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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.

See I very much agree with both of these points. What I resent is scienctism salesmen claiming that we have cracked the code and are about to figure out how to print designer babies on command.

You can sort of have designer babies

Just pick your mates carefully! Ideally for multiple generations.

At just 2 children per generation, you'd have 32 great-great-great-grandchildren to choose from!

Nobody is saying that. Nobody can even alter fifty places in the genome safely today, certainly not in a human embryo.

Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!

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