While browsing through the old threads of the forum, which I do quite often, I stumbled across
this thread, which first discusses genetic manipulation of cats making them unable to cause allergies. The debate then moves on to challenge genetic manipulation in general.
Now, the discussion sports an exceptional amount of fallacies from the opponents of genetic manipulation, which made it, frankly, a pretty fatiguing read. The ones I could find were:
- Appeal to tradition.
- The Hitler card ("[d]idn't Hitler try to create the perfect race before?").
- Pseudo-science (pretty literally "genetic manipulation is unpredictable and leads to monstrosities, 'cause that's the way it was in that Hollywood movie").
- Religion used as argument ("we should not 'mess with' God's creation).
- Slippery slope.
- The argument that genetic manipulation is "pointless", despite from the fact that it's brought about cats people can't be allergic to.
Evidently, genetic manipulation had not had time to be critically considered by these people, as their arguments are typical "fear of new things mode".
Well, the reason I'm starting
this thread is that the one I linked to is from back in 2004, and I'm curious to know if you guys have differing opinions.
Personally, I fully support genetic manipulation of animals that leads to advances such as allergic people being able to be around them. It'll better the lives of so many people, and really, as demonstrated by the fallacy list above, the arguments against simply do not hold water. If regular breeding is OK, so is genetic manipulation. It's really that simple.