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I thought it was relatively easy to keep zygotes dormant for arbitrary lengths of time, but embryos are more developed and this definitely raises philosophical
by anonytrary 6y ago
I thought it was relatively easy to keep zygotes dormant for arbitrary lengths of time, but embryos are more developed and this definitely raises philosophical questions regarding cryogenics. "How big can we go beyond the embryo, and for how long?"
- m463 6y agoIt might make space travel really interesting.
- anonytrary 6y agoIt might make the "nurture > nature" viewpoint interesting, too. If you create a zygote today and you incubate it 500 years from now, will it behave like someone from today? I would guess: probably not, since humans' physical evolution is vastly dominated by their cultural/technological/societal evolution.
- thotsBgone 6y ago> humans' physical evolution is vastly dominated by their cultural/technological/societal evolution Statements like these only make sense in a narrow context. Unless you're suggesting a dog raised like a human would act more like a human than a dog.
- gibolt 6y agoThe context used within a single species seems like a reasonable application
- Iolaum 6y agoThere have some rare extreme been cases where children lived with wild animals in forests and indeed they resembled their social behaviours. (Don't recall sources to include :( )
- astrange 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child Some of these stories are doubtful and obviously none of them are all that scientific… for one thing why are all the reports from Russia?
- sebmellen 6y agoThe story of Victor of Aveyron has substantial evidence behind it. There are certainly very few feral children, but they do exist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron
- astrange 6y agoThat's believable, but it can't teach us much because it's not an intervention study, which obviously you can't do… > According to Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, Victor was a normal child at birth[citation needed] but was neglected by his alcoholic parents from an early age. Hmm. Did they know about fetal alcohol syndrome then? It's suggested he was autistic, which would've been true at birth.
- sebmellen 6y agoThat's true. Unfortunately real cases are few and far between, so they're hard to study in any sort of methodic way. Plus, as time goes on and society becomes more pervasive, these cases will get progressively rarer. I think FASD is a good guess.
- im3w1l 6y agoWe will evolve a lot more in the coming 500 years than we have in the past 500 years. There might not even be recognizable humans around anymore except for some backwards savages in a reservation.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoHopefully the Falklands will still be around.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neetrain 6y agoThere will be no selection pressure. As long as whether you can survive and make children is independent from your gene, Evolution never occurs.
- est31 6y agoThere is still selection pressure today, not because you are too weak physically to make children, but because of sexual selection. Many people have a hard time finding a partner, often due to genetic issues. On the other hand, many people have genetic traits that help making them highly attractive and able to give their genes to many people. So selection is still around, but nowadays we select for different things than nature used to when medicine wasn't as well developed as it is today. Note that this selection alone won't cause any genetic change faster than what existed in the past. What really accelerates changes in the gene pool is us deliberately doing them. We'll start with eliminating hereditary diseases, but I don't think we'll stop there. We'll likely study which genetic variants give rise to desirable traits and then make those mutations to upcoming children of interested individuals.
- danielheath 6y agoWhat do you think is going to kill enough people to create such an unprecedented selection pressure?
- est31 6y agoBehaviour is influenced both from genetic origins as well as from environmental ones. The latter includes things like "how you were raised" but also which hormones and stimuli you were exposed to during gestation. Newborn babies already cry in different ways depending on the languages they were exposed to during pregnancy.
- anonytrary 6y agoSure, but I doubt how newborn babies cry is heavily correlated with how they turn out at young adults... Medieval man born today could probably learn calculus easily because calculus is a standard now. I don't think intelligence has changed much.
- est31 6y agoThat was only an example to show that environmental influences start very early. Your environment continues to influence you until you die, even if that influence in your final years is of a supportive nature. Many elderly people can live quite well in their homes they lived in since decades but once they come to a nursing home, they often become disoriented. And yes, medieval people were as intelligent as modern people. Many of the smartest minds of humanity haven't lived today but hundreds or thousands of years ago. I'd put all behaviorally modern humans are into the same category.
- sam_bristow 6y agoI also expect that a large part of the average intelligence that has changed would be due to improved nutrition.
- astrange 6y agoIt recently (last few generations) went down and then up again because we thought it'd be a great idea to give the whole world lead poisoning.
- dotancohen 6y ago
- meekrohprocess 6y agoCould be a good sci-fi plot. A sleeper ship full of time-delayed embryos crash-lands on an alien planet, and the people are left to grow and develop a civilization with only a ship's computer to nurture and guide them. Sort of like Lost meets Lord of the Flies.
- mereg0 6y agoThat's very close to the plot of the very recent "Raised by Wolves" series.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paranoidrobot 6y agoThere's at least a few books like that, though I can't name the ones I've read. I'm sure it's 2-3. The TV Show Raised by Wolves is essentially this too.
- el_benhameen 6y agoI haven’t watched it yet, but I believe this is essentially the plot of HBO’s “Raised by Wolves”. E: Of course by the time I typed this, there were several other people already commenting the same thing. We’re all unique snowflakes!
- chrisco255 6y agoThe plot of Horizon: Zero Dawn (video game) has some elements of this.
- rlpb 6y agoThis happens in The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, in so far as it is set in a civilisation that started this way. Except that there was no crash landing - it was an intentional method to colonise other planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization
- 6y ago
- ec109685 6y agoYou still need a host on the other side.
- presentation 6y agoThe first generation of embryos are given birth by the original ship's crew, the second generation by the first generation once they've grown old, and continue indefinitely?
- est31 6y agoIn the very first stage of embryonic development, during cleavage, all cells of the clump are totipotent, meaning that if you took out a single cell, you could create a human from it. The article doesn't say at which stage the embryo implanted was, but likely it was in that early stage.
- julianlam 6y ago27 years ago, we can infer based on trends at the time that it would have been frozen at day 3 (vs day 5 which is more common now depending on the clinic). It may be at the morula stage of embryonic development.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoIf we manage to reproduce from digitally stored DNA, endlessly. Where it gets interesting is what happens when we start manipulating and improving DNA digitally before we implant it. Basically things like Crispr are stepping stones towards getting there. But we could be digitally creating and evaluating combinations of genes and genomes from very large databases of historical archives of individuals. The philosophical and ethical questions around this are largely centered on boys of brazil type scenarios. Most of that stuff is driven by popular fiction rather than reality. Another factor is religion and religious objections against stuff like this happening or even acknowledging that this is possible. But the reality is we already have celebrities ordering clones of their deceased pets. From there to designer babies is not such a huge technical leap. Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc. Now imagine dog breeders going digital and creating new dog breeds digitally before planting an embryo. Not possible today but also not that far off probably. If that bothers you ethically, think designer grains or rice from digitally crafted DNA. GMO foods have been a thing for decades. That stuff going digital would be about as controversial. When that happens it won't stop there. Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges such as the low success rate of implanting embryos, the high error rates of dna modifications, the correspondingly high number of abortions needed because of failures, availability of stem cell material (until recently this required embryos), etc. This is not a problem for chihuahuas but kind of a show stopper when it concerns our own genetic offspring. Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely. We're kind of ethically flexible. There's a good chance that this already is happening and that we simply don't get to learn about it for a while because it is kind of illegal and the people involved are not likely to want to be exposed. But the combination of billionaires, fertility issues, and technical capability makes this more a question of when than if, I would say. Supply and demand are not going to be the issue.
- noodlesUK 6y agoIt’s funny that you say all this. DNA (and many actual living things like plants) last a REALLY LONG time under correct conditions. We haven’t got any kind of digital storage with even remotely that level of information density that would last that long without extreme degradation. DNA can last hundreds of years at non-freezing temperatures and still be read, and for thousands of years frozen.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThere's a pretty hard barrier between embryo and implantation, when it comes to IVF. The cells in the embryos are 3 or 5 days post-fertilization, and they're just working off of nutrients from the egg itself. Replicating the actual implantation process, where the embryo gets nutrients from the uterus itself, we haven't made substantial progress towards AFAIK.
- jobigoud 6y agoI think the reason we are not making large progress is simply because it's forbidden research. There is an international agreement called the 14-day rule preventing researchers from culturing embryos past 14 days.
- krisoft 6y agoIsn’t that rule about human embryos only? Are there similar restrictions on pig or sheep embryos?
- nathias 6y agoThese are not philosophical questions.
- IronRanger 6y agoWe should begin to harvest the eggs and sperm (or zygotes) of the most intelligent and productive people on the planet, and then pay people to bring those children to term and raise them. It would eliminate poverty.
- google234123 6y agoGood lucking a significant number of people to actually brith and raise these children - even for a decent income.
- IronRanger 6y agoFailing the implantation of zygotes, we could just allow a free market for sperm. Why shouldn't women or couples be able to pay $10,000 for the DNA of men like Elon Musk?
- google234123 6y agoThis already exists
- sokoloff 6y agoI also have doubts that people who did this for an income are likely to raise them in a way that results in strongly productive adults, even after accounting for some amount of regression to the mean.
- blackcats 6y agoGenes is less than 50% for intelligence.
- OisinMoran 6y agoThere's a book called The Genius Factory about a failed attempt at this.
- dagw 6y agoGoogle "The Nobel prize sperm bank". Someone had already tried.