4 ms·

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc. And if those effects are bypassed with artificial conception, we might end up with humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc. The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness - or perhaps a lack of gain of fitness that would have otherwise occurred.

warent 3mo ago
You’re layering several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though
- Davidzheng 3mo ago
  But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.
  - londons_explore 3mo ago
    There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society. Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
    - close04 3mo ago
      If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective. Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
    - HPsquared 3mo ago
      That's happening now, more or less, across the entire developed world. Not sure about the "successful" part though.
    - vintermann 3mo ago
      Well, something could be successful, in the biological survival sense anyway. Not sure it'd be right to call it human at that point.
  - tskj 3mo ago
    This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases. Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
- tskj 3mo ago
  I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong. It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway". I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
  - xi_studio 3mo ago
    "I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode." We actually have and is called RISK. RISK = Probability * Damage. Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents. Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
    - tskj 3mo ago
      Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario. We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically. Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
- zigzag312 3mo ago
  But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.
noosphr 3mo ago
>I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. You'd have a rather different opinion if you had to squeeze out a water melon out of your genitals.
- FromTheSteppe 3mo ago
  Nobody HAS to do that. If people WANT to have children they should give them the best chances they can. If science proves IVF is the best, every parent must do it, if it's risk freedom has not been proved yet, no person that has other options available should do it. Chances are they would be ruining their children's life by expecting and comparing them to the best, so they can at least not give them handicap from birth. The world is now much more competetive and unfair to our children than it was in our time. My mother has told me countless times that childbirth is one of easier parts of motherhood.
  - noosphr 3mo ago
    Taking advice for raising children from the childless is like asking virgins for advice on sex.
  - endymi0n 3mo ago
    Now that's a very high ratio of personal beliefs to character ratio. I'd be delighted to see some evidence behind your opinions.
- latexr 3mo ago
  What? IVF doesn’t mean that the human is gestated in a glass tube like some 80s sci-fi, the pregnancy and birth still have to occur, carried out by a human.
  - noosphr 3mo ago
    > What? IVF >>, etc.
- piker 3mo ago
  What?
weregiraffe 3mo ago
>The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception How do you know it? Sci-fi tropes are not a good argument.
Arodex 3mo ago
>The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Anti-intellectuallism is everywhere, especially amongst the intellectuals. The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
  - mschuster91 3mo ago
    > The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written. Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly: > Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history. Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798
  - someonebaggy 3mo ago
    AI writing is anti-intellectual. It demands the time of thousands of people to read when they could be reading something with actual meaning. You're demanding scholars to read comic books all day in case they have content worth engaging with (spoiler: they don't).
- 3mo ago
dsign 3mo ago
> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.
saturn8601 3mo ago
Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?
- pelagicAustral 3mo ago
  I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...
  - Qem 3mo ago
    Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy
    - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
      Great share! Thanks.
DanielHB 3mo ago
25% of humans died before reaching 5 in 1800s US, today it is <1%. Its been at least 5 generations since this value dropped dramatically. We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
- wossab 3mo ago
  How would you know?
  - krageon 3mo ago
    When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.
    - b112 3mo ago
      This feels hand wavy. I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures. Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal? Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.
      - grumbelbart2 3mo ago
        Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust. Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.
qsera 3mo ago
> humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc. But can they pay and vote? If yes, that is good enough for the people calling the shots.
killerstorm 3mo ago
> A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies. > meaningful loss of fitness What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already? 150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter... Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?
- plasticeagle 3mo ago
  It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive." Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent. It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.
  - killerstorm 3mo ago
    Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different. So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria. > It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can literally SEE how a change of fitness function affects the phenotype. > You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. There are many studies which describe genetic changes within latest 10,000 years or less. E.g. paper "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe": "We identified 25 genetic loci with rapid changes 21 in frequency during these periods". You can find many similar papers if you do a search One of studies identified changes in loci associated with Y. pestis immunity during the Black Death (i.e. something like a century). Black Death mortality is similar in scale to early childhood mortality 150 years ago.
XorNot 3mo ago
That's a lot of words to act like a total tool towards people born from IVF and their parents.
inglor_cz 3mo ago
There is nothing such as riskless technology, but you can't escape some risk anyway. Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös. Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years. For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.
f6v 3mo ago
Several of your claims are unsubstantiated. Sure, species co-evolve together, environment shapes evolution. But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing? Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.
comp_bio 3mo ago
I think it’s important to remember that the process of selection acts directly on human traits. For example being exposed to high summer heat temperatures may eliminate some people who have unproductive sweat glands, or needing to run down your food may eliminate people who have a muscles that easily tire. Selection (largely) does not act on far removed traits like egg cell characteristics as a proxy of human traits like muscle performance because the genes that are used by egg cells are quite different than those used by muscle cells. So if you worry about some kind of human trait decline you should be much more worried that people have access to air conditioning and grocery stores.
trebligdivad 3mo ago
As I understand it, that they've gone back to the point of making the ovary and the egg itself is going through Meiosis helps here, because it's got the randomness of picking genes between the pair of chromosomes in the source. So it's not just a clone; it's a little more natural than if they tried to produce the egg directly.
conartist6 3mo ago
https://www.smbc-wiki.com/index.php/Royalty https://www.smbc-wiki.com/index.php/Royalty
ACCount37 3mo ago
I'm far more worried about the long term impact of letting evolution exert its pressure on humankind unchecked.
Ylano 3mo ago
Natural reproduction already has a lot of randomness and failure built into it. It's not like egg/sperm selection is a perfect quality-control system. IVF has also been around for decades, and while it definitely needs monitoring, we haven't seen some obvious collapse in health from it
tedggh 3mo ago
Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?
fallingfrog 3mo ago
I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?
bluegreen10294 3mo ago
By contrast, we could also end up with humans that are stronger, smarter, or are better adapted to a changing environment. In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm. The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?
- taskforcegemini 3mo ago
  no natural selection as a filter though

warent 3mo ago

You’re layering several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though

Davidzheng 3mo ago
But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.
- londons_explore 3mo ago
  There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society. Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
  - close04 3mo ago
    If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective. Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
  - HPsquared 3mo ago
    That's happening now, more or less, across the entire developed world. Not sure about the "successful" part though.
  - vintermann 3mo ago
    Well, something could be successful, in the biological survival sense anyway. Not sure it'd be right to call it human at that point.
- tskj 3mo ago
  This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases. Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
tskj 3mo ago
I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong. It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway". I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
- xi_studio 3mo ago
  "I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode." We actually have and is called RISK. RISK = Probability * Damage. Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents. Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
  - tskj 3mo ago
    Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario. We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically. Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
zigzag312 3mo ago
But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.

noosphr 3mo ago

>I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. You'd have a rather different opinion if you had to squeeze out a water melon out of your genitals.

FromTheSteppe 3mo ago
Nobody HAS to do that. If people WANT to have children they should give them the best chances they can. If science proves IVF is the best, every parent must do it, if it's risk freedom has not been proved yet, no person that has other options available should do it. Chances are they would be ruining their children's life by expecting and comparing them to the best, so they can at least not give them handicap from birth. The world is now much more competetive and unfair to our children than it was in our time. My mother has told me countless times that childbirth is one of easier parts of motherhood.
- noosphr 3mo ago
  Taking advice for raising children from the childless is like asking virgins for advice on sex.
- endymi0n 3mo ago
  Now that's a very high ratio of personal beliefs to character ratio. I'd be delighted to see some evidence behind your opinions.
latexr 3mo ago
What? IVF doesn’t mean that the human is gestated in a glass tube like some 80s sci-fi, the pregnancy and birth still have to occur, carried out by a human.
- noosphr 3mo ago
  > What? IVF >>, etc.
piker 3mo ago
What?

weregiraffe 3mo ago

>The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception How do you know it? Sci-fi tropes are not a good argument.

Arodex 3mo ago

>The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...

fragmede 3mo ago
Anti-intellectuallism is everywhere, especially amongst the intellectuals. The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
- mschuster91 3mo ago
  > The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written. Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly: > Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history. Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798
- someonebaggy 3mo ago
  AI writing is anti-intellectual. It demands the time of thousands of people to read when they could be reading something with actual meaning. You're demanding scholars to read comic books all day in case they have content worth engaging with (spoiler: they don't).
3mo ago

dsign 3mo ago

> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.

saturn8601 3mo ago

Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?

pelagicAustral 3mo ago
I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...
- Qem 3mo ago
  Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy
  - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
    Great share! Thanks.

DanielHB 3mo ago

25% of humans died before reaching 5 in 1800s US, today it is <1%. Its been at least 5 generations since this value dropped dramatically. We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."

wossab 3mo ago
How would you know?
- krageon 3mo ago
  When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.
  - b112 3mo ago
    This feels hand wavy. I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures. Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal? Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.
    - grumbelbart2 3mo ago
      Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust. Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.

qsera 3mo ago

> humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc. But can they pay and vote? If yes, that is good enough for the people calling the shots.

killerstorm 3mo ago

> A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies. > meaningful loss of fitness What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already? 150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter... Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?

plasticeagle 3mo ago
It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive." Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent. It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.
- killerstorm 3mo ago
  Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different. So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria. > It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can literally SEE how a change of fitness function affects the phenotype. > You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. There are many studies which describe genetic changes within latest 10,000 years or less. E.g. paper "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe": "We identified 25 genetic loci with rapid changes 21 in frequency during these periods". You can find many similar papers if you do a search One of studies identified changes in loci associated with Y. pestis immunity during the Black Death (i.e. something like a century). Black Death mortality is similar in scale to early childhood mortality 150 years ago.

XorNot 3mo ago

That's a lot of words to act like a total tool towards people born from IVF and their parents.

inglor_cz 3mo ago

There is nothing such as riskless technology, but you can't escape some risk anyway. Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös. Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years. For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.

f6v 3mo ago

Several of your claims are unsubstantiated. Sure, species co-evolve together, environment shapes evolution. But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing? Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.

comp_bio 3mo ago

I think it’s important to remember that the process of selection acts directly on human traits. For example being exposed to high summer heat temperatures may eliminate some people who have unproductive sweat glands, or needing to run down your food may eliminate people who have a muscles that easily tire. Selection (largely) does not act on far removed traits like egg cell characteristics as a proxy of human traits like muscle performance because the genes that are used by egg cells are quite different than those used by muscle cells. So if you worry about some kind of human trait decline you should be much more worried that people have access to air conditioning and grocery stores.

trebligdivad 3mo ago

As I understand it, that they've gone back to the point of making the ovary and the egg itself is going through Meiosis helps here, because it's got the randomness of picking genes between the pair of chromosomes in the source. So it's not just a clone; it's a little more natural than if they tried to produce the egg directly.

conartist6 3mo ago

https://www.smbc-wiki.com/index.php/Royalty https://www.smbc-wiki.com/index.php/Royalty

ACCount37 3mo ago

I'm far more worried about the long term impact of letting evolution exert its pressure on humankind unchecked.

Ylano 3mo ago

Natural reproduction already has a lot of randomness and failure built into it. It's not like egg/sperm selection is a perfect quality-control system. IVF has also been around for decades, and while it definitely needs monitoring, we haven't seen some obvious collapse in health from it

tedggh 3mo ago

Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?

fallingfrog 3mo ago

I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?

bluegreen10294 3mo ago

By contrast, we could also end up with humans that are stronger, smarter, or are better adapted to a changing environment. In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm. The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?

taskforcegemini 3mo ago
no natural selection as a filter though