I think @gwern wrote the go-to reply to this argument somewhere? It's a typical argument of the precautionary principle style. One can make this kind of argument for every major tech change, and somehow they keep being wrong.
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https://ethicslab.georgetown.edu/phil553/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Ord-and-Bostrom-Eliminating-Status-Quo-Bias-in-Applied-Ethics-.pdf … I have yet to see handwringing about 'reduced diversity' accompanied by a from-first-principles explanation of why 70 de novo mutations per (surviving) child is exactly optimal, parental age effects are optimal, and ever larger populations insufficient.
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To expand a little: selection doesn't 'use up' variance bc it exposes rare variants and provides new genetic background for epistasis (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871814/ …), larger populations get more mutations inherently to select from, and fixation makes selecting other alleles easier.
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So you're not going to answer any of the questions and apparently don't know any of the relevant material. Who's the 'zealot' here?
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This could have gone better. For Gwern's argument without the hostility, see http://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusq …. We apply it to this case: does anyone want to increase diversity of the genome in case it may protect against some unknown future disease? Why/Why not?
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My reasoning is that these losses due to diversity are unlikely to be a serious issue any time soon bc the uptake of genomic editing will be slow initially. Furthermore, if we get good at editing, and we find that some variant protects against some disease, can always CRISPR it.
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Furthermore, I'm skeptical about hypothetical downstream losses being weighed above immediate certain gains. Especially when there is a lot of uncertainty about how strong those losses may be at all, may be zero.
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We can't afford to *not* 'tinker'. Nature is fucking up the genome with 70+ new mutations in *each* person, and that's just the ones which are not *immediately* lethal. What a book a geneticist might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, horribly cruel work of nature!
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We also have the luxury of global comparisons across the whole genome in a way irreproducible by the primitive, slow, noisy inference conducted by natural selection.
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You still haven't answered why current paternal age effects and 70+ de novos per person is optimal despite a larger population, as is 1% births afflicted by Mendelian disorders. If you don't know why the status quo is exactly right, how do you know less is worse?
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Suppose NK conducted some open-air nuclear tests and increased the background mutation rate, thereby 'increasing genetic diversity'. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? This should not be a hard question to answer.
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