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When genetic modification of humans is discussed, it is typically in the context of individual modification/augmentation. Whether in early embryonic stages or on fully developed people via gene therapy techniques, the goal is normally to modify outcomes for the specific individual in question.
Probably the reason we don’t discuss society-wide modification much (except in the context of huxly-esque dystopias) is that its proximity to eugenics makes it unpalatable to western society’s current ethics framework. But thinking in the longer term, I find it highly unlikely that future societies wouldn’t utilize this tool given the potential advantages it offers, especially in terms of group cohesion. This of course comes with the caveat that modeling the large scale implications of a small genetic change would be next to impossible. There would likely have to be a lot of trial and error, with some of the errors being quite horrific.
So in this context, I was thinking about what we could potentially modify that would have an out-sized impact on society with relatively little change on humans’ current genetic makeup. And the answer that seemed the most interesting is to modify the rate at which men are born relative to women. What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?). There are examples where there are fewer women than men (ex china), but I’ve struggled to find the opposite. Also, most scientific literature about “gender imbalances” is mostly just ideological fluff.
So anyway, the question I guess is what does this look like, and does it actually lead to a more stable/cohesive society.
Arguments in favor:
Arguments against:
-Susceptibility to military conquest by external groups with more balanced gender rations assuming this isn’t implemented everywhere.
Edit: Formatting
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Let’s say we are in a Cold War with with China. In order to defeat the US they begin with their ideal Chinese man but then change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ. These guys crush the US. But then the super humans end ruling China too. And they are so modified they are more different from Han Chinese than European Americans.
You don’t really need War for this timeline as simply doing it in peace time would end up creating humanoids completely different to current humans and basically a mass extinction even or at a minimum making human existence void of any meaning a second tier species watched over by their better.
Same thing of course applies to AI.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
I've read it. I recall liking it. It is very obscure, right?
I'm not certain how popular it is, but I've seen it come up in a few contexts in the circles I travel in. People around here will cite obscure Larry Niven books fairly frequently ('On the gripping hand'...thankfully the much more crass 'Rape my lizard!' from the same novel never caught on), so I thought there were decent odds that Beggars in Spain was also well known. Particularly given the themes of transhumanism.
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Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that? We were laughably far from good image-gen AI 5 years ago. And genetic augmentation is a particularly ethics-beholden field. We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways, it's not like FTL travel where we've got no good approach.
How many genes can it change? If we want to change a thousand of genes (because e.g. our utility function asks for it) and have no faulty changes in unintended genes, can it deliver that?
If someone wants to make a genetically modified plant, they can just try and change and just discard if edits were faulty, with humans we want reliable ones.
It can't change thousands of genes but it does demonstrate that it's possible to change genes, that presumably there are other ways to change many genes reliably. It's like how the first powered flight makes helicopters, jump-jets, jet-packs and autogyros much more plausible.
And hey, we're talking about a world where 'the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned'. We can't even imagine how rapid development would be, it'd be a different paradigm.
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It's true, predicting the future is a fool's game and betting against progress doubly so. We'll never be able to resolve our bet given the near certain continued existence of the FDA.
That being said:
Say you want to use CRISPR to...I don't know, increase the size of your gut to accommodate the caloric needs of the giant brain your 250 IQ Chinese supersoldier is going to have. There is no 'gut size' gene that you can just augment the expression of, there are massive, interlocking transcriptional networks who need to be turned on at the right times and in the right cell types. This is likely to be far beyond our capability to understand ever, so the only reasonable path forward is building an AI oracle to understand it for us. It's either going to 1) Need monstrous datasets that we probably can't generate in a reasonable way yet 2) Molecular dynamics simulation is impossibly computationally expensive, so figure out some other abstracted simulation method 3) ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.
There is no 'gut size' gene; there are dozens if not hundreds of genes you would need to alter, and moreover, alter in ways that are temporally, spatially and functionally correct. CRISPR just isn't capable of doing that with the precision or reliability you'd need; it's great at knocking out 1 to a handful of genes, mediocre-to-bad at activating genes, and mediocre at silencing genes - and these latter two functions are transient, so you'd need to find a way to keep expressing the CRISPR and gRNA. Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need.
Delivery to somatic tissues isn't currently possible in a meaningful way, although I'm optimistic we might actually solve this in a reasonable timescale. And I suppose you'd want to edit germline cells regardless, but I thought I'd point it out.
I'm most pessimistic about (1), and moreover a decided lack of interest in TPTB (to be clear, the academic establishment. I doubt the deep state cares overmuch) in understanding these systems in a way that we could build or intelligently edit them ourselves. Godlike AI is the wildcard, but at least so far, all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers. And Eliezer tells me we're all dead in that scenario anyways, no?
I'm not a developmental biologist and only tangentially touching on human genetics so I wouldn't say this is authoritative. But that's been my impression over the last decade or so.
A whole mountain range of skulls of the failed experiments when tweaking genes for "well, let's try this and see if it works"/"oh no, it didn't, well fire up batch of embryos number one thousand and let's go again!" and breeding programmes and all the horrors that cutting-edge tech and no ethical oversight will permit. Morals are for losers, baby, nature is red in tooth and claw, we ain't getting 250 IQ without breaking a hatchery's worth of eggs, and they're just clumps of cells that we permitted to go all the way through gestation anyhoo. Not like they're people or anything.
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Why do we need such intensive transformations? We have large populations of very smart people, large populations of very physically capable people. We can sequence genes easily, see which ones are associated with intelligence and physical performance. 250 IQ might be a 1 in a hundred billion genius but still basically possible from blind chance. All we'd be doing is fixing the dice to get an impossibly rare natural creation. Maybe he'd be pretty hungry but we have plenty of calories.
I bet there'd be a bunch of problems with mental illness, you'd need to refine it with time and experience. I know it's more complicated than 'make a statistical model of what genes the smartest people are most likely to have and tick the boxes' but we'd have time for trial and error. Forty years is multiple gamechangers worth of time.
As for how one would edit those genes, I don't know. Technology advanced quickly in the last forty years, we didn't have anything like CRISPR forty years ago. We couldn't even sequence human genes.
Come on, it can do more than that. I got it to write some decent Top Gear fanfiction. Google had theirs doing protein folding, which is vaguely relevant.
Even more relevant: https://nyulangone.org/news/new-artificial-intelligence-tool-makes-speedy-gene-editing-possible
Not perfect but surely proof AI is useful on this front?
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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)
No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.
We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.
You can just take Von Neumann's genome and eliminate very rare variants (which are usually deleterous which is why they are rare), not even him was free from it (early cancer death).
Maybe that gets him 5 IQ points, certainly not 100. Or very likely that he was selected as one of the smartest out of billions people means that there's just less juice to squeeze out of that.
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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
Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.
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
Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.
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Those eggs are immature. I'm not a developmental biologist, but would you expect in vitro maturation protocols to work on eggs forcibly harvested from a 20 week old fetus?
I'm also not confident that there's enough genetic diversity starting from one person to get a true 1 in a billion; won't there be a bunch of alleles where neither parent has what you want? I admit that this may be a nonissue if most of the alleles you want are relatively common, I don't have a good handle on the numbers here.
Put it a different way - Do any of us have a 1 in a billion chance of giving birth to Shaq? I would tentatively guess no, modulo some genetic conditions like acromegaly. Do you have evidence that this is true?
But what then? You have one embryo. Somatic cloning? Things are getting pretty complicated my man.
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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