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As a biologist, the Biology and genetics section was really disappointing. > What’s the minimum viable human population? Depends on your technology. If you ha
by koeng 6y ago
As a biologist, the Biology and genetics section was really disappointing.
> What’s the minimum viable human population?
Depends on your technology. If you have frozen sperm and an effective means of genetic engineering (to fix mutations), the answer is 1.
How about the long term implications of being able to fundamentally engineer life?
- hyperbovine 6y agoAgreed. The questions specific to my field do not seem interesting to me at all as a researcher. They are either way too vague and ill-defined to qualify as serious research, or way too niche to have a "big social impact". Also, IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it surprises me that unravelling the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes is not represented on this list in any way, shape or form.
- trenchgun 6y agoMake a pull request.
- ABCLAW 6y agoI agree entirely. Most of them sound like "how to I justify my AI driven technocracy by pointing to studies of lemurs"
- leetcrew 6y agoit doesn't really seem like an important question anyway. suppose 150 is a large enough population to allow for humans to reproduce naturally without introducing too many genetic defects. it's a cool fact, but 150 is not nearly enough to have people that specialize in all the skills needed to support modern life. a more interesting question might be how many humans are necessary for some target rate of quality of life improvements (and how does that rate respond to increasing/decreasing the population). this is probably more of a political/economic question though.