[MarkWar]

>1) But that's exactly the same situation with natural mutations, which occur with every generation!

Right. And my carefully cultivated garden next to my bedroom window is the same as the hodge-podge of stuff growing in the empty lot across the street.

Mark W.

[Physicist]

But wait...you said in post 108 that cloning makes things worse because it increases genetic diversity. Now you seem to be saying that the cultivated garden is preferable because it has less diversity! So which is it? If we cultivate the human genome by gene splicing, will the human garden become more diverse or less diverse? Which would be preferable?

(My personal opinion is that genetic diversity is good, and that manipulation of the human genome will lead to greater diversity. While your garden may be less genetically diverse than the lot across the street, horticulture overall has added to the genetic diversity of flowers, by preserving and promoting entire sequences of rare mutations that would have been extremely unlikely in the wild.)

The difference between the garden and the empty lot is that the one is the way you want it to be. The useful and beautiful plants are cultivated to thrive, and the harmful are plucked out. Would you not like to see cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy eradicated? Those things kill people. If such genes could be replaced by properly functioning genes, would that not be a good thing?

But look, all this and more I discussed at length in the thread I linked above. We could go on this way, but I'd probably just be doing a lot of cutting-and-pasting from there.