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Is Genetically Engineering Your Children Ethical?
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How is it a slippery slope for two parents to dictate their child will have blue eyes instead of green? Or that their child will not have ADHD?
What will happen is given the modern realities of good looks gets a better start in life, I suspect most Anglos will pick Blue eyes and blond hair and tall, while the short dark skinned types with brown eyes would go extinct. I can get into specifics but i would get in trouble. So everyone will come out looking like tom cruise and nobody will ever look like Caesar Chavez. The differences would become acute and beauty and ugly will lead to greater stereotypes and eventually nations of the latter will be viewed as savages and war will result. The homogeneous mixing of all racial types is the only REAL thing thats breaking down these barriers because everybody is basically is getting mixed from something else.
so given your point Green and blue will become exclusive choices and brown and black will go extinct.
In the Pure breed dog/horse world it would be akin to all dogs being muts, thus losing the moniker “pure breed”
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But how is it unethical for all the men and women of the world to chose to make their children “beautiful” (at least their own opinion of what beauty is)?
And how would it be unethical if all the people of the world ended up looking similar on the outside? Wouldn’t it actually be ethical in that there would no longer be any racial strife? There would be no more hate crimes (based on race). Wouldn’t that be a net good effect and thus, more ethical then what we have today?
And who’s to say that all the people in the world would decide blue or green eyes are better? If we believe Darwin’s works, and we look at what anthropology has told us, we can see that the vast majority of the world had and has had black or brown eyes and black or brown hair. So is it not safe to say that black and brown are the two traits with the best survivability? Perhaps we will all end up with black and brown traits! Not to mention, the ability of Africans to resist the damage from the sun (resistance to skin cancer) with increased solar radiation hitting us more and more would be a good thing to propagate in our children, right?
BTW, was reading an article that says that blue eyes was a genetic mutation in Europe and the reason it (and some of the other recessive traits we find in Europeans) survived is because a “splash of color” helps to “sell your product in a monochrome world.” Thought it was interesting, given this discussion.
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the end dose not always justify the means.
if to get this utopia where we are all the same means generations of exsesive discrimination to weed out the trates that are not desireable then we are going down the wrong path. the change won’t happen over night and that means it will take generations at best to make the change over. so then we hyper agrovate descrimination.
as for the blue eyes and blond hair being less common, that is because they are resesive genetic traits. i remember this from biolagy class. you as a person have 2 trates for eye color. say you have blue yes so your trates read BlBl (Blue Blue). you marry a person with trates BBl (Brown Blue). now you will have children. if you have 4 (statisticly the best number for this example) you will have 2 children with BBl and 2 with BlBl; or 2 brown eyes and 2 blue eyes.
now say both parents are BBl, then with 4 children they will have 1 BB, 2 BBl, and 1 BlBl. so 3 brown eyes and 1 blue eyes.
the same holds true to hair and other traits. so the reason that blue eyes are so uncommon (even with them being primarally Europen traits) is that they are resesive traits, not that they are less desired.oh ya, also by doing this you can posibly eradicate a gene that we don’t know that we need in our sociaty, this could caus prboblems down the road that can not be for sceen.
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Basically the poor people will have have the opportunity to have children of the type they wish and the poor will not. Eventually all the Lessor people ( less popular) will get weeded out, Indians, Eskimos,Pacific Islanders, Latins, Blacks, Some Asians, anybody with different skin, curly hair, dark eyes, all gone in 200 years. 2 billion Tom Cruise look alikes, and 2 billion stupid Paris Hilton’s all trying to get their own TV show. I think the world has enough problems.
I personally don’t have a problem with this but id rather get a few brilliant people to carry us in the future than billions of actors.
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Perv,
I understand what recessive means, thanks. I was pointing out that blue eyes and green eyes are considered a mutation that happened a long time ago, but they stuck around because they were deemed attractive and thus, we had genetic diversity. Not that I didn’t understand why we only have say 12% blue eyes and 88% brown eyes. :)
As for “weeding out” traits that the general world population finds unattractive, how is that any different then choosing your spouse? If a white lady decides to only date white men, is she somehow unethical because she does not want to propagate the traits of a black man? That’s a pretty racist statement if that’s what you are trying to say. I, honestly, don’t see a difference between picking the traits from a list you and your spouse have to offer and engineering your child and choosing to only date black men with red hair and blue eyes that are under two meters tall.
The only difference is that the genetic de-diversification of the race may happen at a faster pace. Which, I may remind you, may actually be considered ethical as we may all have very similar traits resulting in absolutely no inter-racial strife any more on this planet. Wouldn’t it be ethical if no one was murdered because their skin color was different? No one was murdered because they had the wrong eye color?
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As for “weeding out” traits that the general world population finds unattractive, how is that any different then choosing your spouse?
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In the real world people settle for less than their “dream” no matter how many times they protest to the contrary. The choice was made in many cases to include among other things that other persons soul,spirit, and brain and not only the looks. So this ‘choosing the mate’ includes checks and balances. This is removed by the 4 billion Tom Cruises/Paris Hiltons that will soon appear replacing all the others. So now you have reduced the human race to a few personality traits, mental aptitudes, and the brilliant people will disappear leaving a canvas of robots to push humanity forward.
The only tangible benefit will be clothing factories will only have to turn out fewer sized clothing and choices.
Of course better looking people usually hook up with like kinds. Now the problem occurs when the choices are reduced by 2 century’s of people picking from an increasing smaller pool of choices. All the special traits will be lost. Just like when all the animals go extinct. Will these then be placed in human zoos to “protect” them from total extinction. Look ahead. thats what will happen much latter.
Could make for good science fiction. They had a twilight zone episode on this.
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No, genetic engineering is terrible. I would get into details, but every point I could argue has been said by Imperious Leader, even with the twilight zone point. One of the many great episodes to deal with themes of beatuy/perfection/genetic engineering pointed out that in order for there to be beauty, there must also be ugly (or rather, atypical beauty, however you want to look at it :wink: ).
Also, imagine a person having to deal with the fact that theyre not good at basketball because they practiced, but because theyre parents wanted them to be? Would they even feel joy over doing good in a game? Could they understand their teammates emotions and feeling of accomplishment?
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We all know parents who try to live through their children (e.g, sports). do we reallly want to give those kinds of parents power to gentically tailor their kids?
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Thats a good point. The notion of beauty will change as more and more Tom Cruises appear. Then a new paradigm of this beauty will arise, but then all the traits will be weeded out after centuries never to return, then real problems will surface. It will turn into Gattaca where the slightest imperfection leads to personal ruin and loss of happiness. It would be a terrible world indeed. Id rather have ugly people to make fun of. Heck… all the stereotypes would be lost which is 95% of comedy.
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Yeah, I want some engineered kids, but I don’t want anyone else getting them. I wand a Bret Favre, a Kathy Ireland (with slightly bigger hips for making my grand kids) an I want one with a huge head and tiny feet, for comedic relief. Yeah that’d be great.
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Oh thats another thing I forgot to mention, would some sicko engineer their kid to be really ugly?
Or like have a third arm or something?
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Three arms could be usefull, I sometimes wish I had a couple extra arms or eyes…
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But when beauty is the norm, then being different will be an advantage so parents, attempting to give their progeny all the advantages, will want to change what they look like and thus, we will not become Children of the Corn or Der Master Race. But rather, I suspect, we will remain much as we are today, but without the genetic diseases. After all, you marry your spouse because you like his or her traits, thus, wouldn’t it make sense you want those traits in your child?
You cannot make your child look like Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton if you do not have those traits to select from. I’m not talking about splicing someone else’s genes in, you are limited to only what genes you have to offer.
That means, unless a black man had an irish ancestor centuries ago and somehow managed to keep a single gene for red hair, he cannot offer red hair to his progeny.
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you allow even tweaking and some one in 20 years will want to add in the gens from some one else to get even better results. when ever you give some, then some one takes more.
by also getting rid of desiese we could also get rid of cures for other things or even eliminate gens that we don’t know what they do.
who is to say that dislexia (sp) crossed with Audtisam (sp) don’t creat some benafit? both alone are undesireable trates but together they may be what gives us geniouses or some other desireable trait.
by eliminating trates you destroy the chance of things happening that you don’t know about. -
You cannot make your child look like Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton if you do not have those traits to select from.
Ahh but thats the problem. Things will as an outcrop of this technology push all the weird ideas forward. Specific gene traits or new “models” of genetic makeup will become available like a new cake recipe. Women will want instead of cute “toy dogs” “toy children” like Gary Coleman so they teach it to say “what choo talking about Willis” and everybody can have a big old laugh at genetic freeks. It would be a sad commentary on the human condition. For every new technology their are 2 times more idiots thinking of corrupt ways to use the new technology without regard to any moral implications.
As i said before its a Pandora’s box. Lets first get all the hungry people fed and not worry about using our technology to produce more genitic monsters. Heck i can see North Korea using this to make an army of 7 foot soldiers to fight south Korea. Think of how this would disrupt the NBA. The basket will have to to to 12 feet and ill have to alter my shot from the 3 point line because somebody allowed giants to be made. NO way forget it.
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Why worry about feeding people at all? We could easily splice in sequences from plants so that we are fed by being outside for half an hour at mealtimes. Heck, we could engineer it so we don’t need sleep, and thus, effectively increase human productivity by 25-33% (lots of Americans get far less then 8 hours of sleep, that’s why I put the range in.)
I mean, if we want to take this to ridiculous levels.
Or, we could remain in the realm of actual probabilities. People will select the genes from both parents they like the best. “I would like her to have my wife’s nose.” Or “I would like him to have my husband’s chin.”
As far as appearances go, it’d be the same as plastic surgery, only much safer (no surgery, no anesthetics, no recovery, etc) and more realistic (if Mommy does not have DDD cups, Susie cannot either.)
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You know, I would rather genetically engineer SPOUSES than CHILDREN. :-D
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@Cmdr:
Why worry about feeding people at all? We could easily splice in sequences from plants so that we are fed by being outside for half an hour at mealtimes. Heck, we could engineer it so we don’t need sleep, and thus, effectively increase human productivity by 25-33% (lots of Americans get far less then 8 hours of sleep, that’s why I put the range in.)
I mean, if we want to take this to ridiculous levels.
Or, we could remain in the realm of actual probabilities. People will select the genes from both parents they like the best. “I would like her to have my wife’s nose.” Or “I would like him to have my husband’s chin.”
As far as appearances go, it’d be the same as plastic surgery, only much safer (no surgery, no anesthetics, no recovery, etc) and more realistic (if Mommy does not have DDD cups, Susie cannot either.)
if traits were good to our survival then they would be naturally selected, and all this artificial selection would not be necessary. in effect we would be making our selves more susceptible to pandemic disease and that kind of stuff. and about this artificial selection, those fetuses are babies, not dogs or corn. we should treat our species with dignity and not try to completely destroy it.
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I hear this talk about choosing a spouse because of their traits: I dont think most people consciously choose a spouse (or enter any relationship with the opposite sex) because they think their kids would be nice.
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could parents engineer their kids to have either huge knockers or a huge wang. talk about kids owing you something later on in life. :-D
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