Personally, I think this interpretation of polygenic risk scoring is a crock of irreproducible shite. I don’t think it’s your fault, I think a lot of people in the field are shilling something they don’t have for grant money, and they’ve created an exciting sci-fi yarn that’s easy for people outside the field to digest.
Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
I think there’s promise in applying PRS to assessing risk for non-Mendelian disease, but there’s far too many social and environmental variables at play to reliably predict these softer features. Like other people have joked, if you want a single number that best predicts educational attainment, use a zip code.
This has been done. Not to 1cm but ~3cm, and it has been reproduced by many labs all over the world
That said, most genetic prediction aren't targeting exact vales, but avoiding the worst outcomes, which is a lot easier.
Instead of saying this embryo will go grow to X cm, the claim is this embryo is 90% likely to grow to be taller than average.
Same for IQ. They don't predict the IQ, but decrease poor outcomes and increase high ones. Hell, we have had rough monogenic screening for IQ since the 1960s
Particulary the legend for figure 5:
> Activated SNPs are distributed roughly uniformly throughout the genome.
If the authors were actually identifying a genetic component to a heritable trait, I'd expect them to observe some linkage disequilibrium. And without any analysis of the SNPs (are they coding/noncoding? which genes are they associated with?) it's hard to believe that they're uncovering actual biology and not just chance correlates with external/socioeconomic factors.
I also find it difficult to trust studies when the lead author fails to disclose a conflict of interest. [2]
[1] https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/210/2/477/5931053
[2] https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/214/1/231/5930514
This is routinely validated on siblings. If the polygenic scores are as accurate in predicting differences between siblings (who, presumably, share substantially same environment) as they are between unrelated people, it means that they detect real, biological things, instead of just some kind of population stratification. The linked abstract, of course, mentions this, and you'd have known this if you had read the article.
Also, your assumption that socioeconomic factors are independent of genomes (that they are just "chance correlates) is also substantially wrong. Genes correlate with socioeconomic factors, because they often cause socioeconomic factors. People are not born into socioeconomic conditions randomly, they are born into socioeconomic conditions of people who share half of their genome with them.
Do you think no biological basis exists? Either way, they are still correlates, even if some aren't causative.
These models are still predictive when tested against control groups outside the training population.
Understanding whether the model is capturing biology is critical when thinking about applying it to IVF. If the model is primarily capturing socioeconomic correlates, those factors will (in most cases) be fixed for all embryos from a given pair of parents. The PRS needs to be weighting _biological_ risk conditioned on a fixed environment if its to be used ethically in this context.
In what case are you expecting the purchasers to be harmed? It seems reasonable to screen for the other factors as well if a correlation exists.
An example of Nature would be comparing well fed children of basket ball players vs children of horse jockeys.
I don't know why that would be the standard, since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible. But we can get quite close to that standard nonetheless.
And even if it's not possible yet, do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome? It seems very plausible to me, especially with how cheap genome sequencing is now.
Yes, that is my point.
Both intelligence and attractiveness have a significant amount of variation attributable to environmental or other external factors, and have the additional complication that they cannot be measured by a single objective unit (like height can).
> do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome
The quantification of intelligence is notoriously confounded by socioeconomic factors. I do not think talking about predicting a feature makes sense while we are currently unable to describe it well.
IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Kind of like ignoring climate work in favor of Mars colonization. There seems to be a cultural bias in tech towards moonshot panaceas vs doing the unglamorous grind. It makes me think of the Bill Gates quote that "a lazy person will find an easy way to do a hard job," and while that's valuable in some contexts I don't think it's universally applicable.
If we are doing this selection of IVF embryos it is feasible to control for these confounding factors.
> IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Source? Isn't intelligence in adulthood more correlated with your parents than any of these environmental factors? That was at least what I had recalled from twin adoption studies.
Maybe if you do it in North Korea, but US/Europe are already pretty much "maxed out" here. You can always improve things on the margin, but you're not going to see substantial gains of even d = 0.5 magnitude.
https://www.ilsna.net/resources/schoolnutrition/historyschoo....
In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.
"You know, my son was never what they promised me he would be" gets me to tears every time.
from http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Gattaca.pdf
>No one exceeds their potential. If they did, it would mean we did not accurately gauge their potential in the first place.
You think we're going to formalize our class system with genetics and biology but then somehow ignore that in all the realms where it's not relevant? Who decides when it is relevant.
This is why it's critical that access to this technology is democratized and equally accessible to everyone.
It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
> It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
Because the movie has been engineered specifically to make you feel vindicated: Someone is said to be limited, they then overcome this limitation. It is the "american dream" in movie form. Another poster has said it higher up: If genetic determinism is real, the main character is a fraud. Viewed through that lens, it becomes an entirely different movie.
> They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners...
you realize gattaca was fiction, right? and also
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-...
I don’t know if polygenetic testing is going to have a significant effect, but if it does, there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence, and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market.
Its not quite as damaging as 'people are rich because they work harder' but its really not far off
Wealthy people who came from nothing are the exception. Even in places with high degrees of social mobility, climbing the social ladder is a multi-generational saga. Maybe a working class family has a child or two who enter the professional class, then maybe their child has the opportunity for their family to finance a company that goes big, like Dell or Microsoft, or maybe break in as an actor or sports figure. Most likely though, their kids also enter the professional class where the family rolls the dice again the next generation.
Wealth is also correlated with inheriting money...
inheritable traits like intelligence tend to revert to the mean.
> Most rich people are rich because they were born into it.
Both of these can be true at the same time!
Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
> If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
- being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.
Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer
That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-...
https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the...
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...
Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.
Lottery winners have had no experience in managing wealth, often have had years and decades of being impoverished and wishing for products like jewelry that was always out of reach, and then they get inundated with money. They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
You're not making any argument here other than when you're born wealthy you're more likely to be wealthy, and that we know.
>How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology
>They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
Yes, this is what they are saying. There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.
I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
I agree genetics could play a small role, but I think developmental environment is a much larger part of the picture
I'm literally saying the opposite. Rich people nurture and help their children with connections, etc.
>I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
This is saying that self control and delayed gratification isn't a trait. It's saying that financial literacy isn't a trait.
At best it's a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that a huge number of poor people have acquired these traits
And I didn't mean "genetic trait" but rather "behavioral trait." Of course it's available to everyone just more likely to be found where it's been nurtured. There are dandelions growing in the cracks of a sidewalk; it's possible, just harder.
I think another aspect that a lot of discussions miss is a feeling of hope. Rich kids tend to have hope. Very poor kids can feel stuck and hopeless. When you have a child who, at a young age (think five or six, even) doesn't feel hope for their future, they don't try as hard and they're more likely to give up sooner.
Luck can be a bastard like that
More - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
That said, the grandparent's figure are rather wrong, for two reasons. First is that the heritability of IQ is typically estimated to be around 0.8 instead of 0.5, which means that the expected IQ of parents with IQ of 150 is 140, instead of 125. Second is that this is only the expected IQ. If they have multiple children, some will typically be above the expectation, and some below. More specifically, given standard deviation of 15, around a quarter of children of parents of 150 IQ will have IQ of 150 or higher.
This research is not new, it has been done for many decades now. The word “heritability” has a well established technical meaning.
OF COURSE smart people are more likely than average to become rich! How could it be otherwise, unless the only way to become rich was luck?
Now, some people are born rich! But even if it's just the self-made rich that are smarter than average, and people born rich are exactly average (unlikely as intelligence/attractiveness/etc are at least partly inheritable), that means that rich people are ALSO smarter than average. ('above average' averaged with 'exactly average' is still 'above average')
Or perhaps you can admit that in many cases people have achieved moderate to high wealth in democratic free market societies by either working harder or worker smarter than their peers?
Another reason is luck. My father worked from nothing to owning a house in a nice place because he had a skill that was in demand. He nearly lost it all and is now scraping a living in his 70's, because technology made his skill less valuable. 10 more years of luck he would have retired at 50 and I would have had the advantages...
Someone, mentioned that rich people were better looking. Perhaps they are just healthier, better dressed, and better groomed?
The net result is that the process of getting rich is often a multigenerational effort where each generation does everything they can to give their own children more opportunities than they ever had. And if you talk to the people who do that, they’re often motivated by the experience of being poor and hungry and deprived and being willing to do whatever it takes to give their own kids a better chance. Conversely, if you’re born rich, sometimes you’re complacent and entitled and probably spoiled and lazy. There’s a proverb about how many generations it takes to go from rags to riches and back to rags.
You are correct that the best way to become rich is to be born into a rich family and inherit the wealth (or the opportunities that create wealth). But it is simply false to state that this is the only way, or even the predominate way, in which people become rich in democratic free markets. There are a LOT of small business owners in the US that, are at least on paper, millionaires, and most of these people were not born into rich families. Through my life I've known many wealthy people, and only a handful were born into generational wealth, the majority grew their wealth during economic booms and worked to entrench it so they could survive busts, most by starting a small business in a high-value niche. By global and national standards, many people who are simply professionals and not even business owners, are rich or wealthy, just by being smart with their money. If you own a home and are working a job that pays six figures for your entire career and invest well, you will retire a millionaire without much difficulty, which definitely puts you in the upper quintile in the US.
This fatalistic, defeatist, and frankly infantile attitude from some people that acts as if wealth is only ever granted by random chance and at birth is utterly ridiculous, doesn't help anyone, and is factually incorrect from every angle. Your comment clearly illustrates an understanding of this, but you seem bent on defending the thrust of the comment I was replying to from the other poster.
This is really not true anymore. We have fallen significantly down the list, especially if you look at our economic and political peers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-a...
Even in your example, how did they get themselves born into a democratic free market society?
Luck.
Some people really dont like that answer, since it makes them feel vulnerable.
They'd rather blame a victim, and worship a lottery winner than accept that some things are outside their control.
Sure. Your genetics are also luck. But both genetics and being born in a liberal democracy are identifiable variables that have non-random outcomes.
To whatever degree these traits are genetic, you’d expect them to get roughly sorted out to the point where social mobility would decline, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
Or corrupt, or given a leg up through connections of ones father or school.
> and the people who decline in position are either stupid or lazy.
Or unlucky. Or got ill.
Your ideas sound very Victorian to me. I have noticed that most people who did get rich assume it is something special about themselves that did it, I'm guessing you are one of them.
I’m talking about broad population-level averages. Maybe you define “luck” as an actual quantifiable trait that measures whether or not you’re blessed by God, but I define luck as a completely random variable that produces noise in the individual case but does not affect population-wide averages.
I’m exaggerating, but anecdotally HN does have this reputation.
Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure?
What's needed: an egalitarian policy & infrastructure allowing any couple to improve the genetic basis of their progeny, perhaps with more of it being provided to genetically disprivileged.
We have an obligation to provide our children and the whole society with an opportunity to live a better life.
> and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market
The "gap" of single digit amount of IQ points added won't have such effect, but over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Should we deprive ourselves of such possibility due to a generic NIMBY-like market anxiety?
Of course. If we boost an entire generation’s IQ at birth and eventually introduce them into the adult population, what is going to happen is that the boosted generation is going to basically dominate the right hand side of the graph. If you visualize two bell curves superimposed on one another, with one of those curves shifted to the right, then that’s what you’re going to get.
The degree of augmentation is going to make a big difference. During the era of the Flynn effect, we sort of had this happen naturally and we handled it just fine, but a 20 point boost would basically obliterate things.
I’m not necessarily opposed to doing this BTW. I just think it’s going to be extremely disruptive and unpredictable.
> over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Yes, that’s what the original eugenicists thought, too. Here’s the problem, though: what do you do with all of those old and busted natural humans who are less thoughtful, less creative, less capable, less lively? Because those people are really mad that they lost their jobs, and they’re obviously not as intelligent or beautiful or morally good as the new and improved humanity. I mean, all you’ve done was to erase the unfair gap between the below average member of your generation and the above average member of theirs. Those people are all privileged and entitled jerks, and all they’re doing is causing problems.
Oh, did you really think we’d also manage to isolate and eliminate the gene responsible for the human tendency to dehumanize the outgroup? You sweet summer child.
The Flynn effect has not been genetic, and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do.
No, it was developmental, but AFAIK IQ is rather stable once you reach adulthood.
> and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do
Because it was gradual enough that it would be hard to measure, and because the composition of the Western workforce also evolved over the same period of time, making any comparison between generational cohorts virtually impossible.
First though I'd like to see some more resource-sharing of this nature and scale from the rich. Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can most improve life.
When you say things like "deprive ourselves" it's not hard to see that you perceive yourself to be in the group that will benefit either way. Which is fine I think but my life has led me to more easily imagine myself and my descendants on the other side of it.
Yes, we do this. We did this with smallpox vaccination, we’re doing it with polio vaccines, HIV drugs, water purification systems, mobile phone network infrastructure, nets that are treated to protect from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Sometimes people in rich countries go out of their way to invent technology that gives us no benefit but provides tremendous benefit to people in poorer countries, such as Norman Borlaug’s work. The global poor have become less poor to a much greater degree than the global rich have gotten richer.
Most people think this is not the case only because media is not telling about it, because there is little to tell about really. Except extreme cases like https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-...
Being poor or even lower middle class is hard on the body. And it shows. Big time.
I have trouble believing it will remain expensive unless there is a cultural taboo against it.
In general, once proven out, there should be pretty high demand for the tech - and that provides a lot of opportunity for profit for whomever can get the costs down.
What looks like a bigger blocker to me - AFAIK, IVF is really harsh on the body isn't it? Lots of hormones to force out a lot of eggs. That looks like the real adoption bottleneck to me.
I think at the very least there is a hurdle of willfulness (and a monetary hurdle of at least some degree — compared to the traditional alternative certainly).
To be sure it need not be prohibitively expensive, but it sounds like it will go hand in glove with the parental mindset that also seeks out private schooling, tutoring, etc. That probably takes it fairly exclusively into the domain of the well off (and want-to-be well off).
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-just-skin-cells-israeli-l...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/27/parents...
> Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
This already happens with women who try to sabotage condoms and/or collect the specimen after the fact. The rapper Drake has put the phenomena in the spotlight. If this becomes an actual problem, court systems will likely adjust to the times and require a higher burden of proof for paternity claims.
> This already happens How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
China already does extensive genetic modification by way of selective reproduction. Basketball player Yao Ming was the product of a forced marriage between two tall, Chinese basketball players. He was a truly great player until he became plagued by injuries, likely due to overwork. I don’t think that anybody raised any objections due to the (un)fairness of his provenance. In the future, I think that social stigmas will provide an effective barrier to excessive over screening.
And then you can bypass the entire “we don’t know which genes do what” problem because we can just clone people who have whatever qualities we want.
Well, maybe. It turns out your first citation has been validated in mice, and if that was the gold standard, we’d be able to put people into suspended animation (this totally works with mice but not larger mammals) among 1000 other things that never panned out.
If you go back a little bit, there are a ton of things (like suspended animation) that briefly seemed extremely promising and never panned out, and they outnumber the things that actually panned out by about 10:1.
I honestly think that even if this sort of thing was possible, it might be politically regulated out of existence or even out of being developed. We cloned a sheep in the 1990’s, but still no human.
In every IVF session, if you are young and healthy, they may be able to extract around ten eggs. Of those ten eggs, 50% will valid and will get fecundated. You are down to 5. Then, in our case, 50% of the embryos will be carriers and have to be discarded. You are down to two or three that can be implanted. And, from those, you are lucky if one gets implanted in the womb correctly and produces a baby.
What I mean it's that you can choose to a level, but you are quite limited by numbers, even if the technology improves or you are luckier, and you can get more embryos to choose from each IVF cycle.
All that, while the mother needs to be taking a massive amount of hormones that will make her gain weight, feel tired, etc... It's not a walk in the park.
By the way, we joked about the "boutique baby" with the doctor, and she told us that there are many traits that they could select but that it was illegal for them to do so.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is that each detectable genetic feature has a whole panoply of effects, some of which wont' be apparent at birth. Selecting for intelligence through specific genes is like to also be selecting for weak bones, reduced longevity, or other unpredictable side-effects.
Maybe one day it will be possible but there's a chasm between here and there which can only be crossed by extensive testing on real people. Is that even crossable?
I read Gwern's "Embryo Selection for Intelligence" a few years ago:
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Near future possibilities seemed pretty limited based on that review, unless the reasoning was incorrect:
As median embryo count in IVF hovers around 5, the total gain from selection is small, and much of the gain is wasted by losses in the IVF process (the best embryo doesn’t survive storage, the second-best fails to implant, and so on). One of the key problems is that polygenic scores are the sum of many individual small genes’ effects and form a normal distribution, which is tightly clustered around a mean. A polygenic score is attempting to predict the net effect of thousands of genes which almost all cancel out, so even accurate identification of many relevant genes still yields an apparently unimpressive predictive power. The fact that traits are normally distributed also creates difficulties for selection: the further into the tail one wants to go, the larger the sample required to reach the next step—to put it another way, if you have 10 samples, it’s easy (a 1 in 10 probability) that your next random sample will be the largest sample yet, but if you have 100 samples, now the probability of an improvement is the much harder 1 in 100, and if you have 1000, it’s only 1 in 1000; and worse, if you luck out and there’s an improvement, the improvement is ever tinier. After taking into account existing PGSes, previously reported IVF process losses, costs, and so on, the implication that it is moderately profitable and can increase traits perhaps 0.1SD, rising somewhat over the next decade as PGSes continue to improve, but never exceeding, say, 0.5SD.
What is gets right is that there are some serious practical limitations. The most important are around the availability of embryos, financial costs, and diminishing returns.
What it gets wrong is modeling the implementation as an optimization tool opposed to a screening tool.
If you have a pool 10 embryos, with a trait on a normal distribution (eg IQ), you can screen the bottom half out. By doing so, the average IQ goes from 100 (normal mean) to 110, mean for embryos over 100.
People want genetic children, but if for example, a wife is infertile, eggs can be purchased for ~$2.5k.[1]
Using today's technology, you could buy 100 eggs, screen the top 10% (>120), and the average embryo in the pool would be now be the 95th percentile for IQ (eg 125, +1.66 Standard deviations above the mean)
The next technology needed to knock this wide open would the the cloning or duplication of human eggs from a single source. IVT egg extraction yields only 5-10 eggs per cycle. If this could be multiplied in-vitro, money would be the only constraint.
https://www.cryosinternational.com/en-us/us-shop/client/how-...
However, we have been screening for single gene mutations that impact IQ since the the 1960s and they are well validated. For example, the impact on IQ of Trisomy 21 (downs syndrome) has a well validated impact of about 30 IQ points. 16p11.2 Gene abnormality has a well studied impact of 16-25 IQ points depending on the abnormality.
If you had a dumb as rocks polygenic test that screened just these factors, you would see a noticeable difference compared to a control.
But it also isn’t that different to what happens anyway. Elites have superior mate choices on average, able to optimise for intelligence, education level, beauty, freedom from mental illness, financial security. Their children will similarly have such benefits and so on and so forth. This kind of associative mating has generally been rare until recently (at least the part about optimising for intelligence), but presumably explains things like all the genius level Jewish people in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. I actually predict that there will be a wave of post-millennial supergeniuses, when two generations of intelligence based associative mating comes to fruition.
Biology, sequencing, health, bioinformatics etc. is going to be huge business.
As of this writing, I believe whole genome sequencing is in the range of $400 with the cost (slowly) dropping exponentially. When the cost of whole genome sequencing gets to be within $100 or below, we'll see a huge influx of whole genome sequencing and all the side effects that come with it, like sequencing colds, flu and other diseases in real time, at home genetic testing, etc.
Not just baby screening but made-to-order organs, personalized medicine, etc.
I think the timeline is going to comparatively long, on the order of 10-20 years, but it's my belief it is coming.
Though, scientists haven't yet found the gene(s) responsible for my genetic disorder, which seems a lot simpler than predicting "intelligence."
Traits are determined by multiple genes (e.g. eye or hair colour), and single genes control multiple traits (e.g. EDAR gene which is associated with thick hair, small breasts, and shovel-shaped incisors).
Sometimes genes for less desirable traits (e.g. mental illness, sickle cell anemia) may be associated with desirable traits (higher intelligence, resistence to malaria).
Most technology gets distributed to the masses. It makes more sense to sell something cheaply to a lot of people than just a few people at a higher price. The same reason the wealthiest people in the world can't buy a better iPhone. The economics behind the technology encourages mass adoption and a reasonable price
I predict that any company selling this as a service will have extensive legal language in the contract protecting themselves from any liability claim if the promised benefits don’t appear.
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
https://bostonreview.net/articles/ned-block-race-genes-and-i...
Intelligence definitely does have a genetic component - but again that isn't how genetics works. The "UN Man" Tabula Rasa doctrine is ideology, not science.
Clearly there is, or we’d see more Chimpanzees commenting on Hacker News.
The moral issue is not "inequality", the moral issue is eugenics - building their behavior to your desire.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.