alt Hacker NewsImagine all humans have homogeneous advantageous genetic material. We are all healthy and handsome. And then something random targets one or more of such advantageous genes and we are all wiped because we are very homogeneous.
That happens to anything recombinant we produce: crops, cattle, bacteria. That even applies to dog breeds.
"Advantageous" changes as the environment changes. Being a large long lived strong dinosaur is advantageous until meteorite? Then being a small mammal is advantageous. A population explosion of locusts ravages all plants successfully, until a fungus infects and kills almost all, thankfully for locusts some of them which were not "the best" survived that one infection.
Like covid wiped us all right? A deep understanding of our genes means we are more likely to quickly create successful defenses against future hostile organisms, again, the most "hackable" specimens, those in which we could accurately predict the effects of our changes in their genes (including its interactions with virus and vaccines).
And the same homogeneity means that developing a defense for any future hostile organism is much more straightforward, just like e.g. developing software that works on windows is much easier than developing software that works on windows, Linux and mac.