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A comment on What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?. Parent comment

Re:What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing? by ben_w on Sunday March 24, 2019 @05:50AM (#19475409)
Monocultures are fragile. They are fragile in agriculture, they are fragile in software development, and they are fragile in political thought. There is no reason to expect we would not be equally fragile if we all changed our genomes to be the “same race”, especially given that “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis” [1], and therefore can be expected to continue to find it easy discriminate against each other for being different right up until the supermajority[2] are all identical.

[1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

[2] I was going to say ‘entire population’, then I remembered one of our differences includes a desire to be different; how different we get to be depends on social rules, which is why the number of furries who had themselves surgically altered to look like (say) cats is a small non-zero number.

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Re:What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing? by chr1 on Sunday March 24, 2019 @06:38AM (#19475557)
Sure monocultures are bad but talking about banning gene editing to avoid monoculture at this point is the equivalent of proposing to ban people who already own cars to buy teslas to avoid electric car monoculture. Because we are not anywhere near a monoculture, and for some traits monoculture is ok (do we miss the old design of vocal tract that gave us ability to not talk?).

Also we won't have a monoculture for whole genome any time soon, because that would mean for everyone to raise someone elses kid which people tend to not like.

There is a possibility that some people will try to make changes to appearance eye/skin/hair color, shape of nose. But that doesn't have that much effect on survivability of human kind (balancing higher rate of skin cancer vs vitamin D deficiency has other methods now) and banning gene editing to prevent that would be the same as banning all surgery to simply not allow plastic surgery.

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