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Unrestricted gene editing in humans is probably a bad idea. (1) Evolution has been pretty effective to this point, (2) decreasing genetic variability will make

by xr4ti 9y ago

Unrestricted gene editing in humans is probably a bad idea. (1) Evolution has been pretty effective to this point, (2) decreasing genetic variability will make humans as a species more susceptible to extinction from a single event, and (3) it will probably backfire as humans do not possess the foresight to know what the world will be in 1-3 generations and what traits might predispose their descendants to success. Hell what we think of as genetic "diseases" give an evolutionary advantage under the right circumstances (ex. sickle cell anemia + malaria, cystic fibrosis + cholera).

enraged_camel 9y ago
>>Evolution has been pretty effective to this point Survivorship bias, pure and simple. In terms of evolutionary timescales, the success of humans is an anomaly, if not an outright accident. The overwhelming majority of all species that have ever existed has gone extinct. Gene editing has the potential to not leave things up to chance, moving forward.
- xr4ti 9y ago
  Not leave things up to chance?! Is the universe not inherently probabilistic? I'm guessing you mean make things a little more deterministic than they are now in terms of human evolution? Maybe, but I think its important to ask whether or not we already exist in some sort of thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the universe (on an evolutionary spacetime scale). I also think it's not totally accurate to say that most species have gone extinct vs have evolved into something else.
  - landryraccoon 9y ago
    It's equally risky not to do it. Human genetic engineering is a completely new technology. It could be massively disruptive or a dud. But if it is disruptive, then people who are conservative and late to get on board will be left behind. If you're risk adverse, that's probably why it concerns you. Are you afraid it works, or afraid it doesn't?
    - Retra 9y ago
      It is usually better to be the inventor of a new weapon than to sit back and let all your enemies do it instead.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        When testing a new weapon, it is important to make sure it doesn’t explode in your face. I’m not too worried about genetically modified humans, but I think there is a risk someone will make a synthetic “perfect plague” combining high transmission before it’s symptomatic with high lethality — think “breath transmitted HIV”. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology
jostmey 9y ago
Evolution is nothing more than dumb luck trial and error. There has to be a better way. I remember a quote from Gattaca "I not only think we will tamper with Mother Nature. I think Mother wants us to." It would be folly to think that we know how to improve the Human genome. I don't think we understand enough of how the genome works. We certainly can't predict how genetic changes will affect an organism. But I'd like to think that someday we will get there
- cyberlogika 9y ago
  I'd like to think someday AI will help us make those technical decisions, even though we won't fully understand them because the human brain simply can't process the multi-dimensional complexity that a computer theoretically handles no problem. That leaves a lot of room for fear-mongering, but one man's utopia is another man's dystopia, I suppose. As long as humans benefit, I say it's a worthwhile goal to at least explore. If that leads to the extinction of the human race through genetic defect or similar existential tragedy stemming from this, then maybe we just weren't cut out for this gig and should go the way of the dodo. Maybe on another planet, a higher intelligence will figure out how to peacefully coexist with an intelligence of their own creation/modification. Maybe this is just all an inevitable aspect of the evolutionary algorithm at work; who are we to think we can avoid it?
  - noobermin 9y ago
    I've seen a number of articles that there is suspicion that AI (ie., ML'd coefficients in a set of matrices) just reinforces already held prejudices in certain cases which do not actually jive with the facts. How are we to know the AI won't make decisions based on current prejudices that end up also dooming mankind in the future?
    - cyberlogika 9y ago
      And those are definitely valid concerns. And if those 'bugs' aren't preventable or fixed, I guess the question then becomes: whose irrationality kills everyone first, human's or machine's? Perhaps the situation is inevitable, just part of the Great Filter that decides which intelligence-type survives the birthing process into post-evolution. If machines don't threaten our very survival, something (or someone) else will. Perhaps prejudices may be unavoidable in any intelligence, since we build stereotypes as predictive models and ML makes similar abstractions and assumptions which influence perception and predictions. Tangentially related, when TBI patients whose emotional centers are impaired, so is their ability to make decisions [1]. Building a decision-making network without an emotional center may be impossible, since the two seem to be naturally correlated. It's probable an AI won't ever truly be 'emotional,' at least not in the near term. So, in the end, it's reasonable to assume that the AI of the future that can crunch these complex problems won't tell people the answers, they will merely provide possible solutions with varying likelihood of success depending on goals and constraints. In the end, we will have to decide our own fate, and my point is maybe we don't have control over deciding our fate either way--such is the nature of fate. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032808/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032808/
numismatex 9y ago
Eh, I'm fine with it. Beats the fuck out of old-school eugenics. Offers the chance to cure disease, improve humanity and generally make the world a better place. It comes at a steep cost. I think it's obvious what predisposes humans for success -- intelligence and good lucks, for starters.
paulcole 9y ago
> Unrestricted gene editing in humans is probably a bad idea Isn't this what the point of testing is for? To find out if it is "probably a bad idea"? > genetic "diseases" give an evolutionary advantage Touting the amazing evolutionary benefits of CF isn't really helping your case. Sure you (maybe) can't get cholera but you will likely die by 40!
- xr4ti 9y ago
  > Touting the amazing evolutionary benefits of CF isn't really helping your case. Sure you (maybe) can't get cholera but you will likely die by 40! Only if an antibiotic resistant cholera epidemic doesn't wipe you out first! (;
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
psychometry 9y ago
You misunderstand so many things. 1. There are many somatic applications of CRISPR that have no effect on the germline. 2. Even the germline applications don't necessarily "decrease genetic variability". Why would you think that? 3. Even considering off-target effects, the edits made to any particular genome are miniscule compared to its overall size, which I'm sure would astound you. There is no reason to believe these edits will make us less (or more) resistant to environmental exposures. 4. We are not talking making people more likely to contract cholera, which is easily controlled by sanitation. We're talking about preventing or curing debilitating illnesses that confer no benefit to the organism.
- afpx 9y ago
  For 2, isn’t there risk that people will be influenced by association studies and seek out editing of single nucleotides thereby potentially removing ‘bad’ variants from the entire population? For example, say a gwas shows that a snp variant is associated with higher IQ. People rush to edit that nucleotide. But, they don’t understand that that snp variant may have had other beneficial effects ...
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    Likely, only the rich will be able to run out and get gene mods for some time.
    - YouAreGreat 9y ago
      Likely, the rich will set up charities that sponsor gene mods for the poor. (Only a cynic would call it beta testing.)
      - hutzlibu 9y ago
        Aren't we already doing beta-testing medicaments big scale in africa?
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Given that genetic testing(+) has had twice the rate of performance-to-cost doublings as Moore’s Law since the Human Genome Project completed, “some time” may be 21 years from billionaires to subsistence farmers. (+) yes I know that’s not the same as editing, but it’s the closest comparison I have for guestimating future improvements.
landryraccoon 9y ago
Or genetic engineering works, like gambles sometimes do, and societies that embrace it totally leave more conservative, risk adverse cultures in the dust.
pippy 9y ago
The existence of sickle cell and cystic fibrosis means we have a moral obligation to use it, and prevent these horrible diseases. We have ethical justification to use genetic manipulation to enhance lives. By not doing so you're sentencing people to a life of suffering.
- ben_w 9y ago
  CF yes, if I correctly understand that it evolved to help us deal with cholera — which we have now pretty much solved. Sickle cell would be immortal to fix prior to fixing malaria, because the gene that causes sickle cell when you have two copies also makes malaria much less dangerous with one copy.
adrianN 9y ago
Once we get proficient at gene editing, why would reduced diversity be a problem? Diversity is then no longer stored in DNA molecules in different people, it's stored in computers. Getting a new genotype out in the wild could be as simple as downloading a file from the Internet.
- nugga 9y ago
  Indeed, why would reduced diversity be a problem if we're moving towards engineering the optimal human?
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
The dream is to cure one disease - and just one of them. Uprisingsklerosis, the ability to feel anger at ones societysuperior. Imagine a state filled with a people cured of the disease that is liberty. And as a bio-tech researcher you can look in the mirror proud and say to yourself, i contributed to this, i helped create the fossilized alive society. I should feel angry about that, but my boss is such a panda.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
> "(1) Evolution has been pretty effective to this point" to this point. Yet it doesn't look like it will be effective from this point onwards, considering that the traits that will likely be useful to the next era of humanity are not the same traits natural selection chooses.
- Avamander 9y ago
  Given that more educated, career-focused humans have less kids than the less educated.[1] I find it somewhat welcome that we can turn natural selection around, towards those traits we need more to move forward as a species. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
tw1010 9y ago
I think you underestimate how adaptable humanity is, and how much desire it has to survive. If it turns out that there are huge negative effects a few generations down the line, I really doubt that humanity (which is naive on an individual level, but largely wise in aggregate, at least when it comes to survival of the species as a whole) won't correct course.
grondilu 9y ago
Gene editing will probably have negligible impact on human evolution, unless it ever massively scales, and we're definitely not there. Meanwhile, there will be a big demand for genetic engineering, because that's where medicine is going, and nobody is against medicine.

by xr4ti 9y ago

enraged_camel 9y ago

>>Evolution has been pretty effective to this point Survivorship bias, pure and simple. In terms of evolutionary timescales, the success of humans is an anomaly, if not an outright accident. The overwhelming majority of all species that have ever existed has gone extinct. Gene editing has the potential to not leave things up to chance, moving forward.

xr4ti 9y ago
Not leave things up to chance?! Is the universe not inherently probabilistic? I'm guessing you mean make things a little more deterministic than they are now in terms of human evolution? Maybe, but I think its important to ask whether or not we already exist in some sort of thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the universe (on an evolutionary spacetime scale). I also think it's not totally accurate to say that most species have gone extinct vs have evolved into something else.
- landryraccoon 9y ago
  It's equally risky not to do it. Human genetic engineering is a completely new technology. It could be massively disruptive or a dud. But if it is disruptive, then people who are conservative and late to get on board will be left behind. If you're risk adverse, that's probably why it concerns you. Are you afraid it works, or afraid it doesn't?
  - Retra 9y ago
    It is usually better to be the inventor of a new weapon than to sit back and let all your enemies do it instead.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      When testing a new weapon, it is important to make sure it doesn’t explode in your face. I’m not too worried about genetically modified humans, but I think there is a risk someone will make a synthetic “perfect plague” combining high transmission before it’s symptomatic with high lethality — think “breath transmitted HIV”. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology

jostmey 9y ago

Evolution is nothing more than dumb luck trial and error. There has to be a better way. I remember a quote from Gattaca "I not only think we will tamper with Mother Nature. I think Mother wants us to." It would be folly to think that we know how to improve the Human genome. I don't think we understand enough of how the genome works. We certainly can't predict how genetic changes will affect an organism. But I'd like to think that someday we will get there

cyberlogika 9y ago
I'd like to think someday AI will help us make those technical decisions, even though we won't fully understand them because the human brain simply can't process the multi-dimensional complexity that a computer theoretically handles no problem. That leaves a lot of room for fear-mongering, but one man's utopia is another man's dystopia, I suppose. As long as humans benefit, I say it's a worthwhile goal to at least explore. If that leads to the extinction of the human race through genetic defect or similar existential tragedy stemming from this, then maybe we just weren't cut out for this gig and should go the way of the dodo. Maybe on another planet, a higher intelligence will figure out how to peacefully coexist with an intelligence of their own creation/modification. Maybe this is just all an inevitable aspect of the evolutionary algorithm at work; who are we to think we can avoid it?
- noobermin 9y ago
  I've seen a number of articles that there is suspicion that AI (ie., ML'd coefficients in a set of matrices) just reinforces already held prejudices in certain cases which do not actually jive with the facts. How are we to know the AI won't make decisions based on current prejudices that end up also dooming mankind in the future?
  - cyberlogika 9y ago
    And those are definitely valid concerns. And if those 'bugs' aren't preventable or fixed, I guess the question then becomes: whose irrationality kills everyone first, human's or machine's? Perhaps the situation is inevitable, just part of the Great Filter that decides which intelligence-type survives the birthing process into post-evolution. If machines don't threaten our very survival, something (or someone) else will. Perhaps prejudices may be unavoidable in any intelligence, since we build stereotypes as predictive models and ML makes similar abstractions and assumptions which influence perception and predictions. Tangentially related, when TBI patients whose emotional centers are impaired, so is their ability to make decisions [1]. Building a decision-making network without an emotional center may be impossible, since the two seem to be naturally correlated. It's probable an AI won't ever truly be 'emotional,' at least not in the near term. So, in the end, it's reasonable to assume that the AI of the future that can crunch these complex problems won't tell people the answers, they will merely provide possible solutions with varying likelihood of success depending on goals and constraints. In the end, we will have to decide our own fate, and my point is maybe we don't have control over deciding our fate either way--such is the nature of fate. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032808/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032808/

numismatex 9y ago

Eh, I'm fine with it. Beats the fuck out of old-school eugenics. Offers the chance to cure disease, improve humanity and generally make the world a better place. It comes at a steep cost. I think it's obvious what predisposes humans for success -- intelligence and good lucks, for starters.

paulcole 9y ago

> Unrestricted gene editing in humans is probably a bad idea Isn't this what the point of testing is for? To find out if it is "probably a bad idea"? > genetic "diseases" give an evolutionary advantage Touting the amazing evolutionary benefits of CF isn't really helping your case. Sure you (maybe) can't get cholera but you will likely die by 40!

xr4ti 9y ago
> Touting the amazing evolutionary benefits of CF isn't really helping your case. Sure you (maybe) can't get cholera but you will likely die by 40! Only if an antibiotic resistant cholera epidemic doesn't wipe you out first! (;

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

psychometry 9y ago

You misunderstand so many things. 1. There are many somatic applications of CRISPR that have no effect on the germline. 2. Even the germline applications don't necessarily "decrease genetic variability". Why would you think that? 3. Even considering off-target effects, the edits made to any particular genome are miniscule compared to its overall size, which I'm sure would astound you. There is no reason to believe these edits will make us less (or more) resistant to environmental exposures. 4. We are not talking making people more likely to contract cholera, which is easily controlled by sanitation. We're talking about preventing or curing debilitating illnesses that confer no benefit to the organism.

afpx 9y ago
For 2, isn’t there risk that people will be influenced by association studies and seek out editing of single nucleotides thereby potentially removing ‘bad’ variants from the entire population? For example, say a gwas shows that a snp variant is associated with higher IQ. People rush to edit that nucleotide. But, they don’t understand that that snp variant may have had other beneficial effects ...
- jcoffland 9y ago
  Likely, only the rich will be able to run out and get gene mods for some time.
  - YouAreGreat 9y ago
    Likely, the rich will set up charities that sponsor gene mods for the poor. (Only a cynic would call it beta testing.)
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      Aren't we already doing beta-testing medicaments big scale in africa?
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Given that genetic testing(+) has had twice the rate of performance-to-cost doublings as Moore’s Law since the Human Genome Project completed, “some time” may be 21 years from billionaires to subsistence farmers. (+) yes I know that’s not the same as editing, but it’s the closest comparison I have for guestimating future improvements.

landryraccoon 9y ago

Or genetic engineering works, like gambles sometimes do, and societies that embrace it totally leave more conservative, risk adverse cultures in the dust.

pippy 9y ago

The existence of sickle cell and cystic fibrosis means we have a moral obligation to use it, and prevent these horrible diseases. We have ethical justification to use genetic manipulation to enhance lives. By not doing so you're sentencing people to a life of suffering.

ben_w 9y ago
CF yes, if I correctly understand that it evolved to help us deal with cholera — which we have now pretty much solved. Sickle cell would be immortal to fix prior to fixing malaria, because the gene that causes sickle cell when you have two copies also makes malaria much less dangerous with one copy.

adrianN 9y ago

Once we get proficient at gene editing, why would reduced diversity be a problem? Diversity is then no longer stored in DNA molecules in different people, it's stored in computers. Getting a new genotype out in the wild could be as simple as downloading a file from the Internet.

nugga 9y ago
Indeed, why would reduced diversity be a problem if we're moving towards engineering the optimal human?

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

The dream is to cure one disease - and just one of them. Uprisingsklerosis, the ability to feel anger at ones societysuperior. Imagine a state filled with a people cured of the disease that is liberty. And as a bio-tech researcher you can look in the mirror proud and say to yourself, i contributed to this, i helped create the fossilized alive society. I should feel angry about that, but my boss is such a panda.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

> "(1) Evolution has been pretty effective to this point" to this point. Yet it doesn't look like it will be effective from this point onwards, considering that the traits that will likely be useful to the next era of humanity are not the same traits natural selection chooses.

Avamander 9y ago
Given that more educated, career-focused humans have less kids than the less educated.[1] I find it somewhat welcome that we can turn natural selection around, towards those traits we need more to move forward as a species. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

tw1010 9y ago

I think you underestimate how adaptable humanity is, and how much desire it has to survive. If it turns out that there are huge negative effects a few generations down the line, I really doubt that humanity (which is naive on an individual level, but largely wise in aggregate, at least when it comes to survival of the species as a whole) won't correct course.

grondilu 9y ago

Gene editing will probably have negligible impact on human evolution, unless it ever massively scales, and we're definitely not there. Meanwhile, there will be a big demand for genetic engineering, because that's where medicine is going, and nobody is against medicine.