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China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)
- agumonkey 9y agoI was just watching Ender's Game ..
- pcnonpc 9y ago"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ...." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoThe flip side is most people smart/rich enough to get out of China, or get their family members out of China, usually do it
- tormeh 9y agoEssentially we would do what others do now in the west: Immigrate to China and do sucky work.
- nsxwolf 9y agoOr it could mean millions of high IQ Chinese people doing menial jobs while suffering feelings of existential dread at a higher rate than their lower IQ peers.
- pcnonpc 9y agoOr they could build billions of robots with thousands of variations to make everyone live like a king. And they will have high enough IQ to maintain and improve them as they wish. Without say IQ of 100 or more maintenance of advanced robots could be problematic.
- HowardMei 9y agoYep, since the booming of Conficius, generations of Chinese has been wasting their IQ and suffering from rationality-reality inconsistence. Increasing IQ without reforming the culture is just a mean to crush opponents in Chinese social darwin scheme.
- magic_beans 9y agoI'm very interested by this. What is it about Chinese culture that is oppressive to people with high IQs?
- HowardMei 9y agoTurn any rational debate into a moral debate [good people vs. bad people] and appeal to authority/majority [to get the good people tag].
- jpttsn 9y agoThat math seems off. The gain should average 2.5-7.5 points surely?
- pcnonpc 9y agoSource? or calculation? The guy giving the figure is an evolutionary psychologist.
- jpttsn 9y agoIf the difference between "best case" and "worst case" ranges from 5--15, then that's the average best-worst difference. So the range is (x-2.5, x+2.5) to (x-7.5, x+7.5). Given it's a "lottery," the average person would expect x and could improve to x+2.5--x+7.5. But I'm certainly not a psychologist.
- yorwba 9y agoCalculation: Kids differ by 5 to 15 IQ points on average. Assuming a symmetric distribution, that means that the smartest kid would be 2.5 to 7.5 IQ points smarter than the average kid, while the dumbest would be the same amount dumber than the average. Actually, I'm not sure whether "5 to 15" isn't meant to describe the standard deviation, in which case screening lots of embryos might even produce much higher gains.
- thinkcontext 9y ago" ... every Chinese family ..." This is overstated. Plain IVF today in the US costs tens of thousands of dollars. As a result in 2014 it was around 1.5% of births. Some insurance will cover IVF but is more expensive and there are generally caps. Its only accessible to the relatively well off and that's unlikely to change in the short and medium term. So even if development of embryo selection technology proceeds rapidly it would only be available to the super rich for quite some time.
- fvdessen 9y agoIf the expected benefits of the eugenic selection over the lifetime of the child are more than the cost of the medical procedure then we could expect bank/insurance/state to finance the operation.
- thinkcontext 9y agoInteresting idea. But it seems difficult in practice, mainly because it would be more than 20 years before there's any chance that the child could start paying the loan back. There are other issues, like, would it be fair to saddle an unborn child with debt who had no opportunity to choose?
- smaili 9y agoHere's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. It's also interesting to note this was authored in 2013. I would be curious to know the kinds of things discovered in the ~4 year span.
- pcnonpc 9y agoFrom the piece, it shouldn't take very long to put it to use. "When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale? Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are."
- HiroshiSan 9y agois a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?
- BurningFrog 9y agoNo, but there is a strong correlation.
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- foobaw 9y agoNot necessarily but I would argue that the chance of success is higher for a person with higher IQ.
- jaredhansen 9y ago
- CyberDildonics 9y agoThis article is a train wreck of nonsense, misunderstanding and predictions of the future. It is just talking about research of finding correlation in genomes and intelligence. Also Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, followed closely by china.
- jack9 9y ago> Also Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, followed closely by china. What's the point of that? 2017 is not 2013.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoWas it different then and now?
- pcnonpc 9y agoThe East Asian culture strongly values intelligence and education. The parents there WILL act on embryo selection and genetic engineering when it is available and safe.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoThe point is that the article is taking bits of research into simple correlation and extrapolating that into embryo selection, guesses about IQ points being raised and all sorts of other things. It shouldn't be taken seriously in any way. > The parents there WILL act on embryo selection and genetic engineering when it is available and safe. It seems a bit of a reach to be so adamantly sure of what other people will do in an already predicted future.
- LARGEGALAXY 9y agoI am envious and sad as to how this future will look. China is practicing eugenics to raise the IQ of it's citizens and secure its spot as Earths dominant power; meanwhile, Western nations are practicing the exact opposite by importing migrants under a doctrine of "diversity is strength". Scientifically speaking, we are paying the price: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001221 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615... According to this study, the average IQ of France has been falling 4 points per decade. The main attributions: Intellectual citizens having fewer children, and replacement migration. There is nothing more I can say. No more words are needed. This is all I can leave you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoHCpa4rG7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoHCpa4rG7I Heavy price paid, indeed.
- dang 9y agoWe've banned this account for ideological trolling. Accounts that use HN primarily for political or ideological (not to mention national) battle are abusing the site. We ban these, because this kind of thing will quickly engulf the community in flames if we don't. So would you please stop creating accounts to do this with? There are other places on the internet that may be a better fit.
- foobaw 9y agoHere's a newer article on the results: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/health/chinese-scientists-edit-genes-of-human-embryos-raising-concerns.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/health/chinese-scientists... The conclusion: technology is not ready for editing genes of human embryos yet.
- pcnonpc 9y agoThe interview was mainly about embryo selection, not genetic engineering.
- HiroshiSan 9y agoWhat hope do us simpletons have with this technology? Will we be able to edit our DNA to raise our IQ? Learn more efficiently? Better Memory? Etc...
- gwern 9y agoThat paper was obsolete when it was done, even more obsolete when it was published, and totally obsolete now when even on the front page of HN, right now (presumably prompting this submission), there is an article about US researchers successfully editing human embryos with few or no off-targets.
- pavlov 9y agoI guess the movie "Gattaca" just got the location wrong.
- superlopuh 9y agoI'm relatively sure the Soviets had a go and got nowhere. I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far.
- jandrese 9y agoGenetics has come a long way since the Soviet era. We are arguably at the cusp of a golden era of genetic engineering, assuming governments don't move quickly to ban the practice wholesale.
- suprfnk 9y ago> I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far. Why?
- placeybordeaux 9y agothe Soviets were hampered in many ways. One of them was a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- peoplewindow 9y agoAnd a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligence. The USSR was run primarily by highly educated engineers. China has the same issue. Yet somehow the preference of large communist dictatorships for credentialed leaders does not correlate with actual success. One problem is that 'intelligence' is a very tricky thing to define and isn't at all the same as IQ or academic achievement. The world is full of foolish academics. The first thing the nascent Soviet Union tried was putting a committee of academics in charge of setting every price in the USSR, over 21 million of them. The futility of this task was not apparent to any of the ideologically-soaked intellectuals that ran things until the economy collapsed, although I suspect many ordinary kulaks could spot the problem right away.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoThe reliance of measuring intelligence in only a handful of highly specific ways is a failing that is found across humanity.
- kingkawn 9y agoThat anyone believes that this effort at extrapolation will produce anything but monstrosity is unbelievable
- joshmarlow 9y agoCare to elaborate?
- stillhere 9y ago>They seem mostly interested in people of Chinese and European descent. Copy our rolexes, copy our genomes, copy everything?
- andreyf 9y agoI wonder how they define intelligence. I suspect the cognitive traits that will serve an economy best in 30-40 years, when these babies reach the top of their economic productivity, are not what one might expect today.
- Symmetry 9y agoNot perfectly but being talented in one area tends to correlate with being talented in another area.
- riskable 9y agoConsidering that AI will likely take away most regular jobs that leaves... Entertainment. Will super smart brainiacs really have an edge in entertainment in 30 years?
- themeiguoren 9y agoSo I was one of the volunteers for this study - they accepted people based on a threshold of an official IQ test, or SAT/ACT scores. I forget if it was 99th percentile or higher. I heard about it on LessWrong way back while they were soliciting volunteers, and signed up as a way to get a free genotyping since my SAT was high enough. I lost the email thread, but I didn't get my genome data back for about 2 years (April 2015). The researcher I was talking to seemed frustrated at some pretty large delays in the project.
- santoriv 9y agoThis article interviews Geoffrey Miller. He wrote an article around the same time here: https://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 https://www.edge.org/responses/q2013 Here is a response to that article: https://eastasiastudent.net/china/edge-org-chinese-eugenics-rubbish/ https://eastasiastudent.net/china/edge-org-chinese-eugenics-... TLDR; The view promoted by this article is probably only supported by a single person(Geoffrey Miller) and is highly speculative.
- moises_silva 9y agoI know this enters the realm of character assassination, but, after reading the article I also was curious who Geoffrey Miller is. Found a wikipedia article which contains one of his twitter posts: "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth." [0] I know that doesn't invalidate his arguments and you can't judge a whole person by something they posted on twitter, but man, I'm disappointed this is the kind of person whose genes are considered so valuable to replicate. In our efforts to optimize for intelligence we may leave so many other good traits behind. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/how-twitter-schooled-nyu-professor-about-fat-shaming/313728/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/how-twi...
- justinzollars 9y agoTotally 100% unrelated but on the line "China continues to buy up American debt", the United States could just as easily buy up Chinese debt. For some reason it just doesn't do this.
- droidist2 9y agoTrue. It's not considered as safe of an investment. A lot of times you can't even trust the numbers China publishes about their economy.
- dekhn 9y agoAre they still carrying this out? I thought it stopped when the head of BGI bailed.
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- vbuwivbiu 9y agoGiven the way genes work, which is that they operate in networks and rarely code for a single trait, what other phenotypes would be affected by selecting for such genes ?
- magic_beans 9y agoI would expect attractiveness to take a dive.
- erokar 9y agoChina, with its totalitarian capitalism, scares the shit out of me. I truly believe this country poses the single biggest threat to human kind today.
- abledon 9y agoWatch 'advchina' on YouTube, it will calm you down and you'll see they are just human too haha
- magic_beans 9y agoHow is the U.S. any better? (Assuming you're American, correct me if I'm wrong)
- digitalshankar 9y agoIQ is bullshit.
- mcappleton 9y agoPeople are afraid of "super intelligent" AI that can make itself smarter taking over the world. Well they didn't count on people becoming "superintelligent", making themselves smarter :) Not sure how well these Chinese experiments will work out though. For some reason I doubt it will have the amazing effects they intended, at least in the near term.
- lostgame 9y ago>> 'I don’t think they have any imperial ambitions to spread China’s borders—they’re not going to act like Nazi Germany or America in the 20th century' Oh, wow, that's quite a serious yet subtly thrown-in burn...
- xster 9y agoI'm exaggerating a bit but basically: - Primary source of the article says "It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes" - Vice's marketing department: "Gina is engineering babies!!!@$@#%1111"
- circlefavshape 9y agoDear HN - the world would not be a better place if everyone was more like you. It probably wouldn't even be better for you