171–180 of 281 posts
People are genuinely concerned about the unknown effects on the babies, and questioning the authors and the hospital's motivation of applying such techniques to human this early without fully understanding its consequences.
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>improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans. What if it makes people more scared, because they can remember past experiences better. This could lead to less procreation and thus inverse selection pressure. Only because a trait is superficially good it doesn't mean nature would select for it.
Why would a memory enhancing drug only increase rememberance of negative memories and not the positive and loving ones? Such people could become more active, motivated and procreating more because life seemed more motivating for them because they remembered all the good from the past also?
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This is not true. Intelligence is polygenic. The average human is no Von Neumann. At the very least genetic engineering could raise average IQ to Von Neumann’s level. We know that phenotype is possible with no ill effects. It will likely take us much further.
You haven't addressed my point. No one disputes that intelligence is partly genetic. However if it was possible to raise intelligence through genetic engineering with no ill effects then why hasn't evolution increased the incidence of that phenotype already?
https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics
Here’s a brief snippet
> the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of reproductive fitness The famous Ashkenazi theory of intelligence comes to mind. According to this theory, the Ashkenazi were forced into occupations demanding intelligence, and micro-selected for high intelligence. Except the high IQ genes were not previously prevalent among either Jews or gentiles because - like sickle-cell anemia - when they became too prevalent, they result in horrible diseases like Tay-Sachs. In 2007, a unique mutation in a Scottish family was found to increase verbal IQ in afflicted family members vs non by something like 25 points; this would be great for them - except for how that mutation starts causing blindness in one’s 20s or later. (In general, it’s much easier to find mutations or other genetic changes breaking intelligence than helping in cases of retardation26 and autism27.)
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"good but error prone" describes all of medical care right now. Hell, pharmaceuticals aren't even good in many cases.
That's absolutely not the standard for deciding to conduct an experiment on humans.
There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can b…
On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases.
On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a country like China.
Some of them:
- Remove a key gene in a metabolic pathway which can be mitigated by dietary supplements, creating a biological dead man's switch in order to make it easier to control the population.
- Inserting a viral genome into the host genome (preferably also under some deadman's switch), creating in effect a biological weapon
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Why? Seriously why? We do so many unnatural things to us through technology. The article discusses editing genes to try and prevent viruses.
The modern biomedical ethical framework comes out of Nuremburg in response to Nazi atrocities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
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And we can find people who disagree with the broad consensus on climate change, too. Is there a broader point you are getting at?
Facts are not opinion. Morals and ethics however definitely are. You can show with empirical evidence that climate change is true. However no matter how hard you try you can't show with evidence that your moral framework or ethics are somehow the "one true moral/ethical truth".
Is that a fact, or an opinion? :-)
Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on: Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly…
Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure. Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that…
BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and Tay-Sachs disease lead to greater IQ in heterozygotes.
We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.
Complacent western weakness at its best.
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Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure. Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable. My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that…
We know IQ is heritable the same way we know height is heritable. People resemble their relatives more as their shared inheritance grows. BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and T…
Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...