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I'm not sure there's really going to be any improvement at all in their descendants, because I really doubt the company is that aggressive. How many embryos di

by Vecr 2y ago

I'm not sure there's really going to be any improvement at all in their descendants, because I really doubt the company is that aggressive. How many embryos did they go through? Much of the genome doesn't run on Punnett squares, and even in the parts that do, recessive genes can actually do things.

renewiltord 2y ago
If you’re young you can produce 20+ eggs per run. Post fertilization, you can have 15+ if lucky. Their model then places them on a curve based on parental genomes. That is, given these parents are these the children most likely to be high IQ or not. The usefulness of that is up to you. The model is black box and you may never know, it’s true.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice. A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people. Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs". Yeah, if everything undesirable was ruled by a limited number of "garbage" recessives that never did anything on their own, and you could more or less track traits with Punnett squares (or even fuzzier multi-gene threshold charts) then maybe it would work, but it doesn't. Assortive mating of high intelligence people and/or continual, quite large scale sterilization of people with GWAS-rated "bad" genes would work, but it's not what a single-generation-only use of this company does.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    I don’t think the intention is to hurt other people - forced sterilization or any of these things. The intention is probably what parents like me feel: we want to give our kids the best shot at life. And I hope that my children will want to give their kids the best shot at life and having tools like this allows such people the freedom to do so at each generation. I think lots of people will choose this once cost is driven to the floor. I think the advent of these tools will allow us to master random chance. We need not have women go through 9 months of pregnancy with an unviable foetus or bring to term children who will have terrible congenital conditions that they will have to live with. Perhaps with the advent of artificial wombs, gametogenesis, and advanced whole-genome sequencing of embryos we could even master time, and reverse our present decline in fertility rates. But that's sci-fi. What we have today is already amazing, and I hope the good it has done my wife and me is available to all as costs drop and the technology becomes universal. EDIT: Just to clarify since I don't want to get stuck in a back and forth: When I said I'm excited for humanity I did not mean to "clean up the gene pool" or "fix the gene pool" or anything like that that the child comment is referring to. I just meant that people like me could choose for our children that they be born without a random set of conditions. Others, including my children (should they choose otherwise from me), are free to do as they wish, though I would hope that they would choose like I do.
    - Vecr 2y ago
      Well, yes, but the old "clean up the gene pool" propaganda wasn't ever going to work, and it's not going to work on a practical level now. Gene pool stays almost as bad as it always was, and each generation has to put in active effort (with selection systems like this, and assortive mating) to manage the actually expressed genes of the next generation. Fixing the gene pool in any reasonable amount of time would require gene editing and genome designing tech that I wouldn't even know how to start researching.

by Vecr 2y ago

renewiltord 2y ago

If you’re young you can produce 20+ eggs per run. Post fertilization, you can have 15+ if lucky. Their model then places them on a curve based on parental genomes. That is, given these parents are these the children most likely to be high IQ or not. The usefulness of that is up to you. The model is black box and you may never know, it’s true.

Vecr 2y ago
Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice. A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people. Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs". Yeah, if everything undesirable was ruled by a limited number of "garbage" recessives that never did anything on their own, and you could more or less track traits with Punnett squares (or even fuzzier multi-gene threshold charts) then maybe it would work, but it doesn't. Assortive mating of high intelligence people and/or continual, quite large scale sterilization of people with GWAS-rated "bad" genes would work, but it's not what a single-generation-only use of this company does.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  I don’t think the intention is to hurt other people - forced sterilization or any of these things. The intention is probably what parents like me feel: we want to give our kids the best shot at life. And I hope that my children will want to give their kids the best shot at life and having tools like this allows such people the freedom to do so at each generation. I think lots of people will choose this once cost is driven to the floor. I think the advent of these tools will allow us to master random chance. We need not have women go through 9 months of pregnancy with an unviable foetus or bring to term children who will have terrible congenital conditions that they will have to live with. Perhaps with the advent of artificial wombs, gametogenesis, and advanced whole-genome sequencing of embryos we could even master time, and reverse our present decline in fertility rates. But that's sci-fi. What we have today is already amazing, and I hope the good it has done my wife and me is available to all as costs drop and the technology becomes universal. EDIT: Just to clarify since I don't want to get stuck in a back and forth: When I said I'm excited for humanity I did not mean to "clean up the gene pool" or "fix the gene pool" or anything like that that the child comment is referring to. I just meant that people like me could choose for our children that they be born without a random set of conditions. Others, including my children (should they choose otherwise from me), are free to do as they wish, though I would hope that they would choose like I do.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Well, yes, but the old "clean up the gene pool" propaganda wasn't ever going to work, and it's not going to work on a practical level now. Gene pool stays almost as bad as it always was, and each generation has to put in active effort (with selection systems like this, and assortive mating) to manage the actually expressed genes of the next generation. Fixing the gene pool in any reasonable amount of time would require gene editing and genome designing tech that I wouldn't even know how to start researching.