Err - did you actually pay attention during the film? The "minority report" was the dissenting opinion that questioned the verdict decided by the majority, as with a supreme court case.

This is great progress, because it means that lesbian mothers will eventually be able to have children that are genetically related to both parents. This would mean that all their children are female, but they may not mind.

This is false. Male and female genetic contributions are different because of maternal and paternal imprinting - certain genes are "flagged" on or off by methylation of DNA segments, and the pattern is different in men and women. This results in a careful balance - if you used two female sets, crucial genes would appear either in 2x the necessary dose, or be completely shut off, and the fetus would not be viable. As far as I know, to date no one has managed to alter imprinting patterns to that of the other sex. Until they do, same-sex parents are not possible.

Hardly an apt comparison; in the case of terminally ill people, they're going to die anyway, and suicide might save their loved ones millions of dollars (in the US, anyway). The same calculus doesn't apply in the case of infertility.

Man, once our genetic engineering is good enough, one of the first things we should do is migrate those mtDNA genes into the nucleus, already, and get them working under proper sexual reproduction/selection. Clean that shit up.

It also occurs to me that you can use this to identify specific alleles associated with increased risk of cancer. Not that genetic screening is generally very useful yet, but more maps like this will give a better idea of an individual's chance of developing specific types of cancer, maybe even associated with specific activities. E.g., "if you have these particular variants, you're much more likely to develop lung cancer, so you should smoke even less than a normal person." (I hope to GOD we (in the US) have public health insurance before this becomes widespread.)

Err, to fill in that empty shell of a comment, specifically, this will hopefully generate at least a few new genes that are useful as drug targets. Anything that can make chemotherapy a bit more specific instead of just a general metabolic poison is a bonus.

My objection to your line of reasoning is that you impute value to these events at all, and assert that we should be thankful for them, somehow, or consider them beneficial, because they brought us about. But the past is in stone; it does not care if we remember it, or if it is revered. Only the future is malleable. There may one day come a season for us to die in, but I don't believe we've reached it yet; I want to die in a time of our own choosing, not one that our folly thrust upon us.

Uh, so what? World War II enabled me, too. Without it, Indian independence probably would have been delayed, my grandparents may not have met and I would not have been born. Should I thus celebrate Hitler's invasion of Poland? What an odd line of reasoning.

Yes, you're right, because if the planet, say, heated up enough that liquid water couldn't exist in our atmosphere, we would certainly benefit.

Your notions of adaptation are extremely optimistic. Life is not inevitable or omnipotent; it cannot overcome any adaptive landscape. If it could, the Moon would be teeming. It is entirely possible for extinction events to eliminate all life. It is entirely possible for us to create such an extinction event. Stop assuming that just because it can happen, life will recover, or that these events are somehow noteworthy and beneficial.

People need to get over extinctions.

Why are people lauding this dude? He's celebrating our imminent deaths. You can have your own death party, buddy. Me, I want our species to survive at least another few million years, not precipitate a mass extinction event right now.

Some useful reading.

Only someone with zero understanding of selection could make a statement like this. Natural selection is a pretty precise knife - it multiplies exponentially over generations. Even a minor selective disadvantage - a tiny fraction of a percent - results in removal of deleterious variation.

I'm a diligent bug-filer. I don't think a single bug I've ever filed has been dealt with, except by the feature being completely elided by a major software revision (e.g. KDE4). It's always mystified and annoyed me that free software projects don't make better use of the fact that their process can be completely transparent. Developers are too egotistical about their code.

Well, surely you aren't suggesting that forcing kids to do schoolwork for no pay -- the status quo -- is somehow more likely to turn them into writers/poets/scientists than paying them to do schoolwork. So what's your alternative?

What? That's exactly what I'm suggesting - I'm saying that kids who are paid to do schoolwork are more likely to turn into drones and less likely to turn into writers/poets/scientists. That is, they will learn, "The reason I am doing this is to get money," not, "The reason I am doing this is because science/art/music/literature/philosophy/dance/woodworking/programming/math/history/writing is fun."

Quit your job, dude. Quit your job. You're hurting yourself.