@revcomp's banner p

revcomp


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 October 17 21:21:03 UTC

				

User ID: 1681

revcomp


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 17 21:21:03 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1681

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

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

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

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".

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

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

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

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)

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)