Re: "AND ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST" a song

Jim:

>Genetic engineering of Humans.  Why not walk on fire.  The ethical 
>questions are of primary importance here, but what if your family 
>consistently produces children that get Alzheimer's at a young age.  
>There is a gene that can be inserted to prevent this....

I'm not too worried about "fixing" a specific "defect" in a given 
infividual or in their future children.  Once the technique is worked 
out, then man becomes the master of evolution!  I'm not sure how 
religious people look at that, but that is a lot of power.  In the 
beginning man created God to explain things he couldn't understand and 
then eventually man becomes God.  Not sure what to make of it.

As in all things scientific, there is no good or bad about knowledge. 
Knowledge does exist even if we don't yet know the knowledge.  It's 
how we use the knowledge that mades a difference.

Narda:

>But then Joe how do you define intelligence,

That is a somewhat difficult question to answer easily because 
intelligence is composed of a number of different traits.  High 
intelligence to me is not only the ability to recognize when a problem 
exists, but also to learn from different sources and compile all this 
information into something useful that is greater then the sum of the 
individual parts.  There are a lot of people who do very well on an IQ 
test, but I don't consider an IQ test to be that important.  Every so 
often people are born who are geniuses above and beyond gifted.  I 
have no idea how many people fall into this group, but it isn't too 
many.  Most of the recognized ones are in the fields of science and 
math.  When I was at the Univ of Wisconsin there was a person there by 
the name of Dr. Wright who was one of the pioneers of quantitive 
genetics.  Out of tin air he developed the concept of partial 
correlation coefficients, which in the area of quantitive genetics is 
like discovering atoms are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons; 
and he also developed the mathematical understanding of quantitive 
genetics which is basic to understanding evoultion.  Anyway, he wrote 
a 3 or 4 volumn book and it is said that there may be six people in 
the world who understand it beyond the first few chapters.  Now, what 
if we could tinker with the human genome and make this kind of 
intelligence the new average.  Who knows if it is actually possible, 
but it certainly isn't impossible.  

>And who gets to decide this issue?

Well, isn't Hillary Clinton the smartest women in the world?  Maybe we 
should let her decide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Joe Halinar

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