Where is all this going to lead us ?Designer BabiesQuote People with inherited forms of cancer have won the right to select embryos free from genes that might trigger the disease in future generations, The Times has learnt.

We'll all be perfect, and working in QF, with nobody to come and fix our plumbing or take our trash away!But maybe if we are perfect, so will our plumbing, and we will have figured out how to live without creating garbage...Ha Ha Ha!

How many generations before all the poor dumb people die out do you think ? I can see a real uprising here.

Perhaps one indicator of how people will choose genetic attributes, is how they choose names ?There does seem to be very widely held belief that name influences characteristics.Thus there are a scary number of Britneys... Wonder what the stats are for George ? Kylie is very common in Britain.But more seriously, evolution comes into play quite quickly here. Humans like most animals give birth to different numbers of male and female offspring, but by breeding age the numbers are very close to equal, even though they only "need" about 1% males. Quite easy to follow that being in the minority makes your odds of breeding rather better, and you get a better choice of mates.This pattern is so common and so strong, it would be very hard to break.I think the same applies to to the decisions people make about choosing genes for kids. There will be fashions for blonde or red hair, big/small noses et al, but can anyonethink of a seriously bad consequence to this ?The long lead time and the constant changes in celebrities at the top rank means that we won't end up with a generation of Britneys.Some genetic conditions likes Asperger's syndrome may seem to benefit society as a whole, but not the individual, but that's small beer.We're a long way from being able to pick smart babies, and even if that were cracked, quite why is it bad ?As for genetic illness hard to see a higher risk of cancer, diabetes or brittle bones as all that useful.Personally I think that people will simply not want to do this except in the case of major proven risk of clearly bad things. It will not be cheap for a long time, and given that about 1/3 of pregnancies are unplannedit's hard to see most people bothering.Your child is your child. How many people here would adopt ? Even for those who would adopt, they want babies, not older kids, partly because they can make the child "theirs" more.In short this is media scandal, not anything we should care about.If you get smart honest people, and ask them for guidelines about ethics in their area, they will come back with some, pretty much regardless of whether they actually serve any useful purpose.There is a human social tendency to worry about extremes, and thus the people who do ethics find themselves saying that in effect having >0% of the population die of cancer is somehow good.Sad to say, the "ethics committees" get infiltrated by those who have some emotional issue about the subject, or whose superstition drives them to try and screw the process up.The media lap this up. They don't understand or even like science, but as journos they are trained to find "both sides of the argument", which is fine for politics or sport, but sometimes in science the "other side" are barmyinterfering busybodies.Imagine an "ethics comittee" for maths.Is it "ethical" for an insurance company to use probability to charge poor sick people more for insurance ?

I would like to have the society full of designer babes. Everybody will be happy then. I don't think we need all of them to be mathematically efficient. Most of them need not. It would be a boring society with cranks like us doing maths on the streets,for example, say TJ, N and PP(does he do maths!).Soooooooooooo, i am all for genetic engineering in a controlled fashion. We can atleast eradicate lot of fanatics.

Tinkering with the natural selection process could be the last clever thing we ever do ?

In industrial countries natural selection has basically stopped.Thanks to medecine, deleterious mutations are allowed to spread throughout the species.The consequence is that if we carry on like that (no intervention on genes + medecione) we will all be invalid. In a few centuries.The question is: given that we know that, what should we do?Ref: Our load of mutations, HJ Muller.rk: we now know that Muller s prediction is in fact very conservative, as the rate of mutation is higher than was thought at the time.

QuoteTinkering with the natural selection process could be the last clever thing we ever do ?are you saying medecine is the least clever thing we ve ever done?

In industrial countries natural selection has basically stopped.I'm not so sure.We use the term "survival of the fittest" for evolution, with the implication of improvement, perhaps in intelligence of strength.Of coure evolution is the adaptation to circumstances. We observe that the relatively intelligent and strong lion is close to extinction, yet rats prosper.Intelligence is a very expensive game to play.Our brains consume around 25% of our energy, and even small malfunctions can render the indivdual unable to live, much less pass on their genes.Evolved characteristics are trade offs. Most animals are neither strong nor smart, most plants don't try to grow to enormous size, and recall that animals that spend generations in isolated caves lose sight.Humans have a broken gene for producing vitamin C, because the defect didn't matter at a time when we ate so much fruit.There are many opportunities for people with sub optimal brain function to take themselves out of the gene pool, as we see so vividly in the Darwin AwardsAddiction to chemicals, being gullible for fake treatments such as homeopathy or religion, or not concentrating at the wheel of a vehicle. This isn't "intelligence" per se, but brain function in general.Richer people live longer, and their children are less likely to die young, and we observe a rough correlation between acquired wealth and intelligence.Thus in an environment with very good supply, you'd expect people to get smarter, since in that context the energy cost of a bigger brain doesn't hurt your survival chances.Americans who have had about the most secure supply of food in the last century, have grown notably more intelligent. Now there's lots of factors here, not least is that grossly defective people rarely immigrated to America.Humans in general have only quite recently lived in cities. We know that historically big cities had very much lower life expectancy than those in small settlements because of rapid spread of disease. Now, we are almost all descended from people who managed to survive in that highly hostile environment. This has relevance with the expected pandemic of Bird Flu.After it has passed , the gene pool of urban humans in the west will be different, so developed countries do exhibit adaptation.Thanks to medecine, deleterious mutations are allowed to spread throughout the species. The consequence is that if we carry on like that (no intervention on genes + medecione) we will all be invalid. In a few centuries.People with what are considered defective find it quite hard to find a mate, so I suspect the time scale is longer.I believe we can apply the evolutionary principle to societies as well as individuals.We observe that groups of people, sometimes groups as big as states make very bad decisions. Humans evolved for groups of about 10-20, and this accounts for any number of large scale screwups.People now live in larger groups, and people who can work better in larger groups may well have better survival prospects. There are studies in things like the wagon trains crossing America where it's been shown that the more people an indivdual was linked to, the greater their chance of survival.Also there is the case of Jews. For at least 500 years social customs in many Jewish populations, there were explicit constraints on marrying if you did not achieve a given level of accomplishment, sometimes was competitive.There are lesser effects in many cultures, perhaps arranged marriage is a good thing ?Dowries offer another route for making sure your grandchildren have both superior genes, and wealth to increase their survival chances.Finally, it is well documented that there is a huge correlation between survival probability and general "success" in life based upon the education level of the mother, fathers are a very 2nd order effect.Many societies restrict education of women, or simply don't get round to doing so. We note high infant mortality in these cultures. The viablility of such groups in the long run is not that great. Humans got to be the dominant species because we produced a small number of relatively high quality offspring. They require huge nurturing, but it has worked.That being said, evolution is an artifact of the past, and there are any number of fossils of species whose adaptations turned against them.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DiceManQuoteTinkering with the natural selection process could be the last clever thing we ever do ?are you saying medecine is the least clever thing we ve ever done?So you see advancements in medical science as more of a continuum (an evolution if you like) than a step process. Interesting.

I don't really have time to get into all the mistakes you ve posted, but i d say the most shocking one is Humans got to be the dominant species because we produced a small number of relatively high quality offspring.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DiceManI don't really have time to get into all the mistakes you ve posted, but i d say the most shocking one is Humans got to be the dominant species because we produced a small number of relatively high quality offspring. Humans (homo sapiens) became dominant because they were able to grasp things.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DiceManI don't really have time to get into all the mistakes you ve posted, but i d say the most shocking one is Humans got to be the dominant species because we produced a small number of relatively high quality offspring. Never mind DCFC, he loves to rant.

QuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnQuoteOriginally posted by: DiceManI don't really have time to get into all the mistakes you ve posted, but i d say the most shocking one is Humans got to be the dominant species because we produced a small number of relatively high quality offspring. Humans (homo sapiens) became dominant because they were able to grasp things.Yeah, like chemical and thermonuclear weapons.

> Yeah, like chemical and thermonuclear weapons.Touche, TJ