I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
It seems more likely that we would just eliminate some genetic diseases and cancers, and vain/rich parents would select for taller children. Most other differences seem to be too weakly correlated with genes we've identified to result in such a stark change to society. It's less like taking a bunch of dials tuned to 5 and turning then all up to 11, and more like increasing some dials from 5 to 6, and arbitrarily spinning some others because they weren't labeled to begin with.
> I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
To simplify the scenario to a single dimension, imagine how much different the NBA would look like if there were 10,000 Lebron James's and Shaq's being born every year. I'd expect it will take a few generations for sufficient predictive confidence to develop though.
That does get at my point though. While there obviously isn't a single "Shaq gene" or "Lebron gene", I also don't think we could reliably identify even a very large suite of genes that could be tweaked to result in increased "Shaq-ness" or "Lebron-ness". And beyond that, we certainly aren't anywhere close to identifying a "likes basketball" gene.
> I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
This seems like an absurd thing to believe for anyone who has a solid grasp of how evolution by natural selection works.
Or rather, it's absurd to believe that even a small improvement from the average isn't a HUGE advantage for a person's success in life and genetic legacy.
We aren't comparing the global average to the global "best person". We're comparing the typical outcome of a pair of parents with the best possible child those parents could have. Any effects on the outcomes of that child's life based on their genetics will be completely outstripped by how they're raised.
We also aren't discussing selective breeding, the same distribution of people would be pairing and having children.
After several hundred years I could plausibly see a stratification happening among those with the earliest and most advanced access to a technology like this. But given all of the above limitations, I think it would still be fairly limited.
We bypass natural selection all the time. Some people are more vulnerable to certain pathogens. We give them medicine or vaccines to mitigate mortality. Natural selection would have us let nature take its course. Some people have religious beliefs that in fact route people towards nature or God determining mortality rather than medicine.
There is a genetic mutation that allows a person to function normally on just 4 hours of sleep. A person who needs 8 hours of sleep in this world would probably always be behind the rest.
I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
It seems more likely that we would just eliminate some genetic diseases and cancers, and vain/rich parents would select for taller children. Most other differences seem to be too weakly correlated with genes we've identified to result in such a stark change to society. It's less like taking a bunch of dials tuned to 5 and turning then all up to 11, and more like increasing some dials from 5 to 6, and arbitrarily spinning some others because they weren't labeled to begin with.
> I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
To simplify the scenario to a single dimension, imagine how much different the NBA would look like if there were 10,000 Lebron James's and Shaq's being born every year. I'd expect it will take a few generations for sufficient predictive confidence to develop though.
That does get at my point though. While there obviously isn't a single "Shaq gene" or "Lebron gene", I also don't think we could reliably identify even a very large suite of genes that could be tweaked to result in increased "Shaq-ness" or "Lebron-ness". And beyond that, we certainly aren't anywhere close to identifying a "likes basketball" gene.
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> I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
This seems like an absurd thing to believe for anyone who has a solid grasp of how evolution by natural selection works.
Or rather, it's absurd to believe that even a small improvement from the average isn't a HUGE advantage for a person's success in life and genetic legacy.
We aren't comparing the global average to the global "best person". We're comparing the typical outcome of a pair of parents with the best possible child those parents could have. Any effects on the outcomes of that child's life based on their genetics will be completely outstripped by how they're raised.
We also aren't discussing selective breeding, the same distribution of people would be pairing and having children.
After several hundred years I could plausibly see a stratification happening among those with the earliest and most advanced access to a technology like this. But given all of the above limitations, I think it would still be fairly limited.
1 reply →
We bypass natural selection all the time. Some people are more vulnerable to certain pathogens. We give them medicine or vaccines to mitigate mortality. Natural selection would have us let nature take its course. Some people have religious beliefs that in fact route people towards nature or God determining mortality rather than medicine.
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There is a genetic mutation that allows a person to function normally on just 4 hours of sleep. A person who needs 8 hours of sleep in this world would probably always be behind the rest.
Considering that the gap between currently existing "best people" and the average is already really really immense I have the opposite opinion as you.
> Most other differences seem to be too weakly correlated with genes we've identified to result in such a stark change to society.
These findings were always driven more by politics than science.