>At first it's just serious diseases. But then people will want their children to have correct color vision and other nice things.
...and they should. Nobody deserves a suboptimal quality of life due to genetics.
...and they should. Nobody deserves a suboptimal quality of life due to genetics.
I'm a strong techno-optimist, and I think we should have an extremely open mind to the possibilities offered to us by these advances, and we should fight the tendency to fortify our little local maximum out of fear - but we also need to recognize that some really dangerous things lie ahead.
But genes or not, I brought it up as an example of something that we're clearly NOT comfortable removing (even if we could), although there's still plenty of communities where not being gay "would for some reason improve the child's quality of life".
Why are "we" clearly not comfortable with that?
Indeed, if "we" are all uncomfortable with that then we needn't worry about anyone doing it. You seem to be worried that some people are going to want to specify non-gay children but think they ought to have them anyway. For some reason.
On the other hand I admit it might make me queasy to think of parents deliberately engineering their children to be gay. As in "Oh honey, let's make our third child gay, it'll be fun!"
Yes, especially given the fact that the only reason people have children is because nature intends to replace the parents with their offspring, using rules crafted by natural selection, not the parents' tastes.
In fairness, sex was invented at least 1.2 billion years before parents could have possibly had "tastes". The reason we reproduce sexually rather than just churning out clones of ourselves appears to be that we're more resistant to parasites/diseases if our genes keep constantly shifting into new combinations rather than hanging around for too long looking exactly the same.
This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
That's certainly high on the list, but replacing one population with another on a regular basis is also on the list.
> This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
Of course it would. Evolution can be a complex topic, but there's one simple fact at the center -- nature knows more than we do. An organism's ability to survive, to prevail over other genotypes, speaks louder than any of our expressed tastes and choices. That means if parents make the wrong choices, nature will step in and correct them.
We already bar people with heart defects from participating in space programs.
You mention the heart defect. In the movie, the heart defect is only genetically potential, it is implied that if the character had it they would be dead before the events of the film.
Meh. Neither does anyone else, and it won't happen by itself.
If GATTACA was the cost of everyone being healthy, I might take it, but it won't be. We get the world we want, by and large.
Hmm, not sure about that. The rich get the world they want, by and large.
Gattaca is just a scifi movie, not particularly good at science realism. We should not take guidelines for Artificial Intelligence research from the Terminator movies, and we should not take genetics guidelines from Gattaca.
In fact, life was so perfect that the writers had to postulate the existence of non-genetically-engineered people in order to have any drama at all. "Wouldn't it suck if you were born into this society without any genetic enhancement?" the movie asks. And the answer is: yeah, so you should genetically engineer your children.