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> The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity. Not for lifespan. What the author

> The author is saying that this would work as expected, with offspring gaining around 50% of their parents' extra longevity. Not for lifespan. What the author didn't mention is that this equation works for traits affected by a large number of genetic variants, each with small, roughly additive effects. Most heritable traits are like this, and if you plot the probability distribution for one, it looks like a normal distribution. Lifespan, on the other hand, is not at all normally distributed and you shouldn't expect it to work the same way as things like height. (Regarding your proposal, another idea that would probably be more cost-effective is to find people who are already extremely smart and clone them. More details: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/ https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the...)

robocat 5y ago
To add to your point, here is a distribution of heights: https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-distributions/ https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/visualizing-power-law-dis... and here is a distribution of ages: https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expectancy-inequality https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/life-expect...
gwern 5y ago
Life span can be easily translated into standardized units more convenient to talk about which the breeder's equation would apply to, the same way binary or categorical or polytomous traits can often be treated as a normal latent with thresholds. And people calculate heritability of lifespan all the time. (It's low, but that's not because lifespan happens to be Gompertz-distributed.)