> I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.

I agree, and I think we both agree that while it is conceptually possible to reverse engineer most of human biology to the point of eventually understanding how all selection pressures explain the information in the human genome, from your sentence I conclude also that we probably agree that we are far from that position as of today.

> To think otherwise is to acknowledge some sort of higher power that holds a special non-organic ingredient in the mix.

It's not so much a magical ingredient, more than not possessing a manual of the universe, nor guarantees about the distribution of all activities and how humans with specific genomes experience different selection pressures. Our genome only accumulates an effective response for a full history of usual (and now novel) selection pressures, not a description nor the formula describing the dependence on all parameters in the face of selection pressures.

But what I believe the previous commenter refers to is not the question if we ever asymptotically approach this ideal model of selection pressures, but rather that conventional research has already long taught us that healthy body organs require an active life: without exercise the muscles would atrophy like bed-ridden people suffer, and similar for all kinds activities ideally in a mix that is representative of the real distribution of selective pressures.

> To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on orphans and the mentally handicapped.

Can you kindly link me up with references on the non-consensual gynecological surgeries? I happen to be very interested in the dark origins of medicine in general (since one could argue that healthcare is impossible to socialize, whenever we alleviate the afflictions of genetically inclined sufferers -randomly distributed in all populations- then we simultaneously lift the selection pressure, inducing more of such sufferers in the next generation. One doesn't have to be a Nazi to point that out, and unlike a Nazi (who intervene by castration, genocide, etc.) a scientific moral stance is to simply not intervene: neither oppress nor help.

By what right do we alleviate each type of suffering in a few socialized-healthcare generations at the cost of inducing more suffering in many more future generations to come?