"Even worse for future generations, our rate of accumulation of harmful mutations has accelerated as a result of industrialization and modern medicine. People who are less healthy due to lousy genes are more likely to survive and reproduce. We should not let our genomes decay across generations." (read the whole thing)
Via Instapundit, where the top comment reads...
Having programmed a few computers in my day - and having had to fix trash heaps of bad code in legacy programs left by previous programmers - I'd actually be more worried about unintended consequences of editing the genetic code (which is after all just a huge computer program). I can hear the conversation now.And another thing... weren't the Nazis condemned for something similar to this?
"Gee, when we changed that base pair in order to give the kid a genius intellect, it also took away the blood vessels to his kidneys. I wonder how _that_ happened?"
13 comments:
It's a deeper problem than that. What is the fundamental mechanism that drives evolution to begin with. What kicked off evolution as a means of change throughout the universe and the universe itself? How does evolution actually operate? What are its laws and characteristics?
That's old wine in new bottles, by which I mean that the invocation of evolution is a superfluous gimmick.
The debate is over, for all practical purposes.
That said, I've got nothing against GMOs.
Now there is a laser surgery that can change the color of your brown eyes to blue. for five large.
" What kicked off evolution as a means of change throughout the universe and the universe itself?"
I think the non-religious argument would be that it's the only option without an intervening power - evolution as pure chance in a complex environment with energy and gravity present to bump things around.
With living things, it seems to me that the twin drives to survive and reproduce are the keys that keeps it going and even the drive to reproduce and survive could be something that happened by chance. Once it got going, it was self-perpetuating and natural selection is almost inevitable.
As an agnostic, I can imagine a God using that mechanism, or a I can imagine it just happening by chance in an energetic universe with enough time to a run a nearly infinite number of interacting accidents. Once the self-replication accident happened, it would take over and evolution would run as we see it.
A believer would find a God causation much easier to accept, but an atheist, taking that off the table, would still have the incredible amount of time passed that makes almost anything possible purely by chance within all that material and energy.
I think playing with genes like this is dangerous, but worth developing, and impossible to prevent anyway. It will probably be ugly.
The reason we don't live forever is because at some point you just can't take what the future holds, so you punch out and go home.
It's a deeper problem than that. What is the fundamental mechanism that drives evolution to begin with. What kicked off evolution as a means of change throughout the universe and the universe itself? How does evolution actually operate? What are its laws and characteristics?
Too complicated for anyone to "fix".
Plus, seeing entire segments as unhelpful is bunk. It's more often than not environment that makes the pro/con difference. Or the advantage is context: Sickle cell disease is an anti-malarial trait (and not a problem at all if mono-allelic).
The only germ line traits that will be "fixed" are those that are associated with nothing other than disease - CF, trisomy 21, etc. Anything beyond that, i.e. "lifestyle" improvements - would wait until we have three times as much knowledge as there is now.
Science fiction has been addressing the question of human shortsightedness over what traits are negative and which are not for as long as we've understood inheritance and imagined a future where we can choose individual genes or even swap them out after the fact.
There's GATTACA, of course, and I recall at least one story where the physically imperfect are so unknown that someone born with a liver mark birthmark is met with horrified revulsion, to a story where all the rejected genes are kept alive in their own colony just in case they were later discovered to solve a problem instead of cause it, to stories where inherited genetic diseases can be cured in a living person by treatments that remove that gene from the body, permanently. Good stuff and Bad stuff, successes and horrible mistakes... are you wealthy enough to ask for children who don't need to sleep? Ever? (And yes, given double the time, they do take over the world.)
I do think that people will attempt cosmetic manipulation... how much better if I could have gone through my teen years six inches taller? Right?
But the obvious thing is what Ritmo said... the risks of messing up badly even out most when the goal is to eliminate the deadliest and most awful genetic conditions.
Most of the time if I see someone moaning about how evolution doesn't work anymore I end up rolling my eyes. Oh dear, life isn't hard enough... we don't die easily enough... the wrong people have too many babies.
Well, those sorts of sentiments are nothing new. Got a problem with it? Have more kids. But look what happens... we also sort ourselves more and it seems that instead of breeding super smart kids, two super smart parents are more likely to have children on the autism spectrum. So maybe, really, the whole genome is better off when the working class with their working class educations and working class IQs have working class sized families...
And yes... very much something that Nazis were condemned for... The thinking was rampant in the US and England, though, just with more Margaret Sanger and less gas chambers. There will always be an elite despairing of the inappropriately fecund.
It's hard... earning your moral elevation by limiting your own fertility because "reasons" when there is some group of "those people" who insist on breeding like ill-bred rabbits.
Less than 10% of the human genome is actually genes that code for something whose utility we can understand. Until they understand the rest, almost any changes pre-implantation is bound to be just dicking around.
I'm utterly fascinated by the answers, touching on the idea, but not driving down to even a remote theory of what could possibly be the fundamental mechanism to evolution. I think Bag briefly touched on it, but since I've been thinking about this a long time, I have a working theory but no way to back it up other than what I observe going on all around me. In a word I think evolution comes down to Motion. Simple motion. Motion of matter, motion of time mixed together to create more complex motion from the micro to the macro. Without motion you would have a static universe. Particles would just stay in place like being suspended in amber and never move to interact with motion to other particles, and in larger and larger scales. Motion driven by inertia and quantum decay and energy dispersal. I believe at this juncture that the fundamental mechanism for evolution is motion. Pure unadulterated motion and in that motion, inertia, and in that inertia, interaction. Interaction of particles to make larger structures to impact each other into larger sets and subsets of motion and with enough time and space and energy can come into so many permutated combinations of compounds and elements through said motion that you end up with the ingredients required to set life into motion. And evolution not only affects life, it affects everything and without motion, we would have nothing. There would be no time, there would be no space, there would be no expansion or movement of light.
I was reading that controversial book on population genetics early last winter or late fall. One of his chapters dwelt heavily on the largely negative health traits associated with the Ashkenazi ten-point IQ advantage on the general population.
Evolutionary genetics seems to be largely a game of trade-offs, which is why punctuated equilibrium is the current model. Disadvantages associated with a given favored advantage take over when the environment that enables that advantage goes away, and is replaced with a different regime that favors some other advantage with its own bevy of previously-overwhelming disadvantages. The previously minority-vote aspect gains an immediate and overwhelming Darwinian favor, and the population flips much more rapidly than one would expect given the generations of stability which preceded the sudden catastrophic change.
Mitch H. said...
I was reading that controversial book on population genetics early last winter or late fall. One of his chapters dwelt heavily on the largely negative health traits associated with the Ashkenazi ten-point IQ advantage on the general population.
Evolutionary genetics seems to be largely a game of trade-offs, which is why punctuated equilibrium is the current model. Disadvantages associated with a given favored advantage take over when the environment that enables that advantage goes away, and is replaced with a different regime that favors some other advantage with its own bevy of previously-overwhelming disadvantages. The previously minority-vote aspect gains an immediate and overwhelming Darwinian favor, and the population flips much more rapidly than one would expect given the generations of stability which preceded the sudden catastrophic change.
All driven by motion. Allelic shifts. Driven by motion. Evolution driven by motion. It's still happening on every level.
Lem said...
Now there is a laser surgery that can change the color of your brown eyes to blue. for five large.
I just read that not to long ago. Amazing what they are doing with lasers now. This will get cheaper as it spreads amongst the adopters and once the FDA clears it, it will be here in no time. But you know what will happen. People who make their brown eyes blue are going to suffer, I believe, from light sensitivity.
On another note, the video with Crystal Gale brought back some old memories. Man she was beautiful. She was basically the Shania Twain of her time. Or is Shania Twain the Crystal Gale of our time? I don't care.
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