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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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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

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".

Curious. Why people do genetics research at all if it's prohibited where it matters the most, or "EA PGS explains 4% of variance"? Do (some) geneticists secretly hold politically incorrect opinions?

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

Do you think there are alleles than benefit individual's intelligence when they are found in their mother but not themselves?

Thanks, but this is for EA, not IQ. I was curious about better prenatal environment for better IQ rather than helping child get degrees.

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