Would you edit a large legacy system full of the most horrendous spaghetti code, written in a language the best experts only slightly understand, doing many jobs that aren't documented anywhere which all depend on each other? A system with no tests whatsoever?
Oh, and you have to do it in production, and it's a critical system where people die if you get it wrong.
> If nature is so great, why do I have -2 vision and bad teeth?
One could argue that your diet and lifestyle could've caused that, and it's hard to counter. (I have -4 vision, by the way.) I don't think medde's comment adds much to the discussion, but I can see the point about our inability to “understand nature”. We don't know what we don't know.
Maybe ‘lifestyle’ isn't an appropriate word. I wanted to find an umbrella term for all the small stuff that may look irrelevant, but actually is not.
I remember a study not long ago that found sedentary lifestyle drastically affecting chances of death from cardiovascular disease. It does seem plausible to me that there could be many more things that affect us in more subtle and unexpected ways. Posture, thinking patterns—those little habits. Two apparently similar lifestyles may actually turn out to be very different when analyzed to such fine detail.
And since children from early age imitate their parents, it's natural to expect those things to get passed (with certain variance) from generation to generation.
Now the above is very unscientific, of course. I don't deny that genetics matter—just that there might be other things that matter as well.
Analogies from software engineering world are often flawed, but I'll draw one: a shallow fix of an annoying bug without full understanding of a complex system (and decent test coverage) leading to perplexing problems down the line—I think it's a familiar situation.
IMO despite some replies this thread isn't useful overall, and that's the problem.
Most of your short comment is good vs. bad judgement (nature is great, gene selection and cloning are evil). It provoked guard-of-terra's reply, which states the obvious—yes, nature isn't ‘great’ (neither is it ‘evil’, it simply is), and gene selection can be useful—wouldn't we all like to be able to ‘fix bugs’ in humans. I was compelled to reply to it for some reason, but regret that now.
FWIW, I didn't downvote or upvote your comment, and only now have noticed that it's greyed.
Humans have been doing TRAIT selection for millennia, not gene.
Some traits are linked to a single gene, but most of them, aren't. (and to make stuff more confusing, a single gene might affect several traits at once).
I would take the risk to make sure my children do not inherit known bugs.