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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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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.

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.

Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that

well if you somehow get established breed of sperm and eggcells that are 10-20% better than the best, wouldn't be that accomplishment by itself? You can have population of high IQ humans that can procreate naturally and their regression to mean is not to 100 or 105 but 160. Good?

Yes I agree that it would be good to do that, and have made many posts to that effect. Although we don't even need embryo selection for that since we can already identify smart parents, it's useful.

It's possible to study nonlinearity... though of course you are right, it's difficult and one of problems here that due to ethics problem nobody gets dataset on million IQ - genome pairs (we need to oversample at edges of distribution too)

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

We KNOW we can rapidly selectively breed animals that vary enormously from the natural stock.

Yes, that involves actually growing these animals to adults and testing them, but not hoping that our linear regression (19th century math) PGI is true.

Your position here is not the mainstream one, if you asked a hundred researchers in genetics if they thought your method could reach 250 IQ they would disagree. I was trying to do the sort of broad explanatory analogy we do a lot of here because it's a general interest place, but there are technical reasons why you're wrong. If you want to convince anyone, you should use rhetoric that acknowledges you're in an unfavored position.

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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What if we asked them 'how fast we could genetically engineer 300 IQ humans if genetics budgets were >10% from military spending"?

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Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

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?

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

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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