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Comment by jdmitch | Hacker News Reader

Despite laws meant to prevent genetic discrimination, the world of Gattaca is a highly stratified one with two distinct classes: the valids—who have the right genes, the most prestigious jobs and the highest quality of life—and the in-valids, who were conceived in the typical fashion and are relegated to menial work and relative poverty. Eugenics also risks creating a genetically homogenous population that is far more vulnerable to disease and freak deleterious mutations than a diverse one.

Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

[1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...

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Lots of reasons to leave randomness in, from a societal viewpoint. But nobody will stand up and say "screw over my kid so society benefits". We're all mostly selfish, exquisitely selfish when it comes to kids, we will all want our child to be the one that is guaranteed to come out useful and productive.

That's exactly the pitch of the doctor in Gattaca.

The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?

There is some history to be learned from the genetic variability problem of Ireland's potatoes in the XIX Century.

Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.

Variation can be deliberately increased, not just decreased. And PGD creates an incentive for the former: the greater the difference between your own and your partner's DNA, the greater the expected benefit from informed selection.

I was just going to mention that: given economies of scale custom babies will probably share a lot of identical prefab genetic blocks for every specification since it would be far cheaper than engineering every trait from scratch.

At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.

The often overlooked part of Gattaca is that the unmeasured qualities of the hero allowed him to overcome the restrictions of the society.

It starts off with a picture of hell, and then shows him overcoming it.

Heterosis just means there are twice as many factors to worry over. If it becomes too faddish to pick the exact same two genetic codings for a particular gene or select away every gene not on a preferred list, we still lose and immense amount of variability within a generation.

The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")

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