[ExI] biology term

[William Flynn Wallace]

Yes, first, do no harm.  Yet experiments in gengineering with mice and
other animals is not the same as doing them with people.  So how are we
going to know that we are doing no harm when we fiddle with human genetics?

We will do it anyway.  Just look at antibiotics - when they first came out
they cured things previously uncurable things, and germs became a bad word
and we bought and are still buying anything that will kill them.  Now we
know that we created jillions of problems by killing off gut flora with
those same life-saving antiobiotics, and increased a host of problems.

My latest book, B

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:34 PM, rex <rex at nosyntax.net> wrote:

> spike <spike66 at att.net> [2016-10-12 14:07]:
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On
> Behalf
> >> Of rex
> >> There are several terms for it.
> >>
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection
> >>
> >> I suspect it's more common than is generally recognized.
>
>
> > Thanks Rex.  You and Stathis identified it as heterozygote advantage.  I
> > thought there was a more specific term for that concept, but this states
> the
> > notion:
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage
> >
> > OK cool, so if we identify a bunch of these heterozygote advantages,
> then we
> > could use CRISPR to induce the mutant copy widely.  Then when couples
> with
> > the mutation mate, a heterozygous embryo is chosen, then the result is a
> > healthier population (even though not one which can reproduce
> haphazardly.)
>
> Nature will, over the long term, keep the gene frequencies in balance,
> while lagging the environment. Fiddling with gene frequencies without
> knowing more about the consequences is a risky business.
>
> -rex
> --
> Theories: Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii)
> this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true,
> but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so. (J.B.S. Haldane, Journal of
> Genetics #58, 1963,p.464)
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