That is the beauty of this system. Assuming that the technological hurdle of harvesting enormous numbers of embryos can be overcome then it always favors the rich since it is a competitive environment. Just to be clear: let’s say early on it is $1000/embryo you filter out, then a rich person who is willing to put in $1,000,000 will get a 1 out of 1000 baby (according to the attributes which can be selected for at the time, and based upon the weighting that the parent selects). Also there would be some constant cost, let’s say in the realm of 10k-100k just to enter the doctor’s office. Poor people clearly aren’t going to play.
Now let’s assume, like you said that we go into the future and the cost curve has done its magic and now the costs are fixed: $1000 + $10/embryo. Well now lots more people can have a one in 1000 baby. So it all balances out, right? Well no, since the rich guy is getting a 1 out of 100000 baby.
Now there could easily be diminishing returns as you go further out in the curve, I mean we know just about nothing right now, but it is also possible that the returns (in a competitive environment) won’t be diminishing.
Oh, fah. That’s like jumping into a thread about manned stations on Mars or the Moon and saying “but there are starving people on Earth right now!”. Exploring the vector of genetics on the human condition independent of other social variables is still an interesting thought experiment.
I agree with Huzurdaddi’s prognosis, it’s just that to me embryonic engineering is far more interesting than embryonic selection, because the latter really is directly mapped to income but limited in how much it can distort society. Two extremely ugly/short/whatever people are still going to be very much less likely to have a supermodel daughter even with a million dollars spent in embryonic selection than the children of two very attractive people.
It’s only when I got to upper management and started dealing with the actual customers, rather than the contractors or their management, that I abandoned my conservative views. It’s not that all rich kids are entitled, untalented, or undeserving of their positions. It’s just that the ratio of incompetent to competent people in high power positions because of birth is rather bad when compared to middle class positions. The Tony Haywards of the world are far more common than I like to think.
Continuing with the oil company line, if I’m working on a pilot project for a refinery or mine, I know I will deal with skilled (if sometimes difficult to deal with) people up to the point where they can be held accountable. Typically a production manager is about the highest position where I know I’ll find someone who knows what they’re doing. The moment I run into a plant manager, director of operations, it starts becoming a crapshoot. Am I dealing with someone who earned their way into their position? Am I dealing with a rich kid who did go to Stanford and MIT but worked his ass off? Or am I dealing with “junior”, someone’s relative, someone’s school buddy?
I think we can all do an imagination exercise to find a possible social order in such a scenario. But how would order come in place exactly? How could the governement impose a hierarchy of citizens? Don’t you think the majority of non GM people would invoke the civil roghts act, or just do a massive revolution against such a genetic dictstorship?
People really haven’t thought this through. They imagine a 10 year gap where genitifaly superior minority of people will suddenly get more rights and non GM people would be opressed. Wich is really dumb.
It’s not about rights, it’s about the smarter/healthier people naturally rising to the top. There wouldn’t need to be overt discrimination for the healthier children to outperform those that have to deal with more sicknesses.
Genetic engineering will eventually be necessary for us as a species, because we aren’t evolving the same way we used to thanks to already existing technology. Bad eyesight used to be something that would prevent a person from surviving, or from passing on their genes. No longer! Diseases killed people off, leaving behind a more disease-proof gene pool; have some medicine! We control our climates, we can get food regardless of our physical capability, I could go on forever. Humanity doesn’t act like other species, we’ve transcended that in a lot of ways, but our gene pool is becoming more and more of a mess until we use our tech to take care of that as well.
I don’t like it but I don’t really see an alternative! Not that I think this will happen in my lifetime.
True as far as the genome goes, but we sure as heck can alter the environment enough to make our current adaptations less than optimal.
Also FWIW, it’s not the genetics that will make these kids succeed, it’s the rich successful parents. Much, much bigger influence than any physical attribute short of a real handicap.
I’m not saying we’re going to evolve into a bunch of giant asses with fingers; some traits can change over a smaller scale. We’ve already seen a rise in poor vision.
Interesting to the super-rich fucks who’ll have yet another way to fight over getting their kids into Harvard, and science fiction fans, maybe. Judging by the usual hype machine on technology, I’d guess we’re looking at 50 years or more before any sort of “designer” - that is, improving over the average, not just selecting against horrible diseases - embryo selection is possible. Not because sequencing is hard, just because determining what’s associated with anything more complicated than hair color and diseases is very difficult.
Alternatively, to extrapolate the hypothetical, if this really did work I’d expect the cost to forever remain out of anyone but the upper middle class’s reach; like the arms race in land prices over good school districts, it’s a positional good.
Myopia is also aggravated by environmental factors though, so that’s a bit of a red herring as far as genetics.
As for the topic at hand, until the sequencing gets really cheap, it won’t be more than a drop in the bucket for the gene pool. Rich people tend to have lower amounts of children than poor people, and if they know they’re going to have a perfect child, they may even be less inclined to have more than one.
Well, if you are talking about enhancing characteristics, you are immediately talking about 1). If you want your kid to have blue eyes, but there’s no blue eyes in your own genetics, by definition it will involve manipulation.
Filtering out works based on things you don’t want. So sure, you can make sure you don’t have a downs baby, you can make sure your kid won’t be a dwarf, or that he won’t be predisposed to cancer.
Sure, but if you had say a 1/8 chance of your kid having blue eyes, you can now practically guarantee it. Similarly with a hypothetical ‘granite jaw’ gene or whatever. You couldn’t create ‘superbabies’ with X-ray vision or whatever out of whole cloth, but you could tremendously favour certain combinations of characteristics.
Yeah, I agree. Why look at the chart when you can just say what you think is correct based on zero evidence? I love jesus too! Sequencing the human genome was supposed to take until 2020, but the advances in sequencing have been nothing short of phenomenal … almost like the graph said!
Durp! The cost will almost certainly decrease rapidly. So a large percentage of the population will be able to afford the ability to have ‘better’ children than people who go the natural route. However, getting a child which is in the top N% will be strictly a positional good.
Or so that he isn’t NOT tall, etc, etc. The farthest you can go is as far as your genes would allow, but I am willing to wager that is pretty damn far.
Sequencing the human genome was once compared to the scope and scale of going to the moon, as they did the whole thing by hand; it was supposed to be one of the great achievements in human scientific discovery. Five years later there are appliances you just drop DNA in and sequences come out like an easy bake oven. The pace of advancement in genetics easily surpassed the silicon industry over the last ten years. It’s extremely feasible that inexpensive sequencers for doctor’s offices become a reality within the decade.
