As technology improves, so do human capabilities of altering nature, which in turn creates increased responsibility. This directly relates to genetic engineering, which is beginning to morph into a reality. There are advocates for both sides that convey their personal opinions about the hypothetical results, but neither is clearly superior since both arguments speculate upon an unknown future. Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, outlines this topic in his essay “The Future of Happiness,” which focuses on the history of selective breeding and compares the goal of happiness with genetic engineering. Csikszentmihalyi alternates between viewpoints regarding genetic engineering but presents a perspective dominated by warning. Csikszentmihalyi’s presents a chronologically structured explanation of selective breeding with progressive rhetorical questions that balance his support between the validity of the scientific study of happiness and his trepidation regarding potential dangers of the use of genetic engineering for predetermined beneficial traits.
Csikszentmihalyi’s chronological explanation of selective breeding begins in the opening of his argument. After a brief
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An example of this is Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of raise IQs. He suggests the uncertainty about what would happen if humans “enhance[d] everyone’s intelligence (625),” by following this suggestion with rhetorical questions. This leads Csikszentmihalyi into his position that argues giving children the same genome would decrease biodiversity and put the human race more at risk with emerging diseases. He implies a historical element of diseases that almost ended the world, much like the Spanish Flu and the Black Plague. Genetic diversity allowed some people to survive these