Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Underinformed fantasy?

Luddites happen
Fox — (archived)

Stripping your basic premise down to its least reprehensible form, I understand it thus:

-- The human genome is perfectable.

-- Human nature itself makes the research toward this end inevitable.

-- Human science will eventually understand the genome sufficiently to induce inheritable changes toward perfection.

-- Therefore, the human creation of humanity's successor is also inevitable.

However, unless there is a secret laboratory somewhere with an unlimited amount of funding, Science does not operate in either an economic or ethical vacuum. (See my post to Tom about economics in an ethical vacuum.) This is the Age of Information, which, again owing to human nature, makes it also the Age of Public Scrutiny. Opposition to the research outlined above is as inevitable as the research itself. Failure to include this data in the model -- or worse, deliberately discounting its importance -- will lead to some unpleasant surprises for the modelers.

The crux of the ethical opposition is, and shall remain: "Who decides what is perfect, and upon what authority?" The identity of the opposition becomes, as a natural consequence, any- and everyone deemed "imperfect". The potential strength of the opposition currently has an upper limit of 6.5 billion, give or take ten percent... and some of them have more at their disposal than pitchforks, torches and sabots.

While it is true that I openly express frustration with certain elements of contemporary society, characterizing them as "anti-science", it is hardly relevant to this discussion (and borders on ad hominem argument). Whether I personally join the opposition to neo-eugenics (it should be obvious where I stand), or not, does not change the fact that it exists now, and will continue to grow. However, your invocation of the stem-cell research controversy allows me to make it clear that there is no ethical dilemma in supporting it, while opposing "your" program:

Stem-cell research seeks, in its final application, to correct disease and/or injury in individual human beings. It does not seek to make them other than who they are. It does not imply judgement about "fitness", neither in the Darwinian sense of ability to produce viable offspring, nor in the sense of their personal worthiness to survive... if anything, it judges in favor of their right to survive because they are individual human beings. And, stem-cell research does not seek to make individuals, or groups superficially resembling them, obsolete.

Finally, as long as ethical dilemmas are on the table, here's one:

Few, if any, experiments in a branch of science so new are without failures. And, if your are correct about the inevitability of this particular research, eventually the subjects will need to grow and mature -- I'd guess, into young adulthood at least -- before they can be evaluated as successes or failures. Even before that (and I will discount the chimerae that do not survive birth), earlier attempts will fail sooner, and more often.

What will be done with the failures?

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