171–180 of 218 posts
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Or the really scary part...if it not noticed for generations. For example, a reduction of IQ each generation or such.
Very droll. Nice elude to dysgenics [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics
If intelligence isn't heritable and has nothing to do with genetics, please teach a paramecium how to do quantum physics and I'll give you a million dollars
What's the agenda behind the spate of gene editing alarmism lately? The article cites the July Nature Biotechnology article about unintended consequences of CRISPR-Cas9 but subsequent work has eliminated many such consequences using slightly different techniques. No word of that fact in this article. If consequences of genetic engineering are poorly understood, then this isn't reason to worry about reckless research.…
Certain other nations have incentive and experience with sowing controversy and conflict.
There’s probably more incentive structures involved, but those two + a small native group of alarmists seem sufficient to support current levels of perceived alarmism.
From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…
Some parts have a very straightforward meaning. For example the DNA code for insulin is well known and understood, you can copy it to bacteria to make them produce a 100% accurate version of human insulin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
> The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da. It is a dimer of an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by disulfide bonds. Insulin's structure varies slightly between species of animals. Insulin from animal sources differs somewhat in effectiveness (in carbohydrate metabolism effects) from human insulin because of these variations. Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version, and was widely used to treat type 1 diabetics before human insulin could be produced in large quantities by recombinant DNA technologies.
Many enzymes have also a similar straightforward DNA->protein->function story.
(The regulation method to decide what enzymes to produce and how much of them is more complicated, but some are well known.)
If you want to identify the genes for more general traits like height or intelligence, then you will get something like what you said, that is a very complicated interaction on many genes that we don't understand.
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This is why I am strongly against anything but the most urgent genetic engineering. We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. We have never recovered from it, and maybe never will. So now we are going to start in on biology?
> We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. Wait, WHAT?! The thing that allowed millions of people to ascend from what would now be seen as abject poverty and subsistence farming? The thing that enabled mass tool manufacture that eventually led to the Green Revolution and boosted agricultural yields enough to increase the planet's carrying capacity a few orders of magnitude? THAT screw up?! Say what you wan…
We are losing 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal every 24 hours.
That’s an estimated 1,000 times the natural rate.
We fucked up real bad, and the fact that there’s 7 billion of us now and we’ve got iPhones doesn’t change that a shred.
we Will pay for this destruction, in unforeseen, invisible, and difficult to imagine ways.
We could have done better, and ignoring that blocks our path to a better way.
From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…
> No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. Some parts have a very straightforward meaning. For example the DNA code for insulin is well known and understood, you can copy it to bacteria to make them produce a 100% accurate version of human insulin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin > The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From my laymans POV It's just so much more complicated than that. There is an additional huge array of variables like introns[1] and exons[2]. There's also the fact that not all base pairs encode even for genes, there's things like tRNA[3] and ribosomes[4] and the super amazing ribozymes[5]. Even after all that you have specific DNA binding factors[6] that along with the insane machinery[7] of our DNA regulate whic…
C may let you shoot yourself in the foot, C++ may let you blow your whole leg off, but only CRISPR will let you turn it back into a tentacle.
From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…
Evolution is like Motie Engineers (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye). I would summarise the essential difficulty as non-heirarchical.
From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…
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Another example would be King Charles Spaniels, which are overbred to have tiny heads and big cute eyes - and are at high risk of seizures from compression of the brain by the skull :-( I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regul…
I wonder what possess people to want to own dog breeds that are physically deformed by design. What kind of brain injury do you have to have to go out of your way to want to breed these dogs? And why the hell don’t / haven’t animal rights activists, and society in general, vigorously pursue regulation to ban these absurd breeds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I am strongly against anything but the most urgent genetic engineering. We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. We have never recovered from it, and maybe never will. So now we are going to start in on biology?
> We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. Wait, WHAT?! The thing that allowed millions of people to ascend from what would now be seen as abject poverty and subsistence farming? The thing that enabled mass tool manufacture that eventually led to the Green Revolution and boosted agricultural yields enough to increase the planet's carrying capacity a few orders of magnitude? THAT screw up?! Say what you wan…