241–250 of 292 posts
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I think divergence is more likely, simply because of tradeoffs required. For example, physical strength and mental capabilities compete with each other for energy.
Excess dietary energy is more of a problem than a limitation at the moment, especially amongst groups that can afford genetic engineering. Perhaps the first changes would be to our dietary track to absorb more energy, so we can change more things!
I've seen most of these arguments for and against gene editing before, but the fact of the matter is that it will come down to the economic competitiveness of nations, as always. What concerns me in the long term is that gene editing will cause human genomes to converge to a single gold standard with proven mental and physical benefits, thereby reducing our species' genetic diversity and leaving us more vulnerable to…
From an interview with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist: "Q: What does that mean in human language? A: Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple…
1) life isn't about being smart, far from that (that's national emergent feedback, and I often despise nations as a concept)
2) being smart isn't even needed, a culture of sharing and listening would be enough to uplift life by many points. A culture of recognizing ego and letting him shut down then appreciate everything as a whole. Most brains can do this, if people can pass this down.
I regularly remember how everything was beautiful before, even with flaws and limits.. a race for optimization, especially driven by national interest isn't something I'd like to see.
ps: I'd even say, "intelligence" is an emergency mode for our brains, and cultivating it was a normal response, but it's not supposed to be our main mode
I've seen most of these arguments for and against gene editing before, but the fact of the matter is that it will come down to the economic competitiveness of nations, as always. What concerns me in the long term is that gene editing will cause human genomes to converge to a single gold standard with proven mental and physical benefits, thereby reducing our species' genetic diversity and leaving us more vulnerable to…
Thing is, we are naturally not diverse at all (in part because our nearest ancestors with whom which we, at one time, did have reproduction compatibility with, are no longer here): https://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf Specifically, modern humans have, on average, less than 0.1% of differences in their DNA amongst each other: "How diverse are we? Perhaps the most widely cited statistic about human g…
CRISPR is coming. I seriously think with CRISPR we could see several trillion dollar companies. From cancer and aids cures to fundamentally altering what it means to be human, this is all within the near grasp of CRISPR ( if what i've been reading is to be believed ).
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Do you really think you will be among the ones allowed at the top? Protip: if you were you wouldn't be here right now. We will all likely be denied access to the best technology and will quickly fall behind within a couple generations.
Here? As in posting on the internet? Why not?
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Will it cause a convergence? Or, a divergence, as we engineer people for specificity? A dedicated military caste, intellectual caste, etc.
This would imply that you had to choose a specialization when the "designed" human could just be best suited for all of those things. Physical and mental perfection.
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Designing blond babies because society slightly prefers blonds, takes an implicit preference and makes it explicit. Not everyone will be able to afford all the "premium" upgrades on designing their babies (and you can bet that cosmetic features will be premium). People who can't afford blond babies or cute-nosed babies or skinny babies or w/e the hell the fad is, will find that their children grow up to be second-cla…
All of your arguments could apply to cosmetic surgery just as well. I don't agree with your wholesale assertion that all of those who are unable to afford cosmetic surgery (larger breasts, hair implants...) are suffering, however.
But if cosmetic surgery made you smarter, then clearly all who couldn't afford it would suffer (relative to those who could). We don't worry about that because cosmetic surgery doesn't have that potential (or does it? I dunno), but with gene editing I think it's a very real potential.
That's not to say I'm wholesale against it, nor would I support banning research or anything along those lines. But I think it's clear that it will be a huge shock to society if/when this becomes practical, and I don't think our society is particularly good at dealing with this kind of change that can only exacerbate existing issues of inequality.
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Maybe because chemo currently gives you 10% chance, while gene editing at the whole embryo level has 100% chance of resulting in mosaicism. This more recent work by Mitalipov's group dealt with single cell embryo and still ended up with mosaicism, which I was a bit surprised at first. But when you think about it, this single-cell embryo's genome is actively being replicated, so not 100% of the alleles will be edited.…
And is mosaicism inherently bad or harmful? Some people have more than one genome and don't even know about it... Many of the worst disorders are lack of function mutations where mosaicism would indeed fix it. I would be more worried about unwanted edits than missing ones.
The same mosaicism phenomenon which cause tabby cat's coat (especially callico) can be seen in human and would cause that individual to sweat by plaques, instead of the entire body. So you could imagine a scenario where someone would like to select a specific eye, or hair, or skin pigmentation, and end up with inequal pigmentations or a patchwork. That actually sounds cool...
In the case of an autoimmune disorder, like type-I diabetes or a blood disorders like beta-thalassemia, you would absolutely need to hit the proper germline which is responsible for creating your diseased cells. So that's a hit or miss, there is no inbetween. If you do have a hit, then while this germline is dividing and differentiating, it would need to reach a threshold at which the disease becomes asymptomatic. I don't what that number is for any of two diseases I just mentioned, but I would think it is higher than 50% of your cells that need to be corrected, so you would need to successfully hit more than one allele in your succesfully hit germline population that will become blood making cells.
It's a lot of moving parts, which needs to align correctly. That being said, I am optimistic that we will eventually get there. I have some doubt about the scientific pertinence of that "breaking news", i.e. I just don't believe they have accomplished anything that wasn't obvious, but being an optimist, I am sure that not all the ink will be a waste.
Nice question.
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The problem with not editing the germline, is that that could easily be used to implement a DRM scheme. The recipient of this sort of editing might have a very high chance of only producing disabled or dead offspring, as they themselves would have been, without intervention. They, and their descendants, would have to procure this same treatment in order to procreate.
I can’t imagine anybody in their right mind would create a genome that had a DRM. Furthermore, would you sign up for a procedure like that? Also it’s a violation of somebody’s human rights to stop them from reproducing! What is really happening is that normal copies of the human genome are being incorporated. Which are then passed on to your sperm/ovum.