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Comment by flavius29663 | Hacker News Reader

I keep thinking about eugenics, how can we have eugenics without resorting to genocide or ending up with a dystopia, like in Gattaca? Should we even strive to get eugenics, why bother? Where does diversity become detrimental to success for an individual? The clone of a perfect individual will always perform better than the peers, except when we need adaptation and flexibility. Will we get to a society where just some parents agree to alter the genes of their offspring like in Gattaca, for some very niche job opportunities? What happens when it goes wrong, can the child sue the parent?

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I am not sure why you would associate eugenics with genocide. As the article mentions, today you can promote or suppress a gene by simply patching the genome.

And frankly I am not sure which is more dystopian: a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly, vs the present where a kid has to live with those things he can do nothing about.

> a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly

But we're all defective today, one way or another. It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking, and a lot of those people will have a bad upbringing or something else to hold them back. It's true that being beautiful and above average smart will get you through life so much easier though.

Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.

Also, if we weed out "bad genes", we might get a surprise down the line, where those gene were actually essential for out survival as a species, and we might be wiped out by a pandemic or something similar.

Yeah, I dunno, eugenics is hard, ethically speaking. Yes, I would have liked to be beautiful...who wouldn't ?

I have seen Gattaca (a while ago). But if anything it illustrates the point of view of the guy who has to live with a flawed genome (though in the movie a minor imperfection). Isn't it the point of view of the kid who has to live with his below average genome today?

And then the guy who had an accident gets his life ruined because only the dominant subjective "perfection" is tolerated.

It wasn't an accident. Thus the marketing line for Gattaca: "There is no gene for the human spirit.".

> It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking

its actually impossible because the only objective measure of gene quality is the performance of the organism and the performance of the organism depends on the environment.

>Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.

The main problem in Gattaca wasn't that some people were genetically superior, it was that they were marked as superior and others were discriminated against.

I think another way of looking at it is that it showed that people who were handicapped by their parents' poor decisions had a harder time in life. For a modern-day parallel, look at parents who won't allow their kids to get vaccinated, and those unfortunate kids end up with diseases like measles or polio.

They had the whole passport system with "valids" and "invalids", and Vincent eventually achieved his goal. I don't think what your saying was the main point of the show.

No, I'm just presenting an alternate point of view, that of the people in the movie who supported the system in place.

However, one objective fault I see in the movie (from what I remember, it's been many years) is that their "valids/invalids" system assumes that non-GE people are automatically inferior, which may not be the case (and also depends on the task/role). Even today, some people obviously won the "genetic lottery" (like Michael Phelps, who's obviously genetically optimized for swimming compared to most humans, though this doesn't make him good at other things), while others clearly lost.

No, you're right. Dumb old me was looking for an argument when you were trying to simply share your perspective.

Honestly, I was trying to play devil's advocate in a way. In that reality, most of society had decided that getting their kids genetically engineered (GE) was the correct choice: we have the technology, so why not use it? I see it as somewhat similar to medical technologies we have today, like vaccinations, with a small number of people refusing them because "they're not natural" or whatever. Most people prefer to have a society where polio and smallpox are eradicated instead of normally-occurring, so vaccinations are generally required in most places. So in the future, would having your kids GE'ed be seen the same way? For low-hanging fruit, what if your kid has sickle-cell anemia or MS or some other obvious genetic defect, and a simple tweak can fix this and keep them from being condemned to a lifetime of health problems and an early death? Why wouldn't we avail ourselves of this, and what parent would want their kid to suffer with these things? But with GE technology, obviously we can go much farther than just fixing a few transcription errors that have devastating consequences, so where does that lead us as a society? I do find this question really fascinating.

Oh, of course. If it were possible to actually do it, then it wouldn't ever be possible to contain. Either a small selection of elites get access to the tech and use it to dominate all of society, or we all have it. I don't think you could put the genie back in the bottle once it's possible to make your children smarter, stronger and more successful.

Another thing I just thought of with my Michael Phelps example: genetically engineering people isn't necessarily going to make them superpeople, so I wonder how this will be handled. Phelps is really good at swimming with his body type, but that same body type probably means he's also really bad at other sports, such as weightlifting or cycling. Different body types are better optimized for different activities. Currently, people just get lucky usually, born with physical attributes that make them good at those tasks. So you don't see any pro cyclists that look like the "The Mountain" guy from Game of Thrones, for instance (whereas that guy is really good at weightlifting).

>that same body type probably means he's also really bad at other sports, such as weightlifting or cycling

I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'm sure Phelps could lift more and cycle faster/further than most people on earth.

If anything, the fact he's good at swimming means it's likely that he's also really good at other sports - just like someone good at one sort of cognitive task is probably good at most.

I disagree. Sure, he's probably better at those sports than "most people", but that's not important, it's whether he can compete at an Olympic level in those sports. I'm sure he can't. He's optimized for world-class performance in just one sport, but not likely to be able to excel (at that level) in many others, no matter how much he trains.

I can cycle faster and farther than most people on Earth too. That doesn't mean I can compete at a pro level, or worse an Olympic level. I'm nowhere near that level of performance; the bar for "most people on Earth" just isn't very high for most sports, in fact it's pathetically low. Most people are laughably bad at any sport.

"I am not sure why you would associate eugenics with genocide."

Historically eugenics has included some mistreatment of those with undesired traits, upto and including genocide.

Historically chemistry has been used to produce Zyklon B. Doesn't mean chemistry is bad.

But it does show that it can br used in a bad way or or a bad cause. Someone asked why genocide was mentioned. History supports caution on that front, just as it does for chemistry.

Chemistry gets like a trillion plus points for the benefits it's bright and a few hundred million minus pounds for the harm it's caused. And indeed, for some people the term "chemical" is automatically something bad (they don't appreciate it if you point out water is a chemical, and not only because there's an implied "artificial" in its usage).

Eugenics… well, we can see the theoretical benefits of things like ending sickle cell anaemia outside malarial regions, but we're starting from really huge negative points because it turned out that racist people found it to be a really convenient justification for genocide, and sadly genocides get attempted so often[0] that it's probably not going to be possible to dissociate the two.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

Chemistry isn't about discrimination.

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