_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SOCIA/CAPITA-LISM_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
would have to be the best of the systems!

In fact, something like that is practiced in Canada * * *

new invention!! nano-barcode expiration date for eggs!

**** LMAO!!! That's a very sharp answer!

Wow, can't believe I didn't see this thread earlier. I am posting mainly to make sure that it stays in "My Topics" even though some of the ideas presented are making me cringe.

As a side note... The US is not capitalist society. It is a mixed economy with elements of both Capitalism and Socialism. To be purely capitalistic the government would have to remove itself from interfering with the production and distribution of wealth/goods as well removing itself from interfering with private property.

WHAT ABOUT HEALTHCARE???

In Canada, it's universally accessible!

that would be better! tahts why im getting screened and all that before i hink of having any children

Good thought, but think of the fact that in each ejaculate there are 5 billion (or million?) sperm cells, and each is suspect at any time to have a mutation occur in them that could lead to a genetic defect, either restricted to the immediate offspring or open to all his or her offspring to inherit it too.

Add to this that each sperm is individually capable of mutation. That's why siblings (brother to brother and sister to sister) are different from each other. So if you want to get examined prior to sex in which you hope to fertilize the egg of your egg-holder (woman), then that will give you a statistical reading of what your chances are or are not of creating or passing down a defect in your genome. But it won't give you an absolute and definitive answer.

The way to go about this, is to ask the guy to pick one sperm out at a time, examine its DNA, and if it gets his stamp of approval, then it should be let back into the wild, into the petry dish where your favourite egg-producer's egg has been placed, and let the two have fun.

But the technology is not there for that, either, yet.

Well, I see a day (like next week) when there will be End-Of-Life Counseling for folks who have become a drag on the system. If we just sit tight our current administration will implement Beginning-Of-Life Counseling and a panel will decide if we can breed or not.

This is philosophy... not politics!

Dear Katzenschnauzer:
Your fears might be a bit premature: I'd say in another 100+ years (IF NOT EVEN EARLIER) -- when our planet will become
"thoroughly Overpopulated, Humanity won't be able sustaining itself Without such a panel...

...I wonder what the "so-called Philosophers" will say then???
(or will they still prefer hiding behind the purely philosophical issues?!!!)

When politics are getting into our personal lives and deciding health care for us how can philosophy and politics be separate?

I don't see us becoming overpopulated because we will be phasing out people who need medical help that is deemed expensive by a panel.

GATTACA,GATTACA,GATTACA,GATTACA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm surprised no one is arguing that genetic variation is good for evolution (which it is, in fact evolution depends on it). And if that's the case, why should we meddle with (or think it productive to meddle with) the evolutionary process that's kept life living on this rock through billions of years of ice ages, worldwide flood events, meteor/comet impacts, raging wildfires, continental scale lava floods and a host of other life choking phenomenon?

I don't understand it. What if we select-out the very genetic mutation(s) that will carry mankind through the next steps of evolution without ever knowing it, (as there will be no way to know), simply because we see the initial impacts of such as being "disease"?

I wonder what it was like when the human appendix started to atrophy and eventually become vestigial? People can die of appendicitis. So should we treat the gene that prompts the appendix not to develop as a "bad gene"? I doubt it.

So the question constantly returns, in my mind, to 'who gets to decide what is desireable and what is not?' and at the same time, 'who gets to be the genetic code police?'

After all, if we have the ability to detect and affect what is desireable and what is not, should it not be, then, our responsibility to make sure the "undesireable" genes don't muddle the pool? And if that's so, isn't it just easier simply to prevent them from propagating by sterilizing the carriers while encouraging the carriers of the "good genes" to procreate?

do you see how far down the rabbit hole this arguement leads??

According to the course I just finished this argument is no longer valid.

Yes, it's true to some extent, but at the same time healthy natural selection actually requires large "individual' families. This has been determined by the way genes are inherited.

Modern man no longer has the large families that our ancient ancesters used to have. They also don't remain in the same small villiages to interbreed with fairly close relatives which his actually important for natural selection.

You might at first bulk at this because biologists have often say that 'inbreeding' is not good, but that's only when the siblings are very close. Overall, it's actually beneficial for the natural evolution of genes when large extended families do indeed interbreed as was almost always the case in ancient villages because people simply didn't move around as individual like they do today.

So we have already totally interrupted the process of "natural" selection. It's not longer working. We have totally and thoroughly destroyed that process. Currently the human genome is actually in a state of "free fall". It's actually deteriorating.

You might ask how could scientists possibly know what's good for the healthy evolution of genes. Well they know because they genuinely understand the process. They understand precisely how this process works and why those previous conditions would favor that process and why the current conditions do not favor that process, but instead cause deterioration.

In fact, Dr. Silverman (the lecturer of this course I took) has suggested that we may actually have no choice but to restort to the purposeful conscious genetic engineering just to save our species.

If you are truly interested in this topic I highly suggest you watch this course. It's video presentation given by Dr. Lee M. Silver, at Princton University.

This is an amazing course. You might even be able to borrow it free using Interlibrary loan from your local library. Sometime Netflix carries these courses too.

Or if you're real interested you can buy it from the Teaching Company:

http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=1592

This is a cutting-edge lecture and it's quite impressive.

After I watched this course I'd just vote to let the geneticists do whatever they want. They seem to have a really good handle on what's going on.

Don't forget to check through interlibrary loan! No reason to pay for the course if you can watch it for free.

You've got to come away from this course with a whole different outlook on genetics.

But that's not a question of genetics. That's a question of politics.

Clearly in a fascist regime the dictator decides.

In a democracy the people vote in representatives, the representative debate among themselves, and the majority wins the vote.

So the question of "who decides" has already been answered.

A panel of democrate legislators would draw up guidelines and put them into law. And they would constantly be changing to constantly allow for more and more genetic engneering until it finally becomes commercialized and free enterprise captialism steps in to sell their designer genes like as if they are ring-tones.

Yep, that's where humanity is headed. We're headed for a world of designer babies.

In fact, I can't imagine it not coming to that really. It's inevietable. It's not a question of whether or not it will happen, it's just a question of when it will become commonplace.

Interesting food for thought, indeed, AbraC, and worth looking into. I hadn't considered that the population explosion and the globalized nature human culture has short circuited the evolutionary process..

That will take some time to weed through whatever literature is published on it. and when I get done with the research on which I'm currently concentrated, it'll be interesting reading..

I'm not a geneticist, though I used to **** one (i'm sure she'd be ok with that characterization of our relationship) and she never made any reference to such a concept in the many discussions we had on topics of this nature. Perhaps she hadn't come across it in her PhD research on mammalian evolution/gene sequencing.. who knows?

But i have studied evolution from a geologic and earth history perspective, so I'm comfortable with the conversation on evolution and genetics until it gets to a highly technical place.

I just wonder if a significant proportion of the world's human population travels and interbreeds sufficiently to have such derailing effects on the human genome or to halt/revert human evolution.

That's a pretty big pill to swallow.

If life on earth and DNA teach us anything about its nature, it should be that it is highly resilient.

I'd have to look at the assumptions and observations in the work you cite but I'm skeptical of the concept that global human culture has accidentally found a way to invalidate the mechanism behind billions of years of evolution. Most people, on a global scale, reproduce within their own ethnic groups (think India, China, Central/South America)(and travel suprisingly little in comparison to how much Americans) and while that may not be within restrictions the hamlet enclaves of old tended to impose, I definately doubt the lack of that restriction has completely dismantled the evolutionary process..

Well, I didn't mean to necessarily imply that we are already doomed because of this. But clearly we are heading to even more globalization rather than less.

Plus the family size is becoming a major factor too simply because of the numberer of people on the planet right now at 6 billion people we aren't going to start encouraging people to have large families.

The other thing also, is that via modern medicine we are keeping people alive to breed who would naturally never be able to breed either because they would be naturally sterile, or because they would have naturally died long before they would have made it to breeding age.

We've even been doing that via old-fashioned vaccinations such as for chicken pox, etc.

I'm not even remotely suggesting that we shouldn't have vaccinated for those deseases, I'm simply pointing out the fact that we have interferred with 'natural' selection.

If 'natural' selection would have been allowed to work then only those people who would have been naturally immune to chicken pox would have survived and over so many generations no humans would be sustible to chicken pox because all of the people who carred those genes would have died off.

So in a sense, we've already been doing 'genetic engineering' in a way even when we weren't meaning to engineer genes. We were still interferring with the process of 'natural' selection.

Which, again, I'm not even suggesting that this is necessarily wrong.

If the atheists are right and life is just a freak accident, then why not interfer with natural selection? It's just one big accident anyway if the atheists are rights. Why let it continue to go along accidenly if we now have the power to consciously improve it?

We do it for plants and livestock already. Why not treat ourselves to a new pair of genes?

Yes because I am perfect.

I just re-read this thanks to Jeannienbean replying to it.

I just now realized that the very question you ask would have totally different answers for an atheist versus a spiritualist.

An atheists believes that all they are is a sack of atoms. Therefore, if a different sack of atoms had been born, then a different "Person" would have been born.

An athiest views themselves as nothing more than their physical make up and history.

Therefore when you suggest that I would have never been born had different genes been selected for, you are suggesting that I am nothing more than my physical body. Period.

You're assuming that I accept atheism.

However, since I believe in spirit, from my point of view, if they had altered the genes before I was born, I would have still been born, I'd just have a different body! A BETTER BODY hopefully (although in truth I like the one I have). Like Jeannie, I just accidently turned out to be perfect via the normal processes of pot luck.

I could have even been born a woman! That wouldn't change who I am. That would have simply changed my gender.

Your question has totally different answers for a spiritaulist than it does for an atheist.

If atheism is true I would be just as happy to have never been born anyway.

So if atheism is true then go ahead and play the the genes!

If spiritualism is true, you can go ahead and play with the genes anyway.

Either way it doesn't make any difference to me. So I say go ahead and play with the genes either way.