Michael Specter’s paper, How the DNA Revolution is Changing Us, talks about the possibility of changing the genome of living things to “improve” them. This idea seems like another stupid idea, cooked up by laboratory nerds, that’ll change life as we know it. Unfortunately these laboratory nerds are actually on to something, but I still refuse to give these soulless husks the time of day. The big emphasis of the paper was placed on Mosquitos and changing their DNA to make them not spread diseases like AIDS or Zika. While it’s amazing that there is a chance to save people from these diseases we should also remember that not all people are equal, and disease is a simple and natural way of insuring that the strongest survive. After all if everyone lived to pass on genes that produced dumber and weaker people then we’d have an entire class of genetically inferior people leeching off the rest of society, but perhaps CRISPR could also solve this problem as well. The same gene editing that could be used to stop disease could also be used to insure we have healthy people in the future. It’s all very interesting stuff; it just might not really be a moral thing to tamper with powers not intended for us to use.
Do I personally think that CRISPR should be used on humans? No, CRISPR shouldn’t be used on anything. To tamper with nature is to take the beauty out of it. If we change our DNA to what is desirable to society, then we take away anything wild left inside of us. CRISPR is just a way to ensure that all people in the future are domesticated to the standards of whomever is in charge of them. In my opinion this technology wouldn’t be used for anything good, but instead to further enslave those who haven’t yet submitted to the tyranny of civilization. I would say that most “people” have already been selectively bred into domesticated animals. There are those whose ancestors for thousands of years have only lived within the safety of a city, and through the generations have lost any wild spirit within them, and are thus not really people. Compare dogs to wolves, most “people” are dogs while only a few left in the world are wolves or have a bit of wolf left within them. CRISPR would be the complete extinction of true people, in all their natural flaws, and the replacement with domesticated sheeple.