I think you meant confirmation bias.

As I said before I am typing with my thumbs and reading everything on a smartphone and this gets to be an onerous way to go find links to bring back here. If we hadn't lost all our participants in this thread I might be inclined to put in the effort. Right now I have nine windows open that I want to get around to reading, so finding more corroborating pages for our discussion is falling lower on my priority list.

But I'll answer what I can. As for the lack of consensus in the conversation going on among scientists about human germ line modification, I'll just link to an interview with Jennifer Doudna, co-developer of crispr, about her experience at a summit she convened to discuss the topic:

http://www.ipscell.com/2015/04/doudna/ She states: "...Any group of people will have a diversity of opinions. It’s the kind of topic that each of us comes to with our own set of beliefs and level of comfort with making changes to the DNA of an organism. That’s one of the reasons to get together..."

The interview is good reading. Anyway, I acknowledge that there's not a consensus on this idea that it turns out they're not calling a moratorium...but I like how they're proceeding, bringing many parties into the discussion.

Sorry if the following logorrhea is disjointed, I'm just tired of composing it on the phone.

OK. So back to the modification-related question of "why do we draw the line where we draw it?"

It looks like we agree that the complexity of an organism isn't necessarily a good standard for why we humans do or don't alter a particular organism. Or why we should or shouldn't.

The pain standard for us not fiddling with an organism's genetics is an interesting one.

It is said that a sea urchin has a somewhat close genetic relation to humans, yet you wouldn't expect people to hesitate to fiddle with an urchin's genetics as much as much as they would hesitate to fiddle with peoples'. The rhesus, the zebrafish, the rat, the guinea pig...we as a society do not hesitate to inflict horrors on research animals for our health, our comfort and our monetary gain.

(And by the way I am not currently nor have I ever been an animal rights activist, though that's not to say I'm against becoming one...)

Also for our consideration of the nature of animal pain we allow as a society, we have the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center as an exemplar in the world of inhumane institutions, this one having supported the industry of the American heartland for something like fifty years with what have to be incredibly painful experiments on farm animals. So right now our American civilization has a high tolerance for pain, one could say.

I'm not going to chase corroborating evidence right this moment showing whether or how germline modification has been done on rats in the lab or on cows to cause greater milk output, because that is not the point I'm trying to make. My point is that we would do it to them without fully understanding the consequences sooner than we would do it to humans. That is obvious. I want to work with that idea. We don't seem to draw the no-genetic-experiment line anywhere until it gets to us. We do massive breeding and alteration experiments with the bodies of every species but ourselves. I don't think the fact that we inflict pain on a creature - or the fact that as a consequence of our germline modification of them they may have mutilated descendants - is anything that is stopping us from experimenting that way on them.

So far here these are the premises that I have established for myself:

We humans are evolutionarily not a higher animal or a more complex animal. We are not so very different from these close relatives, the other animals. A primary difference between ourselves and them is that we are the animal that USES the other animals sytematically, and with thorough premeditated planning for how we will use them. That is where I'm attempting to seek my personal ethical boundaries on this issue at the moment.

We humans feel special to ourselves and may except ourselves from the experimentation we inflict on the other animals and plants. That's cool with me.

But if we continue drastically altering our food creatures without enough care, without meaningful oversight and guidelines, it wouldn't be pleasant to find one day that we have happened to recklessly alter the heritable genes of creatures we depend on for our survival in a way that results in the unanticipated extinction or large reduction in the population of a species that we use to survive.

Suppose we screw up big when trying to bring back some of our last remaining insect pollinators. Or modify out of existence some "keystone species" in our very own food chain. Or we poison and strip our soils so much with the way we grow our modified monocultures, we back ourselves into a shitshow of famine. I know. Too much speculation. But that's what their doing with these CRISPR conferences. Speculating. Responsibly.

Though I cringe at my own illustration: maybe a difference between my view here and the views of some hardline industrial-scale-GMO cheerleaders has an odd similarity with the theological difference between the Southern Baptist church and a group like the Unitarians on the issue of what they think their respective Gods told them about their dominion over the earth's creatures.

Baptists go, "God gave us every living to use however we want, and Jesus is coming back pretty quick here now so let's get to using!" And I think Unitarians go, "God told us to watch over all these living things and be good stewards of them, so don't use everything up too recklessly. We depend on a lot of those things!"

Well I think we depend on more creatures in more ways than we even know yet. Those microbiota in our soil that assist in the growth and fertility of our crops, the birds and bees, the extended ecosystem really has to be cared for. We don't just need corn or soy. We need lots of organisms to keep us fed.

In the last century of industrial agriculture we have lost countless vegetable landraces our ancestors grew that were so well adapted to their particular places. They're gone. We can deal with it. GMOs save the day, they're so strong they can make it anywhere with the friendly chemicals to help. But the biodiversity that has existed, that was resilient without the alien (as in non-local) chemical inputs, that's gone. And the monocultures that live in their place can be vulnerable to disease and pests due to their genetic uniformity. Shouldn't we ask whether we might be more careful?

We depend on other species. I think we humans should be damn near as careful with how we alter their genomes as we are with how we alter our own.

I think that's as far as I'm going to comment here. I think I'm done with this thread. It was fun while it lasted!