I take issue with all of the following selection criteria:

> myopia
> alcoholism
> addictive susceptibility
> propensity for violence
> obesity

> Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer
> Longest Expected Life Span
> Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care

All of them are vague, probablistic, unscientific, and mostly dependent on complicit human behavior. In other words, you select for one of these pseudo-"traits" (because there's no hard, deterministic science to prove genetic origins for all of these, conclusively with 100% certainty), and then the best laid plans are destroyed when the human being confronts unforgiving realities beyond the womb.

--but, but, but chance! No guarantees in life! Blah, blah, blah...

Don't apply hard science to select for "hope". Select for 5 fingers, sure. Whatever. At least you know you're getting what you paid for.

But, for the love of god, don't select for the "let's hope he stays out of jail" gene. That's a social, behavioral, circumstantial outcome, based on the decision making of the other human beings a person surrounds themselves with.

I take heavy issue with selecting for or against cancer genetics in particular. A lot of actual cancer outcomes rely on circumstances, environment and behavior. Beyond that, cancer is by-and-large a normal outcome for tissues that don't fail for other reasons. Any organ or tissue that doesn't get killed by something else, on a long-enough timeline, will be killed by cancer. Given that premise (the inevitability of cancer) it only makes so much sense to target "cancer genes" as a selection criteria.

Oh, and by the way, if you have any sort of problem with genetically modified foods, then you should take the exact same issue with genetically modified humans.

Monoculture induced by inbreeding, selective breeding and artificial selection is a killer that destroys at time-scales beyond individual generations. Just look at Chihuahuas and their propensity for asthma, or German Shepherds and their weird leg problems.

This is to say that any damage we do now, we won't necessarily be alive, to feel or understand the ramifications of. If all of us collectively decide to choose the absence of an adaptation, and that adaptation becomes essential a century after the fad, say hello to blight, extinction and perhaps the collapse of human civilization. Keep in mind that the loss of civilization (modern human society, and it's trappings of education, and scientific method) has the absolutely damning knock-on effect of being rendered into a scenario where it is no longer possible for humanity to "undo" it's own ruin.

Why? Because when you place a human social group in a suspended state of "less than grade-school quality" education for more than a generation or two, you'll find that on the other end, the group's descendants live in a state of uneducated superstition, lacking disciplines that engage in true scientific rigor (which can be enormously expensive). No more 4 year university STEM fellowships in this barren apocalyptic wasteland. Think in terms of what has happened to Afghanistan, where several decades of war have produced a generation denied of modern society. Now, imagine that same population also suffering from genetic disorders, induced by a fashion trend no one remembers. Only nature will decide who lives in such a scenario. But wait, it gets worse, given tendencies for human xenophobia, what if genetic choices made now, produce a form of future "racism" among uneducated apocalyptic cultures which we can't anticipate?

Okay, sure. This is the Michael Bay Extreme Nightmare Scenario™.

But still, we're toying with "science" that we don't fully comprehend, and all the while, we seem to be approaching it with all the solemnity of a coked-up Fashion designer caterwauling across a runway during Fashion Week in NYC.

If you don't find that dangerous (from a patently non-religious perspective)... well then... I don't know what else to tell you.