The Singularity

[Carry2]

The US is not typical of most developed nations. Income inequality and specifically the Gini index should be enlightening for you.

I missed this the first time around, but RPGuru and Poison Fish pointing it out drew my attention to it. Like Poison Fish said, the US is highly abnormal compared to other developed countries in almost every way.

While information regarding the widening degree of social inequality in the US and other peculiar social features is certainly interesting and welcome- and I will try to revisit the point later- I'm not certain if this affects my example for the intended purpose. Given that I originally took the US as an example of how GDP breaks down by sector in developed nations, breakdowns for the EU and Japan yield pretty similar numbers- 20 to 30% engaged in manufacturing, much of it quite high tech, and 60-70% engaged in services, much of it financial, governmental or IT-based.

Consequently, I'm not sure that my central point has been invalidated: Even if you assume that manufacturing performance is G-factor-independent- which is increasingly debatable- it's clear that developed economies depend to a huge degree on jobs that require a significant degree of technical expertise, ability to correlate information, and/or creative thinking. To the extent that IQ measures these things, and to the extent that those impact job performance (not to mention R&D efforts,) it seems reasonable to suggest that higher IQ (or, more broadly, enhanced cognitive performance) could translate into gains in efficiency across broad sectors of the economy.

I am not saying that investment in education, healthcare, political reform and other social services should not be pursued toward that end. But given that we can tentatively agree that genetics and environment have at least comparable importance in determining economic and social outcomes, and if one tentatively assumes that genetic interventions could eventually be made available for a fraction of the lifetime cost of education, healthcare and other social services, then an argument for the latter's widespread adoption seems fairly compelling.

[Carry2]

A valid point. Sequencing the genes would only be a portion of the cost for this sort of thing, no? I mean if you're doing embryo selection and implantation, doesn't that take sequencing a fair number of embryos? I could easily be wrong here, I'm not a biologist.

As I understand it, there wouldn't be much point to sequencing an embryo's entire genome at present, since we have only the vaguest notion of what most of it does. (By the time we know what 90% of our genes actually encode, we'll most likely have moved on to more efficient retroviral or cloning-based approaches, rather than roll-and-keep chargen, so to speak.)

However, it's relatively cheap to use DNA microarrays to check for the presence of a variety of specific, known mutations or simple mendelian traits- which is most or all what it's going to be used for in the next decade or two. My point was simply to illustrate that the costs associated with biotech procedures tend to fall rapidly once there's a waiting mass market.

That analysis is done about halfway down the page. It starts in the paragraph just above the plot of variance explained vs. standard deviation in SES.

Again... I'm not certain I see support for long-term enviromental impacts on IQ among 1st-world adults. There's a discussion of the impact of malnutrition on height in the developing world- and it's certainly fair to say that environmental factors like serious neglect or physical head trauma can also have a lasting impact on adult IQ- but these are not common in developed economies. (I suppose your point about the SES distribution being skewed is valid, and I'm not a statistician, but offhand I can only say that adult IQ scores themselves seem to taper off neatly on both sides of the bell curve. If, as you suggest, SES substantially modified IQ in later life, you would not expect to see that distribution without massaging the data pretty heavily.)

As to the importance of genetic tinkering, I think that depends if you want equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome, and for whom you want what. If you want to make sure the children of elites have greater equality of outcome, then genetics are probably the way to go. If you want either for everybody else, everything I've seen suggests that raising their economic status is probably a better bet.

Theoretically speaking, this is a matter of price/performance ratio, or how far and how quickly costs can go down over time. In 40 years, spending 20 dollars on a retroviral shot for congenital immunity to AIDS and malaria might be a bargain even to folks from the Congo. I don't disagree with your assessment in the short term, but if costs come down and knowledge goes up at the rate that most researchers are expecting, the equation is likely to change substantially before the end of the century. At least, that's the impression I get.

[warty goblin]

As I understand it, there wouldn't be much point to sequencing an embryo's entire genome at present, since we have only the vaguest notion of what most of it does. (By the time we know what 90% of our genes actually encode, we'll most likely have moved on to more efficient retroviral or cloning-based approaches, rather than roll-and-keep chargen, so to speak.)

However, it's relatively cheap to use DNA microarrays to check for the presence of a variety of specific, known mutations or simple mendelian traits- which is most or all what it's going to be used for in the next decade or two. My point was simply to illustrate that the costs associated with biotech procedures tend to fall rapidly once there's a waiting mass market.

Seems reasonable. Like I said, what I know about biology would fill a fairly short bit of paper. I took one look at going into biostat and fled.

Again... I'm not certain I see support for long-term enviromental impacts on IQ among 1st-world adults. There's a discussion of the impact of malnutrition on height in the developing world- and it's certainly fair to say that environmental factors like serious neglect or physical head trauma can also have a lasting impact on adult IQ- but these are not common in developed economies. (I suppose your point about the SES distribution being skewed is valid, and I'm not a statistician, but offhand I can only say that adult IQ scores themselves seem to taper off neatly on both sides of the bell curve. If, as you suggest, SES substantially modified IQ in later life, you would not expect to see that distribution without massaging the data pretty heavily.)

Not really. The distribution of a population, and the distribution of a statistic calculated from that population can be very, very different. If there's any sort of averaging going into the tabulation of IQ scores, the result is - by the majestic power of the Central Limit Theorem - going to be normal. This includes things like proportions.

Even if they aren't averaging that doesn't mean the distribution of scores isn't normal. A lot of entirely non-parametric statistics (like the various Wilcoxon rank tests) also follow normal distributions, despite making no assumptions about the distribution from which the sample was taken. Perhaps relevantly, the Wilcoxon tests involve ranking data from smallest to largest.

In the interest of full disclosure, this is not an area of statistics I know a lot about. It is not wise however to make an inference about a population distribution's type based on the sampling distribution of a statistic. Since IQ scores are themselves random estimators of unknown true parameters, they're absolutely statistics insofar as I can tell.

(The IQ score is defined as a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. That even of itself does not indicate data massaging. Any normal can be scaled and shifted to be any other normal without altering the calculation of appropriately rescaled probabilities.)

Theoretically speaking, this is a matter of price/performance ratio, or how far and how quickly costs can go down over time. In 40 years, spending 20 dollars on a retroviral shot for congenital immunity to AIDS and malaria might be a bargain even to folks from the Congo. I don't disagree with your assessment in the short term, but if costs come down and knowledge goes up at the rate that most researchers are expecting, the equation is likely to change substantially before the end of the century. At least, that's the impression I get.

People have been making lots of optimistic claims about how technology will uplift the poor for a long time now. This mostly hasn't happened yet, perhaps because really poor people can't afford technology. I'll put my money on solutions that use tools we have, not efforts to produce tools that might produce something twenty or eighty years from now.

[RPGuru1331]

Seems reasonable. Like I said, what I know about biology would fill a fairly short bit of paper. I took one look at going into biostat and fled.

Then fairly warned be ye - none of what he's talking about has even the smallest hint of being plausible. This is slightly more plausible than FTL travel as it stands, in that it isn't quite as blatantly absurd.

People have been making lots of optimistic claims about how technology will uplift the poor for a long time now. This mostly hasn't happened yet, perhaps because really poor people can't afford technology. I'll put my money on solutions that use tools we have, not efforts to produce tools that might produce something twenty or eighty years from now.

The funny thing is, for all his discussing the ease and simplicity of vaccines to cure things for the poor in the Congo, he's missing we have Vaccines now, and the people there frequently go wanting as is.

[Carry2]

Not really. The distribution of a population, and the distribution of a statistic calculated from that population can be very, very different. If there's any sort of averaging going into the tabulation of IQ scores, the result is - by the majestic power of the Central Limit Theorem - going to be normal. This includes things like proportions... ...Since IQ scores are themselves random estimators of unknown true parameters, they're absolutely statistics insofar as I can tell.

As I understand it, the Central Limit Theorem applies to 'a sufficiently large number of independent random variables'. Unless I'm badly misinterpreting the terminology here, G-factor means that the various outcomes measured by IQ tests are not statistically independent. (Even, conceivably, for things like emotional intelligence.) I understand your point about how IQ distributions are normalised, but if relative SES were substantially tied to adult IQ, and the GINI index has been rising, this is hard to reconcile with, say, the Flynn Effect.

People have been making lots of optimistic claims about how technology will uplift the poor for a long time now. This mostly hasn't happened yet, perhaps because really poor people can't afford technology.

Well... in the western world improved technologies unarguably did contribute to alleviating material poverty in a big way ever since the industrial revolution, and by some estimations the green revolution saved a billion lives. More recently, folks in Kenya apparently appreciate the benefits of smartphones, which should make it easier to get a basic education. (This is particularly true given that any aid agency will agree that infrastructure and education are the only long-term solution to poverty.)

But again, I agree that financial subsidies to ensure equal access to genetics and similar technologies could be of great help here (which is one of the things I've been arguing for.) But I've also been pointing out that research in this area will- descriptively- be very difficult to stop due to the economic interests backing their development, and could- prescriptively- be of major social benefit if applied correctly. Given that the genie's out of the bottle, we should at least be making the right wish.

.

[warty goblin]

As I understand it, the Central Limit Theorem applies to 'a sufficiently large number of independent random variables'. Unless I'm badly misinterpreting the terminology here, G-factor means that the various outcomes measured by IQ tests are not statistically independent. (Even, conceivably, for things like emotional intelligence.) I understand your point about how IQ distributions are normalised, but if relative SES were substantially tied to adult IQ, and the GINI index has been rising, this is hard to reconcile with, say, the Flynn Effect.

The various outcomes measured by an IQ test on an individual can be dependent on each other, but still independent of an IQ test on a different person. All that takes to guarantee is a random sample. Independence is a relationship between two (or more) random variables, not a universal condition. That A and B are dependent tells me nothing about the relationship between A and C.

There are different versions of the CLT, some of which are much stronger. Pairwise independence turns out to be sufficient. Random variables can be technically dependent but very weakly so, and hence act essentially independently. This is true of pretty much every opinion survey done in the world; the samples are almost always drawn without replacement, which technically makes each observation dependent on previous observations. Since the populations are usually on the order of millions, and the samples a few hundred however, this dependence is so weak it can simply be ignored, and the CLT still applied.


However since IQs are not calculated from a random population sample, reasoning backwards to their actual population distribution is both difficult and risky. If your sample isn't random, inference gets a lot harder because you no longer have random errors you can quantify with probability theory. You have a non-random bias, which is much harder to deal with.

There are a lot of ways to make data normal, often with a very simple transformation. Usually just taking the natural logarithm does it. Lots of financial data is normalized this way for instance.


Finally, I would point out that you are arguing an essentially contradictory point here. The crux of your previous argument has been that IQ has a strong enough correlation with SES/general prosperity that it's a sensible decision to spend lots of money to raise IQ. Now you are arguing there isn't a strong correlation. You really can't have this one both ways.

Well... in the western world improved technologies unarguably did contribute to alleviating material poverty in a big way ever since the industrial revolution, and by some estimations the green revolution saved a billion lives. More recently, folks in Kenya apparently appreciate the benefits of smartphones, which should make it easier to get a basic education. (This is particularly true given that any aid agency will agree that infrastructure and education are the only long-term solution to poverty.)

Right after the industrial revolution made everyone dirt poor, yes. Those are also infrastructure technologies you are citing there, which genetic tinkering certainly is not.

But again, I agree that financial subsidies to ensure equal access to genetics and similar technologies could be of great help here (which is one of the things I've been arguing for.) But I've also been pointing out that research in this area will- descriptively- be very difficult to stop due to the economic interests backing their development, and could- prescriptively- be of major social benefit if applied correctly. Given that the genie's out of the bottle, we should at least be making the right wish.

You've been arguing that a lot of this stuff is either currently possible, or will be very shortly. I don't see loads of people queuing up to make sure their kids turn out just like Mommy and Daddy want. It does happen occasionally, but it's hardly a runaway train.

[Carry2]

The various outcomes measured by an IQ test on an individual can be dependent on each other, but still independent of an IQ test on a different person.

Ah... I see. You were referring to the average IQ of the group, not the person. My mistake. Thank you for that clarification.

However, I'm not certain if this affects my latter argument. If you are correct in asserting that lower SES significantly lowers adult IQ, and correct in asserting that effective poverty has grown over past decades, it would follow that IQ scores should be falling over that period. This has not been observed.

(Now, it is certainly fair to point out that the very existence of the Flynn effect does argue for a non-trivial environmental component to effective IQ. At the same time, however, it has not flattened the actual score distribution.)

Finally, I would point out that you are arguing an essentially contradictory point here. The crux of your previous argument has been that IQ has a strong enough correlation with SES/general prosperity that it's a sensible decision to spend lots of money to raise IQ. Now you are arguing there isn't a strong correlation. You really can't have this one both ways.

Not quite. Our present exchange is with reference to the relevance of genetic vs. environmental factors in determining adult IQ, not with reference to the effect of IQ upon economic outcomes later in life. (Basically we're talking about environment as a cause of IQ vs. IQ as a cause of environment. Neither is negligible, but they're distinct phenomena.)

Right after the industrial revolution made everyone dirt poor, yes. Those are also infrastructure technologies you are citing there, which genetic tinkering certainly is not...
...You've been arguing that a lot of this stuff is either currently possible, or will be very shortly. I don't see loads of people queuing up to make sure their kids turn out just like Mommy and Daddy want. It does happen occasionally, but it's hardly a runaway train.

The train isn't runaway- yet- but it's not about to reverse into the station either. We can probably steer okay, but just hitting the brakes would involve an awful lot of noise and screeching. I agree that the Industrial Revolution did have serious deleterious effects on human health for many segments of the population, and I agree that there may be analagous bad scenarios associated with gene tailoring. This is part of the reason why I am trying to get people to take this idea seriously.

To flog this metaphor still further: PGD/IVF, although presently crude, inefficient and limited in application, is not going away any more than Newcomen's steam engine, although crude, inefficient and limited in application, was going away at the turn of the 18th century. Gattaca babies are not going to happen tomorrow, but are a serious possibility within the lifetime of most people alive today. This is not an intrinsically bad thing: In a certain sense, gene-tailoring is an investment in the most fundamental infrastructure of all.*

*Usual disclaimer, for the love of Pete:
-IQ does not measure all relevant aspects of cognitive function
-Gene tailoring may also impact health and personality
-Tradeoffs may exist between various aspects of cognitive function
-Traits beneficial to the individual may not be good for society
-Sub-average performance may be hard to distinguish from disability
-Side-effects may include monoculture and inbreeding
-Genetics is not a substitute for a healthy balanced environment
-Please consult your doctor if symptoms persist

.

[warty goblin]

Ah... I see. You were referring to the average IQ of the group, not the person. My mistake. Thank you for that clarification.

I think you misunderstood my argument. Person A's IQ intelligence can be very strongly dependent on their social intelligence. This doesn't tell me anything about whether there's a dependence between person A's IQ and person B's IQ under the sampling design that induces the sampling distribution of the statistic in question. If person A and person B are selected using a random sample of some type, their IQs will be independent. If they are not, there will almost certainly be dependence.

However, I'm not certain if this affects my latter argument. If you are correct in asserting that lower SES significantly lowers adult IQ, and correct in asserting that effective poverty has grown over past decades, it would follow that IQ scores should be falling over that period. This has not been observed.

Or IQ is just plain screwed up as a measurement anyways, and it's weird drifts over time are essentially meaningless. Since IQ isn't a random sample, or even voluntary response from a random sample*, and probably has one hell of self-selection bias, I'm more suspicious of it's efficacy than I am of the effects of inequality. For one thing it's readily measurable that the less well off a person is, the less well they do on any number of standardized tests.

*Which is to say, there's no real way to know how your data relate back to the actual population because your error is unobserved systematic bias instead of randomness. It's rather like guessing about the distribution of foot sizes based on the purchase of men's basketball shoes. Any actual statistician will laugh their heads off at the idea.

(Now, it is certainly fair to point out that the very existence of the Flynn effect does argue for a non-trivial environmental component to effective IQ. At the same time, however, it has not flattened the actual score distribution.)

It wouldn't flatten the distribution. An additive term shifts the mean of a distribution, not the variance. Even if it did, that would be dealt with when the data is standardized to mean 100, standard deviation (square root of variance) 15.

Plus the data is a time series. Time series are always dependent, this one seems to be a submartingale instead of a martingale. All this requires is any sort of effect that tends to increase people's scores. Like say having more experience taking tests.

Not quite. Our present exchange is with reference to the relevance of genetic vs. environmental factors in determining adult IQ, not with reference to the effect of IQ upon economic outcomes later in life. (Basically we're talking about environment as a cause of IQ vs. IQ as a cause of environment. Neither is negligible, but they're distinct phenomena.)

Valid distinction.

[pendell]

This news article crossed my desk today.

Evidently the concept of building a better human was known, once upon a time, as Eugenics. There was such a program in my state of Virginia. It resulted in a lot of people being sterilized as "feebleminded" or "defective".

I think the important thing to take away from this is that we humans don't really have much of an idea what does and does not constitute "defective". And that any such scheme must therefore refrain from trying to remove human beings from the gene pool based on scientific tests. Because our measurements are subject to bias.

Any scheme to improve human beings must first recognize the dignity of ordinary human beings that exist now.

Realistically, I suspect natural selection will be a better way to bring about a better human being than an attempt at artificial genetic engineering. For the same reason planned economies in the 20th century did so much worse than free market economies. Because human minds and human brains simply cannot do a better job of modeling and predicting nature than nature can do for itself. At this time, anyway.

There were a number of attempts to breed a superior human being in the 20th century, and not all of them happened in Nazi Germany. Quite a few of them happened here in America, and so far as I can tell it did not succeed in breeding better , superior human beings. It did , however , result in a great deal of things we are now ashamed of.

I haven't addressed AI singularity, as I think we've got a long way to go before we can reach strong AI. But making a superior human being has been tried before. And if anyone is going to consider such a scheme again, two questions must be answered:

1) Has this ever been done before? (Yes, it has).
2) How do we avoid making the same mistakes as last time , which did little good and hurt a lot of people?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[hamishspence]

I think the important thing to take away from this is that we humans don't really have much of an idea what does and does not constitute "defective". And that any such scheme must therefore refrain from trying to remove human beings from the gene pool based on scientific tests. Because our measurements are subject to bias.

Any scheme to improve human beings must first recognize the dignity of ordinary human beings that exist now.

I could see people wanting to ensure their own children aren't born with a handicap that they themselves have suffered though.

[pendell]

It's hard to argue that a person who didn't want to improve their own health shouldn't be permitted to undergo experimental treatments, genetic or otherwise, and I shan't. That's how we get volunteer test subjects for any other kind of medical research , isn't it?

That said, there are two caveats:

1) The original eugenics went fairly quickly from a voluntary program to involuntary sterilization and euthanasia. Why?

I'm guessing it's because the people in charge were out to save the human race *as a whole*. Saving one person from, say, Down's Syndrome wasn't on the menu. Eliminating Down's Syndrome and criminality from the entirety of the human race was.

From this I draw the lesson that limited goals are a good thing. "Correct eyesight to 20/20" is a measurable, limited goal. "Make a superhuman" is such an ambiguous spec that it could be made to mean ANYTHING. People ten feet tall? People with IQs >180? Is creating such people really the best thing either for them or for society?

It also has the problem that humans are no fit judges of what does or does not constitute "human". The eugencists divided the world into two distinct camps: The Fit and the Unfit. Naturally, they put themselves in the first camp. And they put everyone who wasn't like them in the second camp. I'm not sure of all the scientific rationalization they used to put a pretty face on bigotry, but that is what it was.

I'd have a lot more respect for the discipline if there ever had been a eugenicist who would diagnose him/herself as unfit, and sterilize themselves. But to the best of my knowledge, this rarely happened.

So I've got no problem with individual families deciding what traits they want to pass on to their children. What frightens me is when people want to try to make that judgement for people other than their immediate progeny. For the reason in the above paragraph: Humans are no fit judges of the worth of other humans.

2) The other question is, so we want to not pass on traits to the next generation? What EXACTLY does that entail?

A preliminary read suggests there are two ways:

1) Embryonic screening. Examine the genes of any fertilized egg, and dispose of any whose genes do not match the desired pattern.

....

Forum rules forbid me from giving you a completely frank opinion of such a procedure.

2) Gene therapy.

This doesn't trigger my gag reflex, so long as the parents understand the risks. The risk most obvious to my mind is that we can expect some truly horrible outcomes from experimental gene therapy before we get it right.


My overall point is that all of this has been tried before, with such grotesque results that the entire concept was swept under the rug for fifty years. If there's to be any progress, we can't repeat the same stupid mistakes.

I think the first step is to concentrate on improving the lives of individual human beings at their own choice. Make enough improvements, maybe someday our descendents will become superhuman without even realizing it. As opposed to grandiose plans to uplift the human race and eradicate any trace of genes we don't want.

I don't want a hologram of me telling future generations "We meant it for the best " .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[hamishspence]

1) Embryonic screening. Examine the genes of any fertilized egg, and dispose of any whose genes do not match the desired pattern.

....

Forum rules forbid me from giving you a completely frank opinion of such a procedure.

How about examining the genes of sperm or unfertilized eggs?

[warty goblin]

How about examining the genes of sperm or unfertilized eggs?

In which case, correct me if I'm wrong, you end up looking at something rather like IFV. Which is a complete pain in the ass, and makes those undergoing it miserable.

[pendell]

In which case, correct me if I'm wrong, you end up looking at something rather like IFV. Which is a complete pain in the ass, and makes those undergoing it miserable.

At the risk of sounding utterly stupid, do you mean in-vitro fertilization (IVF)? Or is this a new acronym? My google-fu has failed me.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[warty goblin]

At the risk of sounding utterly stupid, do you mean in-vitro fertilization (IVF)? Or is this a new acronym? My google-fu has failed me.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

This is my stupid brain transposing IVF with IFV, which is an abbreviation for Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Generally these two have only tenuous relations.

[Frozen_Feet]

...eugenics...

And so, 53 posts later you stumble on the issue I alluded to here.

I've heard it said that Nazis could've happened anywhere in Europe, it was just a matter of time. And that is the reason. Once you internalize the thought that humans can be bred like mice, it leads to very nasty places fairly quick.

Eugenics were practiced in pretty much every industrialized country that had heard of Darwin and (then-recent) studies into heredicy. In quite a lot of places, eugenics programs didn't really end until long after WW2 - I think in Sweden forced sterilization of schizophrenics was still practiced as lately as the 70's.

If Nazis hadn't put a bad name on the very concept due to crimes they committed in their misguided attempts to breed a "master race", it might be eugenics would still be practiced everywhere in Europe.

But the kicker is, while Nazis had some severely misguided and unscientific views about breeding of humans, the concept is still sound. Pendell, you alluded to eugenics programs being largely unsuccesful, but that's not quite true. In Germany, schizophrenia and several other hereditary health defects are much less common than in other parts of Europe, due to Aktion T-4. People just are a wee bit touchy about talking of it, since achieving that required gassing thousands of people to death. Oh, and it would also require acknowledging that Hitler's lunatic regime achieved something, which is another touchy issue.

Due to above reasons, any succesful human(oid) breeding program should pretty much forget about trying to improve the existing population, and instead focus on breeding a sub-population with the desired traits. It would also need to be based on volunteering rather than state enforced mandates. Earlier in this thread, I outlined other conditions necessary for such program.

The funny thing is, no matter how many other ethical concerns you can tackle, you will always need a huge number of nubile healthy women to act as hired wombs, because that is the only economical way to provide enough mothers for their questionable-human offspring.

[hamishspence]

Star Trek TOS's shown both "bad" and "good" products of selective breeding programs.

"Bad"- Khan (scientists engaged in selective breeding programmes among themselves, he and his companions are the result)
"Good"- Gary Seven (aliens removed some humans from Earth, selectively bred them for thousands of years, and returned some as guardians, of which he is the latest)

Though there were later allusions to Khan having been engineered rather than bred.

[Frozen_Feet]

As I said earlier, genetic engineering really is just breeding V2.0. It's basically a faster way to achieve same results.

[Gavinfoxx]

Well, Genetic Engineering can put genes that weren't expressed in any of the species that would be capable of breeding together, rather than being limited to what is there...

[Frozen_Feet]

That is true. It might be possible to breed two species to a point where they could interbreed, or wait for a random mutation to create a comparable genetic trait in what is being bred. Both of the latter would take too much time and effort to be feasible, though.

[pendell]

But the kicker is, while Nazis had some severely misguided and unscientific views about breeding of humans, the concept is still sound. Pendell, you alluded to eugenics programs being largely unsuccesful, but that's not quite true. In Germany, schizophrenia and several other hereditary health defects are much less common than in other parts of Europe, due to Aktion T-4. People just are a wee bit touchy about talking of it, since achieving that required gassing thousands of people to death. Oh, and it would also require acknowledging that Hitler's lunatic regime achieved something, which is another touchy issue.

Where can I learn more?

It's not surprising. I'm told that some of the really twisted experiments used in , say, treating cold victims resulted in changes to survival manuals that pretty much every country uses. That doesn't mean we're suddenly okay with Dr. Mengele using those methods, and if he's still alive, we'd still hang him because despite the results the murder of human beings to achieve them is unconscionable.

Due to above reasons, any succesful human(oid) breeding program should pretty much forget about trying to improve the existing population, and instead focus on breeding a sub-population with the desired traits. It would also need to be based on volunteering rather than state enforced mandates. Earlier in this thread, I outlined other conditions necessary for such program.

Agreed.

The funny thing is, no matter how many other ethical concerns you can tackle, you will always need a huge number of nubile healthy women to act as hired wombs, because that is the only economical way to provide enough mothers for their questionable-human offspring.

What about a dating service? Put it on a web site and offer it that way. Send in your name and your genetic profile, we send you a list of matches of similar people desparately seeking someone like you. Lots of people get married or make children, we get experimental results, and because it's a subscription based they pay US for the privilege.

What if a person turns out to have such lousy genes we don't want them in the program? Then they go onto a second list which is run just like a normal dating service looking for matches on the standard dating critieria. "We're sorry we couldn't find a genetic match for you, but here's some hot hunks/gals in your area who would like to meet you."

No one who joins the service leaves a loser. Well, unless they're a registered sex offender, in which case we boot 'em fast.

Of course, we track the results from the non-program dating just as we do the program dating. They're going to be our control group for random mating which will show whether our experiments are actually successful.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Frozen_Feet]

I'm not entirely sure where you could find out more, my source was on Finnish and thus probably not too helpful to you. English Wikipedia has a long article on Aktion T4, though it does not mention any observed long-term effects of it. (It's a good read for anyone interested in topic of eugenics, by the way.) If you can read German, you could try searching the net for statistics on the matter.

But yeah, it's not exactly a secret that almost everything we know about treating hypotermia is legacy of Nazi human experiments, let alone what amounts of various substances count as "lethal dose" for humans.

Your idea of a dating service is interesting. It's funny to know that certain ethic minorities have implemented such services already. It would need state backing, though, because for such project we'd really love to have detailed medical and criminal records of the participants.

[Carry2]

The funny thing is, no matter how many other ethical concerns you can tackle, you will always need a huge number of nubile healthy women to act as hired wombs, because that is the only economical way to provide enough mothers for their questionable-human offspring.

I realise I haven't chimed in for a while, but just a brief comment for the moment: Finding volunteers for this procedure will, IMHO, not remotely be a problem. One of my main arguments during this thread has been that the benefits of gene tailoring will eventually become so overwhelming (on a price/performance basis) that it will be extraordinarily difficult to prevent prospective parents from seeking out the service. (In the same sense that it has been extraordinarily difficult to stamp out illegal abortions and the black market organ trade.)

Women already pay good money for embryonic screening and IVF procedures. The rest is a matter of time.


Also, on the general subject of environmental vs. hereditary factors- while I don't think I've said anything technically inaccurate on the subject, and it is fair to point out that adult IQ is more genetic than not, personality seems to be much closer to a 50/50 split (possibly slightly in favour of environment.) So I don't want to give the impression that genes are the only significant factor at play. There's an old twin study on the subject here, but it's held up reasonably well:

[RPGuru1331]

1) The original eugenics went fairly quickly from a voluntary program to involuntary sterilization and euthanasia. Why?

I'm guessing it's because the people in charge were out to save the human race *as a whole*. Saving one person from, say, Down's Syndrome wasn't on the menu. Eliminating Down's Syndrome and criminality from the entirety of the human race was.

You guessed... poorly. Eugenics started bad, and got worse, because it was primarily a fancy way to dress up various forms of hatred. Some people just had better genes, after all. It didn't really start from an admirable goal, because from the start, it was ex post facto justifications to treat the poor, or non-white people, or whatever, like human garbage.

I'd have a lot more respect for the discipline if there ever had been a eugenicist who would diagnose him/herself as unfit, and sterilize themselves. But to the best of my knowledge, this rarely happened.

It could have happened all the time and it still wouldn't have changed that they were there to assuage the powerful and kick the powerless. You would have needed to see well-to-do white people routinely be told they were unfit for this to perhaps merit concern, and especially, the poor and non-white routinely found to be fit. The kind of unabashed look that lead I believe it was Nash say that we were stupid to pretend women couldn't do math, because he watched some women knit and could clearly see the same skills used to do geometry and algebra at work when uneducated people knit.

I realise I haven't chimed in for a while, but just a brief comment for the moment: Finding volunteers for this procedure will, IMHO, not remotely be a problem.

Yeah don't worry nobody's missed your uninformed offerings, like this one. You do realize that a few rich women having their less-than-2-children voluntarily does not remotely make for a proper sample size for a study, right? No, of course not, that would mean understanding science as it's actually done.

Oh, and you forgot that as a matter of ethics, it's not just the women who matter, but their kids. I'd tell you to read about on what grounds IRBs approve things, but frankly, that should be way down on your remedial reading list.

and it is fair to point out that adult IQ is more genetic than not,

No, it's more economic than not. It's still biased towards middle and upper class cultural markers, on a wide scale, because it's not actually real.

Your idea of a dating service is interesting. It's funny to know that certain ethic minorities have implemented such services already.

...and you have no idea why, huh?

But the kicker is, while Nazis had some severely misguided and unscientific views about breeding of humans, the concept is still sound. Pendell, you alluded to eugenics programs being largely unsuccesful, but that's not quite true. In Germany, schizophrenia and several other hereditary health defects are much less common than in other parts of Europe, due to Aktion T-4. People just are a wee bit touchy about talking of it, since achieving that required gassing thousands of people to death. Oh, and it would also require acknowledging that Hitler's lunatic regime achieved something, which is another touchy issue.

It accomplished murder on bigotted grounds, that achieved some end that some people who had nothing to do with it say is positive; this is by no means a unique accomplishment, and but for forum rules I could give you a non-comprehensive list of equally appalling 'accomplishments' that would be pages long, entirely off the top of my head. If you are feeling the need to defend a pogrom, reconsider your life.

Well, Genetic Engineering can put genes that weren't expressed in any of the species that would be capable of breeding together, rather than being limited to what is there...

...if it works as advertised, and there's no real reason to think it will yet, yes.

[Teron]

Where can I learn more?

It's not surprising. I'm told that some of the really twisted experiments used in , say, treating cold victims resulted in changes to survival manuals that pretty much every country uses. That doesn't mean we're suddenly okay with Dr. Mengele using those methods, and if he's still alive, we'd still hang him because despite the results the murder of human beings to achieve them is unconscionable.




Agreed.



What about a dating service? Put it on a web site and offer it that way. Send in your name and your genetic profile, we send you a list of matches of similar people desparately seeking someone like you. Lots of people get married or make children, we get experimental results, and because it's a subscription based they pay US for the privilege.

What if a person turns out to have such lousy genes we don't want them in the program? Then they go onto a second list which is run just like a normal dating service looking for matches on the standard dating critieria. "We're sorry we couldn't find a genetic match for you, but here's some hot hunks/gals in your area who would like to meet you."

No one who joins the service leaves a loser. Well, unless they're a registered sex offender, in which case we boot 'em fast.

Of course, we track the results from the non-program dating just as we do the program dating. They're going to be our control group for random mating which will show whether our experiments are actually successful.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Quite aside from any moral issues, using the leftover people with "lousy genes" as a control after picking out the desirable ones is really, really bad science.

[Gavinfoxx]

...if it works as advertised, and there's no real reason to think it will yet, yes.

Uhm, it has already done this?? Seriously?? Students splice genes into things to create something that doesn't exist all the time. That's why you have a version of E. Coli lab cultures (the safe, non deadly ones), that smell like banana??

[SlyGuyMcFly]

Uhm, it has already done this?? Seriously?? Students splice genes into things to create something that doesn't exist all the time. That's why you have a version of E. Coli lab cultures (the safe, non deadly ones), that smell like banana??

Yeah. In E. frikkin' Coli.

The step up to humans is like trying to build build a space shuttle because, hey, you can put together a Kinder Egg toy.


And that's probably an understatement.

[Gavinfoxx]

You know that there are a WHOLE TON of strains of E.Coli, and you can find some of the safe ones in just about any biology lab ever??

And also, they already have made glowing pets and stuff... you do know that, right?

[RPGuru1331]

modifying chemical creation structures we already know about to produce different chemicals is a great parlor trick, but isn't actually equivalent to the advanced understanding of genetics that is needed to do pretty much anything that is discussed in 'designer baby' memes. Unless that's solely 'glow like a glowstick', and frankly any parent who would want that should be barred from it on grounds of making their child a frickin' magnet for ridicule.

[pendell]

Quite aside from any moral issues, using the leftover people with "lousy genes" as a control after picking out the desirable ones is really, really bad science.

How so? My thought is, if the "rejects" produce better children then the picked people, that would be an extremely valuable clue that we don't know what we're doing .

As towards ethical concerns -- to me, the fundamental ethical concern is to what extent someone or something is being harmed.

The people who are picked for the selection program are meeting someone who may prove to be a soul mate and have a good probability of those same genes in their offspring.

The people who are NOT picked for the selection program are ALSO meeting someone who may be a soul mate, it's just that they're the same random humanity as you would meet in any dating service. So these participants also benefit and are not harmed.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the "random" people may actually wind up doing better from the program than the selected people. Because human love and human achievement is more than the sum of our genes.

After all, the atomic bomb was invented in the US first because it had the help of many scientists who had escaped from Germany because they were considered "unfit". Which gives a pretty clear indication that we didn't have the foggiest idea what "fit" meant in the 1930s. I've seen no indication that we know much more now than we did then.

I don't think a controlled experiment such as the one I propose will give us the answers. But it will at least put us on the track of starting to ask the right questions. If we're willing to accept them.

Respectfully,

Brian P.