Speeding up Evolution 413
DaytonCIM writes ""We can rebuild him. Make him stronger... faster..." Slate.com has a great article on next generation gene research that promises to build "Supermen" or "Superwomen" out of us all. Insulin-like Growth Factor genes to make us stronger without ever visiting a weight room. EPO to generate more red blood cells and enable us to run "forever." Engineered human "Blood" to speed up evolution, so that we become less susceptible to disease and injury."
jocks (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah but the muscles pull the chicks!
Lack of diversity can kill us. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lack of diversity can kill us. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Speeding Up Evolution" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nazis... (Score:2, Insightful)
And anyways, what they were doing was not genetic engineering. Hell, DNA wasn't discovered until 1953.
How 'bout we fix sick people first (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, the current thinking is that through gene therapy there's at least a possibilty the kid could be cured, ('cept there's a moratorium on gene therapy).
So, being super people is I guess all well and good, for me I'd just like to see this kid not have to eat through a tube.
why not? (Score:1, Insightful)
look at modern medicine.
given this, why wouldn't there only be 3-5 different major dna codings?
Re:In Some Other Context... (Score:3, Insightful)
There were *two* people on that particular flight. The one who stayed with the parameters of the design was *successful* in his flight.
Think about it.
KFG
Re:Doesn't make sense.... (Score:1, Insightful)
If you could fix someone so they were always releasing the "build muscle" regulatory hormones and proteins and never the "break down muscle" ones you would end up with someone who built muscle without work.
Better Late than Never (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me start out by saying, I've lost a contact lens, so I apoligize for the spelling in advance. I'm having a hard time seeing. That said......
The Cold War wasn't the only arms race going on. There's one that exits every day inside each one of it us. It's a race between various pathogens and our immune system. Oddly enough, DNA plays a HUGE role in the functioning of the immune system as a whole.
Did you realize that the reason that African-Americans have sickle cell anemia is that it is an evolved immune response? In order to develop the disease, you must inherit 2 recessive "defective" genes. But if you have only 1 "defective" gene and one "normal" gene, you are immune to malaria. Malaria is a mosquito borne disease that kills more than a million people a year in Africa. My point with is that genes that seem to be "bad" to us, might only seem "bad" because we don't have the whole story.
We've spent either thousands or millions of years, depending on your point of view, on this planet with our pathogens. They change us and we change them. We know that this happens because we can sit in a labratory and observe it. Antibiotic resistant strains are a prime example of this. I happen to call it evolution. Just as wolves thin the deer herds, making them faster, smarter, and stronger, so must the wolves become faster, smarter and stonger to continue to catch the deer. When you consider the amount of time that we humans have spent living with our various bacteria, parasites, etc. , it's logical to me that is happing with us on a microscopic scale.
Genes are very complicated things because they encode all sorts of information about how you function an unbelievably basic level. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the cell wall. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the receptor sites in cell wall. And guess what, mine don't look or work like yours! So I'm near sighted. My whole family is near sighted. My whole family also lives to be a 100 and it's a nice healthly 100, too. I suspect that there is some correlation since the ones that aren't near sighted died in their late 80's and early 90's.
The tinkering with plants hasn't gone as well as most of the public has been lead to believe. They figured out how to make cotton that didn't need to be dyed. It grew as red or blue. Well, they released it. People planted it and now they are being sued. Their neighbors are getting all kinds of odd color combinations in what was supposed to be their white cotton. There's also a "pest resistant" corn. Now that the corn flea beetle and corn worm can't eat corn, what will they be going to go after next? Or, worse yet, will they evolve in to a superpest that can eat the "pest resistant" plants? If they can eat the "pest resistant" corn, will they be able to eat the other "pest resistant " crops we're getting ready to release. We've created other "superpests" and a whole host of other problems with our use of chemicals because we really didn't understand the ramifications of what we were tinkering with - DDT, DES, MRSA, STSS, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms. These are just the ones I can name off the top of my head.
This is a really really good example of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD". They don't understand what the side effects to the environment are with a simple thing like colored cotton. They sure aren't going to understand the full ramifications of making changes to humans any time in this century. Anybody that thinks that is a good idea, should probably get some IQ points spliced in to the DNS sequence.
Queen BRe:Godwin's Law in 3...2...1... (Score:2, Insightful)
Guess this is the end of the discussion, huh? heh.
that's not evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
obligatory Gattaca reference (Score:5, Insightful)
an annual cedes to the perennials (Score:2, Insightful)
Then I get that sense of parental wonder, what are these amazing little beings going to get up to... and the prospect of them staving off aging stretches that wonder out another order of magnitude.
Food for love... (Score:2, Insightful)
A love that is dependent on beauty, is superficial and leads only to misery.
So why be obsessed about superficial attributes such as beauty, strength and intelligence, when love is what we seek?
When you have much love, beauty comes naturally. You even cannot have beauty, without love.
if it was so easy.. (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't speed up evolution... (Score:2, Insightful)
Since evolution doesn't have speed... or goal.
Re:Do the Evolution! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's much more likely that this type of evolution will creep in slowly. People's embryos are already scanned for certain hereditary diseases when they are in a high risk group.
How far off is it before embryos will be routinely evaluated for heart & cancer risk later in life. Only the best embryo will be chosen to grow up.
This seems a logical step. It also seems logical that if you have several good quality boy embryos, you will choose the one that doesn't have the genes for early baldness.
There we go, man made evolution in progress.
I whish I could be around long enough to see where it all will end...
Re:if it was so easy.. (Score:2, Insightful)
You are wrong in two respects. Your first mistake is in supposing that the psuedo-goals of evolution are the same as our goals. Our genes aim to propagate, but we have other interests. So a "tweak" that looks bad to evolution (perhaps women who are smarter but have fewer children) might look just fine to us. Your second mistake is to suppose that evolution made us well suited to our current environment. Most of our adaptive characteristics arose to meet environmental challenges that no longer exist. For example, first world citizens do not, and will never, have to worry about starving to death, so all of our adaptations for dealing with food scarcity are a either pointless or even dangerous.
Evolution is slow. Environmental change is fast. There is no reason to think that we could not, sometimes at least, do a better job of matching ourselves to our environment than natural selection would.
Re:Slightly off topic... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is this playing god? (Score:1, Insightful)
technology won't make us happy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Problems with longevity (Score:4, Insightful)
This is readily debunked. Start with bats and most birds.
Re: Speeding Up Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Evolution is a powerful but imperfect engine. It's great at solving specific problems, but it comes with strange side effects, always, such as the human body's tendency to store fat. Overweight? Blame evolution for your outdated software. Compounding the problem is that evolved systems are difficult to understand, because evolution uses the whole environment to form solutions. Therefore, we won't fully understand our own genetics for a while. Our bodies are evolved with forces present that we can't even see.
Sure, it's nice to tinker. Genetic research is inevitable and really not too far off from selective breeding that we do in life and with lifestock and plants. But there's a difference between using evolution and altering genes. Altering genes does not "speed up evolution". Gene therapy changes evolved code, and we have no idea what the results might be. Fix one thing, and you get a new problem. We will end up chasing windwills in search of the "perfect" body, or we will end up with specifically suited bodies -- people who can live well in zero g; people who can run fast; people who live long.
And seriously, it's all fun and games until Khan strands you in the middle of an astroid.
KKHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Re:Not to mention the expense. (Score:5, Insightful)
All this is legal, and getting cheaper (Moore's law... blah... Blah...).
Whether the rich or the poor or both get the benefits and/or curses of the technology depends on the laws and the cultural aspects, not the science.
Unlike plutonium which is a relatively rare and dangerous element, the the chemicals that this technology uses exist in every cell of your body. You didn't think that your cells went and sliced and diced DNA without the benefit of restriction enzymes did you?
Furthermore, are your gender politics assuming that all the rich people who go for this technology are male? I find your logic there rickety at best.
Re:Eugenics vs. Genetic Engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, as with every other new technology, the wealthy will pay for the privilege of being guinea pigs (aka "early adopters") which the rest of the population will benefit from later. Wealthy patrons (and/or governments) could be benevolent and sponsor poor and needy patients in need of genetic engineering (your cystic fibrosis example, for instance), if they don't mind risking being accused of using the poor as lab rats in their scheme for global hegemony or some other paranoid fantasy du jour.
I don't mean for that to be a flame, I'm just trying to point out that intentions can be spun in all sorts of ways depending on a person's point of view. Given the heavy populist prejudice against "the rich" this issue is likely going to get very messy, as you described.
Re:Superman? In whose eyes? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many parents in America want a brunette child with a stocky figure in a girl? I'm not sure if you're a parent yourself. If you are I'm pretty hopeful that you would tell me that you wouldn't trade your baby for anything. But suppose you were not a parent yet, but about to become one. the doctor shows you a gattaca style menu of possible babies and one of them is the cookycutter bobbie model from snowcrash. And you think to yourself "Nobody will ever call her fat. Or demean her for her appearance. She will fit in in every way. And there's no way in hell I'm going to chose the one with glasses."
And thus, in nine months time, you look down your street at the identical babies in identical prams being pushed out of identical houses into identical ford broncos and realise that the Madison Avenue types who booked 30 seconds during the superbowl outsmarted all of you... except the family down the street who are new here and could only afford a No-Diseases package.
Now imagine if that was true, imagine what it would be like if you were the only UNmodified girl in your class. Would the teasing over being different get easier, or worse? Imagine if your parents had modified you for brains rather than looks and the side effects involved a hairy neck and small horn-like protrusions on your forehead.
Never underestimate the herd mentality. You'll find as many barbies walking the streets as there are people drinking coke today. The pepsi generation will be populated entirley by ken.
God help those whoes parents decided to choose something unpopular or obscure, because your birth-body is one thing you can't throw away when it becomes unfashionable.
Re:"Speeding Up Evolution" (Score:3, Insightful)
PLEASE tell me that you're not anthromorphosizeing evolution!
Humanity is no more or less predictable than any other species on the planet. We just happen to have intelligence, which makes us far more "fit" to a variety of changing climes than any other creature on the planet--barring, maybe, cockroaches.
Considering our species an "experiment" linguistically supposes some other sentient force--either the Almighty God, a neo-pagan manifestsation of nature, or some random aliens. If you didn't mean to say this, then please don't phrase your words like you do.
(And if you DID mean to say it--what's to say that we're not going to be due for another intervention?)
Re:Slightly off topic... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you honestly think that if we could have complete control over our appearance we would choose to simply look like some supermodel? Well, I'm sure some people would, those with the creativity of a ant. The rest of us would become something cool.
I know exactly what I would want:
I'd wand really black skin, two small horns, and (most important) a thick layer of soft, white sheep wool (everywhere but on my face, hands, etc.). That way, I wouldn't have to think about what I want to wear when I go out. In the summers I'd have myself shorn so that I wouldn't get too hot, and I'd always be experimenting with dying my wool in various artistic ways. I suspect the chicks would love it (especially if my competition were a bunch of nobodys that look like Ken dolls). But even if the chicks wouldn't love it, I would.
Philosophical afterword: Isn't it interesting how we usually think we should not praise or blame people for the things that are outside their control, but we have just the opposite attitude about their appearance. If somebody actually takes charge and dramatically alters their "natural" appearance, we critisize it for being "fake" and so somehow second-best. But we praise people who just look good naturally, even though we know they did absolutely nothing to earn our praise. Maybe these attitudes will change once controlling our appearance genetically becomes more common.
Mother Nature will kick our collective ass (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems that it has always been part of our primal programming to attempt turn the tide on Ma Nature from day one. I really don't think we will ever "win". We have diseases, storms, doughts, etc. for a reason. If we did not have these things there would be 25 billion people on the Earth and we would all suffer and perish.
Someone in one of these posts gave an analogy about deer and wolves. People tend to forget that we are animals too. We like to forget that we are subject to the same laws of nature as even the lowliest of animals upon the Earth.
AIDS, cancer, heart disease these are all horrible things. Truly they are, but they are necessary to the survival of all in that they thin our herd which is left oft times unchecked by anything but virus and disease. When we cure AIDS and cancer there will be something to take its place, I assure you all.
I for one do not want to live forever. I will live my days and after those are done I will rest in whichever place we go when we leave here. I sometimes wonder if scientists ponder whether or not what they do is in vain sometimes. As learned individuals you would have to realise that curing one thing is great but what will replace it? Why make the bed when you're just going to mess it up again.
The way that humans pursue scientific research with such gusto is sometimes a little scary. We can't leave things alone when we should. I think this is the case with genetic engineering. I think we will really have to fuck something up before we either stop and say "Maybe we were wrong" or kill ourselves. Hoping that humans will be responsible in these endevours is a huge risk to the planet and countless lives.
Speeding up getting cancer (Score:3, Insightful)
While undoubtedly, all these growth factors will give benefits, like all substances, they have wonderful side effects. IGF has been linked to many types of cancer (although the mechanism is not understood) HGH will cause acromegaly and possibly (reading off the list of adverse reactions to Humatrope) leukemia, intracranial hemorrhage, and pancreatitis. And don't forget that, as mentioned in the article, the whole purpose of these factors is to promote cell division. And while cell division results in growth, it also increases the chances that some random error will occur and create an initiating mutation, eventually leading to malignancy.
Good luck with winning the Olympic gold medal when your body is riddled with sarcoma and you're getting chemo and radiation.
Re:Mod down please (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny thing is, we are not even masters of our own domain. We introduce species into an environment as pest control, and they become new, toughter pests. We pop pills with the latest and greatest chemicals only to discover they cause deaths in people with a previously unknown genetic trait. We split the atom, and proceed to use it to threaten our own existence. We eradicate diseases ( Smallpox, the most virulent strains of Influenza, etc ), but this simply means that is any one of them were ro resurge, it would have the same deadly effect as the Black Plague due to no resistance in the population.
We liken ourselves to supermen every day by pushing the boundaries without knowing or thoroughly considering all the consequences. The fact that "Superman" is in a wheelchair only serves to remind us how foolish we are as a race.
No matter how advanced we become, we are only human. Mortal. Fallible.
Nothing beats a good workout in the gym (Score:1, Insightful)
"Use it or loose it" I always say....
Re:Mod down please (Score:4, Insightful)
While I don't believe that we'll ever perfectly know how to know things and thus not occasially shoot ourselves in the foot, I do believe that our epistomological self-consciousness is increasing.
Re:aS A Drunk biochemist i'll lend my thoughts... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Eugenics vs. Genetic Engineering (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, I would say that all it proves is that stupid criminals are easier to catch than smart ones. ;-)