3 ms·

I'm relatively sure the Soviets had a go and got nowhere. I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far.

• jandrese 9y ago
  Genetics 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 ago
  the 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 ago
    And 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 ago
      The reliance of measuring intelligence in only a handful of highly specific ways is a failing that is found across humanity.
• adrianN 9y ago
  Breeding humans takes time, especially if you have to wait for at least a decade between producing an embryo and finding out whether it's useful for further breeding and can't meaningfully preselect them. The Soviet Union probably didn't exist long enough.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]