Two fairly obvious examples in the field of weaponry present themselves when one wants to argue humans shying away from technology: combat gases and nukes. Both would have been of great help in most of the 20th century conflicts. Neither were used to any significant degree, especially not as the terror weapons they were designed to be.
Of course, there's the MAD aspect to it when one gets to really extreme weapons. But more fundamentally, there's the aspect best reflected in the Royal Navy flat out refusing to develop modern ships and weapons in the late 19th century, out of fear that the enemies would feel tempted to do the same.
This is not quite the same thing as having moral aversion to a technology. But such things are typically masked as such anyway: banning of combat gases was presented as due to them being too inhuman (especially to civilians, as if the military would give a shit), when in fact they were simply too inconvenient, say.
The human taboo on genetics is probably at least 90% self-preservation and conservative fear, and only 10% pragmatic strategic pondering: the threat potential inherent in the unknown is too great, the Eugenics Wars a mere sampling of what would be possible. OTOH, what the Klingons did to themselves might instead be par for the course, the species being quite comfortable with modifying itself and indeed biologically reinventing itself every few decades, as witnessed... Different taboos for different species, is all.
Timo Saloniemi
