Can We Simulate Meiosis to Create Digital Gametes — and Are the Results Your Biological Offspring?
Let’s imagine a world where reproduction has gone fully digital.
We already know that a human genome can be sequenced, stored, and simulated. Given a phased genome (with parental haplotypes separated), it’s trivial to simulate meiosis computationally: apply a realistic recombination map, sample crossover points, recombine haplotypes — voilà, a digital gamete.
Now take two such gametes — perhaps both from you, perhaps from different individuals — and combine them. The result is a new diploid genome, a digital zygote.
You can do this a million times in a second. You can apply filters, polygenic scores, even “genetic aesthetics” heuristics. Biological evolution becomes Monte Carlo simulation on a cloud instance.
So here’s the philosophical question:
If that digital zygote’s genome could, in principle, be synthesized into DNA and placed in a viable embryo someday…
If a genetic test would recognize it as your child…
If it shares half of your alleles, just as any biological offspring would…
Then — is it your biological child already?
Personally, I think this might be the most down-to-earth way for life to continue into the cyber age.
Consciousness uploading, memory replication, digital twins — all of them run into the same philosophical wall:
when a copy wakes up, who is it really?
But digital gametes don’t have that problem.
Their outcome isn’t “another you” — it’s simply your offspring.
They follow the same biological logic that nature already wrote: recombination, variation, inheritance.
Minor critique but I’m pretty sure this is inbreeding at worst and a clone at best which is not really what you seem to be after.
As to the title, I would give a naive “yes” and would broadly be in support of this idea, technical limitations aside of course. That said, if we actually had this level of control I feel like we could probably explicitly select the best genes from both parents and not mess around with the randomization.
Regarding the case where both “digital gametes” originate from the same one, I think it can reasonably be viewed as a digital analog of parthenogenesis that already exists across biology, from lizards and sharks to certain birds.
There’s another interesting question related to this one which has to do with creating a gene edited clone of yourself.
If we can make an embryo from one of your stem cells, we could potentially do substantial editing of it to enhance it in various ways (perhaps to reduce disease risk or increase intelligence).
How many edits would one need to make before it is no longer really a clone of you?
What if instead we grew a genetically enhanced replacement body for you with no knee issues and better cardiovascular performance? Are you still you with a new body?
There are all kinds of interesting questions that arise with sufficiently powerful biotech. Most people don’t spend much time thining about them because the tech to make them relevant is a ways off.
Hijacking this to pick your brain. Do you think head transplants on to repeatedly cloned bodies could work as life extension? Even without genetic improvements to increase longevity, I can imagine switching bodies every 20-50 years becoming mundane with nearly modern surgical techniques provided we can reconnect the nervous system. Related to this, do you think parabiosis would work without all the body switching? I don’t know if this is in your wheelhouse exactly but you mentioned mentioned a replacement body and this has been on my mind for a while.
Yes, I think head transplants could extend lifespan pretty significantly if you can do them safely (they’re currently super dangerous), but I don’t think it would extend lifespan indefinitely. The brain itself ages, so unless you have a means of gradually replacing brain tissue a la Jean Hebert, you’re not going to get to indefinite lifespan extension.
I mean… would you WANT your circulatory system hooked up to that of someone else? Sounds gross, weird and extremely inconvenient to me, even if you’re the one benefitting.
I can see blood transfusions if you can make artificial blood. But I can’t see parabiosis ever being a thing unless it’s in some exceptional circumstances.
I think the big question about head transplants for me is how it interacts with the process of aging, given that body systems are heavily intercorrelated and damage in one system will damage other systems (and vice versa with healing).
Intuitively, I would expect it to work statistically in one of two ways. In the pessimistic case, the brain keeps aging on the normal Gompertz schedule, and even a perfect head transplant can never buy you more than a decade or two before any of your head-located diseases kill you; it corresponds to shifting the aging mortality spike down somewhat, but it is still going to spike soon. (In this scenario, the trauma and cost of a head transplant might rule it out for a lot of elderly people: you might die on the operating table or afterwards, and it doesn’t buy you much time.) In the optimistic case, the near-reset of the body to the pink of youth will eliminate all of the aging acceleration from the rest of the aging body and heal the brain and by changing the exponent, potentially buy you drastic increases in lifespan by flattening the spike, and 50 or 100 years might suddenly be statistically plausible. At which point you might as well consider it an indefinite lifespan extension because who knows where medical technology will be in 100+ years?
It’s not that I want to be fully conjoined with another person, so much as I might prefer that to death in the medium term to get me over the hump to longevity escape velocity. Also, I kind of always imagined it more like a dialysis machine. We don’t grow a whole person so much as a big pile of organs sans brain that is genetically you (or just compatible enough to not cause rejection issues) and get hooked up to that for a while. Maybe medically induce a coma for a few months out of the year, maybe it will be quick and easy to connect/disconnect and you can be plugged in while sleeping or doing desk work. People always object to my life support clone/flesh pile idea but again, better than dying imo.