Xamonas Chegwé wrote:klr wrote:JimC wrote:klr wrote:
Would what is being done to reduce the incidence of one disorder/disease in a relatively small population be acceptable in a much larger one, which is the question JimC originally posed?
Thanks, Kevin, I'm pretty sure you were right about my example being the Tay-Sachs disease in the jewish sub-population. My point is that rational but voluntary small-scale eugenics programs have a reasonable chance of working and reduducing clear-cut misery. Broader and more ambitious programs will most likely run into trouble, as clearly articulated by BAA.
And yet reducing/eliminating CF or something similar could hardly be construed as anything but good for all concerned. We castigate and vilify parents for neglecting their children; If they put their children in harm's way, they can be brought up before the courts, or be deprived custody. If CF were caused by some by some other type of action/neglect, you can be sure there would much more public support for any moves to at least reduce the incidence:
Do (or do not do) this, or else any child that you conceive will have a one in four chance of having a wretched and incurable disease ... It should be a no-brainer, especially with a
Zeitgeist that values the child so much.
???? A couple of posts previously you mentioned that the gene for CF increases resistance to
malaria and cholera. Is that not 'good' for the population? And what other, more subtle benefits might there be to being a carrier of the disease that are not fully understood yet?
Cholera and Typhoid. Malarial resistance is a benefit for carriers of the sickle-cell allele, the other well-known example of an detrimental/beneficial allele.
As for benefiting the population: There are other ways of reducing the incidence of certain diseases or conditions. Proper sanitation and the like is the key to combating cholera and other such diseases - that and medicine. Actually, to seriously push the
positive effects of the CF allele would (IMHO) be going down a potentially dangerous route - letting some people benefit at the cost of others. That's partly* how the allele survives, but we have supposedly reached the point where we can stand outside the blindly directed path of evolution without asking some people to carry the can for general "progress" or "benefit".
*There are other factors, such as reproductive compensation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_compensation
BTW, I'm not aware of any research that suggests that - disease resistance apart - CF carriers are (
inter alia) markedly 'genetically superior', or anything like that.
Xamonas Chegwé wrote:
Playing with eugenics in order to eliminate genetic diseases is a dangerous game to play when all of the pieces are not on the table. We've only just finished mapping the human genome, we have yet to know what all the bits of the jigsaw do.
True, but if we have established clear cause-and-effect in certain areas, then I see no reason not to act on that information, and certainly not to desist on the grounds that we might later find out more in this and other areas. That's what we do in other areas of medical science, and in life generally. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we can never progress if we take the "wait until everything is in place" stance, not least because there is no way of knowing whether or not we've actually reached that point.
A related aside: Whenever someone makes a blanket claim about the evils of GM food, I like to point out to them that we've been messing about with the natural order of things for thousands of years now, often with devastating side-effects to the general environment/ecosystem, and to our own well-being. The switch from hunter/gatherer to farmer was not very beneficial to human health, although in the long run it laid the foundations for organised society where science and other advancements could more readily take place.
Xamonas Chegwé wrote:
Every day, millions of foetuses spontaneously abort because of fatal genetic flaws far less compatible with life than CF, a lot of these still-births occur so early in gestation that the woman doesn't even realise that she is pregnant, but the genes that cause those still-births are not understood in anything like the detail as the CF gene. Why? Because still-births are just accepted as 'something that happens'. It is only when a disease manifests in a living child that we throw up our arms and ask why science doesn't do something to help.
Very true, but I don't see how it materially diminishes my argument at all. To a large extent, my position (such as it is) is grounded in realism. To extend your point even further, the majority of eggs that a woman has never even get fertilised - even though they may be good "genetic material". Never mind the zillions of sperm produced by the average male. But for the most part, we just shrug this off and say "that's life", as we do with spontaneous abortions, which for the most part appear to be just a brutally effective form of natural selection in action. Now, if science were to advance to the point where we
could intervene to a significant degree, then that might change the moral, ethical and philosophical landscape completely. Science has a habit of doing that.
Xamonas Chegwé wrote:
But the fact is, we simply don't know enough to know what the long-term effects of such 'help' might be. The living siblings of the spontaneous abortions can appear perfectly normal, may even have distinct advantages that far outweigh the fact that their unborn siblings are unable even to be born!
The chances are that many (or maybe most) of us
are the living siblings of spontaneous abortions ...
And if you
really want to throw the cat amongst the pigeons, you could focus on the known association between increasing age and likelihood of miscarriage:
The prevalence of miscarriage increases considerably with age of the parents. One study found that pregnancies from men younger than twenty-five years are 40% less likely to end in miscarriage than pregnancies from men 25–29 years. The same study found that pregnancies from men older than forty years are 60% more likely to end in miscarriage than the 25-29 year age group.[33] Another study found that the increased risk of miscarriage in pregnancies from older men is mainly seen in the first trimester.[34] Yet another study found an increased risk in women, by the age of forty-five, on the order of 800% (compared to the 20-24 age group in that study), 75% of pregnancies ended in miscarriage
... or smoking:
Tobacco (cigarette) smokers have an increased risk of miscarriage.[22] An increase in miscarriage is also associated with the father being a cigarette smoker.[2] The husband study observed a 4% increased risk for husbands who smoke less than 20 cigarettes/day, and an 81% increased risk for husbands who smoke 20 or more cigarettes/day.
Both from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage
(I'll try and join in tomorrow, looks very interesting so far).
