See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck for an elaboration.
And then a side effect of all of this is that this huge mass of data is just sitting there to be used for even more nefarious purposes. I can easily imagine a world where an end user is required to submit their genetic data in order to prove their age for an age-controlled app, for example.
If we only imagine the bad outcomes, we'll miss on many good ones. And part of those misses will be worse bad outcomes. For example, if you object to the creation of a third party that could validate your age, what you get is a direct ask for your ID, which is the current reality and far worse.
- Over 90% of children are enrolled in public school.
- 79% of those are in general education classrooms.
yes, yes, the Nazis did it. and Hitler was a childfree vegan dog dad.
1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes
2) the more generic practice of trying to improve the genetic characteristics of your children.
I don't think there is much point in debating 1). But we would be naive to think we are not already doing 2). What else is a prenatal test for down syndrome? What else is selecting your mating partner for desirable characteristics? In animals it's called breeding and it works pretty well. And if you can patch the DNA of your kids to remove potential risks of cancers or other deficiencies, why wouldn't you? Is it better to let cancer take its toll?
Everyone starts with 2) and then it creeps into 1).
Granted, someone who already wishes for or aligns with the idea of ethnic cleansing might start by only publicly sharing their wish for the former to begin with, but I don't see a sensible argument for it being a natural extension of the former.
But we are in coercion territory. What I am saying that we already practice eugenics without coercion, we just don't call it that.
> Almost all commercially sold bananas (the Cavendish variety) are exact genetic clones
But to be fair, I see no issues with genetic testing of embryos that could still be aborted. If a person would grow up with a serious illness it could be considered. But then genetic modification should be accessible too, to preserve the life but update the code.
I am nowhere near an expert on this matter, but probably more informed than the average Joe. What always strikes me in these kinds of debates among non experts is - as outlined in the article - how people equate genetics to certainty. This assertion does not hold up at all once you start taking an even superficial look, but most people never do that.
If you justify this kind of screening on todays data, that most likely overestimates the penetrance for most conditions, you also cannot undo it in the future. If you start screening now and after 30-40 years it turns out your lifetime risks were off by a factor of 3, you still have created a generation that (possibly) underwent extensive and invasive screening, waiting for a diagnosis.
It would be easier to be cautious on penetrance, and reevaluate later, than to never collect the data and hope something changes. The number of these calls to limit our access to data are piling up, and they shouldn't be taken one at a time.
I know it felt clever writing it, surely many found it clever cynicism, but in no way does it reflect real life kidney donations.
However to call this outcome unrealistic, now or in the future seems incorrect as there is already a thriving pay for kidney trade.
https://www.dw.com/en/inside-a-global-organ-trafficking-netw...
It’s happening, isn’t it? And we’re just lazily walking toward it. Passkeys. They’re part of the move toward digital ids aren’t they? I bet we’ll see these digital ids bundle a password/key manager, instead of being inside one. And have your dna, faceid and touchid.
If I wrote this just 5 years ago, you’d think I was crazy. But now? Tsk.
It made me feel a bit funny: I was the weirdo for being AGAINST this, and it seemed like any arguments I put forward were dead on arrival.
A large part of that, IMHO, comes from mass media outright programming people to be afraid. Fear sells, and authoritarian politicians are more than willing to capitalize on selling the "solution".
In a some way this is already happening (eg Judges forcing cochlea implants on babies while denying the parents support in learning/teaching sign language to the child)
Many people see this as an attack on the deaf community and their culture - and I have to agree.
It's simply a horrible argument to suggest that you have to protect a disadvantaged community by making sure they don't shrink. There's much better ways to be respectful of the great human beings these people are.
That should be entirely down to the parents.
Someone having a genetically engineered baby doesn't affect anyone else.
When making decisions that will affect (in planned and unpredictable ways) the phenotype of a person over their entire life course - society / medical experts and researchers etc necessarily need to have a say.
We can't beat or euthanise our children, neither should we have carte blanche over their genetic makeup.
Note - I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't employ gene modification to ameliorate health issues or even to improve other metrics. However this is absolutely not just 'down to the parents'.
Granted, if everyone were sequenced and had access to that information it probably wouldn't take too long before certain categorizations became a requirement on the dating profiles, and that's a slippery slope...
(Regardless, nature filters us all by genetics in several stages, and our entire concept of sexual attraction and social groupings are based on the most direct form of priliminary selection for genetics that evolution could achieve with our limited available senses.)
WillAdams•1h ago
rootsudo•1h ago