High iq people aren’t smart enough to reproduce, so this might not work out in the long run.
US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a very optimistic view on eugenics in practice
I do, partly because my wife and I are beneficiaries of it already. We had our genomes available in the first place because our embryos are likely to grow into children with congenital conditions (my wife and I are carriers) and pre-implantation testing is what has enabled us to dodge the high-likelihood errors. Walk into an obstetrics clinic in San Francisco and you’ll find pamphlets for https://www.natera.com/women…
This is a form of survivor bias.
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
There absolutely is backlash against screening for autism, as absurd as that is.
It's not absurd, once you remember that autistic people are human beings with feelings. Edit: Sort of shocked that I am having to spell this out to all the "but embryos..." posters, but the backlash is coming from autistic human people with feelings. I was not insinuating some anti abortion sentiment.
Well I'm autistic myself, so...
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#24Gataca was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
Gattaca wasn't futuristic at all; it was obviously a commentary, and condemnation, of historical racism and prejudice.
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#25High iq people aren’t smart enough to reproduce, so this might not work out in the long run.
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Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#26I'm not sure how well incentivized these organizations are to correctly use the GWAS data vs just appear to do something and then take your money. Assortive mating and then maybe screening for stuff like Tay-Sachs and autism would for sure be cheaper (assuming there's not backlash against those screenings too...)
Ideally the data would just be openly shared with the parents, and they could see the provided analysis, do a separate analysis themselves, use open source tools, or have a separate company do the analysis. Then it's just up to the parents to select the DNA they want.
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re young you can produce 20+ eggs per run. Post fertilization, you can have 15+ if lucky. Their model then places them on a curve based on parental genomes. That is, given these parents are these the children most likely to be high IQ or not. The usefulness of that is up to you. The model is black box and you may never know, it’s true.
Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice. A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people. Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs".…
I don’t think the intention is to hurt other people - forced sterilization or any of these things. The intention is probably what parents like me feel: we want to give our kids the best shot at life. And I hope that my children will want to give their kids the best shot at life and having tools like this allows such people the freedom to do so at each generation. I think lots of people will choose this once cost is driven to the floor.
I think the advent of these tools will allow us to master random chance. We need not have women go through 9 months of pregnancy with an unviable foetus or bring to term children who will have terrible congenital conditions that they will have to live with.
Perhaps with the advent of artificial wombs, gametogenesis, and advanced whole-genome sequencing of embryos we could even master time, and reverse our present decline in fertility rates. But that's sci-fi. What we have today is already amazing, and I hope the good it has done my wife and me is available to all as costs drop and the technology becomes universal.
EDIT: Just to clarify since I don't want to get stuck in a back and forth: When I said I'm excited for humanity I did not mean to "clean up the gene pool" or "fix the gene pool" or anything like that that the child comment is referring to. I just meant that people like me could choose for our children that they be born without a random set of conditions. Others, including my children (should they choose otherwise from me), are free to do as they wish, though I would hope that they would choose like I do.
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#28[deleted]
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice. A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people. Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs".…
I don’t think the intention is to hurt other people - forced sterilization or any of these things. The intention is probably what parents like me feel: we want to give our kids the best shot at life. And I hope that my children will want to give their kids the best shot at life and having tools like this allows such people the freedom to do so at each generation. I think lots of people will choose this once cost is d…
Well, yes, but the old "clean up the gene pool" propaganda wasn't ever going to work, and it's not going to work on a practical level now. Gene pool stays almost as bad as it always was, and each generation has to put in active effort (with selection systems like this, and assortive mating) to manage the actually expressed genes of the next generation.
Fixing the gene pool in any reasonable amount of time would require gene editing and genome designing tech that I wouldn't even know how to start researching.
Re: US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'
#30I'm not sure how well incentivized these organizations are to correctly use the GWAS data vs just appear to do something and then take your money. Assortive mating and then maybe screening for stuff like Tay-Sachs and autism would for sure be cheaper (assuming there's not backlash against those screenings too...)
There absolutely is backlash against screening for autism, as absurd as that is.
I wonder if it's similar to the deaf community's outcry against cochlear implants? People love their subcultures; seeing new medical technology wipe out their culture probably feels like genocide[0] to them (even if the majority population perceives it as a good thing).
[0] One of the UN-recognized forms is "preventing births within a population"