I know it is taboo, but ignoring the possibility that it will happen anyway also seems to be taboo. We're edging slowly in that direction.
The drive for this stuff to happen is there, maybe they'll do it illegally, rich people only, maybe it will be 'special cases only' at first but somehow I expect it to creep in under the radar.
Personally I think it is a bad development, I'm not sure if google books results work but here is one to a book called 'backdoor to eugenics':
My family has a history of bad knees. Like, a third of my family over age 30 have had significant knee injuries. I had one at age 22.
My girlfriend's family has a slight history of heart troubles.
My family has no such heart problems. Her family has no such knee problems. If there was a way to ensure any children we had would take its general cardio systems from my bloodlines, and joints from her bloodlines - sign me up. I have better eyesight, whereas she has perfect skin. I have broad shoulders and a strong frame, whereas she has a cheetah's metabolism.
If I could ensure my children got the best traits of both of us, I'd do it happily and pay a lot for it. It seems like a fantastic thing to me, and the idea of it is pretty exciting. Thoughts on why it might lead to bad places?
I figure there is a lot of stuff going on that we haven't got a clue about yet and by selecting for some traits that are clearly visible to us we may be inadvertently introducing major trouble down the line.
I fully sympathize with those who would like to get rid of hereditary diseases, pretty much every family has their share of them, but you have to ask yourself if you think it is wise to second-guess evolution before having fully grokked the mechanisms and datastructures at work here.
As long as we refer to the majority of our DNA as 'junk' we have a long way to go in this respect.
You are exactly the person I had in mind when I wrote above that parents would like to have 'perfect' children.
by selecting for some traits that are clearly visible to us we may be inadvertently introducing major trouble down the line
Do you have any reason to believe we will be introducing more trouble down the line than if we'd continued procreating in the usual fashion? I don't see any actual argument. Genetic techniques can even be globally beneficial in the long run by counterbalancing the dysgenic effect of modern medicine that helps genetically disadvantaged people survive and procreate.
I'm afraid you've got me there, this is speculative in nature, only time will tell.
Let me try another angle then, to me evolution is not about individuals, individuals are merely the current vessels holding a single copy (with possibly some local variations if you want to be very precise) of the status quo in contemporary genetics as perceived by that individual.
Sexual reproduction is in the majority of the cases the way in which this genetic material gets mixed and slowly, over generations these changes + mutations introducing new variation have converged on the diversity that you can observe around you.
To find the 'keys to the kingdom', to get 'root' on this system is of course a very powerful tool, but if you don't know exactly how powerful a tool is or how it works you would be wise to meddle with it as little as possible until you do have that knowledge.
Keep in mind that we will be selecting for phenotype only, what's going on under the hood is a question that your great-great-grandchildren might be able to answer, and if our luck of the draw runs against us it is possible that we introduce some effect that will only become apparent to them, we'll be long dead by then.
Those effects could be worse than the things we are trying to cure today, and I'm merely cautioning to be careful about unintended side effects of over enthusiastic modifications to our 'imperfect' genome.
It has served us well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt until we have solid proof that we are not going to create a larger problem.
That depends how far we go with this, once the technology is there to mix in 'healthy' genes with deleterious ones the door is immediately open to add genes from a 'library' as well.
Say a couple want children, but they want a red-haired girl, even though their genetic combinations make that an impossibility (just for the sake of an example I took something from the 'cosmetics' department, not from the disease department) you could conceivably splice in the genes to make that happen.
The problem here is that even though the resulting phenotype may be the desired one that there could be any number of interactions between the 'undesired' genes and the rest of the genome to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations.
It will take a long time before we will know if that's the case or not.
to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations
Why would you want that, if every generation has the option of designing their children anyway? And they can always revert to a backup genotype from 2000 if there's no other recourse.
Eliminating medical problems ought to raise no objections, but "broad shoulders and perfect skin" is surely an aesthetic preference only. It's not far from there to "my wife has blonde hair and I have blue eyes..."
That's absolute true, but like plastic surgery, cosmetic genetics will be a byproduct of genetics for medical reasons.
I fail to see how you can only have the one without the other, you can just wait for 'designer eye colours' and other fashionable items such as the ultimate breast implant (simply encode for that perfect breast size) and so on...
Exactly, if people want this enough, they'll go to another country for the service. And if so many people start going abroad, their influence might spread through Europe. If that continues, a critical mass might be reached where eugenics becomes less taboo and more accepted. There are a lots of "if"s there, but it's possible.
Out of curiousity, where are you? In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.