Case in point: the ongoing scandal over alleged performance-enhancing drug use by some of baseball’s greatest players that has torn apart followers of the national pastime. This year marked the first time since 1996 that not a single player was selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite having some of the biggest names in the history of baseball up for nomination. Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa — all first-ballot candidates, all suspected steroid users, all de-nied. Baseball fans expected a tough time of it for the likes of Bonds and Clemens, but a complete shutout of people suspected of cheating but never confirmed - such as Mike Piazza - was completely unexpected. It was society’s way of saying that we want to pay to see incredible athletic performance on the playing field, but it still has to conform to specific notions of “fair.”
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1. Ray (RDP)Not all peoples are squeamish about eugnenics
how little improvement there has been in human evolution.
Oh, there has been technical advancement,
but, uh,
how little man himself has changed-Khan Noonian Singh
Of course, it's also the case that humans presumably are already breeding for intelligence quite effectively at the top end of things, because the intelligent tend to breed with the intelligent. That, unfortunately, does nothing to raise the overall standard (it might help the most intelligent become more intelligent, but that's probably the result of the resulting nurture rather than the underlying nature).
(Another problem is that in the West, the intelligent are increasingly often not reproducing at all, because they realize what a difficult economic proposition it is.)
You are assuming that intelligence breeding works this way. For example it could easily be the case that more intelligent people breeding leeds to more children on the autism spectrum and other such consequences rahter than just purely more intelligent children.
And no I am not suggesting autistic children are unintelligent (my eldest is on the spectrum), but he is not the forerunner of the genetically perfect super intelligent either.
What I am saying is the mind is a complex system and I don't think intelligence (as we understand it today) is any kind of simple linear thing to be bred for like eye color.
Work out hard, rub some HGH creme on your legs to aid recovery: "unfair"
Have a surgeon physically remove a tendon from your knee and place it in your throwing elbow: "fair"
At the same time, my experience is that 95% of people who talk about "the singularity" are creepy dudes who seem mostly driven by the idea that in the future they'll get a blowjob from Seven of Nine.
There have been claims that Yao Ming is the result of a crude eugenics program.
Voluntary euthanasia is legal in a few countries, and that's something that is often shocking to the masses. With GM all it takes is for one first world nation to make it legal for it to become something the superrich can take advantage of. And if we're talking about modifying human eggs and sperm so as to produce superbabies, it only means two weeks Liechtenstein while the samples are taken, the gene work is done, and the egg is implanted. Then it's jut a normal pregnancy and childbirth.
I think the real problem is an extension of what Bitter Mouse alluded to, the fact that the Human Genome Project has taught us that the action of genes is a lot more complicated than we thought. This will be especially true in a system as complex as the brain, where small changes can have huge cascading effects that we really don't understand and can't easily predict. For a long time the "superbabies" will be ones born without relatively simple negative gene expressions -- the genes for Downs Syndrome, things like that.
The other issue that we'll have is that it will be almost impossible to do experiments that would lead to improving human intelligence through genetic manipulation. The animal models don't work so well because the brain is such a complex system. And if you work on a human and screw up, you've suddenly become Josef Mengele.
I don't think about this stuff very often, but I wouldn't turn down a blowjob from Seven of Nine.
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