The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again
Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#82I hope they're aware of this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00945-7 You can't clone forever.
It's mentioned in the parent article.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the point of your comment besides sidestepping a clearly revolutionary mind and an interesting scenario.
The point of my comment is to call attention to the SV tendency of hyper-focusing on the newest shiny toy as a solution to all problems while ignoring the real solutions to the real problems we have right now. If we assume roughly 1.2k people were as smart as Einstein when he was born then, thanks to birth rates, we could have our "10000 Albert Einsteins" today. Statistically speaking ~3k of them alone were born in e…
Well it would certainly help to know before they're born which children are going to be Einstein. Maybe with ten thousand of them around we could ask some to help sort the education system out.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#84Humans can likely be cloned too. Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues. Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.
Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?
Seems to be working pretty well in the case of these horses.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#85Since we've reached this point, it seems like the next logical step would be to standardize the genomes allowed just like racing standardizes the vehicles (to a point, I know). It seems so much less interesting for the competition to devolve to "who can afford the best horse genome" instead of the actual skill and ability of the player. Since we're already cloning the horses, just force everyone to use the same horse…
The next actual step according to the article is genetically engineering the horse clones. They've already crispr'd five as proof of concept.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#86The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.
At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#87The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only…
Is imagine the high pedigree horses are already so genetically similar to each other at this point that they're already vulnerable to that.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#88Since we've reached this point, it seems like the next logical step would be to standardize the genomes allowed just like racing standardizes the vehicles (to a point, I know). It seems so much less interesting for the competition to devolve to "who can afford the best horse genome" instead of the actual skill and ability of the player. Since we're already cloning the horses, just force everyone to use the same horse…
What about the polo player's genome?
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature. This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to…
You forgot the /s That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.
I did not forget a /s.
The Wikipedia page has linked references. You’ll have to provide more evidence for me than your statement for me to disbelieve them after I read through to confirm that the Wikipedia article wasn’t misinterpreting or misquoting.
Re: Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what if there's an even better horse out there Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics. Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged. Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without th…
It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable? I feel like I am missing a lot.
Can you imagine the insanity when they try to do "LLM style" sequencing?