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China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

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Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#21
post #4

Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelli…

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

No. The most important factors, in diminishing order, are: Grit, intelligence, beauty, education.

But if you read the article, they're not really selecting for IQ itself, but academic success, so that covers all of the factors, just weighed.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#23
post #4

Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelli…

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

[deleted]

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

It's not "enough", but it really helps. It's highly correlated with a whole host of different positive life outcomes.[1] People argue over how important it is, and it's certainly not the only thing that matters, but yes, the general consensus is that IQ is meaningful and predictive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

[deleted]

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#25
post #20
post #3

"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points . So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ...." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838

That math seems off. The gain should average 2.5-7.5 points surely?

Source? or calculation? The guy giving the figure is an evolutionary psychologist.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#29
post #4

Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelli…

It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate.

I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI's disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina's, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American & European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more.

In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution.

As far as embryo selection goes, '5-15 points' is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I've tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it's not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection (Which is why I'm more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#30
post #26

Here's a newer article on the results: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/health/chinese-scientists... The conclusion: technology is not ready for editing genes of human embryos yet.

The interview was mainly about embryo selection, not genetic engineering.
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