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Original Paragraph:
A little further into the future are technologies to give us
control over our children's genetic heritage. My favorite is the libertarian
eugenics sketched decades ago by science fiction author Robert
Heinlein–technologies that permit each couple to choose, from among the
children they might have, which ones they do have, selecting the egg that does
not carry the mother's tendency to nearsightedness to combine with the sperm
that does not carry the father's heritage of a bad heart. Run that process
through five or ten generations, with a fair fraction of the population
participating, and you get a substantial change in the human gene pool. Alternatively,
if we learn enough to do real genetic engineering, we can forget about the wait
and do the whole job in one generation.
Source: http://patrifriedman.com/prose-others/fi/commented/Future_Imperfect.html#A_little_further_into_the_future_are_technologies_
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[Thu Dec 4 13:00:39 PST 2003-337] Unknown:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity, anonimity is one of the Internet goodies, which allows us to be more honest than we could expect. Those two "designer kids" paragraphs made me laugh perhaps your intention. Do you believe in genes and "science fiction"? Many do. The story of being able (sometime in the "near future") to select our children's traits is a hoax to me, however, rather surprisingly, there are enough gullible people to invest time and resources (what about public resources, that is, tax payers money) in that "research" adventure. Which makes me think why do they do it?
Do we believe those generous medical promises that seldom materialize or are we just concerned with our "bad" traits or even frightened at the possibility to transmit them to our children. Either way spending huge sums of money on Genome projects and alike seems quite irrational to me considering all the poverty in the world. Maybe you will have something to say from the point of view of the evolutionary psychology, it may explain it by means of the mighty gene with its ultimate reproductive and survival goal (or program).
As far as this "mother" is concerned, to me she is The Mother if the baby came out of her womb. For the simple reason that this is the definition of the word "mother". It is often a good idea to consult a dictionary. There are recent attempts, though, to redefine the word (and by that belittle the role of the woman) with complex inventions and in vitro techniques but it doesn't change my opinion on that. View it that way:
Who contributed more to the baby: the external genes "donors" or the woman who let the baby grow in her for 9 months and supplied it not only (a joke here) with some invisible genes and sperms but also with sustenance and everything else (soul perhaps, who knows) that this growing human needed from her?
Apart from that remark many things you say are interesting, the Journal of Interesting Economics is a great idea, I may contribute (send for evaluation) a paper any time soon.
[Wed Apr 21 07:50:40 PDT 2004-111] WKDecker (NOSPAMwkdecker89@yahoo.com.NOSPAM):
The difficulty in genetic redesigns is the same one faced by computer programmers,
the inability to be certain all consequences of a change are either benign or favorable. I shudder to contemplate the effect of seemingly minor changes which cause major problems. I suspect that such attempts may recoil on those who attempt them.
[Thu Sep 16 21:01:36 EDT 2004-259] Patri Friedman (NOSPAMpatri@clevername.net.NOSPAM):
You are surely right that minor genetic changes will have unexpected consequences. Fortunately, the knowledge of the consequences of a change is a piece of information. That means it has low marginal cost. Which means that you (and others) can sit back and wait for those who make the attempt, and see what happens.
There may be a lot of problems among the first attempts, but the masses need only adopt those whose cost / benefit combination seems desirable.
[Wed Sep 28 18:42:03 PDT 2005-270] NOSPAMlegisjuris@yahoo.com.NOSPAM:
I thought the movie Gattaca had a very nice portrayal of this idea of designer children and the possible societal consenquences. Interestingly, in Russian sci-fi, there is a scenario interplanetary explorers come upon a dead civilization that destroyed itself because of such selective breeding. If everyone wants all the same exact traits in their children, the end result is that we all become clones of one another. One disease would wipe us all out. Who knows? Maybe the whole process will reverse when all reach perfection and then deformed and retarded will become fashionable.
[Tue Jun 13 10:00:16 PDT 2006-163] Damien (NOSPAMblogger@mindstalk.net.NOSPAM):
In the spirit of trying to predict traffic jams as well as cars:
I envision selection at the embryo level, not gametes; just seems easier. Make lots of embryos, let them divide, pick off a cell and analyze it, take your top N choices for now or later. Anyway, immune conformity could be a problem -- which is why genetic consulting clinics might be networked, encouraging or even requiring parents to record the immune factors they selected. This can be perfectly anonymous, because the key information parents need is what other parents are selecting, in the aggregate. If immune factor X is becoming too popular then embryos with other factors become more attractive to the parents making a choice.
[Sun Oct 15 05:55:50 PDT 2006-287] Unknown:
Could you also cite the title of the Robert Heinlein book you mention on egg selection.
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