Optimistic future sci-fi movies.........

[Myasishchev]

There have always been nonwhite people as qualified as white people, and there have always been women as qualified as men, but it wasn't that long ago that corporations, governments, and other institutions routinely excluded those people or relegated them to menial work like cleaning floors. Discrimination based on genetics doesn't make sense, but it happens nonetheless.

After all, there was a time when European scientists were convinced that whites were a genetically superior breed and all other races were genetically inferior. They had elaborate rationalizations for why it was simply the natural and necessary order of things that whites remain dominant, because they were intrinsically more intelligent, competent, rational, and moral than the "degenerate" breeds. That belief had no actual basis in fact, it was irrational and stupid, but it was taken for granted by Western civilization for many generations. So it's not really surprising that in a future like Gattaca's where there's actually a basis for the notion of some people being genetically superior to others, old habits of thought might reassert themselves. It's just that in that future, the definitions of the "superior" and "inferior" breeds are based on something other than skin complexion. But it's still essentially racial discrimination.

Not quite.

See, when they (grantedly illegally) sample Vincent Freeman's DNA, they aren't going to find out solely that he was conceived naturally. They're also going to find out that he has the genes to be really, really, really, really smart and really, really, really, really disciplined (really, as close to pathologically disciplined as you could ever want).

They'll also find out he has a heart condition, sure. So yeah, he's going to be grounded from flight duty, but why in the world would they turn away someone with a naturally occurring grade-A genotype in every other respect, just because it's naturally occurring? It's like if someone handed you a diamond, better than most of the diamonds you usually take, but you throw it out because it has a minor imperfection that has nothing to do with the task you were going to assign to it, and because it had formed in the Earth's crust instead of in a diamond plant.

It's not enough to say that his physical infirmity would have kept him from being part of Gattaca, or at least part of the gene-blessed caste. Irene Cassini also has a congenital heart condition, and she works at Gattaca openly!

It makes me wonder how biased Vincent is in his narration of this "dystopian" gene-biased future. Maybe he could have gotten a job at Gattaca, but knew he could never go to Saturn with his heart. And for good reason--sending an astronaut who has an even chance of keeling over dead halfway to Saturn is a ridiculous chance to take, that cannot be supported by a rational decisionmaker.

So maybe Gattaca's society isn't really so bad, and Vincent isn't really so noble. Maybe the entire charade was motivated by more than a desire to just be successful. Maybe Vincent had to be the hero of his own personal drama, selfishly and wrongly risking the success of the Saturn mission, and even the lives of his comrades, because of his own pursuit of glory.

 

[Christopher]

See, when they (grantedly illegally) sample Vincent Freeman's DNA, they aren't going to find out solely that he was conceived naturally. They're also going to find out that he has the genes to be really, really, really, really smart and really, really, really, really disciplined (really, as close to pathologically disciplined as you could ever want).

They'll also find out he has a heart condition, sure. So yeah, he's going to be grounded from flight duty, but why in the world would they turn away someone with a naturally occurring grade-A genotype in every other respect, just because it's naturally occurring? It's like if someone handed you a diamond, better than most of the diamonds you usually take, but you throw it out because it has a minor imperfection that has nothing to do with the task you were going to assign to it, and because it had formed in the Earth's crust instead of in a diamond plant.

You're assuming that their decisions are going to be rational. That's not how prejudice works. Different people's views of the world can be profoundly different based on their unquestioned assumptions. You or I can recognize that someone with an unengineered genome can be brilliant and capable, but someone who's been raised all their life with the preconceptions that unengineered genomes are intrinsically inferior isn't going to be able to see the facts for what they are, because human beings are very, very good at blinding themselves to facts that clash with their prejudices.

And they don't even always consciously realize it. Take those European scientists who believed their work "proved" the inferiority of other races. There was one famous test where scientists measured the brain size of the different "races" by filling various skulls with seeds of a certain size and counting the seeds. Their results allegedly "proved" that Caucasian brains were the largest and African brains the smallest, but those data were entirely incorrect. The scientists were trying to do it scientifically, but their prejudices were so deeply ingrained that they unconsciously introduced bias -- for instance, if a Caucasian skull held fewer seeds than the experimenter assumed it could, they might assume they were doing it wrong and jam the seeds in more tightly, while conversely they might unconsciously pack the African skull more loosely. This sort of thing happens all the time, which is why the scientific method requires multiple independent experiments in order to try to cancel out unconscious personal bias (not always successfully). These scientists weren't intentionally perpetrating fraud, but they were human and they unconsciously tried to make the evidence fit their assumptions of how the world was supposed to work.

The same thing happens even today. There are so many studies that allegedly "prove" that boys are better at math than girls, but those studies fail to account for environmental bias and they exaggerate a slight difference between the average performances that's swamped by the sheer breadth of variation within either sex. Back in the '90s there was a controversial book called The Bell Curve that purported to prove that there was an intrinsic difference in intelligence between different races; its argument was BS because it was predicated on the fiction that IQ scores are actually a meaningful measure of intelligence and that IQ tests are not racially biased to begin with.

People see what they expect to see, and it's hard to convince them otherwise. Heck, your diamond example is a perfect illustration, only in reverse; we're at the point where synthetic diamonds can be made with higher, more consistent quality than natural diamonds, but our culture (and the aggressive PR of the diamond industry) conditions us to assume that natural diamonds are more desirable and that synthetic ones are inferior regardless of their actual quality. It's not that hard, therefore, to imagine a society that embraces the opposite prejudice, whether about diamonds or about people. It's just as arbitrary either way.

It makes me wonder how biased Vincent is in his narration of this "dystopian" gene-biased future. Maybe he could have gotten a job at Gattaca, but knew he could never go to Saturn with his heart. And for good reason--sending an astronaut who has an even chance of keeling over dead halfway to Saturn is a ridiculous chance to take, that cannot be supported by a rational decisionmaker.

Exactly. Key word: "rational." Gattaca is a movie about prejudice, and that's never rational. It's arbitrary and unfair, and otherwise rational people can come up with all sorts of absurd justifications for it.