Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

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You realize trans people are going to go extinct right?

It should be clear as day to anyone with even a passing interest in biology. Once we've identified exactly what genes influence transgenderism, and genetic editing of our embryos is commonplace for the populace, no one is going to allow their children to be born with a predilection for being transgender. You'd be literally putting your child at an enormous disadvantage for no discernable reason.

Look how long its taken for gay people to be accepted by society. Not decades, but centuries. Transgender people don't have that long. In a century, we'll be editing genetically superior superbabies. No parents in their right mind would give their children such a tremendous disadvantage in life when they could make them "normal". I suspect gay people will probably go extinct too, but one never knows with 100% certainty how these things play out.

I suspect a great many classes of people / traits will go extinct. Down's Syndrome babies will certainly be screened out of the population, because again... in a society of beautiful 200 IQ super athletes, why would you deliberately hinder your child?

You vastly underestimate the complexity of the human genome and also assume transsexuality is _all genetics. Ontogenesis, epigenetics, environmental factors, ... there is a lot more on sex variant hardware front than genetics.

Sex is bimodal, by definition parents can't define a "right body" in this regard.

And anyway, at that point of understanding and manipulating human biology, "people" will likely moved beyond limiting categories such as 'sex'.

So what you're saying is that people are grooming young boys and girls to be transgender?

Sounds pretty bigoted, bro

> You vastly underestimate the complexity of the human genome

We mapped it out 20+ years ago. We learn more about it each year, but what's more, the extent of our knowledge increases exponentially, not linearly.

> Ontogenesis, epigenetics, environmental factors, ... there is a lot more on sex variant hardware front than genetics.

You act like these are factors that can't be controlled, if not entirely, at least to some degree.

> at that point of understanding and manipulating human biology

We are very nearly at that point. Within anywhere from 20-30 years, maybe even less. If you think "people" will have moved beyond limiting categories in that time, you're not thinking clearly about the past, but what's worse, you're not thinking clearly about humanity.

If you think we'll end up in a Star Trek-like world before we have the ability to successfully manipulate the genome, you can just look to the fictional history of Trek for that... we were supposed to be in the middle of the Eugenics Wars right about now. Turns out they'll come later, I guess.

Mapping DNA is not understanding genes. We know very, very little about the genome. In fact we're still discovering new mechanisms of encoding and meta-encoding. We can't even say where "genes" begin and where they end.

We identified a few single genes in _association with certain risks, but literally nothing is understood in complex interactions and how environment and genetics make for the concrete phenotype.

Transsexuality is related to brain anatomy, which... is about the most obvious complex system in the body...

Have you had any introduction to bioinformatics at all? Your enthusiastic futurism is uncalled for.

We also thought to be at the edge of AI in the 50s, thought the mystery of the brain was about to be illuminated with the introduction of fMRI and weather prediction is only marginally better at what farmers were capable of for thousands of years. Nobody can extensively model even a single cell today. Do you know how prostate cancer cells ultimately always evade androgen deprivation therapy? Me neither. Nobody does. All we are celebrating is "this transporter may play a role" types of "breakthrough", achieved by extensive experimentation.

Humans tend underestimate chaotic complexity...

And again, what are you even getting at? To understand and manipulate transsexuality completely, you need to understand and manipulate sex expression completely. It's pretty telling that you assume "parents" will chose to eliminate transsexuality exclusively. Why wouldn't you rather have intersex humans? There is no inherent value to sexual dimorphism and the sexual evolution likely isn't related to survival, but rather costly (see birds).

Snails do fine.

Clown fish do fine.

Sex is overrated.

You just want to construct a reason to be edgy on transsexuality... don't you?

Haven’t you seen Gattaca? There will be plenty of babies born to parents who can’t afford to genetically modify their children. We can’t even get insulin to the people who need it today.

> There will be plenty of babies born to parents who can’t afford to genetically modify their children.

Yes, and how far behind will they be left?? This is one of my primary concerns.

GATTACA tells the story of a single individual with Herculean willpower. That's simply not most of society. For every one Vincent Freemans, there's 999,999 Carls from The Breakfast Club.

Oh good, eugenics.

> Look how long its taken for gay people to be accepted by society. Not decades, but centuries. Transgender people don't have that long.

You might wanna read up on actual history before winging it. We've been around since time immemorial. Nothing new here, we've been variously celebrated, tolerated, and eradicated by societies throughout history. The last big purge was during the holocaust. Is that the side of history you wanna be on? Oh right, the eugenics thing. I shouldn't presume.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

I've written before that there'll be a second eugenics movement. It'll likely happen when we have more knowledge about the human genome and a very easy way to edit it.

You're also assuming because I think a thing will happen, that I want it to happen. There are lots of things that I don't want to happen, that I'm almost certain will happen.

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