Thank you for the feedback. I wish people who down voted would have commented why.
I was surprised that the article was at first upvoted but then then the balance changed later on. While not very relevant to the topic of this discussion this honestly feeds my curiosity and has had a nice side effect of motivating me to spend a few more hours working on the two projects I have that will hopefully give me (and perhaps the community) some solid empirical data about karma mining and dynamics.
1) It is extremely speculative.
Seems a valid reason to downvote.
2) The post makes a variety of implicit assumptions about what genetic modifications will and will not be possible.
All of the points described seem to me achievable just by using existent human genetic variation. However I didn’t specifically speculate on what is or isn’t possible. I simply tried to think of what seemed most probable people would desire and gravitate too.
3) The post makes assumptions based on current genetic hypotheses that don’t have strong data. In particular, while there is some evidence that the Tay-Sachs allele has benefits in the heterozygous case, the evidence is still weak.
Tay-Scahs was used as a example of the kind of trade off people might need to consider. Small risk of very bad disease that brings emotional suffering versus a likley advantage. The example itself can be changed to something else, but the idea that such trade off’s aren’t present in our genome would require a …. novell argument. It also seemed dust speck games where popular here.
4) The post is vaguely transhumanist yet not connected to rationality.
For this reason I posted it in the discussion section.
As a downvoter I thought I’d make it clear why I did so. The article is extremely confusingly written, with a failure to establish what exactly it is saying, claiming to be a comparison between natural selection and genetic engineering but then switching to a list of bulleted predictions which use quite technical language without much explanation other than the occasional wiki link.
For example
“Energy requirements will be relaxed. The cost benefit comparison was much more important even in our very recent evolutionary past as is attested by say different maturation rates (age of menarche, average pregnancy length, dental and bone development, ect.) between different groups, than it will likley be in the near or perhaps medium view. After all to people likley to reproduce primarily by in vitro fertilisation, guaranteeing their child a caloric intake larger than norm by say 50% will not be a major expense.”
What exactly are you saying here? I actually wrote out a guess but I still do not know.
First of thank you very much for the criticism and response :)
Now I’ll try my best to use as little “technical language” as possible:
Food is cheap and will remain relatively cheap for humans who are likley to have most of their kids genetically enhanced. This is very different from our ancestral environment or even the environment a few centuries ago. Modifications that do desirable things but mean you can’t handle starving or prolonged malnutrition as well as a unmodified human or that you perhaps digest food slightly less efficiently or that you perhaps just simply have a faster metabolism and need to eat more are not likley to be things that parents will shun (except perhaps those with a “survivalist” mindset, but I think we’ll see few of those).
Now the list of features I first used (age of menarche, average pregnancy length, dental and bone development, ect.), is a list of features that are tied closely to the fact that brain development takes priority and that development needs to be paced. Some of these could be speed up with no ill effect on the development of the expensive brain by just upping the calorie and nutrient requirements of the organism.
Children being athletic and outpacing their peers in development seem things parents might want (even today some parents wait a extra year before enrolling their kids in school to basically ensure they have a edge in social interactions, imagine being able to buy the same physical advantage but not having to wait that extra year).
Well the proposed Tay-Sachs benefit is an example of a trade-off that probably isn’t present in our genome to as large an extent as was supposed during the hey day of the overdominance hypothesis. For heterozygote advantages to be a serious ethical issue would require the advantages they conferred to be difficult to obtain by other means, IQ I can see, but anyone rich enough to afford a designer baby probably isn’t going to bother giving it a sickle cell allele.
Thank you for the feedback. I wish people who down voted would have commented why.
I was surprised that the article was at first upvoted but then then the balance changed later on. While not very relevant to the topic of this discussion this honestly feeds my curiosity and has had a nice side effect of motivating me to spend a few more hours working on the two projects I have that will hopefully give me (and perhaps the community) some solid empirical data about karma mining and dynamics.
Seems a valid reason to downvote.
All of the points described seem to me achievable just by using existent human genetic variation. However I didn’t specifically speculate on what is or isn’t possible. I simply tried to think of what seemed most probable people would desire and gravitate too.
Tay-Scahs was used as a example of the kind of trade off people might need to consider. Small risk of very bad disease that brings emotional suffering versus a likley advantage. The example itself can be changed to something else, but the idea that such trade off’s aren’t present in our genome would require a …. novell argument. It also seemed dust speck games where popular here.
For this reason I posted it in the discussion section.
As a downvoter I thought I’d make it clear why I did so. The article is extremely confusingly written, with a failure to establish what exactly it is saying, claiming to be a comparison between natural selection and genetic engineering but then switching to a list of bulleted predictions which use quite technical language without much explanation other than the occasional wiki link.
For example
“Energy requirements will be relaxed. The cost benefit comparison was much more important even in our very recent evolutionary past as is attested by say different maturation rates (age of menarche, average pregnancy length, dental and bone development, ect.) between different groups, than it will likley be in the near or perhaps medium view. After all to people likley to reproduce primarily by in vitro fertilisation, guaranteeing their child a caloric intake larger than norm by say 50% will not be a major expense.”
What exactly are you saying here? I actually wrote out a guess but I still do not know.
First of thank you very much for the criticism and response :)
Now I’ll try my best to use as little “technical language” as possible:
Food is cheap and will remain relatively cheap for humans who are likley to have most of their kids genetically enhanced. This is very different from our ancestral environment or even the environment a few centuries ago. Modifications that do desirable things but mean you can’t handle starving or prolonged malnutrition as well as a unmodified human or that you perhaps digest food slightly less efficiently or that you perhaps just simply have a faster metabolism and need to eat more are not likley to be things that parents will shun (except perhaps those with a “survivalist” mindset, but I think we’ll see few of those).
Now the list of features I first used (age of menarche, average pregnancy length, dental and bone development, ect.), is a list of features that are tied closely to the fact that brain development takes priority and that development needs to be paced. Some of these could be speed up with no ill effect on the development of the expensive brain by just upping the calorie and nutrient requirements of the organism.
Children being athletic and outpacing their peers in development seem things parents might want (even today some parents wait a extra year before enrolling their kids in school to basically ensure they have a edge in social interactions, imagine being able to buy the same physical advantage but not having to wait that extra year).
Well the proposed Tay-Sachs benefit is an example of a trade-off that probably isn’t present in our genome to as large an extent as was supposed during the hey day of the overdominance hypothesis. For heterozygote advantages to be a serious ethical issue would require the advantages they conferred to be difficult to obtain by other means, IQ I can see, but anyone rich enough to afford a designer baby probably isn’t going to bother giving it a sickle cell allele.