MORE ON EUGENICS & GENETIC ENGINEERING: A reader sends this gem:

To tie two recent Instapundit threads together, I don’t see much difference
between anti-cloning and anti-genetic engineering laws on one hand and the old anti-miscegenation laws on the other. In both cases the Law declares that certain types of families and certain types of offspring are Officially Undesirable.

An anti-genetic engineering law is itself a eugenics measure, as much if not more so than as the old anti-miscegenation were. It’s a eugenic measure of the old style, where the State decides what genes and genetic combinations are “good” or “bad” and imposes its decisions with the force of law. An anti-genetic engineering law and an anti-miscegenation law differ only in that the later declares “genetic purity” to be “good” (socially desirable and required by law), while the former declares “genetic naturalness” to be “good.”

This bears repeating: Anti-genetic engineering laws would be no different, in style or motivation, from the eugenics laws of the ’30s. All that would change is the definition of “socially desirable” genetic combinations – “pure” genes in the case of the old laws, and “natural” (or “wild type”) genes in the case of the new ones.