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Broad-scale co-evolution means that if you use your co-evolved common sense on the co-evolved natural world, you will broadly speaking be safe. Even with a bit
by jerf 4y ago
Broad-scale co-evolution means that if you use your co-evolved common sense on the co-evolved natural world, you will broadly speaking be safe. Even with a bit of experimentation on the fringes. Our technological world has then co-evolved with our common sense, which is why despite the several ways our houses have things running through them which can kill us, they don't manage to do it very often.
When you start playing with genetic engineering directly, you're stepping out of your co-evolved "common sense" space into a much more vicious domain, and you get a double-whammy in that not only is this space much more vicious, you are also very very much trying to interact it with intuition built by interactions completely unsuitable for it.
No, people do not understand what they eat, how electricity works, or how their smartphone works, but they are co-evolved with all those things. You are not co-evolved with the results of genetic engineering. You are also not co-evolved with raw exposure to the space of all possible drugs, which is why I left that one out of my list. Notice the incredibly more strict protocols our society uses around those than we use for food, electricity, or smartphones, because we are not co-evolved with arbitrary drug chemicals. None of the other three things are unregulated by any stretch of the imagination, but neither are they regulated to the extent that pharmaceuticals are.
Genetic engineering has a degree of danger beyond anything you are co-evolved with. I'm not directly arguing very much further than "you can't analogize it with anything you are familiar with"; it's a rich question. From a certain point of view (and a pretty good one at that) my entire point is that the question is exponentially more complicated than you are giving it credit for; I'm not trying to actually answer it, implicitly or otherwise. I mean "exponentially" quite carefully and mathematically; part of the co-evolution is that it selects a much, much smaller subset of possibilities out of the full exponential space, resulting in a much smaller "space of interest".
- cwkoss 4y agoIt's a lot simpler than that: - it is immoral to genetically experiment on others (especially children) without their consent. - individuals should have the right to attempt to genetically engineer themselves if they wish: if they understand and accept the risk society should not seek to stop them.
- giantg2 4y agoI might agree with that second one provided that germ line isn't affected. If it is, then their changes affect future generations. I'm also curious if there are any scenarios where this might be used on a host and an infectious agent is present in the host which shares the right cut point to create some unknown mutation. It's probably 1 in a million, if it's even possible. But it's interesting to think about.
- idiotsecant 4y agoIf you accept that damage to the future genetic health of your descendants due to an action you take is unacceptable do you agree that failing to remedy an obvious genetic flaw in yourself is equally unacceptable? Why or why not?
- giantg2 4y agoThis is a discussion about uneducated self-treatement. In such a case, I think it should be non-germ line. Correcting germ line issues could still be preformed by some trained person to avoid potentially making things worse.
- adolph 4y agoThe term often used for non-germ line is Somatic. Human mutations arise in two major settings: the germline and soma. Germline mutations occur in sperm, eggs, and their progenitor cells and are therefore heritable. Somatic mutations occur in other cell types and cannot be inherited by offspring. Somatic and germline mutations matter in health and disease. https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-020-3508-8 https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
- ajani 4y agoI agree. I too am scared by the idea of some random person playing around with genetics. We don’t allow anyone and everyone to play around with nuclear technology. I wish no one had ever played with nuclear technology. We would have avoided a lot of harm already caused. And a lot of harm that is surely yet to come, because ‘yet’ is a very long time. Infinite even. And maybe nuclear genetics will nonetheless develop in the hands of power seeking governments. But it’s still better than Steve from 2 streets over accidentally unleashing a strain of resistant bacteria on the neighborhood.