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kleinbl00  ·  3696 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Neotechnological Luddism

What are we going for?

Eugenics is old hat. Liberals have been going after it for generations. The trick of it is that by the time your Wunderkind are ready to breed, you've been out of office for twelve years. People are more of an investment than Drosiphilia melanogaster; it takes time to slide from unter- to ubermensch.

What about the slice'n'dice method?

in vitro's brutal; most people don't realize that. It sucks for mom and it's hell on eggs. That's just gettin' 'em to cook. Gene targeting is a stone cold bitch and it's low-yield. I don't know the numbers but when your principal method involves bioballistics you're not looking at 100%.

There's two forks here: we can screen for failures or we can build for successes.

On the screening side, been there, done that. My daughter had a full workup from some lab eager to get my wife's business. We knew she was chromosomally clean 6 weeks into it. There will be more of that. It will get cheaper. Will we get to the point where we abort fetuses with, say, red hair? Mmmmmaybe. I don't see it being common, though. We're already cooking off baby girls to a certain extent and there's a fair amount of horror attached to it. There will always be the lunatic fringe but I expect people are going to continue having normal, healthy babies for the foreseeable future.

On the building side, it just ain't that simple. I love GATTACA as much as the next guy; maybe more. It's not my field of expertise and I'm not confident in my answers but what little I know edges me towards the probability portion of the program. If you wanna have 100 kids and expect one standard deviation to be ubermensch, yeah, maybe. But if you wanna have 1 kid the genetic surgery is gonna be tricky for a while to come. Genetics is about probability, not individuality.

Besides which, "transhuman" is a bad thing to be in a human race. Scientific American did a workup on what people would look like if you got rid of all the genetic baggage we're carrying; the result was fuggly. Not quite Man After Man fuggly, but close.