Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfleet

[Vanyel]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

I think there is a difference between repairing a defect and enhancing someone beyond normal human parameters.

Seemingly not. Bashir was almost drummed out of Starfleet because a defect was corrected.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

I think there is a difference between repairing a defect and enhancing someone beyond normal human parameters.

Seemingly not. Bashir was almost drummed out of Starfleet because a defect was corrected.

And he got his mind rewired - emerging far smarter.
A procedure that, in 1/2 cases, creates someone with ambition to rule commensurate to that intellect.

That goes beyond any definition of defect - save for the one that sees 'defect' as any imperfection, deviation from an 'ubermensch' ideal.

 

[Vanyel]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

I think there is a difference between repairing a defect and enhancing someone beyond normal human parameters.

Seemingly not. Bashir was almost drummed out of Starfleet because a defect was corrected.

And he got his mind rewired - emerging far smarter.
A procedure that, in 1/2 cases, creates someone with ambition to rule commensurate to that intellect.

That goes beyond any definition of defect - save for the one that sees 'defect' as any imperfection, deviation from an 'ubermensch' ideal.

His description of himself as a child was that of some one with severe mental disabilities even by today's standards. Rewiring his brain was the only way to help him. I don't see how that can be any different from getting a missing limb to grow in utero.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

Seemingly not. Bashir was almost drummed out of Starfleet because a defect was corrected.

And he got his mind rewired - emerging far smarter.
A procedure that, in 1/2 cases, creates someone with ambition to rule commensurate to that intellect.

That goes beyond any definition of defect - save for the one that sees 'defect' as any imperfection, deviation from an 'ubermensch' ideal.

His description of himself as a child was that of some one with severe mental disabilities even by today's standards. Rewiring his brain was the only way to help him. I don't see how that can be any different from getting a missing limb to grow in utero.

Rewiring his brain had a 50/50 chance of turning him into a sociopath.
You call that a cure? It's far worse than the disease.

And, of course, Bashir received not only the 'normal human' mind package - not only 'modelling' him closer to a normal human.
Rather, he got the entire aggressivity inducing superintelect, ubermensch Khan package.
You call that merely 'correcting a defect'? Really?

Not to mention, Bashir's described himself as merely not very bright before he became version 2.0. There is a long way from there to 'mentally disabled'.

 

[Vanyel]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

Not to mention, Bashir's described himself as merely not very bright before he became version 2.0. There is a long way from there to 'mentally disabled'.

"Merely not very bright", yes, but Bashir went further:

In 1st grade when other children were learning to read and write and use the computer, I was still trying to tell a dog from a cat, a tree from a house.

Bashir to O'Bien
Doctor Bashir, I Presume

That is far beyond "merely not bright." It enters the realm of mental retardation.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

It changes little whether he was retarded or merely 'not bright'*; as said:
"Rewiring his brain had a 50/50 chance of turning him into a sociopath.
You call that a cure? It's far worse than the disease.

And, of course, Bashir received not only the 'normal human' mind package - not only 'modelling' him closer to a normal human.
Rather, he got the entire aggressivity inducing superintelect, ubermensch Khan package.
You call that merely 'correcting a defect'? Really?"


*And it's highly debatable whether one can call him retarded - Bashir was able to follow - badly - school courses, for one thing.

 

[Stoek]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

First of all as regards Bashir, I think it is safe to say that he was mildly retarded prior to the treatments. If his parents had been content to have him elevated to "normal" intelligence then I strongly suspect it would not have become an issue. But that's not what they did. They had his intellect increased to well beyond the norm, increased his recall abilities, and also had his reflexes and co-ordination enhanced.

Now as for the whole genetic augmentation thing, actually it makes a fair bit of sense if you think about it just from a basic safety standpoint. Let's say you have a person with a genetic defect. Well that's fairly simple because you have a baseline to compare against so you can repair the defect and make the person normal. But enhancements? Well for that there is no baseline so there is the risk that the enhancements will have unintended negative side effects. A point which is demonstrated fairly clearly in the DS9 episodes dealing with Bashir's interactions with the other augmented humans. This idea is also touched on in the Eugenics Wars duology by Greg Cox.

Personally I think the safety factor is a pretty valid reason for limiting the scope of genetic engineering. The "Khan" factor not so much. Mainly because the latter is frankly quite naive. It presumes that biology is destiny and completely ignores environment. While it is certainly not impossible for someone like Bashir raised with loving (if a bit daft) parents in a culture that stresses egalitarian values to end up with a compulsion for galactic domination it's by no means inevitable. In his books Cox suggests that part of the reason why Khan and company ended up the way they did is because they were raised in isolation by a bunch of nutters who kept telling them how awesome and destined to rule they were. And on Enterprise, we're shown that Arik Soong raised his augments in much the same way.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

Personally I think the safety factor is a pretty valid reason for limiting the scope of genetic engineering. The "Khan" factor not so much. Mainly because the latter is frankly quite naive. It presumes that biology is destiny and completely ignores environment.

Ignoring nurture, concentrating only on nature is quite naive, yes.
But ignoring nature, concentrating only on nurture is equally naive.

Many human behaviours are clearly genetically (aka nature) conditioned; many individual human traits, as well. One could very well envisage creating a person so genetically predisposed to aggressivity that no amount of loving nurture could make a moral, peace-loving person out of him.
As a real world example, sociopaths; they may follow moral rules because society imposes and enforces them (by legal and social success means), but they don't really care about them, internalise them.


In the trekverse, as Archer said and 'Dr Bashir, I presume' confirmed (200 years later) creating someone with superhuman intelligence (even normal intelligence, as long as it's achieved by genetic engineering?) will in 1/2 of cases lead to increased sociopathy and aggressivity, increased ambition and lust for power.
And if in 200 years they weren't able to remove the flaws from the augmentation process, then these flaws are probably related to a fundamental characteristic of said process.


Would, in the real world, making someone far smarter than a baseline human make him a dictator-in-waiting?
I very much doubt it. But you can never know.

In the trekverse, though, the scenarists decided it does in at least 1/2 of cases (depending on nurture, presumably?) - probably because it gave them the villains in 'space seed' and then continued with the same idea; and because of inertia and not wanting to touch transhumanist themes.
In the trekverse, every time one tries it, one flips the coin - and sees what comes out from Pandora's box.

 

[Timo]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

Considering that we have seen the government freely and publicly experiment with breeding a superior type of human in "Unnatural Selection", we could deduce one or more of three things:

a) The government can do things civilians cannot, including creating supermen.
b) The creation of physically superior supermen is okay, as long as nothing is done to the mental aspects.
c) Only certain very specific techniques for superman creation are banned.

I don't really think that a) alone carries much merit, as the very existence of the specimen the government created would still be illegal, that is, incompatible with the rules governing the civilian life of the specimen created. Clearly the superchildren from the episode were intended to live out normal (if disease-free) lives as free citizens, until the tragic turn of events.

The other episodes dealing with the odd ban would still be largely compatible with both b) and c). It's just that we hear in ST:Nemesis that one of Picard's many weird incurable diseases was a longstanding family trait - surely it should have been removed long ago from the family line through genetic engineering if it were legal to engineer out things that weren't related to mental acuity?

Combining a) and c) would work well with "Dr Bashir, I Presume?" where the Bashirs do apparent good but get jailed for it. If the specific technique they purchased were especially prone to creating Khans and Jack Packs, and only some significantly less effective (or more expensive, or otherwise undesirable) techniques would have been harmless and legally available to civilians, it would make sense for the Bashirs to go illegal. Especially if anybody receiving even a harmless cure at childhood would be permanently filed as a suspicious case and banned from certain lines of work, lest he actually be smart enough to keep his superhuman, inhuman ambitions secret till a key moment.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

If Bashir was so disadvantaged prior to his treatment, then how do you explain Mirror Bashir, who seemed fairly normal (and surely did NOT have access to genetic engineering)?

 

[Stoek]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

If Bashir was so disadvantaged prior to his treatment, then how do you explain Mirror Bashir, who seemed fairly normal (and surely did NOT have access to genetic engineering)?

Well I can think of more than a couple of explanations...

1: The cause of the retardation may have been an in utero environmental event (radiation for example) and MB was not exposed to any such.

2: MB may have not had precisely the same parents as PB. Let's say that one or more of Prime Bashir's parents had a sibling of the same gender. Now let's say for simplicities sake that Bashir's father was the same in both universes but instead of the woman who was his mother in the prime universe, instead MB's father married that woman's slightly younger sister. Well the genes could be similar enough to still get someone who looked like the Bashir we know but was genetically different enough to not have the developmental difficulties (assuming the cause of said difficulties was genetic rather than environmental).

3: Mirror Bashir may have for want of a more precise term "gotten better" over time. This may sound far fetched but I have witnessed it first hand. At the fast food restaurant that I worked a young (early 20's) developmentally challenged woman was hired to do fries. Besides a certain level of mental retardation she also had physical expression of her condition (which I don't know what it was). She had shortened fingers and was not quite five feet, and had a round chubby face. She would have reminded you of a cabbage patch doll come to life. Anyway in the beginning she was to put it simply maddening. Her entire shift she had to be reminded literally every step she had to take. Not just once per shift but over and over and over. And then one day it was like someone flipped a switch. Suddenly she was doing her job without having to be prompted. And if she was uncertain about something (like if it was busy enough to put two baskets down to cook instead of one) she would ask. But it didn't stop there. She started to observe people doing things like making desserts, and milkshakes and she started doing the same. She figured out how to read the screen that tells people what the orders are. In time she was able to hand food to drive thru customers, and get orders together. She was never blindingly fast but it was a HUGE improvement over where she started. I doubt that my verbiage is correct but it's like she suddenly laid enough neural pathways that her capacity was increased.

To an extent it's suggested in the DS9 Season 8 novel Cathederal that something like that may have been the case with Bashir if he'd been left to develop naturally. When Prime Bashir became intermingled with his counterpart from another reality, he learned that, that Bashir held a job, had friends and a wife. So perhaps the same was true of Mirror Bashir.

 

[Timo]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

If Bashir was so disadvantaged prior to his treatment, then how do you explain Mirror Bashir, who seemed fairly normal?

He was a completely different person, of course. Just like everybody else in the various Mirror realms, he just happened to look and sound like his "regular" namesake, with few (very few!) shared bits of personal history. That's how all the Mirror encounters appear to work: they take two largely incompatible lives from the infinite supply of possibilities, and combine them at the exact time and place when and where they briefly do share some characteristics. Probably the very mechanisms of Mirror travel would preclude a young Julian Bashir from meeting a young Mirror Julian Bashir who was markedly different from him.

Subtle doesn't cut it - not when Vic Fontaine in one realm is a hologram and in another is a living (or, rather, dying) human being.

in the end, we have no way of judging, in subjective let alone objective terms, how much the young Julian was in need of treatment, and how much that treatment helped him, and how much of the treatment was "surplus". Certainly everything we have seen of him falls well within the human norm. But just as certainly we haven't seen everything.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

While there are some deviations from the concept in some episodes, the basic principle of the mirror universe is that its inhabitants possess the opposite characteristics to those of their prime universe counterparts.

 

[Timo]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

Naah. They are just evil and lesbian.

Which as such isn't sufficient proof that the regular Ezri is nice and straight.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MikeS]

Re: Putting restrictions on the genetically enhanced is very un-starfl

A real life example - Nazi use of Eugenic theory to back up their ideology of hatred meant that many people could not accept Darwins theory of evolution for a couple of decades. Thankfully people like Dawkins have rescued the theory from the extremists. I assume a similar situation in the Star Trek universe.

Wasn't that Theory already 70 or so years old by the time the Nazi's came to power?

The theory of Evolution? Yes.

Eugenic theory? A couple of decades.

My point being that people thought that the two were inseperable and Darwins theory was relitively "hushed-up" between the forties and the seventies when Dawkins came along.