Sweforce wrote:Attempts to ban the practice will only slow down the process somewhat and THEN someone that didn't hesitate to do it (China perhaps) will utterly curbstomp those that was stupid enough not to design their own IQ 200+ designer babies en masse.
Well, the first problem is that it's probably not that simple. There's no simple set of genes for intelligence (as far as we know, and you can bet they've been looking), so I think it would take a formidable understanding of an incredibly complex system to successfully breed super-smart babies in the first place. We're nowhere near that currently, so there's no guarantee that even in the best circumstance such a program will produce any more than past programs to breed super smart people by selection (which, as I understand it, weren't very successful). Larger brains don't equate to higher IQ's, and breeding two geniuses rarely gets you another genius, so there's some evidence that genius is as much about how the brain develops as it is about genetics.
Second, even if you understand the genome well enough to get your target trait, genetics is fraught with unintended consequences. Genetic code is spaghetti code; a change in one place can have ripple effects in systems that seem totally unrelated. In Russia in the 50's, there was an attempt to domesticate foxes for the fur trade by breeding them for docility (foxes being particularly uncooperative animals); the result produced more friendly foxes, but which barked like dogs and had floppy ears and curly tails and black and white spotted coats that were useless for the intended purpose. Clearly the genes for docility were also linked to other traits which, perhaps not surprisingly, had produced similar changes in domesticated dogs. It's difficult to know ahead of time what will go wrong with test babies when you start flipping gene switches, and experimenting like this on humans is morally problematic as well as extremely dangerous.
The potential benefit might be worth the risk and effort, but I don't think it's by any means a no-brainer. With advanced enough super-AI technology you can work out these problems, but if you have such super-smart AI, what do you need with super-smart kids anyway?
Finally, the wisdom of creating a new species to replace your current one has always escaped me. There is a powerful biological drive to perpetuate one's own species; why would people be eager to commit species suicide by artificially creating a "better" new one?
Sweforce wrote:Imagine how late medieval Europe would have fared if there had been a ban on the use of gunpowder. Those that ignored the ban would eventually just roll over their opposition but THAT wouldn't have happened because the first firearms where junk and by the time they got better the ban would rapidly have been lifted/ignored by anyone with an any sense of self preservation. I predict that this is exactly what will happen with genetic engineering of humans. Sadly by then, if the leaders in the field are unwilling to share their knowledge others may go for shortcuts and we may end up with an Eugenics War anyway. Actually that is exactly how I would place this iconic event in an updated Star Trek Canon. I would then have a second war several centuries later where the Federation are utterly crushed as a direct result of having abandoned genetic engineering. Gimping yourself isn't really a smart thing to do.
I'm not convinced that having a few extra super-smart people is really that much of a decisive advantage. Unless you plan on forcing ALL of your people to have gene-enhanced babies... but I don't think any government on Earth has that much control over its population. And I shudder to imagine the dystopian society that would try.