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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Gattaca is one of my favorite movies, mainly because of how believable the concept is. Lets say tomorrow they create a commercially available means of ensuring a child is physically and intellectually superior. Once people start availing themselves of this service anyone with the means almost has to do it as well simply as a kindness to their unborn child to ensure they don't end up as a subspecies to the new genetic ubermensch. Society would quickly split into a genetic upper and lower class exactly as displayed in the movie. It would be very hard to consciously condemn your child to the lower class for the entirety of their life if you had the means to do otherwise.

I'm not advocating for this, just describing what I see as the most likely scenario.

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Problem is genetics is messy as the article states, and we have a long way to go to unentangle the role the environment plays, plus there are always unpredictable environmental factors. There’s also the possibility of negative side effects to certain genetic advantages. You might predispose your child to being a genius and mentally ill.

I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic. There would be too many exceptions like Ethan Hawke and Jude Law’s characters.

>I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic.

When your entire society is structured around covertly filtering out people with the wrong genes, you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Natural-born people can't succeed because they've been predicted they won't succeed, and engineered people succeed because they've been predicted they will succeed. I'm not even saying this happens because someone wants it to happen like this to maintain the status quo. It can happen because your peers push you in a direction that aligns with society.

Also, if you think about it, the movie never directly states that engineered people are actually "better". Sure, they're on average taller, with perfect eyesight, and with the lowest chance of developing certain conditions, but they're not necessarily smarter or stronger; they're just as smart or as strong as they could have been given their parents. The space program was filled with "the best", but we don't actually know if it would have operated worse with a mixer personnel, that's just what the administration believed.

While I don't disagree with you based on today's genetic mastery I think things could look very different in 25 years.

Also all of human history is essentially different castes deciding they are better and society adapting to it.

And what if in 25 years we're able to show that environmental factors are more important than genetic for a majority of things?

Lol, then I guess it doesn't come to pass

As a society we've been doing this forever. People are already separated by their visible traits (skin color, hair color, sex), however, now we can separate people by invisible traits (penchant for disease, carriers of deficiencies, etc.). The end game here will be mandated genetic tests for a host of activities where some invisible trait could have a consequence on the outcome of that activity.

For example, if you are prone to heart disease and have been hired as a airline pilot, would your company be negligent if they could have required a simple test to find this out? Although this is a contrived example, the list of such situations could be endless and doubtless over time you will be asked again and again to submit to a genetic screen in the future. (in the same way that as an American you don't have to give out your social security number, but if you want to access to a credit card or a bank account you sort of have to).

Will this lead to people be denied access to certain activities due to their genetics - absolutely. I'm not laying out a moral judgement here, just that this future is almost a certainty.

It is far more likely that your "genetic upper class" will be heavily discriminated against.

Worst case would be that the world splits into countries with exclusively natural born and genetically engineered people and that those countries would enter into conflict with the goal of driving the other extinct.

Do you mean like vaxxed vs unvaxxed?

Oh yeah because unvaxxed people are treated differently.

To be fair, the unvaxxed are superior to the vaxxed in many ways.

I can't think of any.

Starting to think the unvaxxed are like the old vegetarian joke. "How can you tell if someone is unvaccinated? Don't worry they'll tell you."

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