“He wanted to elevate the human race by doing this, but he couldn’t find many Nobel laureates who were willing to contribute or who were able to contribute,” Sandel said.

But Pinker said the real problem was that it is prohibitively difficult to engineer smart children.

“A human being is a staggeringly improbable arrangement of matter,” Pinker said. “As the bumper sticker says: ‘stuff happens.’”

Pinker left audience members with the sobering thought that their immediate futures are extremely variable.

“Think about the number of things that could happen to you in the next hour. It’s an extremely depressing list,” Pinker said.

Despite the disagreements, the panelists and audience seemed to agree about the weight of the moral questions involved and the prominence that genetic engineering will claim in society.

“The biggest issue between the U.S. and the rest of the world right now has to do with genetic engineering,” said IOP Director Daniel R. Glickman said. “These are not hypothetical issues. These are issues that are important to legislators.”