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Anyone paying attention to cognitive genomics knows wide-spread germ-line engineering is inevitable. The gains are just too great. Once we know the causal varia
by ZhuanXia 7y ago
Anyone paying attention to cognitive genomics knows wide-spread germ-line engineering is inevitable. The gains are just too great. Once we know the causal variants, raising IQ by 5+ standard deviations will be very feasible. In the short term (next 5-10 years) half a standard deviation is possible with single-trait embryo selection.
And iterated embryo selection (which does not require knowing the causal variants, just the predictive ones) will also be possible, and offers 5+ SDs.
Gwern has a great write about about it here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
With this in mind, does anyone really think China and Singapore will not embrace this? And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them.
- Max_aaa 7y agoAll it takes is for one group to start. Then the rest would either have to follow or be overtaken.
- zapita 7y agoActually all it takes is for one group to make the assumption you just made.
- reallydude 7y agoTakes less than that. My baby can be better (healthier, safer, smarter, whatever) is sufficient.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Dirlewanger 7y agoIt's already started. The China of the last 20 years has repeatedly demonstrated they don't give a shit about the morality/future ramifications of any of their actions regarding science's unexplored territories.
- quotemstr 7y ago> morality/future ramifications of any of their actions regarding science's unexplored territories Have you considered the possibility that it's a good thing that China's isn't letting subjective feeling about morality stand in the way of progress? It's easy to get stuck in a rut where we fear new technology, pre-emptively declare it unethical, and never experience the benefits. IMHO, the west has gone way too far over the past few decades in the direction of risk aversion and the "precautionary principle", and China's boldness is a much-needed corrective.
- devoply 7y agoHave you considered that such a rut could at one point even now be progress. Where we are happy with the level of tech we have and for 1,000 or 10,000 years things stabilize on this planet?
- quotemstr 7y agoblink Are you really trying to define stagnation as progress? Is war peace too?
- devoply 7y agoIf technology is war, then "stagnation" is peace. And technology, at least the way that Capitalist society does technology, is war more or less on the status quo. You could do technology other ways where this would not be the case, but then that would force you to think differently then the way you are thinking now where war is good. I am not arguing here that Capitalism does not work, it works very well... I am not arguing banning technology either. All that I am arguing is that there are other paradigms outside of those where technology is progress and progress is good. This paradigm is a very convincing paradigm because of how well it works in Capitalist society and how it generates wealth and helps accumulate power.
- quotemstr 7y ago
- ZhuanXia 7y agoExactly, it is overdetermined. In the west we have Lysenkoists on the left (who refuse to acknowledge that intelligence is even heritable) and on the right we have people who believe embryos have souls. Asia has none of these problems, and will thus force us to get over our scruples.
- ladberg 7y agoWhere are you getting 5+ standard deviations from? That's an insane number. Assuming a normal distribution, around ~2000 people in the world would fit that description today, and finding those 2000 and analyzing their genes to find what's different would be a nearly impossible task.
- ZhuanXia 7y agoIt does not work like you would intuitively think, where smart people have special unique alleles that make them so smart, instead they have a higher proportion of common alleles that have a slight positive effect on IQ and a lower proportion of common alleles that have a slight negative effect on IQ.
- RobertoG 7y ago>"And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them. " It seems to me that if that happen the big division (us and them) will not be along national lines, but generational. So, we would be like children, compared to our children, anyway. Maybe I'm growing old, but sometimes I already feel like that.
- brighter2morrow 7y agoIf we can edit cognitive things like IQ then will we be able to modify other cognitive things like sexuality and gender identity?
- devoply 7y agoHere we go again... You would think we learned the first time with the Nazis... but nope... The seduction of the ubermensch is too strong. I would like to point out that there is no higher, just fit for purpose. If you give these technologies to businesses and to governments they will use it instrumentally to create stronger soldiers that can take more abuse or build better workers that don't feel any negative emotions and can work longer hours. In the current environment this is stupid. Just look at what we have done to dogs, you want to see human equivalent to pugs or chiwawas.... or rottweilers?... or hell chickens.
- DuskStar 7y agoIf I had the option... Yes of course all of my kids would be brilliant, hard working, resistant to depression, physically fit, physically attractive, cancer resistant and anything else that might give them an edge. I don't consider that to be "creating ubermensch" any more than picking the person I have kids with is.
- devoply 7y agoThen find yourself a partner and go on your merry way. Humans are not capable of creating such a thing, they will create something like it but it will not be what you desire. Bad examples could be any of the following: > brilliant and hard working Introverted thinker. Works long hours, does not challenge authority. Chinese work pretty hard for next to no pay, why can't you be more like them? > resistant to depression Lobotomized individuals are pretty resistant to depression as well. > physically fit Sure looks like a body builder, and has all sorts of rage issues from the excessive testosterone in her system. > physically attractive We all look pretty good compared to chimps. > cancer resistant Sure let's engineer humans to better tolerate the pollution in our cities so we can pollute more.
- dekhn 7y agocomplex phenotypes like intelligence are dominated by small effects caused by large numbers of variants. it's not simple "causal variant" like you see in mendelian disease. We also don't know what the long term effects of making changes like this are.
- ZhuanXia 7y agoI know that; I said "causal variants" not "causal variant." It will take hundreds of edits to raise IQ several SDs. I think this will be very feasible in 10 to 20 years.
- dekhn 7y agoI don't think that mental model really works for these sorts of traits. The functions are highly nonlinear and the cross-terms are very dense. And, you still haven't addressed the unintended side effects problem, which would only be well understood after a stastical cohort of people received the treatment, and were compared to a carefully matched control group, studied over decades.
- quotemstr 7y agoIt really doesn't help that much of the public conversation is based on the false premise that intelligence is primarily an environmental phenomenon and that heredity has only a minor influence or none at all. The blank slate model is severely incompatible with how biology actually works, and a civilization holding onto it when competitor civilizations are embracing gene editing technology and intelligence augmentation will guarantee failure.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- buckminster 7y agoIf very high intelligence was an unmitigated good then wouldn't evolution have done this already?
- SkyBelow 7y agoNo. Evolution works on a 'good enough to not die out' basis, except quite a lot of species do die out.
- devoply 7y agoJust look at high intelligence and its correlation with all sorts of other issues including rare diseases, social issues, mental health issues, etc. It's empty idealism to think that the human condition can be solved through genetic engineering, if anything it can be made quite a bit worse.
- tendersej 7y agoWhat if a ream of social and mental issues could stem from people of high intelligence feeling alienated due to their being so different from their « standard intelligence level » fellow humans?
- rocqua 7y agoThat strikes me as wishful thinking by intelligent people who consider the problems they and their surrounds suffer to be unique and blamed on 'the others'.
- antepodius 7y agoAnd it's empty pessimism to think it couldn't be. High IQs might have deleterious side effects, but even ignoring the possibility of those ever being fixed- given the association of IQ with negative side effects, if I offered you a pill that would give you an IQ of 80, would you take it? If we raised the intelligence of everyone future child that would have had an IQ of 80 or below to 100, would that not be an improvement to the human condition? If we eliminated genetic diseases, would that not be an improvement?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scohesc 7y agoI'd say they've already embraced genetically modifying animals and now most likely humans. There's a lot we don't know about in China considering their secrecy and control of information.
- djohnston 7y agoI agree with you on most points, but I do hope the timeline isn't so fast. I was hoping to be dead before this happened.
- danarlow 7y agoThis is not correct reasoning about genetics. I've seen a lot of comments with this same incorrect claim on HN recently. In a complex trait like IQ, there is no reason to believe that stacking all of the alleles that each are individually associated with small gains in IQ will result in a large cumulative effect on IQ, let alone an additive effect. It could easily result in decreased IQ-- there are plenty of examples of negative epistatic interactions between loci. Even if you had all the individuals in the world in your GWAS, you couldn't estimate all of the possible pairwise interactions between loci, let alone fit the higher-order terms. The only way to really measure the effect of a combination of alleles is to find a subpopulation with that combination. That hasn't stopped people from trying to fit polygenic models for IQ based on all of these tiny effects, and unsurprisingly the best model only explains 10% of the heritability of the trait. I don't think that model has been carefully validated in a new cohort either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the true predictive power was lower.
- hodder 7y agoYour claims are completely unverifiable speculation and are frankly absurd. I would bet every dollar I have against there being a simple method to increase IQ by 0.5 SDs within 5-10 yrs. I’m sorry but your prediction of 5SD increase is frankly science fiction novel territory. It is not science. Gene editing will be pursued around the globe, and countries that fail to embrace it may be left behind in health and wellness. However, let’s not radically rush to science fiction level conclusions (stated as fact) of megahumans without any evidence that it may be possible. [Edited for an incorrect use of hyperbole around the math of 5x standard devs. I removed it from the post as I am acknowledging that using excess hyperbole in a post specifically directed at criticism of wild predictions is beyond ironic and unfair to the OP above.]
- ZhuanXia 7y agoI did not say 1000 times smarter. I said 5+ standard deviations. John von Neumann had an IQ 5+ SD above the mean. We know this phenotype is possible. It is not science fictional to think we can raise the average to at least his point. In animal breeding we increase traits by much more than 5 standard deviations all the time. Iterated embryo selection and/or direct genetic engineering will be able to do this. It breaks no physical laws, it is in concert with what we have already observed and our understanding of cognitive genomics is getting to the point that it is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention that we will be able to select/edit for intelligence comparable to John von Neumann. Look at the "Known for" section of his Wikipedia page to see what such people will be capable of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann "That sounds vaguely like a science fiction story" is a very poor heuristic for determining if something is possible.
- hodder 7y agoI am very familiar with von Neuman. I understand the potential of what intelligent individuals can figure out and accomplish. Von Neuman was a truly incredible individual. My criticism is specifically directed at your timelines and foregone conclusions that intelligence is as easy to increase via artificial embryo selection as more observable traits such as size by observing alleles. I stand by my statement that I would bet every penny I have against your proposed 5-10 yr timeline of simple half st.dev increases in IQ.