Genetic Manipulation

''Molecular Genealogy -- Good? Bad? We could end up with lists of genetically acceptable and unacceptable people...''

One word (okay, really a base sequence): GATTACA.

Molecular Phylogeny, OTOH, rocks. :)

Mainly because it's more about animals than people; the concept is the same.

I know the feeling you're talking about, but I got it at what I think is a larger scale when I was describing on another list how evolution has been chugging along the way it does for three billion years or so, and the inexorableness of the way it works, and I'd have to throw in an exception: "except for the human invention of genetic manipulation, of course."

We live at a remarkable juncture. After fiddling around for only a few thousand years practicing with animal husbandry, we're on the cusp of cracking the code -- OUR code -- with the Human Genome Project, and we're doing quite well with the technology of genetic manipulation. Three billion years of Evolution (Respect The Bitch[tm]), and all of a sudden there is a species with the ability to tinker with not just other species' genomes, but even its own.

I think it's the end of an era, and the start of another.

I had fun writing self-modifying code back in my microprocessor days. You can do cool tricks, and write tight, elegant programs -- but it's hard to document, and when it misbehaves, can misbehave really badly. Didn't the Big Guy Himself say something like, "THOU SHALT NOT EFF WITH THY GENOME -- DEBUGGING SELF-MODIFYING CODE REALLY SUCKS"? -- Peter Kaminski, 20010807