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Genetics is just really complicated. It is not at all simple like the 'blue eye gene recessive, brown eye gene dominant' charts you might have studied in school. It is not designed to be comprehensible, it's a giant mess that somehow works most of the time.
Why don't everyone's kids look like models? Why are some people born retarded goblin-creatures with gruesome, deformed faces? Why are people dying of old age? Because we don't have a good understanding of genetics, because it's just very difficult. Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.
Not to mention that measuring intelligence is complicated, whether it's people or AI. Intelligence is a vibe, a fuzzy, qualitative thing. You can tell the difference between smart and dumb, that is immediately obvious. But quantifying it is very hard.
It is completely understandable for the genetic basis of intelligence to be very murky and unclear. Meanwhile, heritability is possibly the oldest branch of biology. Animals were being bred millennia ago, we know it works, few things have a stronger basis in fact.
See I very much agree with both of these points. What I resent is scienctism salesmen claiming that we have cracked the code and are about to figure out how to print designer babies on command.
You can sort of have designer babies
Just pick your mates carefully! Ideally for multiple generations.
At just 2 children per generation, you'd have 32 great-great-great-grandchildren to choose from!
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Nobody is saying that. Nobody can even alter fifty places in the genome safely today, certainly not in a human embryo.
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Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui
Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.
Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!
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