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Nature is great. Which is why cloning and gene selection is bad (we don't understand nature yet).
by medde 13y ago
Nature is great. Which is why cloning and gene selection is bad (we don't understand nature yet).
- ceejayoz 13y agoHumans have been doing gene selection for millennia.
- speeder 13y agoHumans have been doing TRAIT selection for millennia, not gene. Some traits are linked to a single gene, but most of them, aren't. (and to make stuff more confusing, a single gene might affect several traits at once).
- guard-of-terra 13y agoIf nature is so great, why do I have -2 vision and bad teeth? I would take the risk to make sure my children do not inherit known bugs.
- IanCal 13y agoWould you edit a large legacy system full of the most horrendous spaghetti code, written in a language the best experts only slightly understand, doing many jobs that aren't documented anywhere which all depend on each other? A system with no tests whatsoever? Oh, and you have to do it in production, and it's a critical system where people die if you get it wrong.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoWe know a long list of genes that are obviously broken versus a non-broken version that serves billions of people well. Why not replace all faulty genes with known good ones? In homozygote cases, you can replace one of two copies with good version.
- goblin89 13y ago> If nature is so great, why do I have -2 vision and bad teeth? One could argue that your diet and lifestyle could've caused that, and it's hard to counter. (I have -4 vision, by the way.) I don't think medde's comment adds much to the discussion, but I can see the point about our inability to “understand nature”. We don't know what we don't know.
- VMG 13y ago> One could argue that your diet and lifestyle could've caused that, and it's hard to counter. I think he chose a benign example, but I'm sure everybody is aware of birth defects.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThose "benign examples" are life-long liability in money, happiness and increased risk. Thank you very much.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI know people of the same lifestyle who have good vision and/or perfect teeth. Sometimes clearly inherited. I don't want to "understand nature", I don't want to change my lifestyle, I just want it to be fixed, next generation getting the good parts.
- goblin89 13y agoMaybe ‘lifestyle’ isn't an appropriate word. I wanted to find an umbrella term for all the small stuff that may look irrelevant, but actually is not. I remember a study not long ago that found sedentary lifestyle drastically affecting chances of death from cardiovascular disease. It does seem plausible to me that there could be many more things that affect us in more subtle and unexpected ways. Posture, thinking patterns—those little habits. Two apparently similar lifestyles may actually turn out to be very different when analyzed to such fine detail. And since children from early age imitate their parents, it's natural to expect those things to get passed (with certain variance) from generation to generation. Now the above is very unscientific, of course. I don't deny that genetics matter—just that there might be other things that matter as well. Analogies from software engineering world are often flawed, but I'll draw one: a shallow fix of an annoying bug without full understanding of a complex system (and decent test coverage) leading to perplexing problems down the line—I think it's a familiar situation.
- philwelch 13y agoBecause we've interfered with nature enough to let you live.