Can someone give me a non-religious moral reason not to pursue this?
What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?
I consider diseases and human frailties a great part of what makes us humans. If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
The likely problem is the potential for increased suffering for future generations, not necessarily to the child to be immediately born.
There are genes that a usually superior when heterogenous. Sickle cell is the classic example. But it is quite possibly true that Tay-Sachs is also heterogeneous superior -- there is circumstantial evidence that it has been positively selected for.
If people feel it is necessary to make the smartest children possible, the grandchildren will risk immense unnecessary suffering, unless they are brought into this world under the loving care of a genetic counselor.
But surely humans beat randomness at many if not most tasks. This argument is not as much about whether we get sharper teeth or not, as it is about possibly saving a kid about a genetically inherited disorder. You may consider human suffering to be what defines humanity, but those who suffer most certainly don't.
I'm just saying humans tend to optimize for the short term.
Suffering is essential because without suffering, there is no empathy.
I'm reminded of the episode http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Masterpiece_Society_%28e... in which a technology created to help blind, helps crew to save the society, which couldn't conceive it because it was too perfect.
And about betting randomness... I recall sometime reading about this certain ethnic group, which is taboo to single out and which has a disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners (amongst other interesting features). The work describe how this people had both, compared to baseline population, higher than average IQ and higher than average propensity to some rare autoimmune disease that affects the brain. It turns out they had a higher incidence of several genetic mutations that each individually made you smarter (thus adaptive), but when found in the same individual made him sick.
Now, extrapolate this to a bunch of helicopter parents, micromanaging optimization to this or that characteristics in their own kids genotype. To me it sounds to much like a bunch of script kiddies merging commits to an arcane, critical, undocumented legacy system.
The same thing that makes me think that I am better at building a bridge than random chance -- while the correlation between my predictions of the results of my actions and the actual results of my actions is not perfect, it is definitely greater than zero (which is what the correlation would be from random chance).
> If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
[citation needed]
Humans already are better long-distance runners than just about any other animal [1]. As a general rule, we don't spend all day running, despite the fact that we probably could.
> myopia
> alcoholism
> addictive susceptibility
> propensity for violence
> obesity
> Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer
> Longest Expected Life Span
> Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care
--but, but, but chance! No guarantees in life! Blah, blah, blah...
But, for the love of god, don't select for the "let's hope he stays out of jail" gene. That's a social, behavioral, circumstantial outcome, based on the decision making of the other human beings a person surrounds themselves with.
I take heavy issue with selecting for or against cancer genetics in particular. A lot of actual cancer outcomes rely on circumstances, environment and behavior. Beyond that, cancer is by-and-large a normal outcome for tissues that don't fail for other reasons. Any organ or tissue that doesn't get killed by something else, on a long-enough timeline, will be killed by cancer. Given that premise (the inevitability of cancer) it only makes so much sense to target "cancer genes" as a selection criteria.
Oh, and by the way, if you have any sort of problem with genetically modified foods, then you should take the exact same issue with genetically modified humans.
Monoculture induced by inbreeding, selective breeding and artificial selection is a killer that destroys at time-scales beyond individual generations. Just look at Chihuahuas and their propensity for asthma, or German Shepherds and their weird leg problems.
This is to say that any damage we do now, we won't necessarily be alive, to feel or understand the ramifications of. If all of us collectively decide to choose the absence of an adaptation, and that adaptation becomes essential a century after the fad, say hello to blight, extinction and perhaps the collapse of human civilization. Keep in mind that the loss of civilization (modern human society, and it's trappings of education, and scientific method) has the absolutely damning knock-on effect of being rendered into a scenario where it is no longer possible for humanity to "undo" it's own ruin.
Why? Because when you place a human social group in a suspended state of "less than grade-school quality" education for more than a generation or two, you'll find that on the other end, the group's descendants live in a state of uneducated superstition, lacking disciplines that engage in true scientific rigor (which can be enormously expensive). No more 4 year university STEM fellowships in this barren apocalyptic wasteland. Think in terms of what has happened to Afghanistan, where several decades of war have produced a generation denied of modern society. Now, imagine that same population also suffering from genetic disorders, induced by a fashion trend no one remembers. Only nature will decide who lives in such a scenario. But wait, it gets worse, given tendencies for human xenophobia, what if genetic choices made now, produce a form of future "racism" among uneducated apocalyptic cultures which we can't anticipate?
Okay, sure. This is the Michael Bay Extreme Nightmare Scenario™.
But still, we're toying with "science" that we don't fully comprehend, and all the while, we seem to be approaching it with all the solemnity of a coked-up Fashion designer caterwauling across a runway during Fashion Week in NYC.
If you don't find that dangerous (from a patently non-religious perspective)... well then... I don't know what else to tell you.
I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others?
The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race.
And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?
Racism: The external indicators of race will be under the parent's control. Look what rich people do to become more whitebread; imagine what parents will do to make their babies more acceptable. The entire process will enable racism on a level beyond any in history: prenatal genocide?
Cruelty I mean by the prejudices 'natural' babies will endure simply by being born into a world that favors others. They will be branded even before they are born, as inferior, through no choice of their own.
Class: No matter what class I am, I would definitely want my kids to [have a chance of] go a class higher than I am, and if I would deny my kids that opportunity for my own reasons, then that would be an evil, selfish act against my children;
Cruelty: If such society really is likely, then the same argument applies even more; I have a clear duty to protect my kids from such cruelty, and that duty is more important than the need to protect myself from some discrimination or conserve financial resources;
Race: well, it doesn't apply for me (same race marriage, all embryos would be the same), so I can't honestly say how it'd feel - but yes, given current experience in many countries it will mean that there will be a bias of skin color. But does it have horrible consequences? I mean, the current effect of gender-biased abortions in large Asian countries results in skewed gender rates and the excess males w/o mates will create social unrest; but race IMHO is generally a cosmetic difference, so nothing really changes if suddenly all of Earth decides to have white, black or purple skin.
If many parents choose to blunt the racial characteristics (not just skin color but eyes/lids, nose width, lips, limb length, jaw, teeth) it will serve to make any 'normal' child with those characteristics a real standout. Racial characteristics become almost proof of genetic inferiority. There's no problem with that?
As for the second statement - Any 'improvements' that are sufficiently large to matter will probably be sufficiently large to detect; the problem is about how we treat "genetic inferiority" as such, not really about how it is detected - by looking at racial characteristics, blood samples, asking your parents or your next-gen-facebook-DNA-profile.
I feel that your points sum up, in essence, to 'this will lead to more inequality'. And yes, it will. Probably the only thing that can make it equal is to ensure that everybody can do that (although we can't ensure even that everybody can eat or not be a slave) - since we definitely can't ensure that nobody will do that.
But while their decision is rational for them individually, it perpetuates racism in the culture by reaffirming that the skin color of the privileged is the "right" skin color, which reduces the pressure on the society to examine its prejudices. Children of those parents with the wrong skin color who can't afford the treatment will still be discriminated against, but there will be fewer of them then there would otherwise be, so they'd be even more isolated and unable to effect change.
If this cycle continues to a point where the cost of the treatment becomes zero, eventually everybody chooses to give their children the privileged skin color, and the disadvantaged group effectively disappears. Is that genocide? I dunno. But it's definitely something.
These dilemmas have been common to disadvantaged groups throughout history -- see the struggles light-skinned black people in America have had with the morality of "passing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_%28racial_identity%29), or the tensions that can emerge in Jewish families when a child marries a Gentile. Genetic modification would just make the process of choosing to "opt out" of your own race easier, which would tempt more people to try it.
Self-interest is the prime motivator of human behavior, so if we want to avoid a future like this there will either have to be objections that speak to it directly ("It's too expensive!" "There's a 5% chance of horrible complications!" etc.), or laws will have to be made to prevent it in the same way that we prevent people from other forms of self-interested behavior that hurt society at large.