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It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and maj
by gwern 9y ago
It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate.
I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI's disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina's, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American & European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more.
In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution.
As far as embryo selection goes, '5-15 points' is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I've tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it's not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection (Which is why I'm more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)
- le-mark 9y agoSounds like you're really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome? Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
- gwern 9y ago(Gattaca is a fictional movie, not a realistic outcome. What anyone thinks about it is irrelevant because it has not, will not, and could not happen, any more than Brave New World.) As far as making use of these techniques, certainly. Transhumanists, socialists, and 'liberal eugenicists' have always advocated 'seizing the means of reproduction', so to speak, but it's mostly been theoretical; modern behavioral genetics has fill in so many of the blanks that concrete discussions and analyses can be done, IVF embryo selection can be done right now, CRISPR can also be done now if you can find anything useful to do with it besides fixing rare genetic diseases, and IES and genome synthesis will be possible within the next 20 years.
- cliffy 9y agoWhy do you say its unrealistic? Eugenics has been seriously considered in the past, and is likely to be seriously considered in the future. If genetic modification and control becomes 'easy' and relatively safe I don't see why those in power wouldn't try to exercise control over that power. In that future its not hard to imagine lawmakers banning having children who would have inherited known genetic 'defects'. Now imagine 'defects' are classified as having dark skin, or whats considered a 100 IQ today.
- gwern 9y agoGattaca is unrealistic because (aside from being intended as mass-market entertainment rather than a scientific extrapolation) it is simultaneously too aggressive and too conservative: it envisions a world in which instant genome sequencing can be done effectively for free on a global scale (which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are developed) while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably <100% for traits of interest like intelligence) and ignoring the overriding phenotypic information, but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable. If the Gattacaverse's scientific understanding and control of genetics were really as perfect as portrayed, none of the events would happen in the first place - it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example. Its poorly conceived world is mostly there as as simplistic grade-school-level allegory about 'how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover' with a genetics gloss. Which is fine as entertainment, but where we're going looks nothing like Gattaca.