Do you remember these lines from the movie Jurassic Park?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.
Donald Gennaro: It's hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations ...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may ... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table] you're selling it, you wanna sell it. Well ...
John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before ...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Here is the latest example of not stopping to think if we should. It's called "Crispr":
It took millions of years for apes to evolve into humans. It may take only a century for humans to change again.
Genetic engineering, which for decades never quite lived up to its promise, is being transformed thanks to a new tool called Crispr. Scientists can use it to manipulate the genes of any living creature with astonishing ease. Its initial applications have been to target genetic disease, modify foods, and develop new drugs. What comes next is up to us.
You can read the rest @
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-01/the-genetic-tool-that-will-modify-humanity
In those millions of years of evolution we evolved into something more or less in equilibrium with our environment, an environment that controlled us more than we controlled it.
But our rapid population growth since the beginning of the age of technology has destroyed that environment. Its control over us has been reduced to the destructive influence of the poisons we have poured into it. The only way an equilibrium could be reestablished is for those poisons to drastically curb the human population.
Such a thing may not be the ultimate goal of Crispr. But if it is, shouldn't Crispr be considered more of a tool for genocide than a benefit to We The People?
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