Genomic Prediction is the first company to offer polygenic risk scores for embryos rather than adults:
The firm is mainly promoting its tests as a way of screening out embryos at high risk of certain medical conditions. But the company’s polygenic test for “mental disability” is more controversial. It isn’t accurate enough to predict IQ for each embryo, but it can indicate which ones are genetic outliers, giving prospective parents the option of avoiding embryos with a high chance of an IQ 25 points below average, says Hsu.
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Information from the same test could be used to go one step further and select whichever embryo is most likely to have a high IQ. “What that corresponds to is way-above-average intellectual potential,” says Hsu.
Naturally, this has been deemed highly unethical.
Yeah… Sure. This’ll work.
My guess is that it all devolves into massive lawsuits, about the time they start actually listening to these dumbasses.
Right now, the amount of real, verifiable knowledge we have about what does what down at the genetic level, as far as determining intelligence and other traits, well… It’s probably not too much better than palm reading, TBH. Some of those kids that get selected for “intelligence” are likely to be either boring normies or mentally deficient, while some of the ones they abort might well be the next Einstein. We don’t know what we don’t know, and experimenting with this crap at this stage is exceedingly foolish. It’s bad enough buying Betamax; how will it feel to have your kid at age 25 turn out to be the genetic version of that…?
Also, how do you suppose that kid’s going to feel, knowing that mommy and daddy had them modified to live out their fantasy dreams? If you think sports dads and stage moms are bad now, wait until you’re dealing with the ones who paid massive sums to have the ideal running back or the next latest starlet specifically engineered for them…? You think it’s rough being forced to live out your parent’s dreams for you, wait until you see the angst this kind of crap is going to generate.
Agree entirely.
Also, I would add the old joke about the super-model and Bill Gates.
The super-model suggests to Bill Gates that they should get married so that their kids would inherit her looks and his brains, and he replies that it might not be a good idea. What if the kids got his looks and her brains instead?
Jurassic Park is an excellent warning about why this sort of thing is a bad idea.
Steve Hsu had a response here.
The ethics of the scenario don’t matter; there will always be people who’re unethical to try this idiocy out, trying to create the “superman”. The thing that matters is the actual likelihood that something like this might work, in the real world.
Which is a proposition I find ludicrously unlikely. If you want to play god, you’d better be capital-letter God. So many factors go into making us what we are as humans that I seriously doubt that any of the necessarily simplistic and mechanistic things we could do at this stage of things would actually accomplish anything close to what we desire. Same-same with longevity, and a lot of the rest of our biology. Mod something now, find out it’s key and essential to something we don’t even know about today, in a couple of generations. People have been running into these nasty little surprises for quite awhile, now–There are some indicators, for example, that an appendectomy has quite high correlation with developing Parkinson’s. We also know that the tonsils are apparently tied in with the immune system, as is the spleen. Remove either, and you’re doing long-term damage to your health.
We think we know a lot. We really don’t know s**t.