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I hope stories like this bring to light the dangers of letting parents select genes or traits in their kids. Humans tend to shoot themselves in the foot and mak
by chrischen 10y ago
I hope stories like this bring to light the dangers of letting parents select genes or traits in their kids. Humans tend to shoot themselves in the foot and make poor predictive choices. They also tend to cluster, and if beauty trends are any identifier, letting people select genes will inevitably lead to a trend of less generic diversity among humans.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoYour basic argument is the naturalistic fallacy, that "nature" "chooses" more optimally than directed engineering can. I wouldn't disagree that genetic diversity in plants and animals increase the speed of survival and adaptability probabilities in aggregate. That is however a significantly different argument than the goal of optimization which is what parents are doing when they eg. select for an embryo without BRCA-1.
- Ygg2 10y agoNo. The "market"/"humans" doesn't choose optimally for long term survival. They optimize for some parameter, which bears little to no correlation with greater chances for survival. You can see this everywhere, from tomatoes (and now even cherry tomatoes) that taste like cardboard because producers optimize for pretty looks (which are used to determine if the product is faulty); to bananas.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe argument is that engineering directed towards our short-term wishes seems quite likely to produce a result that's even worse for our long-term needs than simply continuing random wandering. If we value diversity or some other population metric, then directed engineering can optimize also for that, and better than nature; however, realistically speaking, we're more likely to fall victim to some fad that embryos with gene ABCD-1 seem like the best kids ever but then a generation later find out in large scale that two parents with ABCD-1 result in kids with some horrible side effect. Just as we optimize for fruit that look well but taste bland (because the consumers in supermarket look but don't taste), we are at a risk to optimize our next generation for "marketable" features at the cost of important but less visible things, e.g. athletic performance at expense of old-age wellbeing, early IQ scores at the expense of mental stability, cosmetic features at the expense of resistance to diseases which didn't matter before a homo sapiens monoculture.
- maxerickson 10y agoPerhaps the best way to counter that is advance the technology such that people can cheaply make changes to themselves. If genetics is just fashion I expect you'd see quite a jump in diversity.
- Ygg2 10y agoYeah, but changing all your cells is going to be next to impossible and/or exhausting. You need to disable your immune system, to let the virus change ALL of your cells (and PRAY it only makes necessary changes), or be left with possible immunity disease.
- maxerickson 10y agoYeah, but changing all your cells is going to be next to impossible and/or exhausting. Unless it isn't. Who knows where things will go.
- Ygg2 10y agoYour immune system won't allow arbitrary rewrites. Arbitrary rewrites are what viruses do.
- maxerickson 10y agoYou gotta get more Rumsfeldian here. There are things we don't know that we don't even know that we don't know. Is there a clear path to arbitrary editing of genes? Nope. Does that mean that we absolutely won't figure out how to make arbitrary edits? Also nope.
- Ygg2 10y agoI mean sure in theory, we could if we had nano machines that can bypass immune system. In practice, our best bet is viruses.