Star Trek/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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** It's not genetic engineering that's illegal, it's genetic augmentation. Genetic treatments to fix birth defects are fine, and probably cross-species mixing are also fine, but making a [[Warhammer 40000|Space Marine]] is not. Also, mixing in alien DNA after the kid is born is probably going to be very, very difficult.
*** Sort of makes one wonder how the genetic engineering project underway in "Unnatural Selection" is legal, given what we later learn about Federation laws.
**** Unnatural Selection is basically a TOS episode translated into TNG. It's really easy to imagine McCoy in place of Pulaski, and it still works. It can probably be written off as [[Early Installment Weirdness]], due to being one of the early seasons where TNG was still floundering about trying to recreate the style and feel of TOS.
** Feel free to correct me, I can only recall one reference (in Enterprise) to genetic engineering being required to make a hybrid baby. It makes sense, but there are too many hybrids who were clearly the product of accidental pregnancies to assume that this is the case all the time (Tora Ziyal comes right to mind).
*** When Worf and Jadzia were discussing having children, Jadzia went to Dr. Bashir to get some sort of medical procedure done to make it a possibility. The episode doesn't say outright whether genetic engineering but it might've been, or it might not have been. Also, regarding hybrids at least in the case of Bajorans and Cardassians, there is a discussion on the [[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine/Headscratchers|DS9]] page about how those two races had been interacting for millenia and neither had a taboo against genetic engineering, so it's possible that, either through natural or artificial sources, the two species were interfertile (who knows if their offspring would've been, though; since we never saw Ziyal or any other Bajoran/Cardassian have kids it's a matter of speculation). With humans, was there ever any hybrid we see that was explicitly an illegitimate or at least unplanned child? I can think of at least one (Alexander), suggesting that, as ludicrous as it may sound, maybe the major Alpha Quadrant races ''are'' interfertile in the Star Trek universe, possibly having something to do with the "shared DNA" mess from the TNG episode "The Chase". In that case, genetic engineering has nothing to do with producing hybrids, and therefore they wouldn't violate humanity's genetic engineering taboo.
**** In Jadzia and Worf's case, the complication was the symbiont. And most races being interfertile is explained by the TNG episode that reveals that most sentient life in the galaxy was seeded by the same humanoid precursors, meaning that they all share some amount of genetic similarity. Arguably being interfertile isn't a story bug, it's an in-universe feature.
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