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1mo ago
You don't need to know how intelligence works, you just need to sequence enough people in genome wide association studies, build a polygenic score and then run it
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1mo ago
250 IQ is 10 standard deviations from mean IQ 100, SD=15
If we have 1000 offspring per generation via egg harvesting embryos, taking the top 1% (10) they should be 2.33 SD from the mean
With 80% heritability, response to selection per generation is 1.86 SD
Thus it will take 5.36 (6) generations of selective breeding to get 250IQ with 1000 offspring per generation
Or 6 * 20 weeks = 2.3 years
If egg/sperm are from +3 SD donors, it's 3.76 (4) generations, or 1.53 years
Please consider donating towards my volcano lair lab on Kickstarter
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1mo ago
Oocyte in vitro maturation (IVM) is a thing. I am not sure if anyone has used it on foetal eggs, but it is likely possible.
You aren't restricted to the original stock you can introduce new sperm each generation
To scale it up, you could potentially encourage eggs to divide (like identical twins) then sequence one, and if its the one you want, keep splitting
I think these things are not too hard to solve, you just need time and money, and the will (and lack of ethical restraint)
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1mo ago
We can get freakish results via artificial selection, but yes we hit limits, eg greyhounds are only like 30% faster than wolves.
But look at corn vs teosinte, or milk yields per cow doubling in the last 50 years... or von Neumann in 1000 years from a hybrid of Middle easterners and Europeans...
I think we could make IQ tests that went further than the current highest scores ie reverse digit span tests, reaction times etc. If you can reliably get the same answers as someone with 160 IQ but faster... you're smarter than them
But yeah the real proof would be accomplishment, IQ is just the best measure we have for intelligence and the goal would be better output eg important original research etc
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1mo ago
EA correlates with IQ, and is the best we have in many cases
EA takes seconds to fill out on a form, so there are millions of genotyped samples and thus good GWASs
IQ is harder to obtain, and is controversial so nobody wants to fund it, so nowhere near as many samples
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1mo ago
You can't take half the components of a Ferarri and half the components of a Ford pickup, mix them together and have a working car. The piston of one wouldn't fit in the cylinder of the other.
But you can mix the genomes of males and females of the same species.
Cars have very few components so the variation is eg swapping out this brand of muffler for another one - they must all fit together. Genetic variation is extremely small (modifying less than a billionth of the system) - and mostly independent of other variation.
Imagine a car with 10,000 tunable components, that can vary without breaking the machine (life is robust to variation)
There are 8 billion cars, almost completely stock. Some have a few parts well tuned, and are fast, some have a few parts detuned and are slow
The fastest cars have 500 components perfectly tuned and are 4 or 5 standard deviations faster
What I'm saying is we look at millions of cars tuning matched to speed. We use this to work out what the best tuning is, then we select for that, making a car that uses existing components, but the combination has never existed before naturally.
We KNOW we can rapidly selectively breed animals that vary enormously from the natural stock. Look at racehorses, dogs, milk production in cows, the giant extremely fast growing chickens we eat today that lay eggs at phenomenal rates etc etc
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1mo ago
What matters most
Most work in human genetics is finding the cause of genetic disease (inherited and cancer)
In all western countries I can think of, they do prenatal screening tests, the results of which are used to kill the genetically less fit.
What is this if not government eugenics program that almost all scientists support? High 90% of people terminate down syndrome foetuses upon positive result.
In polls, most westerners are ok with termination to stop disease, just not ok with anything that looks like making super babies
Though of course, if you look at sperm donation stats I am sure the average chosen donor is above average IQ, height, attractiveness etc
Great post.
A culture war angle you didn't touch on was admixture with white Australians.
You are either aboriginal or not, ie 1/16 counts the same as 100%.
Nature or nurture, whites outperform aboriginals, thus the indigenous medical school scholarship students all look like this:
I would be willing to bet most pure blooded Aboriginals are most concerned about better food, health and shelter while the 1/16th seem to be fighting hardest to get the government to hand out cushy white collar jobs - this looks to be what the voice is to me.
It is totally unacceptable in polite company to point out how white some of these activist / scholarship recipients / welcome to country paid performers etc look
I am a geneticist - nobody talks about selectively breeding human IQ because it gives you bad press, your uni may fire you and you will no longer get any grants.
But humans are just animals, and IQ is just a normally distributed polygenic trait... so ask them about whether it would be possible to say breed +5SD weight or wing size in fruit flies or mice length and they will say "of course"
The rapid turn around of generations via embryonic eggs is science fiction, but it's much closer to "geostationary sattelite" than "warp drive".
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10mo ago
Jesus did not preach kin selection, but the opposite:
Luke 14:12-14 New International Version
Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid.
But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous
Gametes are used in biology because it works across species, while chromosomes or morphology don't.
The two stable equilibria are large cells (eggs, high investment) or small cells (sperm, cheap and mobile). There are no in between sized cells.
All differences in the sexes stem from this fundamental point. It is the reason for sex organs being the way they are. It is why female mammals are the ones who get pregnant and produce milk (they are the sex who invests more)
Different sized cells lead to different life and reproductive strategies, which lead to different morphologies, in body and mind.
Morphology follows from cell size, to focus on human morphology is to lose the perspective that we are just one of many animal forms building on binary gametes.
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5mo ago
You would expect the Asian norm of kids looking after you in retirement vs Western welfare state would lead to them having higher birthrates than us, but those societies have some of the lowest TFRs on earth.
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11mo ago
Chat GPT-4 gets 88th percentile on the LSAT vs 40th for Chat GPT-3
If you are using the free version it's the equivalent of a D student, pay $20 to get an A student.
Your professor used to be right when he said the cutting edge AI model wasn't that good for law, but AI moves so fast he is now wrong
Jesus fathered no children. His most fervent followers, like monks and nuns took it literally and worked to help the poor and needy, neglecting to have families of their own.
Jesus and his followers didn't expect many generations to come after them, and humans to colonise the galaxy... they expected an apocalypse, and soon.
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10mo ago
LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act
An article on how it changed how the country is governed:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
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6mo ago
And life years lost.
Perhaps greatest is loss of potential offspring. Instead of grandchildren a parent has to bury their kid and see their line end
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8mo ago
He believes wokeness is downstream from the civil rights act.
Seems plausible, though I haven't seen comparisons of legislation vs wokeness in other similar Anglo countries like Canada and Australia who have frequent first nations prayers before government meetings.
That he would gamble and eventually lose was foreshadowed here
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/
COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?
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11mo ago
Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.
Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.
You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.
There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?
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1yr ago
Invest in public companies likely to do well with AI. There is the BOTZ ETF, obvious plays like Nvidia etc. I wouldn't rely on some things appreciating in value, robots or future ruling classes may not be sentimental
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1yr ago
Many gender norms are amplifying existing sex differences. Eg men are naturally hairier than women, shaving exagerates this
With no ethics, and a big budget you could go very fast.
Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.
In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)
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