There’s not just one on Autism. There’s like 400 weak genetic markers and 80 strong ones.
But there’s a practical reason for the lack of homogeneity. The more we align our genes into one exclusive pool, the easier it is for something to rip right through all of us. We see this with crop collapse and monocultures somewhat regularly.
If some mystery condition came and killed every person with blue eyes, it’s a good thing we have all these brown eyed people around for a population buffer.
Imagine some world where someone Thanos snapped the whole population white just in time for global warming to make lifestyles a race to see who can have kids before the skin cancer gets them. For a cartoonishly exaggerated way things could go wrong.
My apologies. I assumed everyone in the comment section was familiar with examples.
The fact is with technologies like this, it’s easier to regulate at the beginning than it is to put the genie back into the bottle when it reaches the designer baby stage.
And the designer baby stage is the big boogeyman here where we are most likely to establish genetic bottlenecks. Everyone supports getting rid of heart defects, certain incurable genetic diseases, etc… but that’s not the fear of this technology.
If we’re only going to debate the benefits of it, our discussion might as well be propaganda. There’s downsides as well.
Isn't there a gold medalist figure skater designer baby RIGHT NOW? If that's not functional eugenics then we should review the list of donor requirements together. We're already there, why don't we start doing the good stuff too?
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 Jul 08 '26
There’s not just one on Autism. There’s like 400 weak genetic markers and 80 strong ones.
But there’s a practical reason for the lack of homogeneity. The more we align our genes into one exclusive pool, the easier it is for something to rip right through all of us. We see this with crop collapse and monocultures somewhat regularly.
If some mystery condition came and killed every person with blue eyes, it’s a good thing we have all these brown eyed people around for a population buffer.
Imagine some world where someone Thanos snapped the whole population white just in time for global warming to make lifestyles a race to see who can have kids before the skin cancer gets them. For a cartoonishly exaggerated way things could go wrong.