Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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So the real question in regards to both abortion and embryo hacking is how much value we place on other humans -- humans of a different color, humans that are babies, humans that disagree with us. Do we treat them as we would want to be treated? Or are they basically disposable?

This gets particularly interesting when we consider that most people would be absolutely horrified at the idea of killing humans which are "imperfect" in some way, yet as one of the sibling comments says:

Its perfectly fine to take an active hand in evolution by selective breeding through marriage, thus "remove "bad" genes from a family tree and potentially adding "good" ones.

Presumably the creation of the embryo would've involved some degree of selection already, so "embryo hacking" seems more like patching bugs before birth... and this process is basically on the border between controversial abortion and widely-accepted selection before conception. I suppose your opinion on it rests on some deep notion of what you think humans and life is/should be.

Also non-religious and ambivalent about this - if only for the fact that governments and corporations are likely going to eventually figure out how to use this tech to their own advantage...

> This gets particularly interesting when we consider that most people would be absolutely horrified at the idea of killing humans which are "imperfect" in some way, yet as one of the sibling comments says:

>> Its perfectly fine to take an active hand in evolution by selective breeding through marriage, thus "remove "bad" genes from a family tree and potentially adding "good" ones.

Eugenics got itself a bad name early in the 20th century, but if you discard that cultural meme, the basic idea of purposefully improving genetic traits does make quite a lot of sense. It's that meme that makes people discard the concept wholesale.

Eugenics got a bad name because they've tried to play god by sterilizing people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization . There is no cultural meme here.

There was also the socially-constructed "ideal" human that eugenics strived for, or how it designated non-white races as "inferior" genetically, or the subjugation of the individual's fitness to society's "needs". My feeling is that these ideas are "not even wrong" enough that they'll incrementally come right back if you don't place a moral firewall around the entire concept.

> My feeling is that these ideas are "not even wrong" enough that they'll incrementally come right back if you don't place a moral firewall around the entire concept.

Interesting concept, I haven't thought about that this way before. Thanks!

Sure there is, as you've just demonstrated. Compulsory sterilization is one of many ways to implement eugenics, and the fact that it is so closely associated with the general concept is the cultural meme TeMPOraL was referring to. Other more benign forms of eugenics like incest taboo or selecting your sexual partners are not just acceptable, they are often not even seen as eugenics, because eugenics is "that bad thing the Nazis did".

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