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The first early human eggs from stem cells

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Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#131

Post by jfyi »

latexr wrote: post #46
emsign wrote: post #35

Imagine guys like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Thiel cloning themselves. That's 100% dystopian. We would never be able to get rid of madmen! Power corrupts and makes the powerful just weird and unable to make rational decisions. That's why people in power need to be replaced regularly to have a stable society.

I agree with the second part, but I’m not convinced cloning those people would lead to other copies of them (not that I’m advocating for it, either). Your environment/upbringing/opportunities shape a lot of who you become. Musk famously has kids who find him abhorrent, I see no reason to believe that he’d be a competent father even to himself. Especially since the kid would have siblings who could open his eyes to th…

It doesn't need to make clones into absolute copies of them to be problematic. It's just an obfuscation of a very old idea, the divine right of kings.

It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#132

Post by antasvara »

Mistletoe wrote: post #130
antasvara wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote: > Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specifi…

I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result. > the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.

>What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.

Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:

1. This kid isn't intelligent. 2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.

What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.

This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."

In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#133

Post by sudo_cowsay »

lsbehe wrote: post #123
sudo_cowsay wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.

What exactly is the good idea? It's ignoring my accessibility options. I'm getting motion sickness.

If you have motion sickness and have a macbook, use the motion sickness dots.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#134

Post by throwaway173738 »

tskj wrote: post #102
throwaway173738 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.

I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.

A lot of these issues have more to do with how we’ve constructed our society than with some loss of purity. If you want people to have more sex, make cities and towns more livable, get people out of cars, give them living wages so they have free time, create societal supports for childcare, make giving birth and pediatric care completely free, and support people forming associations outside of work. These are all barriers that have appeared basically my lifetime and it’s way more likely that people are making informed choices than that there’s some horrible transformation we’re all undergoing.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#135

Post by userulluipeste »

aitchnyu wrote: post #52

To confirm, we get a clone of the blood donor right, whether man or woman?

That is a good question. Excepting the sexual ones, all the cells in an organism are diploid¹, including the ones found in blood (excluding erythrocytes, since those do not have a nucleus, therefore -- do not have chromosomes). Yet in natural development of the organism, a bunch of stem cells, which are of regular (diploid set of chromosomes) type, are evolving to form the ovaries, containing from very beginning all the ova (egg cells) that the female may have in her life. Ovum does only have a haploid¹ chromosomes set, until fertilization.

In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source.

What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#136

Post by [deleted] »

tskj wrote: post #102
throwaway173738 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.

I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.

[deleted]

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#137

Post by plasticeagle »

killerstorm wrote: post #100
plasticeagle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive." Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are tho…

Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different. So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria. > It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can lit…

I suppose that must depend on one's definition of "substantially". Human's haven't changed "substantially", and neither do new breeds of dogs and cats.

Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#138

Post by pelagicAustral »

Qem wrote: post #127
pelagicAustral wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...

Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy

Great share! Thanks.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#139

Post by killerstorm »

plasticeagle wrote: post #137
killerstorm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different. So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria. > It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can lit…

I suppose that must depend on one's definition of "substantially". Human's haven't changed "substantially", and neither do new breeds of dogs and cats. Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.

People in the past could survive and procreate without modern medicine (basically without any medicine at all as doctors could do very little 200 years ago) with ~50% success rate. I'd suspect this rate is already lower now, and it might matter in multiple ways

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#140

Post by bluegreen10294 »

londons_explore wrote: post #20

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation,…

By contrast, we could also end up with humans that are stronger, smarter, or are better adapted to a changing environment.

In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm.

The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?

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