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1168 points jbredeche | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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morkalork ◴[] No.43998684[source]
I think it was here a few years ago that I read a comment saying that sick children will be the Trojan horse for normalizing gene editing of humans, because who could say no to sick children, right? Well, guess it's here now, so how long utill the eugenics wars start?
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jjcob ◴[] No.43999056[source]
It's not a slippery slope. Fixing defects is rather straightforward, since it's usually a single gene that needs to be edited.

If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.

For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.

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beeflet ◴[] No.44000755[source]
>For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.

Well, you're wrong. Where is the line drawn for what constitutes a disease? Retardation? Autism? Eventually every child below, say, 130 IQ will be considered disabled and unable to find work.

Apply this to every other trait: cardiovascular health, strength, height, vision, etc. All forms of weakness can be considered a disease. The end product of eugenics is that mankind will be made into a docile and fragile monoculture.

>If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.

And? it's obvious that the technology will eventually be capable of this, just not all at once. It starts with single-gene mutations, then it will be 10's of genes, and then hundreds and thousands.

That is the slippery slope: there is absolutely nothing about your reasoning that prevents one step from leading to another.

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1. tptacek ◴[] No.44001357[source]
He wasn't saying that curing diseases wouldn't lead to designer babies because he objects to the idea (though he might). He's saying that the factors that lead to a "130 IQ" score are, to the extent that they're causatively genetic at all, highly polygenic. Molecular genetics results aren't putting us on a track to predict polygenic behavioral traits (I guess except smoking?), let alone control them.

It's helpful to evaluate claims on this thread in the context of the story. It's possible (though still a very open question) that complex behavioral traits will generally become predictable or maybe even controllable in the future. But those would require breakthroughs (including basic science discoveries breaking in the direction baby-designers want them to) more significant than the announcement on this story.