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To: Popocatapetl

Eugenics up to now [and for a while in the future] has been/will be conducted with a sledgehammer. Really interesting stuff could become possible in 100-200 years, when we will be rewriting genomes in minute detail.


15 posted on 01/06/2007 8:25:57 PM PST by GSlob
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To: GSlob; TigerLikesRooster; SuzyQ
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to think that extensive human genetic engineering ("rewriting the human genome") is both inevitable, and a good thing. I doubt it, on both counts.

I remember reading an article in a Howard County (MD) newspaper in which the author was trying to figure out why Howard County had one of the worst rates of child abuse in the USA. Howard County is home to a high percentage of wealthy and very well-educated people, and is where one of the earliest and best of the "planned communities," Columbia MD, is located.

The upshot was that intensely wanted and meticulously planned children tend to be very much the vehicles of their parents' egos. They are expected to be irresistably cute, invariably emotionally rewarding, hyper-bright, high-achieving from the earliest age, etc. And when they "fall short" in any way --- when they cry a lot as babies or have a persistent rash, or dribble fudge sauce on the white-and-gold brocade sofa, or fail to be interested in the Teach-Your-Toddler-Japanese tapes, etc. --- the parents tend to either get terribly frustrated and angry, or they detach emotionally and lose interest in the child altogether.

Kids who are the result of expensive laboratory procedures, will be under enormous pressure to repay the investment in many ways. Their parents have expections related to their childrens' status as products, rather than as persons.

There's more than a whiff of the inhuman in the genetically engineered, ubermensch dream.

34 posted on 01/07/2007 2:42:08 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o (Begotten, not made.)
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