Proposed Genetic Engineering revolution

The highest calling with in the humanist philosophical paradigm (and a high calling within most religionist paradigm) is the betterment of the human condition. Proper use of technology has gone far to increase our life span, reduce infant mortality, reduce the instance of lower life forms preying on us, increase the quality and availability of food, reduce bodily discomfort, minimize negative climatic influence, etc. Most of my fellow humans in my caste take these improvements for granted, Other rail against the very technology that helps us so.

I propose the human genome (the DNA that defines us) be not only mapped, but understood. The effort to get a total "atoms to organs" understanding would likely return back a thousand fold in new opportunities and life improvement. ( the effort to get to the moon only had about a 100 to 1 payback). Whole classes of diseases would be reduced to historical curiosities. A genetics industry would quickly eclispe the vaunted computer revolution. Our present generation would be pitied for having been needlessly subject to such a short life and so many diseases.

Eventually, when society becomes more civilized and places more value on ethics, it would be time to consider "a phase 2 upgrade of our planet's sentient beings" At least our present populations understands that it lacks responsibility to make the decisions to change what people are. The simple adage "you can't do that, you'd be playing God" suffices. However, in the long term unless our creator steps clearly steps forward and interviens in some way to the contrary - it would seem to fall on our successors to further advances "mans dominion". What else could God expect - after all, a 6 day creation sounds a bit rushed; and it's been at least a millenium since we've had any updated written Diety advice (according to the largest religions) I'd recommend starting off with less controversial changes which would be breeding compatable with our species: (first investigate genes from similar species - for some fixes, why reinvent the wheel) shore up the lower back and knees eliminate baldness, color blindness, Tay Sachs, familial ALS, Cystic Fibrosis, Diabeties etc Downs syndrome just as most lifeforms have biomechanisms to collect and remove harmfull excess chemicals - we should add to the list - since modern society has more potentially harmfull chemicals. people groups that live in certain environments could be selectively given things like better microbal immunity, better heat tolerance, built in UV skin protection, etc it may also be possible to back down the tendency towards violent behaviour (but we must be most careful making genetic alterations to our pphacthe lest we "loose our humanity" (whatever that means) Eventually, it would be neat if most humans could be about 3 foot tall and weigh 50 lbs. It would be like doubling our food capacity and tripling the effective land space.

I expressed the above with the following post to the skeptics list:

Malthus raises an interesting point - but to me much like the prognostication "by the year 1950, horse dung will be 2 feet deep in the cities". Inability to envision the effect of motorized vehicles then is no different from people now with no concept of what the genetic revolution could bring. Try to imagine a world when tools to understand and manipulate genetic code are as ubiquitous as tools today to understand and manipulate computer code. I feel the biggest human holocaust will be the result of warped gene hackers unleashing a virus which wipes out most of the worlds population. Our last century of no human darwinian force will be remedied in a few weeks of an apocalyptic plague of "biblical proportions". People with intellectual and economic resources will be able to quickly concoct an antidote. But lessor educated, isolated anti-technology minions will perish. A less nasty version of this would be a long latency virus attacking the human reproductive system. Again, the only people then able to pass on genes would be those with resources. I'm not saying this would be fair or politically correct, but it would be a huge roll back of the status quo of more ignorant people reproducing the fastest. On the bright side, such technology should also allow farm animals and crops to have far higher yields, more parasite resistance, and more adaptability to less productive land. The greatest decrease of human impact could one day come from people engineered to be only 1 foot high and 20 pounds in mass. Such people would only need 1 fifth the resources, be more altruistic, be less sick, smarter, live 200 years, and maybe civil enough to maintain a proper population. The knee-jerk response "don't play god" is a result of countless techno-phobic movies - mere atavism of the first cave man to accidentally get burned by the fire, put it out and say, "we're not ready for this". The argument, "we are too stupid and uncivilized to meddle with the human genome" should be "we can not allow our species to stay so stupid and uncivilized". Genetic engineering is passively done every time one selects one mate over another - at some point it must be managed more by the mind than the gonads. -maybe in a life time after mine, Eric Krieg

------- The following is a related discussion between Fred and Eric:

I admit maybe I should reference this in my crackpot page