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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Idk generally biodiversity is a strength for life and gene editing ourselves to be more similar and eliminate mutations opens up some long term danger. Even just monocultures without same genetics but same species clumped up too much in an area can end up wiped out.

Now with gene editing technology perhaps we'll avoid the issues because we can literally just edit ourselves to not die to a new disease, but that's gonna depend on how much we can do and how fast we can do it.

I think it's perfectly fair at least to worry that planned genetics might have an unexpected issue the same way planned economies did. Easy to think you outsmarted the greater systems of the world until it bites you in the ass.

I don’t think any genomes are being fully replaced. It’s just people selecting for the best traits in their future offspring, which retains vast majority of the diversity of current populations.

Relatedly, is this not already a current concern with drop in fertility rates? Perhaps certain populations outbreeding others is creating a monoculture, yet I never hear this as a concern. Curious!

Do the genes that code for immune system responses also tend to be the ones that have a big effect on polygenic scores for eg, intelligence? If not, I'm really not too worried about these selected embryos being dangerously similar to one another

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