that is true there is an enormous benefit to raising the BASELINE intelligence of a population. Once you get more people above certain thresholds more careers and opportunities open up to them, less crime destitution will come from being born a dullard with no prospects other than digging ditches, where even that is automated.
How will we ever get where we need to be without some experimentation? Allow poeple to catalog the genes of people like the chinese are doing, use computers and statistical analysis and the tests/outcomes of people to isolate the gene mixes that seem to have a higher % correlation of certain abilities, then insert those into new babies as parents decide they want to enhance them. Totally optional, and we will see how it all pans out. That is the only way, it’s like being partially pregnant, you kind of have to just test modifications out to see how they pan out. Saying wait until we have all the relevant info is essentially saying never do it.
There is a BIG difference between a little, some, and ALL.
There are IMO plenty of human traits that most folks agree are somewhere between significantly (like “intelligence”) and highly (like your face looks like X) and 100 percent (you are missing X gene and you have Y disease) significant.
As far as I can tell, we are just scratching the surface on getting to understand the last one.
IMO we know so little how genes work in the big picture that the first one is nearly a joke for us knowledge wise.
All the more reason to devote more effort and resources to understanding how things tick.
What makes person A more intelligent than person B?
Working memory? speed of thought? more efficient signal transmission in the brain that allows for more speed? More dense and quicker to connect neurons? How is memory structured and stored in the brain? We need to find these things out, and once we do, we can start to run experiments to alter the characteristics of the brain, a physical thing, to make us smarter.
And yes. Better. That last is something everyone believes, but pretends not to on intelligence. No one thinks someone is a better person because they are taller, but deep down, when we see someone is more intelligent, we see them as being a better kind of human being. They are sharper, more insightful, can solve more problems, have more options opened up to them, tend to be less dependent and dead weight on society, etc etc. It is built into us from nature to admire those kinds of traits more in the modern world as they convey an advantage in mating, and as long as that’s the case, we ought to stop pretending we don’t give a damn about it and allow the people who were not so gifted to enjoy in those fruits.
People say they are for equality, but we live in a hybrid capitalist/socialist system (not complaining, it’s the best of the other bad options). And in that system greater talent yields greater rewards. If the disadvantages are extreme like severe mental retardation we will kick some cash to help people out, but what about that VAST ocean of space between full on retarded and average intelligence? People presume the outcome differentials is just a function of peoples starting wealth when we see day in and day out that lower skilled labor matters less and less . It’s bullshit. It’s a function of the makeup of the person just as much if not more. There are still islands of areas where greater intellect matters less. You don’t need to know calculus to be a good football player. But how well does a career like a football player scale? Terribly. Transportation jobs are low skilled labor that scales and ALREADY we see the elites who were gifted with mutant like intellect building code and robots to automate and hollow out even that bulwark of low skilled labor value.
The idea that ANYONE wants to put the brakes on this kind of inquiry because of a lack of knowledge essentially relegates hundreds of millions of people into the gutter of outcomes. And confused liberals will rail about inequality of wealth while the children of one family works 3 times as hard to understand advanced calculus while another who won the genetic lotto spends less than a third of the time and either moves onto something else, like coding, or dives even deeper into mathematics.
ENOUGH. The tyranny of the genetic lotto MUST be broken and incinerated. Nature, you have been left unchecked for too long, it’s time, past time that mankind had a say in our own direction.
Well, of course!
Study and understand the crap outa this. I’m behind that 110 percent.
Myself and others are pointing out, that given IMO our rather pathetic understanding of how genetics work…that maybe actually messing with it might not be a good idea (barring rather well defined circumstances).
If we fuck up the human gene pool are we going to take solace in the fact the Bonos will take over for us?
If we fuck up the human gene pool, we’ll know long before it’s spread so far and wide there aren’t 1,000,000+ humans with “unmodified” genes still remaining. Personal suffering of those affected is a reason to be cautious - I don’t think the potential end of the human race is a very reasonable fear at this point.
I do think we need to study and learn and should not run in without research and do things willy-nilly. But neither should we wait until we know absolutely everything before we take any chances. The issue is decided exactly where that middle ground should be. How much do you think we need to know before we risk each kind of modification? I’d really honestly like to know where you think the benchmarks should be.
Now obviously, some people are “no modification ever” and some are “do whatever you want, as long as the pregnant lady agrees” (assuming there is a pregnant lady - I’m talking real-world children to be born, not lab embryos that aren’t going to be carried to term anyway), but most of us are probably somewhere in between. So, if you think “not now, but later” which milestones do you think we need to meet for the answer to be “now”? And which of these is at all possible (doesn’t require a unified world government)?
It may be news to you, but pretty much everyone in America except American Indians are descended from immigrants. Some are very recent.
You don’t appear to understand genetics very well. Even assuming that immigrants have better genes than non-immigrants (and wouldn’t the very best in a population stay where they were, having done very well there) they are not genetically pure. Reversion to the mean means that their children will be more like the average. Even if there is a direct genetic cause of success in one aspect of life, the person might have quite ordinary genes in other areas.
Your argument sounds just like those of the eugenicists. That didn’t turn out well, did it?
You tell me.
Personally I get the impression we don’t have a clue as to what most of our genes do. And that even isn’t factoring in what Voyager pointed out. That it seems that many of the genes are interellated in how they express themselves…which just takes a complex problem and makes it exponentially worse.
To me, gene science is about at the point some cavemen realized if you put some certain kinds of rocks together they got warm…and they decided to build a nuclear reactor.
I asked first.
As I’ve said, I think for cases (like Krabbe) where lifespan is expected to be short (< 10 years) and difficult, then genetic modification of a fetus (with parental consent) is merited now so long as the gene causing the problem as been identified and successful animal trials (where applicable) have been done. It’s a huge risk, of course, but the alternative at the moment is certain death (barring a miracle cure in the near-term future). Sort of clinical trial-y, with follow up and results reported.
Future modifications would be partially based on the success or failure of the first attempts, so I’d need the results on those before I can set timeframes/benchmarks on them. If the first attempts seem wholly are successful, then after a few years we can move on to the still-fatal-early-but-not-as-early and the very-bad-but-not-fatal conditions.
That’s a great analogy. Especially since a little bit after they handle these rocks they go “oh shit, my hair is falling out. Didn’t see that coming.”
Another random point.
Let me give you a random gene sequence.
You tell me what kind of animal you’ll get. And some generalities on the many aspects of it.
If you can’t do that, you REALLY don’t know your gene engineering worth a tinkers damn.
Different immigrant migrations have different characteristics. For example, the people crossing the southern border tends to be more of a mix of low skilled labor. The Indian population tends to come in with work visas or to go to school or something like that. I was at USC recently and it’s like little india, which is great! I’m glad we have more super bright people drawn to the US, but the fact remains that this is not a general slice of the indian continent, it’s a smarter sample, that’s how they were disproportionately selected and able to cross the seas to the US, a much higher barrier than crossing a border.
The best might stay where they are if they live in a wealthy nation, but if you are a super bright indian guy/gal that can study and get a high end job, would you rather go to the US or the UK, or stay in india? Where do you think a software engineer makes more money? India or the US?
It’s EXACTLY the opposite of what you suggested, it is the brightest segment of the population that has greater freedom and ability to travel to better opportunities with higher pay and prosperity. US companies actually sponser foreign nationals that are bright, they WANT more of them to come to the US, are they tapping the indian kid who can barely understand algebra? even if he works harder? No. There is a natural magnet and brain drain of the cream from less developed countries to more developed countries.
As for my arguments sounding like the eugenicists of old, not really. I don’t want to force anyone to do anything. What I want is for people who did not receive the gene combinations that allow for hyper intelligence to get a boost for their children that would likely never happen.
Go listen to this talk, a guy who wrote a book called the son also rises:
lineage is POWERFUL, and what is the one thing we know is transmitted through lineage? genes. It's the genes. Accept reality, we need you to do that first, then we can work towards some solutions that even the scales. Before we learn all about proper gene enhancements we'll probably dive more into the smart drugs, like modafinil.I think you’re making a false presumption that there are no smart criminals. While certainly many criminals, particularly low-level ones, are stupid not all of them are. Intelligence is not the same as morality.
Why is eliminating a negative different than enhancing a positive?