@iknowexactly
@icarus
To be honest. My gut feeling is that we will never fully understand how genes work. I know that is a strong statement. It is not uncommon for a genome to pick up other genes extract from other organisms and include it. Mitchondria came about this way.
there are over 10 million SNPs(single nucleotide polymorphism). the number of permutations and cross interactions is immense..how about the "introns"....
Let us not forget about the jumping genes...yes, you are reading that correctly, some genes will simply JUMP from one location to another. This is like removing the whole of city or a town(NYC) from the groundup, and implanting in another country(japan) or within another city in another country(barcelona spain) and then returning it back.
Or sometimes, taking half of LA and meshing it with half of moscow and not miss a beat.
Then there is the genetic fat tails...random, errant behaviours...when genes suddenly start behaving differently from the way they've been acting for god-knows-what.....to me this the beauty of evolution. It creates diversity and makes things sooo interesting.
Who knows? maybe it is a good thing jimi hendrix wasnt aborted?
Scientists should never fall for the arrogance of thinking we've solved everything and therefore we can start creating perfect babies... Every single time in scientific history that has always proven false. We know soo little.
That is why i suspect the real truth is between blank-statists and gene-is-destiny crowd. It is not one or the other.
We are simply too marvelous a creation of biology.
@icarus
To be honest. My gut feeling is that we will never fully understand how genes work. I know that is a strong statement. It is not uncommon for a genome to pick up other genes extract from other organisms and include it. Mitchondria came about this way.
there are over 10 million SNPs(single nucleotide polymorphism). the number of permutations and cross interactions is immense..how about the "introns"....
Let us not forget about the jumping genes...yes, you are reading that correctly, some genes will simply JUMP from one location to another. This is like removing the whole of city or a town(NYC) from the groundup, and implanting in another country(japan) or within another city in another country(barcelona spain) and then returning it back.
Or sometimes, taking half of LA and meshing it with half of moscow and not miss a beat.
Then there is the genetic fat tails...random, errant behaviours...when genes suddenly start behaving differently from the way they've been acting for god-knows-what.....to me this the beauty of evolution. It creates diversity and makes things sooo interesting.
Who knows? maybe it is a good thing jimi hendrix wasnt aborted?
Scientists should never fall for the arrogance of thinking we've solved everything and therefore we can start creating perfect babies... Every single time in scientific history that has always proven false. We know soo little.
That is why i suspect the real truth is between blank-statists and gene-is-destiny crowd. It is not one or the other.
We are simply too marvelous a creation of biology.
Quote: (07-08-2013 05:06 PM)Icarus Wrote:
Quote: (07-08-2013 04:59 PM)iknowexactly Wrote:
It's always good to bring up Jimi Hendrix's mother was a sadly dysfunctional drunk who didn't want to give birth to Jimi. Luckily for music there was no mandatory sterilization eugenics program.
Cherry picking is a fallacy. And eugenics does not rely on sterilization only. Positive eugenics would consist, for example, of tax incentives for the best specimens to breed more, thus ensuring that the human capital of a society appreciates over time.
If one could have a society where everyone is highly intelligent, gorgeous, and mentally stable, I don't know what we're waiting for. That would be the closest one could get to true equality, since everyone would be dealt a similar hand in the genetic lottery.
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A year from now you will wish you had started today.....May fortune favours the bold.