Am I the only one who faces a weird sort of existential lump in the pit of my stomach when I think about how, in the world "we're" creating, I never would have made the cut?
I mean, if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday. I can't dissociate my adult self from my embryo self enough to ignore that.
And who knows? Maybe I would have made the cut. Maybe I'm as good as my parents could do. But I can't shake my unease about treating rejected embryos like there aren't adults implicit in them that we're never letting see the light of day.
BugsJustFindMe · 17h ago
> if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday
You wouldn't have existed in any meaningful definition of "you" if your embryo had been destroyed, so you wouldn't be dead. Being dead and being not here are not the same thing. I've never had children. That doesn't mean my children are dead.
smeej · 14h ago
There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now. When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" that could suddenly be killed?
BugsJustFindMe · 14h ago
Look, up front, I get what you're saying. But people actually make decisions like this about procreation all the time. We do genetic testing of parents to make sure they don't pass on devastation to their kids. People who want kids get sterilized to intentionally halt their genetic lines all the time. People choose their sexual partners by selection criteria. This is different only by degrees.
> When did something so significant happen that I became an "I"
Consciousness. The "think" part of "I think therefore I am". The part that makes humans human at all. Life experience. Presumably many years of it. You aren't even the same person you were yesterday let alone the cluster of cells that never experienced consciousness.
> I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now
Stopping there is arbitrary. If some rockslide hadn't happened a million years ago then your parents wouldn't have been born. It's causal chains and forking paths all the way down. How much do you debate the morality of rockslides? We have the power as a species to stop them now. Do we stop them? Do we never stop them? Both paths are genocide, just of different groups of people who will never be. Which group is the one we should choose to support?
ImJamal · 17h ago
Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
Elle_Benjamin · 16h ago
Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
I think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.
const_cast · 6h ago
But if we follow that definition of harm we get to an untenable place. Big boys gotta eat, and broccoli is good for you. We have to draw the line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw the line so far back that we're considering clumps of cells on the same level as us.
We can do that, sure, but what do we gain? More heartache, harder decisions, more prison time? What's the benefit?
bobmcnamara · 16h ago
> Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
Yes. But I don't wander around saying that harvesting it doesn't harm the plant.
BugsJustFindMe · 16h ago
Maybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
ImJamal · 16h ago
What does harm have anything to do with it? The person I was responding to said you wouldn't have existed which is false.
BugsJustFindMe · 16h ago
The medical and scientific consensus is that embryos are cells capable of creating personhood rather than consisting of actual personhood.
Not to mention the obvious difference between something that has lived experience and something that has none.
ImJamal · 16h ago
First, things can be alive, but not persons.
Second, personhood is a philosophical thing so the medical and scientific communities' opinions are not relevant
Third, I looked up lived experience on wiki and it is talking about knowledge gained from the experience. A baby who was born yesterday doesn't have lived experiences so are they not a person?
BugsJustFindMe · 10h ago
> First, things can be alive, but not persons.
Non-persons cannot be me, a person. A precursor is a precursor is a precursor.
ImJamal · 10h ago
Human embryos are human. Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons?
BugsJustFindMe · 10h ago
Human embryos are special human tissue that may become human, not human. Category boundaries and specificity exist for a reason.
> Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons?
We quite often use the word "human" as an indicator of future or past potential or characteristic without meaning that the thing itself is a human. My dad's ashes are "human remains", but they're definitely not a person.
LadyCailin · 16h ago
This is such a baity statement. This is literally the heart of the “personhood” debate, so you can’t sit here and pretend like this is a clear cut scenario.
If you want to make a falsifiable statement, go for it, but don’t make a metaphysical statement and then assume it’s well established physics.
ImJamal · 16h ago
Why are you conflating personhood with being alive? Things can be alive without being a person. As far as I can tell no embryologist would deny that embryos are alive. The only debate is if they are a person.
If you kill a dog then the dog died. If you kill an embryo then the embryo is dead. It is irrelevant if either of those two are persons.
BugsJustFindMe · 14h ago
Question to understand the baseline you're coming from: Are you declaring a moral equivalence in this thread between destroying a non-person thing and a person thing?
ImJamal · 12h ago
No. I'm saying three things. First, embryos are alive. Second, you were once an embryo (it is a stage in human development). Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said.
I'm not taking a position on if an embryo has personhood.
BugsJustFindMe · 10h ago
I was also once the molecules from the outgassing of Napoleon's corpse and the cheesecake my dad had for dinner, and burying Napoleon differently or my dad being on a diet might have caused someone else to be born instead of me, but it's curious that I don't see us debating weight loss and the burial practices of exiled monarchs. Maybe causal chains of branching paths and being grown from cells aren't actually useful metrics for being "me" after all.
> Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said.
Something that eventually became me ceased to exist. It wasn't anywhere close to being me yet, just a precursor, like Napoleon's chest hair.
matthest · 16h ago
I would argue this has more or less been the case for most of history, in a different form.
It used to be that most people died young. If your genes weren't strong enough, disease would've knocked you out before you became a teenager.
It's only relatively recently that we've made it possible for people of all genetic types to survive into adulthood.
smeej · 14h ago
It has, but in an accidental way, in a, "Shit happens," sort of way, not in a, "My parents looked at me, decided I was faulty, and never gave me a chance," sort of way.
This is much more akin to the old practice of leaving babies to die by exposure if they seemed sickly/weak, which still turns my stomach.
I think it would even be a different thing to me if we were screening sperm and ova for their genes and only combining the best sets than screening the embryos.
nathanaldensr · 16h ago
The movie Gattaca addresses this very topic.
smeej · 14h ago
Back when I watched it, I thought it was a dystopian film. I seem to have interpreted it differently than a sizable portion of today's tech elite.
cocoto · 17h ago
The problem is that you can not ban eugenic tech long term, because the other countries will use this to get better IQ and dominate you.
lm28469 · 16h ago
Genetical predisposition isn't anywhere close to being the bottleneck in term of geopolitical domination, even in "advanced" countries, you'd get much better results by improving education
drjasonharrison · 16h ago
education, social environment, nutrition, dark and quiet at sleep times, clean air...
Bluestein · 16h ago
I could be mistaken, but it's not an either/or.-
What if ... both?
PS. Lots of "exponential" all-or-nothing, intelligence related "arms races" around lately ...
Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life
TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war.
Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts.
Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.
Solstinox · 16h ago
I’ll let them go first. I insist.
We can barely manipulate simple organisms without causing negative second order effects to cascade through our systems.
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
It would be a matter of concentrating specific SNPs that are already identifiable in human populations. There is no need to create new SNPs of unknown outcomes. There would be no difference if the SNP was put there through intervention or if it was inherited by a parent. Since these SNPs already exist the outcomes can and are being studied.
Solstinox · 13h ago
These are the types of assumptions and blindspots that lead to unintended negative effects.
Your approach assumes that the distribution of those SNPs at the population level is immaterial.
What makes an allele attractive at one frequency can expose new liabilities at a different frequency.
cjbgkagh · 12h ago
>> Your approach assumes that the distribution of those SNPs at the population level is immaterial.
No it doesn't.
>> What makes an allele attractive at one frequency can expose new liabilities at a different frequency.
So there is this thing called statistics...
There is a false assumption in behavioral genetics that behavior and intelligence are weakly linked to 1000s of SNPs which would make it rather difficult to stay within normal bounds, but in reality there are a few rare SNPs that dominates high intelligence. The RCCX genes of TNXB, CYP21A2, and C4 being the strongest. Of these I would focus on only two TNXB SNPs and there are many people walking around today who have them.
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
It's one of those arms race things, and people are already doing this but quietly for obvious reasons.
Similar to putting weapons on drones, it used to be unthinkable and now it's unthinkable not to.
Bluestein · 16h ago
> and people are already doing this but quietly for obvious reasons.
Heck, for argument, "incels" would argue the females of the species have been doing this forever, at least in very broad strokes.-
ch4s3 · 6h ago
There are some 530 genes associated with intelligence and they are mostly small contributor. There’s also a large environmental component that is poorly understood.
I’m not sure that gene edited super intelligence is in the near future.
potato3732842 · 16h ago
Don't even need to do that. Just engineer out the diseases that drag us down.
mmooss · 16h ago
Always the techno-anarchist - or ironically, the techno-fascist - dream: Technology is somehow inevitable. But somehow we have prescription controls on drugs, many materials and tools are illegal, nuclear weapons are limited to a few countries.
As a society, we have power if we want to use it. It's never perfect, but it can be very effective. Saying it's impossible is just a means - intentionally or not - of preventing people from using that power.
unstablediffusi · 15h ago
>As a society, we have power if we want to use it
you have no power over China, which is what the GP implies
logicchains · 16h ago
Humanity doesn't have anywhere near a rigorous enough understanding of biology to engage in large scale human genetic engineering without risk. It's quite possible the society that dives in headlong will end up making some mistake that renders a large proportion of its population sick or infertile in later life. Population IQ will also matter much less in 5-10 years as AI becomes capable of doing the majority of intellectual labour.
cannonpr · 17h ago
I often find my self conflicted over Gattaca, because I much prefer Ian banks vision of the future, “beauty and intelligence should be a basic human right through technology” yet Gattacas dystopian vision is much more likely what we are going to get thanks to capitalism.
Also with imperfect technology, options like these will also do a lot of damage to human genetic variability, till some fun pathogen comes and has words with us over the matter.
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
Humanity is getting better at combating pathogens to the point we wouldn't have to rely on genetic diversity for resilience, additionally such treatments could be given to those already born.
It's not like human variability would be lost forever, we can make and keep copies.
Gattaca's core message is that there is no gene for the human spirit, but in reality there probably is, behavior is highly genetic. Also consider that Vincent could have had a heart attack during the mission, that would put his actions into a rather selfish light.
My optimistic view is that an improved understanding of the mechanisms would lead to direct medical interventions, in such a world Vincent would have been able to have his heart properly treated.
I have ME/CFS from a genetic condition and I treat it by suppressing IL-1B cytokines with diet and medication. I was lucky enough to be able to figure this out and I would like more people to have this knowledge.
cannonpr · 16h ago
I don’t disagree, and I also have some unique genetic conditions that I won’t get into, they are depressing. However I will say that humanity is peppered with radical choices that did a lot of damage because we “thought” we understood, and we are barely scratching the surface of how life really works, epigenetics alone is barely explored. There likely is no gene for the human soul, there likely is an incredibly complex systemic interaction…
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
Think of how complex LLMs are and yet their emergent behavior is based on a few very simple rules and an easy to understand loss function. Due to the emergent behavior things can have the appearance of being far more complicated than they actually are. It is hyper-dimensional and granted humans are not good at that but computers are and some humans are capable of using computers as a tool in that way.
>> The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics, as proposed by Chabris, Turkheimer, and others, states that a typical human behavioral trait is associated with many genetic variants, each accounting for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.
I think a big part of this assumption is the use of Linear Regression in GWAS studies, the problem is that SNPs have a multicollinearity problem where the inputs are not independent from each other. That the results of these studies reflect that assumption should be of no surprise. I think using better math this stuff is more easy to detect.
cannonpr · 14h ago
So… I hope your version of trying to understand life is a fruitful path, however my understanding of the underlying biomechanics, messy, deeply “physics” based and 3d, leaves me with confused more often than not. The behaviour is emergent but not out of simplicity.
In a similar analog to machine learning there are fundamentalists approaches and there are empiricists approaches. Most medical researchers need to be able to defend their work and it’s easier to defend fundamentalist ideas - but they spend so much time arguing over minutia that they often miss the forest from the trees. Not to say that such work is unimportant but the academic environment is rather suboptimal in driving research direction. It’s hard to navigate uncertainty when deviations from what is formally known are heavily punished.
Take for example that we can read DNA and therefore have a list of every bioactive peptide that the body produces, we also have WGS so we can identify people with changes to these peptides. By using algorithms on these populations we can understand quite a lot about what these peptides do without understanding the mechanism by which they do it.
colechristensen · 17h ago
I'm thinking it will be a vaguely more Hyperion vision with different groups and different strategies. After a few centuries some humans which are barely recognizable and some humans who are highly conservative and probably a lot in between.
Basically I think humans taking our genetic code into our own hands intentionally is inevitable and the question shouldn't be whether it should be allowed or not but instead how do we do this wisely and when are we ready for which steps.
donsupreme · 17h ago
straight up Gattaca
> Nucleus also provides probability assessments for the embryos’ IQ, height and eye color. Sadeghi said that Nucleus informs customers of the strength of the various predictions. IQ predictions are limited in accuracy, according to the company.
sokoloff · 17h ago
Tell me the parents’ IQs and heights and I can give you a prediction of the embryo’s measures for $59.99.
mschuster91 · 17h ago
Doesn't work that way. Both height and IQ have a serious dependence on nutrition of both the mother while pregnant and the offspring during adolescence as well as mental stimulation for the latter, oh and the father's nutrition and both parents' history with drugs and medication also can play part in the genetics and epigenetics of the offspring.
On top of that you have recessive genetic traits as well which means you can get stuff like skin, hair and eye color that "pause" sometimes over generations. Used to be quite a source of infidelity allegations until Mendel's inheritance research, and frankly it's still something that pops up even today.
sokoloff · 16h ago
> Doesn't work that way.
If we take 100 embryos and we both predict their heights and IQs at 18, you with only biological sex and me additionally with the heights and IQs of the parents, I will wager a large sum that my predictions will be better than yours.
Are you interested in taking the other side of that bet for even money? I’ll even give you +110 odds to ensure you have a sportsbook-sized edge if there’s no predictive value.
sorcerer-mar · 17h ago
Yet despite variation in what people eat and what drugs they take, high-IQ people tend to be born to high-IQ people and same for low-IQ.
Even twins raised in totally separate households will have very similar IQs later in life.
This epigenetic stuff is invariably copium from people who don’t want to admit their intellectual gifts are in fact gifts and as a corollary, all the downstream economic rewards of intelligence are also mere gifts from the lottery of being born to high-IQ parents.
cjbgkagh · 16h ago
It can be both genetic and epigenetic, but concur I was one of those people who believed I was smarter simply because I wanted it more and worked harder. I found out later in life that my outcomes were largely genetic and this has increased my acceptance of others as they are.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
Yeah obviously epigenetics and environment matter. We should try to improve people's conditions all over, and also accept that not everyone can just work their way to "intelligent" and deserve dignity nonetheless.
Balgair · 14h ago
Fun little quirk of IQ: Lower-IQ scored couples tend to have children with higher IQ scores, and higher-IQ scored couples tend to have children with lower IQ scores.
The explanation seems to be that whatever random genes you got to have an off-average IQ score cancel out with your partner and your offspring then regresses to the mean.
sorcerer-mar · 12h ago
Yep! With caveat that you mean “higher than the parents,” I.e. you wouldn’t generally have a below-mean couple produce offspring that’s above the mean or vice versa.
piombisallow · 17h ago
One more way to scam desperate parents doing IVF out of their money.
Finally my favorite movie Gattaca is coming to life.
What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy, and it'll be interesting to see if as this tech gets better, the people who go through this process start having similar looking children.
michaelbrave · 17h ago
I can't remember it's name because I didn't get around to reading it, but there was one sci-fi book where something like Gattaca happened but it happend in a very corporate way, meaning you could buy preset options (wealthy would do custom), everyone became mostly the same height and look etc, or they could tell which preset their parents chose etc, the problem was later on when diseases happened it was catastrophic since the genetics were too much the same.
fensgrim · 17h ago
Looks like Chemical Garden trilogy by Lauren DeStefano might be a fit - but as it seems to be a cross between typical young adult fiction of 2010's and poorly made romance novel, I do hope there's something less.. pulpy.. with the same premise.
mbg721 · 17h ago
We'll just switch to the Cavendish human.
lurk2 · 17h ago
> What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy
What work are you referring to?
guywithahat · 14h ago
People were using AI models to detect different attributes from a picture of their face
I'm not saying it's very exact, but I think the general premise holds true: there will be certain options we can choose from, and those options will lead to a certain convergence of traits or features. How strong the convergence will be is yet to be seen (if it happens at all)
Teever · 16h ago
I don't think it'll be straight forward as the Anna Karenina principle.
While a lot of physical characteristics are indicative of some sort of underlying health defect and those defects can have effects on IQ/personality and humans are very evolved to detect these things, that doesn't mean that the absence of these defects through genetic modification will necessarily lead to similar looking people.
For an example of this take a look at the picture of The Martians[0], a group of individuals considered to be astoundingly intelligent. Despite coming from the same time and place and small ethnic group they bear a passing resemblance and many of them look quite different.
Now this doesn't get into the possibility that humans will use genetic modification to impart superficial aesthetic choices on their children that will be subject to the fleeting whims of fashion as we're already seeing with cosmetic surgery and injectable fillers/botox that kind of stuff will be subject to the cyclical nature of fashion/style and not intrinsic to the any sort of physiognomy.
If anything we're likely to see people who look radically different than any traditional expectations of beauty and the traditional correlations between appearance and intelligence will be totally out the window. Sooner or later we'll be able to create people who have feathers instead of hair and someone (probably the kind of person who currently has gauge earrings, split tongues, and eyeball tattoos) will decide that this is what they want for their kids.
There isn't going to be clean mapping between intelligence and someone who has feathers for hair, or purple eyes, or three breasts.
I like the accidental eugenics the USSR did by concentrating their scientists in Akademgorodok (Siberia), the kids born there are unusually smart. Similarly in the USA the SATs for collage admissions did end up with more pairings of smart parents.
EA-3167 · 17h ago
Like Gattaca, except there's no evidence that this process yields statistically significant results, never mind the intended, positive results free of complications.
I mean, if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday. I can't dissociate my adult self from my embryo self enough to ignore that.
And who knows? Maybe I would have made the cut. Maybe I'm as good as my parents could do. But I can't shake my unease about treating rejected embryos like there aren't adults implicit in them that we're never letting see the light of day.
You wouldn't have existed in any meaningful definition of "you" if your embryo had been destroyed, so you wouldn't be dead. Being dead and being not here are not the same thing. I've never had children. That doesn't mean my children are dead.
> When did something so significant happen that I became an "I"
Consciousness. The "think" part of "I think therefore I am". The part that makes humans human at all. Life experience. Presumably many years of it. You aren't even the same person you were yesterday let alone the cluster of cells that never experienced consciousness.
> I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now
Stopping there is arbitrary. If some rockslide hadn't happened a million years ago then your parents wouldn't have been born. It's causal chains and forking paths all the way down. How much do you debate the morality of rockslides? We have the power as a species to stop them now. Do we stop them? Do we never stop them? Both paths are genocide, just of different groups of people who will never be. Which group is the one we should choose to support?
We can do that, sure, but what do we gain? More heartache, harder decisions, more prison time? What's the benefit?
Yes. But I don't wander around saying that harvesting it doesn't harm the plant.
Not to mention the obvious difference between something that has lived experience and something that has none.
Second, personhood is a philosophical thing so the medical and scientific communities' opinions are not relevant
Third, I looked up lived experience on wiki and it is talking about knowledge gained from the experience. A baby who was born yesterday doesn't have lived experiences so are they not a person?
Non-persons cannot be me, a person. A precursor is a precursor is a precursor.
> Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons?
We quite often use the word "human" as an indicator of future or past potential or characteristic without meaning that the thing itself is a human. My dad's ashes are "human remains", but they're definitely not a person.
If you want to make a falsifiable statement, go for it, but don’t make a metaphysical statement and then assume it’s well established physics.
If you kill a dog then the dog died. If you kill an embryo then the embryo is dead. It is irrelevant if either of those two are persons.
I'm not taking a position on if an embryo has personhood.
> Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said.
Something that eventually became me ceased to exist. It wasn't anywhere close to being me yet, just a precursor, like Napoleon's chest hair.
It used to be that most people died young. If your genes weren't strong enough, disease would've knocked you out before you became a teenager.
It's only relatively recently that we've made it possible for people of all genetic types to survive into adulthood.
This is much more akin to the old practice of leaving babies to die by exposure if they seemed sickly/weak, which still turns my stomach.
I think it would even be a different thing to me if we were screening sperm and ova for their genes and only combining the best sets than screening the embryos.
What if ... both?
PS. Lots of "exponential" all-or-nothing, intelligence related "arms races" around lately ...
... interesting times.-
Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life
TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war.
Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts.
Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.
We can barely manipulate simple organisms without causing negative second order effects to cascade through our systems.
Your approach assumes that the distribution of those SNPs at the population level is immaterial.
What makes an allele attractive at one frequency can expose new liabilities at a different frequency.
No it doesn't.
So there is this thing called statistics...There is a false assumption in behavioral genetics that behavior and intelligence are weakly linked to 1000s of SNPs which would make it rather difficult to stay within normal bounds, but in reality there are a few rare SNPs that dominates high intelligence. The RCCX genes of TNXB, CYP21A2, and C4 being the strongest. Of these I would focus on only two TNXB SNPs and there are many people walking around today who have them.
Similar to putting weapons on drones, it used to be unthinkable and now it's unthinkable not to.
Heck, for argument, "incels" would argue the females of the species have been doing this forever, at least in very broad strokes.-
I’m not sure that gene edited super intelligence is in the near future.
As a society, we have power if we want to use it. It's never perfect, but it can be very effective. Saying it's impossible is just a means - intentionally or not - of preventing people from using that power.
you have no power over China, which is what the GP implies
It's not like human variability would be lost forever, we can make and keep copies.
Gattaca's core message is that there is no gene for the human spirit, but in reality there probably is, behavior is highly genetic. Also consider that Vincent could have had a heart attack during the mission, that would put his actions into a rather selfish light.
My optimistic view is that an improved understanding of the mechanisms would lead to direct medical interventions, in such a world Vincent would have been able to have his heart properly treated.
I have ME/CFS from a genetic condition and I treat it by suppressing IL-1B cytokines with diet and medication. I was lucky enough to be able to figure this out and I would like more people to have this knowledge.
Biomolecular condensates: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9974629/
Take for example that we can read DNA and therefore have a list of every bioactive peptide that the body produces, we also have WGS so we can identify people with changes to these peptides. By using algorithms on these populations we can understand quite a lot about what these peptides do without understanding the mechanism by which they do it.
Basically I think humans taking our genetic code into our own hands intentionally is inevitable and the question shouldn't be whether it should be allowed or not but instead how do we do this wisely and when are we ready for which steps.
> Nucleus also provides probability assessments for the embryos’ IQ, height and eye color. Sadeghi said that Nucleus informs customers of the strength of the various predictions. IQ predictions are limited in accuracy, according to the company.
On top of that you have recessive genetic traits as well which means you can get stuff like skin, hair and eye color that "pause" sometimes over generations. Used to be quite a source of infidelity allegations until Mendel's inheritance research, and frankly it's still something that pops up even today.
If we take 100 embryos and we both predict their heights and IQs at 18, you with only biological sex and me additionally with the heights and IQs of the parents, I will wager a large sum that my predictions will be better than yours.
Are you interested in taking the other side of that bet for even money? I’ll even give you +110 odds to ensure you have a sportsbook-sized edge if there’s no predictive value.
Even twins raised in totally separate households will have very similar IQs later in life.
This epigenetic stuff is invariably copium from people who don’t want to admit their intellectual gifts are in fact gifts and as a corollary, all the downstream economic rewards of intelligence are also mere gifts from the lottery of being born to high-IQ parents.
The explanation seems to be that whatever random genes you got to have an off-average IQ score cancel out with your partner and your offspring then regresses to the mean.
What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy, and it'll be interesting to see if as this tech gets better, the people who go through this process start having similar looking children.
What work are you referring to?
https://x.com/hamptonism/status/1929702249439412248
I'm not saying it's very exact, but I think the general premise holds true: there will be certain options we can choose from, and those options will lead to a certain convergence of traits or features. How strong the convergence will be is yet to be seen (if it happens at all)
While a lot of physical characteristics are indicative of some sort of underlying health defect and those defects can have effects on IQ/personality and humans are very evolved to detect these things, that doesn't mean that the absence of these defects through genetic modification will necessarily lead to similar looking people.
For an example of this take a look at the picture of The Martians[0], a group of individuals considered to be astoundingly intelligent. Despite coming from the same time and place and small ethnic group they bear a passing resemblance and many of them look quite different.
Now this doesn't get into the possibility that humans will use genetic modification to impart superficial aesthetic choices on their children that will be subject to the fleeting whims of fashion as we're already seeing with cosmetic surgery and injectable fillers/botox that kind of stuff will be subject to the cyclical nature of fashion/style and not intrinsic to the any sort of physiognomy.
If anything we're likely to see people who look radically different than any traditional expectations of beauty and the traditional correlations between appearance and intelligence will be totally out the window. Sooner or later we'll be able to create people who have feathers instead of hair and someone (probably the kind of person who currently has gauge earrings, split tongues, and eyeball tattoos) will decide that this is what they want for their kids.
There isn't going to be clean mapping between intelligence and someone who has feathers for hair, or purple eyes, or three breasts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)