Oddbean new post about login | logout It is. It's literally selective breeding. And probably incest, as well. Selective, incestual breeding with strangers. Or can just have sex with your spouse in your 20s. 🤷🏻♀️ I'm so glad that these people are dying out and, no, this won't help them stop dying out because these are people who couldn't be bothered to just have sex with their spouse in their 20s because they see children as accessoires to life, rather than the main show. They're not going to get over 2.1, as a group. Ngmi.
Selective breeding of dogs, plants, etc has historically been a try and see approach (a best guess) by discarding the undesirable offspring and only breeding the desirables. That is not the same thing as targeted gene modification. Having sex with a partner who looks good with the hope of having a pretty baby is selective breeding. That's not a new idea. Editing the genes directly is totally different. https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/gm-plants/how-does-gm-differ-from-conventional-plant-breeding/
Or in this case looking at the genes directly and deciding all is well and changing nothing. This isn't a binary issue. There are benefits to these advances beyond just having a baby later in life. It's totally awesome that parents can learn beforehand that their child will have a terrible disease, etc, for example. I tend to find the whole eye color, gender, etc thing weird and something we should discuss, but the medical application for prevention and treatment are amazing and should continue. Most people tunnel vision on one use case, and either discard everything because of that or some other ridiculous religious belief. Both are equally dumb.