MORAL RELATIVITY...... "MIUAUG".......

How many times have I said it..... harped on it... raved, ranted, mumbled, blubbered, blabbed, whined, bemoaned, predicted.....

No Anchor.. = tossed about in a stormy sea of opinion...

...and you wonder why I keep on about mankind needing to be reconciled with its Creator?

Apart from the Almighty and his revealed morality, there is no REASON "not" to do this, along with a grab bag of many more tantalizing ideas.

This works fine, UNTIL... like the shows about a computer which 'suggests' changes to itself to 'improve' its performance, the scientists are thrilled.. then finally, the greatest improvement is to cull the scientists who created it, and it now has the power to achieve it.

Steven, all of us would do well to listen to the voice which came to your biological (?) ancestors in the wilderness of Sinai....

"Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord".....etc

The future is now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=6810aba681c951e4&ex=1195534800

Would Amy Harmon, the author of the linked NY Times article, have aborted a foetus that showed too many negative genetic characteristics?

How about posters here?

Would any of you abort a foetus that looked as if it might grow up a bit stupid or ugly?

I am not sure that people would be brighter in “this brave new world”.
Indeed there could well be a dramatic drop in creativity required in all fields, not only art, but also science. Many creative types have higher than normal levels of shizotpy and other psychiatric disorders.

Schizophrenia, as does schizotypy (common within families of schizophrenics) has possibly genetic causes (which twin studies indicate), then removing this gene could ultimately result in dumbing down society.

One hypothesis suggests that schizotypy is a result of genes that enable a trait of creativity.

http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/sohee/Publications/Folley_Park_NIROT.pdf

http://www.unm.edu/~marni1/stats/schizotypy_creativity.pdf

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/jrp.pdf

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/nettle%20and%20clegg%20proceedings%20b.pdf

Perhaps schizophrenia is too much of a good thing ...

I don’t really know how one could gentically engineer for brilliant minds.

Imagine what the world would have lost if Stephen Hawking’s ALS had been detected in utero, and he had been aborted.

Also, the environment is often a necessay precipitant for conditions to develop, such as the defensive sickle-cell allele. One sickle-cell allele, protects you from malaria; two, and you get sickle cell anemia.

If climate change does occur rapidly, tiny bobbed noses are not going to be very suitable; people will need larger and wider noses to cool the air.

It seems that genetic engineering, by removing certain genes, may in fact, cause an unravelling of protection and adaptability that has evolved over time. Lewontin, I think, argued this point.

As for “beauty”, it changes from one era to another. It is tied to natural selection and need to procreate. It is also subjective. As a young woman, I wasn’t attracted to muscley men - I felt that all was missing was the fur. I am sure other females felt the same. A man’s intellect was the component which “turned me on”.

It would seem that gentic engineering could in fact create a common, and ultimately boring society, subject to other different forms of disfunction or disease. Certainly not one I would care to live in ... and for so long ..

hear hear Jamo ...
They certainly did try that one in WW2. People never learn, wonder how Monsanto would react to that un-challenge since they are losing the GM battle. Maybe we could sell them our seeds as well since they already own 91 % of worldwide seeds.I forgot.. we cannot sell ours because our DNA is owned by some other company.

Sorry guys 'n'galls. The time is not ripe as yet.We need a few more years of sucking fluoridated/chlorinated tapwater to get into the dumbing-down mode.

DANIELLE, JAMMO & EFTFNC

My guess is that what we'll have initially is an extension of what happens now.

Today foetuses that are afflicted with genomes likely to cause congenital diseases – Down's syndrome, Huntington's and Tay Sachs among them - are routinely aborted. As our testing capability improves we'll do more tests. Within a decade or so we may be able to determine whether a foetus is likely to grow up a bit dim, or be sexually unattractive or has an elevated probability of being homosexual. The parents will then be able to decide whether to abort the foetus and try again.

Later I can envisage couples fertilising a series of ova in vitro and then choosing to implant only the best ones.

At the moment of course the failure rate with implanted ova fertilised through IVF is high; but I have no doubt the technology will improve.

If you ask me to put a date on this I'd guess at about 2020. By the time my grandchildren get to childbearing age they'll be wrestling with these decisions.

DANIELLE,

Standards of sexual attractiveness are actually not as variable as you seem to imagine. Evolution seems to have programmed men and women to prefer coupling with healthy mates. Sexual attractiveness seems to reflect, albeit imperfectly, a potential mate's fitness.

So beauty is in the eye of the brain programmed by evolution.

CJ MORGAN,

If I am only one quarter as successful as Michael Crichton I shall not complain.