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Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. The cold tr

Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.) From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,
- martin-t 1y ago
  There is no _we_. There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that. There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children. These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it. In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.
attemptone 1y ago
>Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural". Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".

wizzwizz4 1y ago

It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.) From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.

daedrdev 1y ago
I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
- squigz 1y ago
  Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,
martin-t 1y ago
There is no _we_. There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that. There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children. These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it. In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.

attemptone 1y ago

>Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural". Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".