Hello Tanus, and welcome to EvC!
Tanus writes:
I'd like to respond to the idea of eugenics and all forms of genetic engineering being a bad idea.
All forms of technology, whether fire or stone tools, have the capacity to both harm or help the user. There is no doubt that early attempts at improving the human race met with different sorts of failures and if we continue to try genetic manipulations we will have some pretty spectacular failures, but does that mean that we should give up fire because some people get burned? Should we give up cars because there are crashes? Should we stop speaking because people sometimes say stupid things?
Mistakes are the way we learn and they are the reason that we must keep trying until we learn how to do something.
The conversation I was having with NWR (amongst others), was not regarding the mistakes that could potentially be made while getting to grips with genetic engineering. I think they'd agree with you that not doing something simply because mistakes could be made, is a bad reason not to try something.
Instead, the point being raised was that this genetic engineering might actually hinder our fitness in the long run, because of genetic variation becoming very low within the human population (everyone want s to be immune to cancer, wants to have great stamina, wants to be smart, etc.). And that because of this, it might not be the brightest idea to over-engineer the human genome.