Dangers of designing a ‘filtered’ Love Island version of perfection

AND welcome to Love Island World... a place where everyone is beautiful, tanned, toned and ripped. Where eyes are blue, teeth are white. Everyone is perfect (physically, at least).

It might make a bit of fun TV (if you’re into that sort of thing) but what if it was to become reality? Then entertainment quickly becomes the stuff of nightmares.

And yet this week it emerged that is the way we are heading.

A report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concluded there is nothing morally wrong with choosing the characteristics of your child.

When I first read the news I thought it must be focused purely on attempting to make changes in a human embryo which faced such genetic diseases as cystic fibrosis or Down’s syndrome.

So did reporters at a press conference launching the report at Birmingham University.

They asked the study’s author Professor Karen Yeung if the scheme would rule out designing such traits as being tall or having blonde hair or blue eyes. “No, we don’t rule that out,” she replied. No. And with that one word we move into a Brave New World of horror. Because it

Could fake humans be the norm?

means at some point in the future – if this report became law – parents could have gene therapy to ensure their baby fulfilled their personal criteria of perfection.

The Nuffield Council say any gene editing must be in the best interests of the child and only permissible if it did not increase disadvantage, discrimination or division in society.

But who knows how this can be interpreted in a future society? Who knows how the goal posts of “disadvantage” will change as the fake Love Island version of being a human becomes the norm?

Already there are too many young people who won’t permit an image of themselves to be seen without it going through a smartphone picture filter to brush away the bits of themselves they deem imperfect. Cosmetic surgery clinics are reporting a surge in enquiries from people wanting to go under the knife to be sculpted into the “filtered version” of themselves.

And now parents could create a ‘filtered baby’ from birth.

It will leave us with a society in which any deviation from the “perfect” will be deemed even more questionable.

Even more will rest upon how we look, not who we are.

The smiles may be more dazzling but I can guarantee you that Love Island World will be a far, far duller place to live.