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Re:UK to allow babies from three people by toyg on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @04:38AM (#8996006)
> The smart get smarter, the fast get faster, the strong get stronger, and the inferior disappear from the gene pool.

That stopped some time ago for humans, at least in industralized countries. Modern medicine, long periods of peace and (eventually) welfare provisions have taken care of that. This is a further step in that direction.

Evolution works over huge numbers, both in life and death; by effectively reducing the death-count around the globe, we're progressively abolishing it for humans.

> If anything, genetic modification will allow the less gifted to pool funds and improve their own gene pool in a way that was simply not possible before.

I fear that "pooling funds" could signal a mischaracterization of poor people as "less gifted", which is absolutely not the case. "The poor" are the ones who have historically improved our genepool, by constantly churning huge numbers of children who would then proceed to fight to death (often literally) for survival and success. "The rich" have always opted for in-breeding, low numbers and social welfare among their peers, resulting in weak genes and lots of hereditary diseases surviving the centuries. In this sense, "the poor" have absolutely nothing to gain from genetic manipulation: children are their only resource and they will continue to produce as many as they can, resulting in a stronger and more variegated gene pool without having to add anything to the process.

The GATTACA scenario is real in the sense that a certain mindset is common around modern elites, a view that the rich must be somehow superior to the poor (smarter, healthier, harder-working, etc) otherwise they wouldn't be where they are. Policies like Tony Blair's suggestion that "fat people should pay more for healthcare" are appallingly neo-darwinistic, but they've also been mostly rejected out of a sense of human decency. I expect this will continue to be the case; as a lot of modern history reminds us, it takes very little to send entire populations back to the Middle Ages, and genetic discrimination would light a very powerful fuse.

Re:UK to allow babies from three people by icebraining on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @07:35AM (#8996469)
That stopped some time ago for humans, at least in industralized countries. Modern medicine, long periods of peace and (eventually) welfare provisions have taken care of that. This is a further step in that direction.

Evolution works over huge numbers, both in life and death; by effectively reducing the death-count around the globe, we're progressively abolishing it for humans.

That's a common argument, but isn't it putting too much emphasis on death as a driver of natural selection? I mean, a person who lives 80 years without ever having children is as much an evolutionary dead end as a bird who dies before he gets to reproduce.

As long as there are genetic factors that lead to some people have more or less children, evolution is still at work, even if they both live to be the same age.

Re:UK to allow babies from three people by maxerickson on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @05:58AM (#8996213)
This treatment doesn't do anything to reward the mutated mitochondrial genes (your 'step in a direction'), it eliminates them from the population.

If you were saying that the mutated mitochondrial genes were a sign of otherwise inferior genetics, gross.