Should we force our own evolution through genetic engineering?

Question

Should we engineer our own evolution from now on, using all available tools? Or would this be too narrow minded and we lack the foresight to take into account all natural variables required? As in would we transform towards one goal, without taking into account other things that could lead to extinction of a very specified human being?

Answer 1

It would be unwise now to try it but perhaps someday. We could theoretically perfect some of the inefficiencies that exist because of the way evolution doesn't always follow the most efficient paths. The problem is we are far too complicated and rely on some of the flaws in unknown ways. When our understanding becomes far greater it may be possible to manipulate DNA and eventually create a superior being.

With the ability to manipulate DNA to that degree, there is a danger that we would lose something. It reminds of a story I once heard of aliens coming to Earth to find new mechanisms of inheritance to enhance themselves. If that ability ever comes, we would cease to be humans as we know them. If we posses the wisdom to exercise that kind of power is question for science fiction but I don't think we possess the wisdom or knowledge now.

Answer 2

Natural selection is directed to propagate survivors, and survival is correlated with identifiable biological adaptations, cultural adaptations, and learned skills. Here are some empirical identifications:

1. Strong people are more likely to survive than weak people.

2. Intelligent people are more likely to survive than stupid people.

3. Dextrous people are more likely to survive than clumsy people.

4. People with high stamina are more likely to survive than people with low stamina.

5. People with high natural resistance to disease are more likely to survive than people with low natural resistance to disease.

6. People with acute senses are more likely to survive than people who are near-sighted, deaf, or impaired in taste, smell or touch.

...and so on. Most of the correlates between trait and survival are commonsense notions, which careful study does not contradict, rather confirms.

Furthermore, most of the correlates are heritable: they run in families; they breed true across generations. Being heritable, they can be intentionally selected for propagation and for concentration by careful choices in regard to human mating. In a word: eugenics.

Selective breeding will work as well for humans as for any other kind of animal, simply because the same genetic rules apply for all animal species.

Genetic engineering is cut-and-paste gene recombination. It's a more direct approach to doing what selective breeding does. It might be perfectly OK to do some amount of genetic engineering, provided that the race being engineered never, never, NEVER becomes dependent on any further genetic engineering (or other technical tricks).

Always, the race must have recourse back to the natural way, because that's the method of racial propagation which is "sponsored" by nature, needing no technological help for making it work. There's only one thing wrong with technology, and that's that a race using it can come to depend on it, can be made lazy by it, can lose natural adaptations through the prolonged use of it.

It is not good to sacrifice endosomatic quality simply because an exosomatic substitute is available. The availability of that substitute might be TEMPORARY! If it disappears, and you no longer have the original natural adaptation, your race will become extinct.

Besides all that, it's foolish for anyone to say that evolution has no goal. It might be true that evolution is aiming at no specific form of life, but it has been going steadily in the direction of rising complexity in matter, including but not limited to living matter. Ever since three quarks formed the first proton, not long after the Big Bang, natural laws have been bootstrapping ever-higher layers of organization in matter, emergent properties rising from the statistical envelope and interplay of earlier and simpler properties.

From photons (via pair production) to quarks...,
From quarks (via strong nuclear interaction) to hadrons...,
From hadrons (via strong nuclear interaction) to atoms...,
From atoms (via gravity) to stars...,
From stars (via supernovae) to the nucleosynthesis and dispersal of elements...,
From an enriched interstellar medium to molecular chemistry (via electromagnetism) and a 2nd generation of stars (via gravity)...,
From the newer stars (via gravity) to planets with reducing atmospheres and metallic cores...,
From solar radiation and reducing planetary atmospheres (via electromagnetism and heat) to organic photochemistry...
From organic photochemistry to molecular replicators... to life... to more complex life... to intelligent life... to philosophy & science...

...to whatever else is headed our way.

Evolution does have a discernable general direction. There's no reason to suppose we are the last stop on this particular bus route.

Answer 3

Evolution is not "directed", it does not have a goal.