RE: Homo evolutis
June 30, 2016 at 1:28 pm
(This post was last modified: June 30, 2016 at 1:30 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 29, 2016 at 6:53 pm)RozKek Wrote: What I'm afraid of is when we accomplish genome editing; eradicating diseases, making all babies, stronger, smarter and more intelligent by removing bad genes and only leaving good genes, diversity will decrease and people will become way too alike. If that happens and continues at the end we'll all be very similiar and we'll essentially become robots with our only purpose being self replication and thriving on. It feels as if life would become bland, but of course I'm all up for editing ones genetics to avoid down syndrome, cancer, diseases etc but in a complicated way I'd like it if we didn't allow adding good genes or at least not too much to keep diversity alive i.e removing the bad genes and leave the rest remaining without adding any superior genes. I hope you get what I'm trying to say.
People will only become more alike under sustained genetic editing if we are always right in predicting which genes are good and which are bad, and furthermore what is good for one is good for all, and what is bad for one is also bad for all.
Since which genes are good and which are bad often depends on the environement to which the carrier of the gene is exposed, what is good for one is not always good for another. Since genes are often very complicated in their expressions, we probably won't be always right in predicting which genes are good for whom in what circumstances.
Therefore I think gene editing won't be a clean, homogenizing thing.
Potentially customized gene editing could even lead to much faster accumulation of genetic differences and rapid speciation.
