What is up with these comments? State sponsored behavior modifications? Eugenics? Public propaganda while hiding some sinister truth? China isn't some kind of dystopian conspiracy-laden techno-thriller enemy state. The team simply wanted to sneak this experiment past medical practice laws and scientific ethics -- they probably would have been fined and punished in a similar fashion have they done it in the U.S or Europe.
A lot of it comes down to appearances it seems like. For awhile a year or two ago there were articles coming out about how some American scientists would do difficult to get approved work done in South America. If rules aren't universal then the global system just incentives skirting regulations to keep up with less inhibited peers.
It will be interesting to see if the babies grow up with any side affects from the editing. DNA is hugely complex and changing some elements of it could easily effect other parts (I imagine).
Very unlikely. For a conception happening from people around 30 years, they will be passing 20 to 30 thousand DNA mutations to their offspring, and around 100-150 genetic mutations.
Statistically cas9 is barely worse than just be born to a late parent.
>Statistically cas9 is barely worse than just be born to a late parent.
Depends on what's being mutated. It seems likely that 1. random mutations with catastrophic outcome would be negatively selected for evolutionary, 2. Humans try to meddle with genes that may be disproportionately important.
So I'd put the risk of gene editing quite a bit higher.
Interesting. I still roll to disbelieve on China shunning human enhancement. The gains are just too great, the fruit too low hanging. Several standard deviation increases in polygenic traits are on the table, including the most important economic trait, intellectual ability: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Given China’s almost unique state capacity to think long term, history of eugenic policies in sport, an ironically less Lysenkoist population than America, and a cultural focus on educational achievement and competition, this seems overdetermined.
In fact, animal breeders are getting very keen on iterated embryo selection. So the technology will get investment even in environments where it is illegal for humans.
We live in interesting times. Even a 2 standard deviation increase would allow a small population to produce the vast majority of genius-level intellects. 2 standard deviations is on the way low end of what iterated embryo selection offers. Should we find the causal variants, direct editing offers vastly more.
A world-wide ban on this technology is not on the table. Plan accordingly.
Well, if human gene editing really would work, than china (and others) would not only select for intellect, but also for obedience. Which is scary.
Apart from that I do believe, that in the future human gene editing makes sense. Once it is actually understood.
(until then volunteers are allright with me, but experimenting with babys ... is a bit off)
Because we are successfully eliminating natural selection in various ways. But evolving works naturally through selection. Degeneration would be the long term effect, unless we find other ways. And improving our genes as we see fit ... seems to be a solution.
There was recently a story about a "Paean to Alpha Centauri", so I'll leave you with an appropriate quote:
"My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?"
- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
I have no idea how you'd manufacture both a loyal and genius breed - what/whom are they loyal to?
Yes. I am a little worried about genetic engineering in the very very long term, as it seems to make eusocial organization possible, which I find pretty abhorrent.
In the short term though, it seems like a good idea. Regardless, in a multipolar world we don’t have much choice in the matter.
>>Well, if human gene editing really would work, than china (and others) would not only select for intellect, but also for obedience. Which is scary.
Generational planning...who will be at the helm 20+ years later? "The Party"? Maybe if it was a Medieval Kingdom, but even then you'd wonder how that would affect the fighting spirit of the people. Might commit national suicide
Any evidence that we are successfully eliminating natural selection? A huge amount of selection is for things that aren't immediately obvious, or more subtle: the immune system, beauty, personality traits the other sex finds attractive, etc.
The range of selectors we can actually affect is extremely limited. There's a vast range of selectors we can't affect. In the grand scheme of things, we've hardly made a dent. That's my point.
To back this up, at least this paper claims that the idea that natural selection is being referred inoperative in modern human populations is widely rejected by evolutionary biologists.[1] Changes in human society have actually accelerated selection for certain types of traits that we know of. For example, genes that help people deal with our increasingly unhealthy diet may be strongly selected for.
We don’t need the causal variants for embryo selection, just the predictive variants. We have this for height now. The only reason we don’t have this for IQ now is everyone doing GWAS studies are too chicken to put an IQ test in with their other measures. As the cost of a sequence declines, this will not last.
Obviously, this is not an issue if there is state involvement.
Polygenic scores for IQ are correlated with other traits that are less desirable (schizophrenia for example).
I think the lift in IQ you get from embryo selection is counteracted by a lot of other (negative) factors.
It is also unclear to what degree epigenetic inheritance plays in IQ. My opinion is the 8-10 IQ point boost is less than variance from unknown factors relating to doing IVF versus natural birth. In other words I would still go with natural birth (which has been time tested by evolution)
This is certainly not something that can be answered with a simple Yes or No.
I am by no means saying that the underlying traits are casually related — only that metrics which predict one may also predict the other.
The human brain is a complex system and IQ itself is a very simplistic way to characterize it.
Think of it this way: imagine IQ is like electricity powering a city. Different city configurations have very different power and load requirements. You might find that, in general, cities with more power function better.
But perhaps the well functioning cities also had better transmission infrastructure. If you applied the rule of “more power is better” to a city without that infrastructure it would blow fuses everywhere and cause chaos.
As it turns out, we have multiple contradictory findings about whether high IQ is positively or negatively correlated with mental illness.
But even if you believe there's a negative correlation, it doesn't mean that many predictive SNPs can't predict both.
E.g. cloud cover is predictive both for rainfall and heavy snow. However, heavy snow is negatively correlated with rainfall. The latter doesn't negate the former.
People have done IQ vs genetic variation in GWAS. They find that there is almost no impact of common variants on IQ.
Example:
>A genome-wide polygenic score constructed from the GWA results accounted for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence in the normal range in an unselected sample of 3414 individuals, which is comparable to the variance explained by GWA studies of intelligence with substantially larger sample sizes.
You are making some serious mistakes in your citation of that:
1. a polygenic score is not 'the impact of common variants'; that's the SNP heritability, such as the GCTA or LDSC. It's not 1.6%, it's closer to 30%. You edited out the part of the abstract which correctly specifies this: "the single-nucleotide polymorphism heritability for the extreme IQ trait was 0.33 (0.02)"
2. that is not the best predictor of intelligence; it is not now (that would be Allegrini et al 2018), and it was not then either - you have to go all the way back to like 2014 for 1.6% to be SOTA and I'm puzzled why you cite Zabaneh at all, which is one of the most obscure IQ GWASes... The actual SOTA is 11% or higher.
3. your claims about power are obviously wrong, as Allegrini et al 2018 uses far less than 'tens of millions' and still greatly outperforms it. (Which has something to do with those rare beneficial variants not existing which they were looking for...)
So, we can predict 11%, not 1.6%, and common variants have a large impact, 3x that, and rare variants account for even more, easily 50% including what you might call semi-rare variants (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/106203v2).
No, it's not. You are still confusing heritability with PGS, and that's a much better PGS than is available for most 'biological' traits. Look through something like LD Hub to get an idea of average GWAS PGSes currently: <11% is very common.
The linked study uses ~1200 very high IQ individuals (4 sigma out), so it has the same population of very high IQ individuals as you'd have in a random sample of tens of millions.
There's also been large studies that have used years of educational attainment as a moderately-correlated proxy for IQ.
the enriched population does not help as high IQ is not caused by rare variants. Rather it is the proportion of common variants that increase IQ to common variants that decrease it. This is why we need millions of samples.
> the enriched population does not help as high IQ is not caused by rare variants.
The enriched population tends to have a higher population of these common variants. Saying it "does not help" is kinda silly-- the authors and reviewers behind this Nature MP pub disagree with you, as do I ;)
In the end, we have small randomized sample studies directly on IQ; enriched case-controlled studies like this one; and large studies looking at proxy variables (educational attainment). They have all come up with broadly similar estimates for the effects of polygenic variation on general intelligence. That is, we have enough information to be reasonably confident in an upper bound.
I think you perhaps misunderstand the study's conclusions (and that of most GWAS on intelligence). They conclude that high IQ (>170) is mostly not caused by genetic variants.
>They conclude that high IQ (>170) is mostly not caused by genetic variants.
The abstract does not mention that; they claim:
"This study shows the utility of extreme trait selection for genetic study of intelligence and suggests that extremely high intelligence is continuous genetically with normal-range intelligence in the population."
I don't think anyone would seriously claim that high IQ is mostly not caused by genetic variants, given the prior knowledge of the heritability of IQ.
>Focusing on the core 4-test g measure, we think that accounting for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence is exciting for several reasons. First, this effect size is greater than the effect sizes from previous GWA studies of the normal range of intelligence.45 The effect size of 1.6% represents >2.5% of the heritable variance of intelligence, which is comparable to the most robust effect sizes in behavioural research.46
That they are "excited" to account for at best 2.5% of high IQ through genetics suggests that genetics is not a large contributor to high intelligence.
Previous studies demonstrating high heritability of IQ did not discriminate between genetic inheritance and social/cultural/environmental inheritance. Clearly, the latter are more significant contributors than is genetics.
> Previous studies demonstrating high heritability of IQ did not discriminate between genetic inheritance and social/cultural/environmental inheritance.
The pre-natal environment is shared, and depending on the adoption process there could be a great deal of correlation in a range of environmental factors. It's not like these kids are grown in a vat and distributed randomly in the population is it?
They're obviously wrong and engaged in puffery when they claim to be SOTA. Look at http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n2/full/mp2014188a.html , for example - that was 3 years before and had a similar PGS of 1.2%. Or, if that's too obscure, look at the SSGAC EA2 / Okbay/Selzam et al 2016 (no excuse for not knowing that one), 2 years before, and more than double, at 3.5%.
> 3.5% genetic association with intelligence means that 96.5% is not genetic.
No. It does not mean that. As I literally just explained to you: a specific PGS variance != SNP heritability != heritability. (How could you possibly think that when I also just explained to you in my other comment that the current IQ SOTA is 11% and you replied acknowledging as much?) The best estimate of intelligence heritability in adulthood at the peak, using measurement-error-corrected estimates, is 70-80%. Very far from 3.5%. Or 11%, or 30%, or 50% for that matter.
"Heritability" includes non-genetic factors, and combined with genetic factors accounts for ~50% of variation in intelligence.
For genetic factors alone, the consensus so far is that there is very weak correlation of genetic variation with intelligence, unless a not quite-yet-established polygenic score is constructed. To wit:
>From the 1990s until 2017 no replicable associations were found. GPS from these early GWAS, which we refer to as ‘IQ1’, predicted only 1% of the variance of intelligence in independent samples. It became clear that the problem was power: the largest effect sizes of associations between individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and intelligence were extremely small, accounting for less than 0.05% of the variance of intelligence.
However, things got "better":
>in 2016, a second meta-analytic GWAS analysis with a sample size of 294,000 identified 74 significant loci30. This analysis produced a GPS, EA2, that predicted 3% of the variance in years of education on average in independent samples30.
It stretches the imagination how one would go from these numbers to claiming that "The best estimate of intelligence heritability in adulthood at the peak, using measurement-error-corrected estimates, is 70-80%.
> "Heritability" includes non-genetic factors, and combined with genetic factors accounts for ~50% of variation in intelligence.
No, it doesn't. Heritability is intended and defined to include genetic factors only, unless you are referring to indirect genetic effects which are mediated through the environment but are still genetic in origin.
> For genetic factors alone, the consensus so far is that there is very weak correlation of genetic variation with intelligence, unless a not quite-yet-established polygenic score is constructed. To wit:
You are again being extremely misleading and selective in your quote-mining, and you omit all of the qualifiers that Plomin & Stumm include, eg "Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences" - 'identified genome sequence differences' does not imply that they are the only genes involved. Merely that some have been identified, and more will be. As they then go on to point out in the parts of the review you ignore, future GWASes will surely make much more progress in identifying SNPs, and approach the SNP heritability ceiling of ~30% given enough data.
> It stretches the imagination how one would go from these numbers to claiming that "The best estimate of intelligence heritability in adulthood at the peak, using measurement-error-corrected estimates, is 70-80%.
Er, because I'm not talking about SNP heritability estimates. I am talking about estimates from twin studies, adoption studies, and MZA studies, which estimate total genetic contributions. The lower-bound is 50%, you don't get anything lower from any twin studies, and this is deflated by the fact that many twin studies are looking at young kids and the Wilson Effect has not yet kicked in; this is then further deflated by the fact that they use noisy IQ measurements, which inflate the error variance component and hide the shared-environment/heritability components. Correct for those, and you get up to 70-80%. All of this is covered in the Plomin textbook cited there, starting pg171, where they cover things like how MZA designs deliver 72% heritability estimates and they explicitly mention that measurement error biases downwards ('Corrected for unreliability of measurement, heritability estimates would be higher...'). They are being highly conservative by using a lower bound of 50%, and they are wrong to, because as I already mentioned family-GCTA/GREML-KIN indicates that semi-rare variants alone get you up to 50% heritability, so we can be sure that 50% is a considerable underestimate (which is consistent with their expanded textbook discussion noting that the real heritability is much higher).
No, I do not. Linking to Shalizi, who systematically misrepresents the issue and ignores all the evidence against his claims ( https://humanvarieties.org/2013/04/03/is-psychometric-g-a-my... ) is not an impressive thing to do, nor does it defend in any way pcrh's persistent errors and misquotations and misrepresentations of SNP heritability & PGSes (which rhetorical strategies and arguments bear a remarkable resemblance to Shalizi's own attempts to FUD intelligence & heritability, which have failed so spectacularly he hasn't dared address the issue since Rietveld et al 2013 came out...).
Let me get this straight, you contend that we should believe that Shalizi is an unreliable source and your justification is a post on a "human bio-diversity" blog run by white supremacist and anti-semite John Fuerst amongst others.
It would be bad enough if you were linking to a rebuttal of the post on heritability linked to by the parent, but this is a blog post attacking a different post by Shalizi.
How is this in any way relevant? More importantly, why would this convince anyone that Shalizi gets heritability wrong?
The link does nothing to refute Shalizi's point. It basically amounts to saying:
-Other models of intelligence as wrong and g is real because tests results correlate with each other, which is completely orthogonal to Shalizi's point. Because of the very nature of testing the results are going to correlate with each other; the most trivial example is, using Taleb's example, if dead people take the test. Dead people are dead and have an IQ of zero, and this is enough to increase the correlation (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1114977580053147648).
-Apparently confirmatory factor analysis means g is relevant because...confirmatory factor analysis means g is relevant? Nothing addresses the fact that g could be an artifact that arises in any set of measures that correlate with each other regardless of the origin. Adding to that, there is scant evidence of any link between g and the underlying neurobiology and/or actual causal genetic mechanisms, beyond very trivial cases such as obvious malformations etc. On the contrary, neurological findings are pointing to the opposite direction (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23259956).
-Even if we have no idea how g works it's still useful for predictions for stuff like educational attainment so it's relevant. Well duh, if you're good at taking tests you're going to do well in an environment where your attainment depends on your doing well in tests. Again, there is enormous circularity in reasoning. And as for the other outcomes, look at it this way: you could combine many measurements from your body (say, various analyzes from blood samples, but even trivial things like number of legs or amount of blood in your body could do), find they all correlate with each other (because when your body is breaking down it is likely damage to one organ that's spreading damage to other organs etc.), and from all that stuff you could draw a general "health quotient", or HQ. It would be highly heritable, there would be literal millions of SNPs that are associated with it. It would have immense predictive value for a variety of social outcomes. Does this mean that HQ reflects a unidimensional, physical reality in your body? Does this mean medical practitioners would have any use of it? And more crucially, does this mean that attempting to optimize for it (as opposed to, you know, optimize for actual real things that we can readily see) wouldn't be an utterly fruitless endeavor?
One last thing, since people seem to love brandishing GWASes around like a magic wand: people in the community are becoming increasingly disillusioned with them these days. (The head of EMBO, Ewan Birney, recently spoke about this. Note that I'm talking about academic geneticists, not the small clique of psychologists/"independents" from institutes with shady funding whose names invariably pop up when dealing with the less savory elements of the debate.) Again, for a geneticist, you need to find an actual genetic mechanism to prove something is "genetic", otherwise you end up with ludicrous associations (https://twitter.com/SbotGwa/status/1151964472921219073, or a GWAS for type of fat used in cooking). This has not deterred people from less rigorous fields such as psychology to attempt to GWAS for literally anything. A charitable interpretation is that people conducting such studies are unusually naive, a less charitable one would be to draw connections among the aforementioned small clique and correlate them with the views people in said clique have expressed, and reasonably infer that a motivated agenda might be at play here.
Of course I'm not looking to convince you since you appear to have read a truly gigantic amount on the subject and probably have a list of well-prepared rebuttals for literally any argument so that anyone with less time for online posting would never have the last word, so this is more of a post for any passer-by who'd think that IQ has any relevance beyond some niches of psychology. It's certainly not a thing in mainstream popgen or any field of genomics and if someone presented an abstract at any conference dealing with the kind of stuff posted on humanvarieties they'd be laughed out of the room.
> -Other models of intelligence as wrong and g is real because tests results correlate with each other, which is completely orthogonal to Shalizi's point. Because of the very nature of testing the results are going to correlate with each other; the most trivial example is, using Taleb's example, if dead people take the test. Dead people are dead and have an IQ of zero, and this is enough to increase the correlation (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1114977580053147648).
No, it's not. There is no reason whatsoever that there has to be a positive manifold, attempts to construct batteries without it have failed, this is one of the most important empirical reasons for g, and you leading with this point demonstrates you didn't even bother to read the rebuttals to Shalizi.
> -Even if we have no idea how g works it's still useful for predictions for stuff like educational attainment so it's relevant. Well duh, if you're good at taking tests you're going to do well in an environment where your attainment depends on your doing well in tests. Again, there is enormous circularity in reasoning
This ignores the enormous number of correlations (and causality, via PGSes in within-family settings) with everything from brain volume to longevity, and also the fact that adding education as a mediation does not eliminate those correlations. The only circularity here are the strawmans you are erecting.
> It would be highly heritable, there would be literal millions of SNPs that are associated with it. It would have immense predictive value for a variety of social outcomes.
The heritability of longevity is actually quite low. You should think about why your thought experiment didn't work.
> The head of EMBO, Ewan Birney, recently spoke about this.
Birney is deeply ignorant. He makes mistakes all the time. For example, he claimed recently that embryo selection had never been done, not even in animals; actually, it's been done commercially for years. Or his most recent op-ed, where he confused SNP heritability with heritability and claimed that demonstrated that 90% of income is 'environmental' (a misunderstanding all too evident in this thread) - so embarrassingly obviously wrong even his geneticist friends had to correct him and he issued a mea culpa. You shouldn't take your beliefs about 'disillusionment' about GWASes from a guy who doesn't even understand the basics about them and spouts off claims that he didn't spend 30 seconds googling.
> Again, for a geneticist, you need to find an actual genetic mechanism to prove something is "genetic", otherwise you end up with ludicrous associations (https://twitter.com/SbotGwa/status/1151964472921219073, or a GWAS for type of fat used in cooking).
No, you don't. This is an extremely narrow conception of things. Preferring a specific type of fat in cooking is no more ludicrous than, say, preferring tea to coffee (which is heritable and the GWAS works fine for).
> Of course I'm not looking to convince you since you appear to have read a truly gigantic amount on the subject and probably have a list of well-prepared rebuttals for literally any argument so that anyone with less time for online posting would never have the last word, so this is more of a post for any passer-by who'd think that IQ has any relevance beyond some niches of psychology.
Passerbys should take into consideration the quality of evidence being cited by this throwaway account, and to what extent they appear to have not read a truly gigantic amount on the subject, when they read sweeping descriptions of what 'academic geneticists' think etc.
> It's certainly not a thing in mainstream popgen or any field of genomics and if someone presented an abstract at any conference dealing with the kind of stuff posted on humanvarieties they'd be laughed out of the room.
Results from SSGAC etc are extremely mainstream. They are published in Nature and similar outlets. Papers use IQ/EDU PGSes and the genetic correlations all the time for many purposes. Look at the reverse citations for papers like Okbay or Selzam. 'laughed out of the room' indeed!
>No, it's not. There is no reason whatsoever that there has to be a positive manifold
Yes, there is. You didn't understand Taleb and Shalizi's point obviously. Look at the tweet.
>This ignores the enormous number of correlations (and causality, via PGSes in within-family settings) with everything from brain volume to longevity, and also the fact that adding education as a mediation does not eliminate those correlations. The only circularity here are the strawmans you are erecting.
"Adding education as a mediation" does a lot of work in this sentence here.
>The heritability of longevity is actually quite low. You should think about why your thought experiment didn't work.
Where in the world did I mention longevity?
>Birney is deeply ignorant.
Lol, so the head of the most prestigious center for genetics in the world is ignorant. Is Graham Coop ignorant as well? How many genomics professors are ignorant then? Also you didn't even bother to research what he actually said. He protested in response to the disillusion about GWASes from the community (again, we're talking about the community of academic geneticists with a PhD in biology, not social scientists or psychologists) and he was in favor of some of their predictive power.
>No, you don't. This is an extremely narrow conception of things.
Yes, you do. You have obviously never stepped in a single genetics lab or done any actual academic research if you think otherwise. That's how genetics works: you've got to show a genetic mechanism to show something is genetic. It's like the "all biologists are from Missouri" thing. GWASes suggest things, they may nudge in a direction, but they do not prove. This is like basic stuff.
>Preferring a specific type of fat in cooking is no more ludicrous than, say, preferring tea to coffee (which is heritable and the GWAS works fine for).
It's absolutely ridiculous and if you don't think otherwise I don't know what to tell you. The fact that you can GWAS for literally anything should be evidence against their predictive power, not for it.
>Passerbys should take into consideration the quality of evidence being cited by this throwaway account, and to what extent they appear to have not read a truly gigantic amount on the subject, when they read sweeping descriptions of what 'academic geneticists' think etc.
I use throwaway accounts because I can't be bothered to remember my password for this site. And, in case it wasn't obvious, and anyone may feel free to believe me or not: I happen to do genomics research for a living. It's literally my job, and I interact, for better or for worse, with hundreds of similarly minded people who do similar things. I didn't bother to read psych papers from 1983 but I do know the mainstream consensus, in 2019, in the genomics community (again, not in the social sciences).
>Results from SSGAC etc are extremely mainstream. They are published in Nature and similar outlets. Papers use IQ/EDU PGSes and the genetic correlations all the time for many purposes. Look at the reverse citations for papers like Okbay or Selzam. 'laughed out of the room' indeed!
Again, SSGAC is a social science institute. And again, doing a bunch of GWASes to "predict" (the word is used loosely) social outcomes is not how actual biology works. No, rallying behind the magic card "but I controlled for things!" does not work either. Biologists now how complicated things can be and are very hesitant to put forward causal mechanisms behind even minor, uncontroversial traits unless they're absolutely sure of what they're doing, and it usually involves tremendous amounts of money and often new technologies. That a bunch of social science guys put forward such very bold conclusions (involving, once again, a very distorted meaning of the word "predict") without batting an eye should tell you more about the researchers' bias than the "insight" they purported to discover.
Again, you just try to get a talk at the Biology of Genomes in CSHL or at the EMBL about the heritability of preference for cooking oil, see how that works.
>That they are "excited" to account for at best 2.5% of high IQ through genetics suggests that genetics is not a large contributor to high intelligence.
Bit of a stretch there mate; that doesn't follow at all.
Accounting for 2.5% of the intelligence variation through genetics does lead to the conclusion that 97.5% of high IQ is not accounted for by (known) genetic variation.
Doesn’t that just mean we don’t definitively know the vast majority of the causal factors? Which is not at all the same as saying we know it’s not genetically determined?
Depends on the weight you assign to "just". At the current level of knowledge it would mean that genetics is not an important contributor to the differences in "intelligence" between individuals in the general population.
What the important factors are is obviously an interesting question.
We have already identified variants than can account for over 10% of variation in intelligence. Researchers have gotten around the lack of GWAS IQ test results by using years of educational attainment as a reliable proxy. These results have been achieved in less than 2 years and the science is rapidly progressing.
He targeted CCR5 which does have some (pretty striking) effect in mouse learning and synaptic turnover in particular. He was aware of that study. https://elifesciences.org/articles/20985
Yes, do to their large population and slightly higher average quantitative abilities (at least if you trust their PISA scores), they have roughly 20x more 4 sigma people than America.
Chinese technological dominance seems likely even ignoring embryo selection. This will likely be amplified by better agglomeration in cities.
Were western institutions capable of thinking long-term, this would add to their desire for human enhancement.
The PISA scores they’ve done so far have been limited to Shanghai (the richest city) and then I think Zhejiang or Jiangsu (the richest provinces). It isn’t really a good sample of the entire country. I’ll be convinced when they release the scores for Henan :).
Western institutions biggest advantage is the ability to easily leverage worldwide talent, which is incidentally China’s biggest deficiency. A lot of China’s human capital, for example, has helped with the success of America’s tech industry.
Humans can be enhanced in other ways that don’t involve messing so finely with Mother Nature. We can simply develop and use better tools, for example.
> Given China’s almost unique state capacity to think long term
Beijing is presently a dictatorship. It is making the classic short-term decisions associated with placing personal political survival over national imperatives. (It made terrific capital investments between Xiaoping and Jintao. But the incentives changed with Xi for life.)
What makes China uniquely positioned with respect to human genetic engineering is its willingness to treat its population as test subjects. That’s a huge advantage, albeit one with the predictable downsides.
> Zhang was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 1 million yuan ($143,000), while Qin was given a suspended sentence of one year and six months in prison and fined 500,000 yuan ($71,600).
Well, in America imigrants are put in concentration camps and desperated poor people are allowed to sell their blood 2 times a week. But it doesn't mean that if a scientist does that kind of unethical experiment, he wouldn't be put in jail.
Actually you're the one who isn't understanding that there is no meaningful difference. Concentration camps are just worse than usual prisons. The biggest difference isn't the institution, it's who is selected to be sent to the camp and that they can never leave.
People in prisons or concentration camps often have to work against their will. This is an accepted form of slavery in our society. The imprisoned often have no enforced rights. A ward can just search your room, take your property and you can't do anything against them. They are allowed to use force to make you obey. Who is going to protect you? The police?
> Concentration camps are just worse than usual prisons
A concentration camp is a detention facility for holding people without pressing charges or the intent to immediately press charges.
> it's who is selected to be sent to the camp and that they can never leave
You can't leave a prison until your sentence is done. You typically don't get to leave concentration camps unless it's a time limited internment camp.
> People in prisons or concentration camps often have to work against their will
That's true but penal labor is not the same as forced labor in concentration camps. Penal labor is regulated and is specifically as a punishment to an indicted crime. There are certainly issues with penal labor, but it's not the same as working Concentration camp detainees literally to death.
Concentration camps use labor typically as a means to kill the people in the Concentration camp - who are not there because they've been charged (rather, they usually are detained on ethnic origin).
An immigration holding facility is not a concentration camp because the detainees are being charged and released (either via deportation or local release). Further, labor is not used in an immigration holding facility (but if you're charged and transferred to a prison, then you might have penal labor).
There are plenty of gripes to have with the prison system (especially the for profit prison system). There are gripes to have with immigration holding facilities. To call either one a concentration camp is to devalue and horrendously understate the horror of concentration camps.
I guess I'm reading the sentence I partially quoted as referring to two different groups both with negative circumstances -- immigrants in detention on one hand, and on the other poor people selling blood.
If their response was replying to the previous comment (medical experiments on unacceptable citizens), then I just assumed the two sentences were meant to be connected.
America is evolving. It looks like Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has reinvigorated the conversation around a Universal Basic Income of $1,000/month for every adult American which ultimately could end the poverty you're referencing which is due to the lack of any value gains from economic success of capitalism from being distributed to all "shareholders" of the nation. Likewise the current administration is a failed attempt at tyrant wannabe who lack the integrity to stand with and defend their constitution - and they do other shitty, and internationally illegal things - like separate immigrant children from their parents.
Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this sort of research is necessary. The sooner we are able to genetically engineer improved humans - first eliminating the incidence of genetic disease and second making overall healthier, happier and smarter people - the better the world will become.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and please don't snark, regardless of how wrong another comment is or how strongly you feel about it.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I likely have a heritable genetic disease, so if I want kids, they’ll take a bunch of embryos, and do genetic selection on them to decide which to implant.
So, I guess they’re already trying on my future children?
That is a fully general counterargument against animal testing to show the safeness of any drug or treatment. Clearly humans and other animals have enough in common such that successful animal trials are evidence of safety in humans.
We are gonna look back on this just how we look back on Giordano Bruno. Future generations would find it ridiculous that he was jailed for technological progress and science.
