> remove all risk from our lives

As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.

I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.

My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.

The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.

I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.

Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.

I'm so sorry that happened. As a parent, stories of injured children get that bad-news stomach drop to me, and I both empathize and sympathize. We are dealing with a similar (but older child) issue now and it is just heartbreaking to see them hurt.

So as someone who spent the last few years caring for a kid with a genetic defect.... I really don't wish that on anyone.

If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.

And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...

> But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.

You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.

Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?

If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?

> If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?

We're not that smart. Everything has unintended consequences. One example some people have studied is sickle-cell anemia. It's a recessive trait so if you get two copies of the gene you get sickle-cell which is a horrible disease. However, if you only get one copy of the gene it provides substantial immunity against malaria.

Now, maybe in this case you could say, okay, we will cure malaria somehow, not worth sickle-cell existing. But the thing is that gene isn't "the gene for sickle-cell anemia," nor is it even "the gene for malaria resistance and sickle-cell anemia." It affects hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of different things.

I think there are some conditions where I don't have a problem doing that, and sickle-cell, mitochondrial disease, these things do seem "bad enough" to be worth putting our fingers on the scale. But I am not sure it's so clear-cut, and I think it's right to say that eugenics are categorically suspect.

> We're not that smart.

How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.

> Everything has unintended consequences.

People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.

I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.

> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons

The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on

Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I do not understand why you reposted your comment. I've already replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618552

I've posted a reply to this in haste, but it was a bit more emotionally charged than ideal. This is a reworded version that I believe reflects my thoughts more accurately.

> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.

> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.

But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?

> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.

How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?

> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.

I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.

> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?

I think FollowingTheDao has a point worth exploring and it's easy to be afraid of it because it sounds cruel and against modern individualistic thinking.

Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.

> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?

I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.

I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.

These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.

I do not think they have a point that can be explored much, or that they're suggesting an exploration of anything to begin with. I further think that the fear is on their side: fear from being associated with a historically malicious movement (eugenics), fear from being the possible culprit of unintended suffering (gene editing going wrong downstream) and thus having that responsibility, and fear of the disruption of some higher balance they believe exists (religion).

For example,

> may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall

How will we find this out if we espouse gene editing in general as bad?

From my perspective, like religious folks in general, they wish for leaving unknowns remain unknown and just being passive; unfortunately, I think this goes against the very essence of life, and our very fundamental biases that come from being alive and perceiving ourselves as sentient.

If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything: the smallest things would require a full and complete understanding of the entire state of the world, lest I might cause some unintended effect that may hurt me greatly, and so when I do do anything, I'm exhibiting hubris. This is also why I brought up healthcare in general being a best effort, because all active actions in life are at most a best effort due to the impenetrable wall between our perception of the world, and the world in its actuality.

To tie it back to your example:

> Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.

Think about how you can reset your graphics driver by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B without having to restart your entire system. Or how you continue to write programs, despite not being able to guarantee that the code you write for those programs is actually what's going to execute, on the state you expect them to be executed on, in the environment you expect it to execute in, in a way you expect it to execute. You might get other programs inject themselves into your program, other programs manipulate the memory of your program, the system libraries you call into do something unexpected because 20 years have passed and now things are different, or simply being scheduled out and your program not even receiving CPU time, meaning if your program powered a real time experience, that now ceases to be that way.

There's a balance between best possible healthcare for all individuals and full blown eugenics. Neither extreme is very good, so yea it's worth at least trying to understand the consequences.

In the extreme of too much healthcare for too long, we'll breed humans into being dependent on it. That's a risk because if we somehow stop being able to provide that healthcare, we might die out. On the other hand, maybe we'll always be able to provide that healthcare and we'll become superior in some way as a consequence. This probably already happened with the technology of clothes, cooking, and houses. We depend on those because we're hopeless at digesting raw food and staying warm at night, whereas animals without those technologies are burdened by things like permanent fur coats and more expensive digestive systems, or having to slow down in the cold.

That's general healthcare. The issue here is different - "bad" genes are probably actually good at the population level so do we really want to get rid of them?

I'm not much of a luddite but I really don't think we should manually eliminate any "bad" genes from the gene pool. That's like trying to improve the environment by exterminating some troublesome species without realizing the indirect benefits it provides. Do you also call protecting endangered and apparently useless species a religious like fear of disruption of some higher balance?

> If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything:

So you obviously don’t understand my worldview. I don’t worry about the small things, I worry about the big things. But yes, so careful, because I have empathy. For example, it’s easy for me to throw a cigarette butt out of my window and it’s very convenient and it makes my life easier. But I know the consequences of that are many fold, starting fires, having animals eat the cigarette butt. So I don’t do it.

The topic is about genetic editing and just throwing in the mitochondria of some random woman into the cytostolic DNA of another woman. Does anyone know the effects of that yet, long-term? Not only for the population but for the child?

Has that even been examined before?

I'd assume no. How would they do that though if we all stood up, regarded this as eugenics, and banned it for good?

Where do you draw the line between small and big things though? I can appreciate if someone tries to go for paraconsistent logic rather than classical when thinking about the real world, but then I think it's important to establish where we both land in there.

Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.

It's like he managed to be against eugenics, because it's eugenics, but not be against any of the negative consequences that eugenics brought in the past. For me this reeks of someone putting on a facade.

> Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.

I did not say that at all. Mitochondrial diseases are not transmitted 100% to the children so I am saying go ahead and reproduce and accept the results.

  But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.

That's a thought terminating cliché for the ages ! The problem with eugenics is the noneconsensual, racist, ignorant ways and ideas of the early egenists. But the idea of editing out genetic mutation that purely detrimental (like the COMT-Val158Met polymorphism that make people prone to psychosis and schizophrenia, or one of the defective variants of the many genes that cause hereditary blindness or deafnessl would be a net positive for everyone. How can you argue otherwise?

They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!

> How can you argue otherwise?

Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?

Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.

You didn't argue for anything! Assuming science had the ability to cleanly edit that variant (which is not the case today), the ethical choice is to remove that small risk factor.

That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever. The fact that the COMT enzyme is also implicated in estrogen metabolism is not an argument for or against editing out the known defective variant of the COMT gene.

There is an argument to be made that we should wait until medical science has the means to cleanly and reliably do a single gene edit but I don't buy the argument that removing a gene variant from the humans genes pool is eugenics therefore it's bad and should be forever forbidden.

> That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever

When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.

For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.

So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.

Eugenics gets a bad rap for good reason. But like everything in life, it's not black-and-white. It's one of those scary words people are afraid of because some assholes used it for evil. But avoiding having children because you don't want to pass on genetic diseases doesn't make you Hitler. So let's leave the charged language in the trash where it belongs.

I've got a genetic disease. I decided not to have kids because I didn't want to pass it on. Ended up with one anyway, and I hope for his sake he didn't inherit it, because I don't want him to have to deal with the problems I have. You might say that's not natural, but humans have evolved to care about our offspring. What can be more natural to a human than not wanting to watch your child suffer?

Your argument could be used to justify abandoning health care altogether. I should have died of gangrene when I was 12, but I had ingrown toenail surgery that saved my life. I wear glasses, surely that goes against natural selection since I wouldn't be as fit a mate as someone with 20/20 vision. My girlfriend had breast cancer, should her children have grown up without a mother for the sake of the species? Should I abandon her because her breasts and ovaries were removed and she's no longer a fit mate?

Evolution is just a process, and one we've been opting out of for thousands of years, ever since the first human helped another human survive something that should have killed them. Don't make Darwin your god. The irony would spin his coffin right out of the ground.

When applied to non-human life, the alleged benefits of eugenics goes by the names domestication, husbandry, and similar.

Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.

I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.

Not all eugenicists had what they thought were Negative intentions. In the 30s the plan was to send Native Americans to the cities to to interbreed breed with white people to make white people more communal.

And besides, aren’t we forcing these genetic changes onto the children without their consent?

We force life itself on them without their consent, so ensuring they actually live past childhood seems like a package deal...

Is there less beauty and purpose and meaning in a child who lives for 1 month over one that lives for 80 years?

Objectively yes, I'm not even sure that's a question.

I have some serious antinatalist leanings, but if one is going to live (assuming decent quality of life and what not) more life is always going to be objectively better.