Thursday, August 04, 2011

[aemncaba] Artificial human speciation

If you could genetically modify your yet-unconceived child so that he or she will only be able to produce children with a certain "acceptable" subsegment of the human population, would you take that option?

As horrible as that sounds (to me), I believe many people will take that option.  Many societies and parents already attempt very strongly to socially enforce marrying within the race, or forbid marrying certain other races.

I speculate that the technology to do this is not very far off.  There seems to be only a few proteins (bindin receptors?) involved in fertilization which detect whether sperm and egg are of the same species.  Modify these, and you're done.

After genetic modification of your children, these specificity traits could be passed on to their children and further descendents.  In essence, this has created a separate human species.  If many people do this (and I believe many will), there will result a tremendous fragmentation of the human race, with a great many incompatible species.

World peace will become more difficult.

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