That's not "what evolution is". See [1] for why this is a fundamentally wrong way to think about it.

[1] http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....

This is the actual quote:

> genetically gifted individuals having children together ... which is already happening and has been happening for eons ... I mean, that's what evolution is.

That is exactly what evolution is. The fit only mate with other fit individuals, accelerating the spread of traits which make them fit.

With regard to my other statement:

> The smart get smarter, the fast get faster, the strong get stronger, and the inferior disappear from the gene pool.

The burden is on you to prove that intelligence, speed, and strength aren't being heavily selected upon in the human population. I made it as an off-hand comment, but I think it's pretty spot on regardless.

I'll say it again: "...genetically gifted individuals having children together" and "The fit only mate with other fit individuals" is not what evolution is. Forms of life (including humans) have sometimes evolved strategies that try to allow them to select mates based on fitness, but the emergence of these strategies also allows those that use bluff and deception to gain an advantage by deceiving fitter mates into mating with them. "Fitness" here isn't some linear value, its multi-dimensional.

Also, the very idea of individuals being "genetically gifted" is fairly meaningless. In a sense, every living human is genetically gifted because we possess genes that allowed every one of our ancestors over the last 2.4 million years to survive long enough to successfully reproduce. Most of the ones that tried didn't manage that.

Survival of genes (not individuals) is what counts. Evolution doesn't have a purpose and it doesn't result in progress ("accelerating the spread of traits which make them fit", as you put it). I just tried to point that out.

That stopped some time ago for humans, at least in industralized countries. Modern medicine, long periods of peace and (eventually) welfare provisions have taken care of that. This is a further step in that direction.

Evolution works over huge numbers, both in life and death; by effectively reducing the death-count around the globe, we're progressively abolishing it for humans.

> If anything, genetic modification will allow the less gifted to pool funds and improve their own gene pool in a way that was simply not possible before.

I fear that "pooling funds" could signal a mischaracterization of poor people as "less gifted", which is absolutely not the case. "The poor" are the ones who have historically improved our genepool, by constantly churning huge numbers of children who would then proceed to fight to death (often literally) for survival and success. "The rich" have always opted for in-breeding, low numbers and social welfare among their peers, resulting in weak genes and lots of hereditary diseases surviving the centuries. In this sense, "the poor" have absolutely nothing to gain from genetic manipulation: children are their only resource and they will continue to produce as many as they can, resulting in a stronger and more variegated gene pool without having to add anything to the process.

The GATTACA scenario is real in the sense that a certain mindset is common around modern elites, a view that the rich must be somehow superior to the poor (smarter, healthier, harder-working, etc) otherwise they wouldn't be where they are. Policies like Tony Blair's suggestion that "fat people should pay more for healthcare" are appallingly neo-darwinistic, but they've also been mostly rejected out of a sense of human decency. I expect this will continue to be the case; as a lot of modern history reminds us, it takes very little to send entire populations back to the Middle Ages, and genetic discrimination would light a very powerful fuse.

Evolution works over huge numbers, both in life and death; by effectively reducing the death-count around the globe, we're progressively abolishing it for humans.

That's a common argument, but isn't it putting too much emphasis on death as a driver of natural selection? I mean, a person who lives 80 years without ever having children is as much an evolutionary dead end as a bird who dies before he gets to reproduce.

As long as there are genetic factors that lead to some people have more or less children, evolution is still at work, even if they both live to be the same age.

If you were saying that the mutated mitochondrial genes were a sign of otherwise inferior genetics, gross.

    > Absolutely nothing we can do artificially
    > will have as great of an impact than
    > genetically gifted individuals having
    > children together.

We already have technology that's good enough to improve on that, e.g. splicing out a gene known to cause a disease from one of those parents.

Yes. Because what really matters is the restriction of the pool from which those random genes are chosen through mate choice. The overwhelming majority of the time you're randomly choosing between identical genes.

When you start playing with genetic engineering, the whole world is your oyster and your choices are liable to be far worse than random chance among a carefully curated pool. I think genetic engineering will be fantastic for curing specific ailments, but will be a total flop when it comes to creating super humans. Natural selection will always do it better.