Detweiler Vision vs Beowulf Code: "Right" and "Wrong"

Crown Loyalist wrote:The original Detweiler's vision seems to have been not dissimilar to that of a certain Alpha Centauri faction leader I recall:

We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Dynamics of Mind"

I wonder how much time it took for Mesa to go completely off the rails. It may have been Detweiler himself, who could have been truly inspired by the benefit of humankind, but that nonetheless led him down the road towards plotting to overthrow the Solarian League. I can't recall how much the books go into that background.

It's hard to know because you're right that we don't get much on Leonard Detweiler. However, if he thought that his descendants would stick to the plan he set down for generations and generation after his death and not alter it according to what they think is necessary...than he wasn't so smart.

You know. I never realized that cloning had such an importance already. My niece sent me this website...

In addition, there are no clear, defensible arguments in favor of offering cloning as an option for producing offspring. Cloning is endorsed by some as a procreative technique that provides a cure to infertility or an option for people who have genes they do not want to pass on and the chance to have genetically related offspring for gay and lesbian couples or people without partners. Such arguments are not convincing.

Some proponents of human cloning who recognize the weakness of their arguments, continue to support the development of human cloning under the banner of freedom — freedom of reproductive choice and freedom of scientific inquiry. They argue that people should have the choice to produce offspring in this way, and scientists should have the option to explore human cloning without outside interference. With these arguments, proponents of human cloning are able to side-step the lack of clear benefits of this technology by raising a banner to "freedom" and "choice."

http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetic ... pageId=106

High ideals on that site, but atrocious layout and weird points. Its apparently written in 1999 as well, so the last 15 years of ethics and bioscience advancements have passed it by.

Regarding the website, I really doubt Cloning will replace sexual procreation. Somehow, i doubt humanity will give that up.....

Im also interested in their description of some terms, such as the labelling of the failed attempts that took place in the leadup to dolly as all failed lambs, instead of failure to mitose as a zygote, failure to implant, and miscarriages, all of which are already a part of natural life, not just in vitro. yes, nature has a lower failure rate, but it has hundreds of millions of years of practise at getting a working system, compared to our puny humans 30 or so years.

I cant speak on the commodification of humans and a reduction of diversity, but i suspect current laws and ethics already prevents these, making them moot points.

the point about permanent gene pool changes and a reduction in diveristy is interesting, but somehow, i suspect, not relevant for at least 25 years at a bare minimum, due to the fact that for there to be spreading of modified DNA, the modified person must first reproduce.. to change laws, create an embryo, implant it, wait out the pregnancy, then grow the child through puberty to adulthood will take a long time. as for gene pool diversity reduction, that would require that there be no mutations in the egg as compared to the egg that become the donor human, that there are no environmental factors acting on a cell as it grows into an embryo, and that scientists arent actually trying to put in variations to keep the gene pool diverse, to prevent this problem.


The threat of eugenics is probably at least partly justified, but probably even further away then genes entering the gene pool, so I think we dont need to worry about it. Several of my lecturers work on genomics and evolution, and they think this is the better part of 40 years away, due to the fact that while sequencing the genome was a hard and long task, figuring out what every part of it does, and how they all interact is magnitudes harder.


On a final interesting note, apparently the author isnt a biologist, but a lawyer.

For a better opposing point of view, i prefer the American Association for the advancement of sciences point of view that we really shouldnt try reproductive cloning on humans for a while, as we still have many problems to sort out first. they released it in november last year as well. http://www.aaas.org/page/american-association-advancement-science-statement-human-cloning

cthia wrote:You know. I never realized that cloning had such an importance already. My niece sent me this website...

JohnRoth wrote: The MAlign doesn't accept the limitations inherent in the Beowulf Code, and they're not willing to let natural selection do its job, either.

Amaroq wrote:They seem to be rather heavy-handedly turning natural selection into very focused artificial selection on the human species and greatly speeding up the process. That can't possibly go wrong. Blagh.

aairfccha wrote:Exactly. For optimisation (necessarily done with respect to a limited set of circumstances) and artificial selection, you'd think they learned from our genetic impoverishment in domestic animals and plants. I think they should have just continuously pumped likely advantageous (IQ-enhancers known to work well, enhanced visible/audible spectrum, regeneration without regen therapy) and fun (fur, tail, cat eyes) modifications in the general gene pool by offering them to the general public without a coherent attempt at superiority.

How many genes, regulatory sequences and LINCS (*) would need to be modified to get a functional prehensile tail? Probably closer to a thousand than to one.

Then what happens when the kids inherit half of the modification?

(*) Long Intersomething Non Coding Sequences. These are chunks of transcribed DNA (at least 200 base pairs long) that aren't turned into proteins. There are about 10,000 of them. A small number have known functions; we have no idea what most of them do. The field is sharply divided between people who think most of them do cell-type specific stuff, and people who think they're junk.

Didn't Alison refer to some of these as junk when discussing the Grayson gwnetic problems?

JohnRoth wrote:
How many genes, regulatory sequences and LINCS (*) would need to be modified to get a functional prehensile tail? Probably closer to a thousand than to one.

Then what happens when the kids inherit half of the modification?

(*) Long Intersomething Non Coding Sequences. These are chunks of transcribed DNA (at least 200 base pairs long) that aren't turned into proteins. There are about 10,000 of them. A small number have known functions; we have no idea what most of them do. The field is sharply divided between people who think most of them do cell-type specific stuff, and people who think they're junk.

In the (possibly unlikely) case of all modifications resting on the same chromosome, this should be impossible except for copy errors. If it does happen, my guess would be a vestigial tail. Also, (distant) ancestors of humans had tails so it might not be that difficult.

aairfccha wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:
How many genes, regulatory sequences and LINCS (*) would need to be modified to get a functional prehensile tail? Probably closer to a thousand than to one.

Then what happens when the kids inherit half of the modification?

(*) Long Intersomething Non Coding Sequences. These are chunks of transcribed DNA (at least 200 base pairs long) that aren't turned into proteins. There are about 10,000 of them. A small number have known functions; we have no idea what most of them do. The field is sharply divided between people who think most of them do cell-type specific stuff, and people who think they're junk.

In the (possibly unlikely) case of all modifications resting on the same chromosome, this should be impossible except for copy errors. If it does happen, my guess would be a vestigial tail. Also, (distant) ancestors of humans had tails so it might not be that difficult.

Important fact: when sperm meets egg, the process of putting the chromosome pairs back together results in approximately 36 "crossovers," so that part of the resulting chromosome comes from dad and part from mom. So even putting it in one place wouldn't help.

The HOX genes for a tail still exist. Early fetuses have tails; they get reabsorbed later - except when they don't. See http://funstuffcafe.com/human-tail-just ... oing-wrong (via IO9). WARNING - probably NSFW.

A really functional tail, though, would require all the sensory-motor wiring through the spinal column (where will it find the space?) into the appropriate parts of the brain and the "homunculus." Integrating it properly wouldn't be a trivial task.

Alison, in her research, found what the early Grayson's did in order to 1) try to adapt the colonists to Grayson and 2) what they appeared to use as a delivery mechanism and vector- a "common cold". It worked…….sort of. It worked enough to let the following generations of the population survive and breed. It spread rapidly and it did mostly lock itself into the Grayson's genetics to make them more resistant to the accumulation of heavy metals that was ONE of the major problems on Grayson.

The problem- there is always a problem and unintended consequences- is that the "fix" ended up being the cause of lethal mutation(s) in a signifcant % of male fetus and leading to the overbalance the women to men in the Grayson population with the social adaptations that followed.
The Alignment has shifted to breeding humans like we now breed cattle, dogs, and a whole range of GMOs. They also treat the results as part of their own new cast system of humans plus the useful sub-breeds to provide labor and services. Look at the mindset of much of the Alignment and its Manpower operations. You “cull” any of the examples (or whole lines) that don’t work out the way you want or develop significant problems that make them unworkable as intended or dangerous to the Alignment. They consider anything below Gama Line as-at best- useful tools.
Read Jack McBride’s thoughts in Torch of Freedom to see his shit in opinion of what they are now doing. They are PLANNING on killing billions of “normal’s” to advance their ideals and would appear to not consider most of what is going to be left of normal’s as being worth using even breeding stock for non-primary lines.

Crown Loyalist wrote:I wonder how much time it took for Mesa to go completely off the rails. It may have been Detweiler himself, who could have been truly inspired by the benefit of humankind, but that nonetheless led him down the road towards plotting to overthrow the Solarian League. I can't recall how much the books go into that background.

What makes you think they went off the rails?

Torch of Freedom, prolog to Part III wrote:Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.

That's genetic slavery in a nutshell. Maybe not the way it worked out, but it's the basic concept behind the MAlign's "specialty lines." We've seen at least three and possibly four of them. They aren't genetic slaves, but they aren't Mesan Alphas, either.

JohnRoth wrote:

Crown Loyalist wrote:I wonder how much time it took for Mesa to go completely off the rails. It may have been Detweiler himself, who could have been truly inspired by the benefit of humankind, but that nonetheless led him down the road towards plotting to overthrow the Solarian League. I can't recall how much the books go into that background.

What makes you think they went off the rails?

Torch of Freedom, prolog to Part III wrote:Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.

That's genetic slavery in a nutshell. Maybe not the way it worked out, but it's the basic concept behind the MAlign's "specialty lines." We've seen at least three and possibly four of them. They aren't genetic slaves, but they aren't Mesan Alphas, either.

You keep repeating that, but modifying people to suit the environments in which they work does not automatically mean genetic slavery. Nor does it automatically mean a caste system. It depends on who makes the decisions on who gets modified and how.