Embryo selection is the killing of a human being. It is highly immoral. It will hasten the demise of what's left of Christendom, which always was the West. God is not mocked.
Given that Human embryos can split (identical twins) or combine (chimeras) and God made them to do that I am pretty sure he doesn't believe embryos are humans (unless you think identical twins have only one soul). Also he says as much literally in the bible, "I knew you BEFORE you where in the womb," implying preventing IFV is killing someone if a human would have come to exist from the process. Even the greatest Catholic philosophers didn't believe this nonsenses (see Thomas Aquinas). It was made up by Pope Pious the 9th (the guy who ripped penis off statutes).
Not that any of this matters because due to super low ferity rates Catholics are going extinct.
I have a better idea for those that dislike selection. Never observe your mate, or hear them. Just put a blindfold on and headphones. Looking at your partner and deciding that he or she is not likeable is eugenics. From a technical PoV this means more intelligent people will get even better control over their offspring and gain an even stronger comparative advantage statistically speaking since their priors encompass a larger probability space of positive outcomes.
You'll only get a few embryos from a given egg selection, so the possible effects of embryo selection don't seem that great? There may also be morphological reasons for selecting a given embryo that would increase likelihood of live birth that would trump any polygenic score concerns. Or am I missing something?
Yep my wife just did an egg collection at 34. She got 16 eggs but she has pcos so they aren't all of great quality. We ended up only getting 2 usable embryos and of those one was faster growing so is the clearer choice for implantation. If we have to do another collection we'd try ICSI and hopefully have a better embryo yield.
Still think these articles about the technologies might give people a false sense of the choices you actually get with IVF. Most people are just aiming for a healthy live birth!
Bio-engineering is needed to fix everyone anyways. Should have been selective breeding for intelligence to at least make a subset of the general population near the theoretical limits of human intelligence so they can work on such a technological milestone. So much wasted time.
I dont like developments in embryo selection. Certain non-western societies are more willing to use embryo selection than western, which means this gives ammo to people who hate us.
You better start convincing the Westerners then. I think this will come fast, as it did for regular IVF. No one wants to be left behind, and non-Westerns in general are too poor to use this.
Natural selection pales in comparison artificial selection. Literally see the domestication of animals and optimized crop breeds.
If someone is 6ft 2, beautiful features, 3+ Standard deviations of cognitive ability above average, and so on... but need assisted reproductive tech to reproduce... you'd call such a specimen dysgenic?
We can use IVF to create embryos from genius donors. Then encourage average families to incubate and raise those embryos themselves. Which enables the average family to make great contributions to society and given them economical mobility opportunities.
We can even use IVF to give interracial couples the option of not race-mixing. A white father can father a white egg donor, and have his wife surrogate the embryo and have a white son to replace himself. His wife can go to a sperm bank and have a daughter to replace herself.
That probably wouldn’t work like that, bearing in mind that evolution comes with trade-offs. Unless intelligence is pleiotropically linked to cognitive ability and physical attractiveness—which are three separate domains—you’d probably lose something else. To me, though, increasing cognitive ability increases innovations per capita, which in turn drives advancements in CRISPR, eventually allowing us to design a “giga-chad.”
"Certain non-western societies are more willing to use embryo selection than western, which means this gives ammo to people who hate us."
First of all, I do not believe East Asians hate us, despite the efforts of those who control the West to instill hatred across the planet. Second, the non-Western societies you speak of are more forward-looking. Much of the West is hindered by religious dogma.
I think it makes more sense to just select the embryo with the highest IQ rather than having a focus on health genes like those for blood pressure or diabetes because smart people tend to take better care of their health anyway and they have a higher income to see doctors and address these health issues.
> Herasight is the name, which presumably relates to Hera, the Greek goddess of family and women, which shares the root with 𝘩𝘦𝘳itability.
I was not able to find any support for this idea. The root of "heritability" is known; it is the proto-Indo-European root *ǵʰeh₁, meaning "leave behind". In Latin this became a word ("heres") referring to someone's heir; in Greek the cognate word is chera, meaning "widow".
Hera, on the other hand, is the name of a god and has no certain etymology. (Burkert's 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘙𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘯: "The name of Hera, the queen of the gods, admits a variety of mutually exclusive etymologies.") But there isn't even a theory that it is related to chera. (That would be very odd indeed, since Zeus isn't dead!) Wiktionary lists three ideas, that it derives from heros ("hero") or hora ("season"), or that it comes from the language spoken in Greece before the Greeks arrived. Burkert (a much older work) seems to prefer hora, since that's the only theory he actually mentions.
One issue is that people using embryo selection and gene editing will probably wish to select only for physical traits and intelligence (can you imagine parents selecting for greater humility or compassion?). We might end up with intelligent people who do not have the prosocial traits usually correlated with high intelligence. What could be more dangerous than that?
Also, selfish take warning: We regular humans are going to eventually end up in the dust, lol.
It is sort of lame too, in a life fulfillment kind of sense. If you are a couple that knows about these developments, for example, you might just delay having kids until way later, just to wait for better technology that can give you way smarter kids or something.
10 euploid embryos is definitely not "typical" for a couple, that's very optimistic. Of course there's individual variation and high responders but the average for a 30-35 year old woman is 2-5 per cycle and it gets worse with age. That will definitely attenuate the results to some degree.
I don't get this firm's estimate that if the parents average 115 IQ, then the embryos average 115 IQ as well, which seems high. Your calculation takes into account regression toward the mean, but their widget doesn't seem to.
"The mean IQ you put in is actually the genotypic mean IQ of the parents (as we state) as we didn't want to get into the complexities of modeling regression to the mean in this widget, although we do of course model regression to the mean in our customer reports."
Okay, but leaving "the complexities of modeling regression to the mean" to the casual user of the widget to deal with seems guaranteed to mislead a lot of people.
Right, and this was a potential worry in deciding to display the IQ gains as we have. However, this approach precludes the needs to specify the heritability controlling the degree of regression, which is still a point of particular controversy among skeptical statistical geneticists in this area.
I was going to post a screenshot of the IQ widget as the most broadly interesting aspect, but then I realized I can't because of their failure to deal with regression toward to the mean.
The current work focuses on the broad improvements we've made to PGSs for disease and highlights the substantial risk reductions achievable through their application in embryo screening. Surely that is exciting enough as it is!
We've done the same for our IQ PGS and will shortly release its validation paper containing several screenshot-able figures.
Embryo selection is the killing of a human being. It is highly immoral. It will hasten the demise of what's left of Christendom, which always was the West. God is not mocked.
In autistic Catholic philosophy, yes. Not really though.
Interesting phrase: Autistic Catholic philosophy. Actually, just Catholic morality, God's morality. God's structure of the universe. You'll see.
Given that Human embryos can split (identical twins) or combine (chimeras) and God made them to do that I am pretty sure he doesn't believe embryos are humans (unless you think identical twins have only one soul). Also he says as much literally in the bible, "I knew you BEFORE you where in the womb," implying preventing IFV is killing someone if a human would have come to exist from the process. Even the greatest Catholic philosophers didn't believe this nonsenses (see Thomas Aquinas). It was made up by Pope Pious the 9th (the guy who ripped penis off statutes).
Not that any of this matters because due to super low ferity rates Catholics are going extinct.
How does that even work it's not like these embryos are fetuses they haven't gone through that phase
I have a better idea for those that dislike selection. Never observe your mate, or hear them. Just put a blindfold on and headphones. Looking at your partner and deciding that he or she is not likeable is eugenics. From a technical PoV this means more intelligent people will get even better control over their offspring and gain an even stronger comparative advantage statistically speaking since their priors encompass a larger probability space of positive outcomes.
Western concepts predated christianity. They are pretty much an advancement of the early european farmers ideas.
And the west post enlightenment has dechristianized, and focused more on people of european descent.
Also, the concept of God has been refined more. It's not a sky daddy, but logic, possibility fulfillment and ensuring impossibility.
Great news. It is always good to learn of advancements to improve the human genome.
You assume we can improve faster than genes can mutate and evolve. It smacks of hubris to me.
"You assume we can improve faster than genes can mutate and evolve. It smacks of hubris to me."
It is not hubris, just a fact. Humanity can improve either through selective breeding or genetic engineering.
You'll only get a few embryos from a given egg selection, so the possible effects of embryo selection don't seem that great? There may also be morphological reasons for selecting a given embryo that would increase likelihood of live birth that would trump any polygenic score concerns. Or am I missing something?
You can look up typical results, but there is a lot of between woman variation. I know some 30 year olds who got 20 eggs.
Yes, morphological scores are routinely used by IVF staff. https://www.asrm.org/asrm-academy/asrm-academy-on-the-go/embryo-data-grading--evaluation/grading-scales/ You will want 6AA.
Yep my wife just did an egg collection at 34. She got 16 eggs but she has pcos so they aren't all of great quality. We ended up only getting 2 usable embryos and of those one was faster growing so is the clearer choice for implantation. If we have to do another collection we'd try ICSI and hopefully have a better embryo yield.
Still think these articles about the technologies might give people a false sense of the choices you actually get with IVF. Most people are just aiming for a healthy live birth!
The true revolutionary breakthrough will come with genetic enhancement. This will provide a serious effort for the ascendency of humanity.
Bio-engineering is needed to fix everyone anyways. Should have been selective breeding for intelligence to at least make a subset of the general population near the theoretical limits of human intelligence so they can work on such a technological milestone. So much wasted time.
Good benefits all, evil benefits a select few.
I dont like developments in embryo selection. Certain non-western societies are more willing to use embryo selection than western, which means this gives ammo to people who hate us.
You better start convincing the Westerners then. I think this will come fast, as it did for regular IVF. No one wants to be left behind, and non-Westerns in general are too poor to use this.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/is-ivf-dysgenic
Natural selection pales in comparison artificial selection. Literally see the domestication of animals and optimized crop breeds.
If someone is 6ft 2, beautiful features, 3+ Standard deviations of cognitive ability above average, and so on... but need assisted reproductive tech to reproduce... you'd call such a specimen dysgenic?
We can use IVF to create embryos from genius donors. Then encourage average families to incubate and raise those embryos themselves. Which enables the average family to make great contributions to society and given them economical mobility opportunities.
We can even use IVF to give interracial couples the option of not race-mixing. A white father can father a white egg donor, and have his wife surrogate the embryo and have a white son to replace himself. His wife can go to a sperm bank and have a daughter to replace herself.
ART is a eugenicist's best friend.
That probably wouldn’t work like that, bearing in mind that evolution comes with trade-offs. Unless intelligence is pleiotropically linked to cognitive ability and physical attractiveness—which are three separate domains—you’d probably lose something else. To me, though, increasing cognitive ability increases innovations per capita, which in turn drives advancements in CRISPR, eventually allowing us to design a “giga-chad.”
"Certain non-western societies are more willing to use embryo selection than western, which means this gives ammo to people who hate us."
First of all, I do not believe East Asians hate us, despite the efforts of those who control the West to instill hatred across the planet. Second, the non-Western societies you speak of are more forward-looking. Much of the West is hindered by religious dogma.
I think it makes more sense to just select the embryo with the highest IQ rather than having a focus on health genes like those for blood pressure or diabetes because smart people tend to take better care of their health anyway and they have a higher income to see doctors and address these health issues.
> Herasight is the name, which presumably relates to Hera, the Greek goddess of family and women, which shares the root with 𝘩𝘦𝘳itability.
I was not able to find any support for this idea. The root of "heritability" is known; it is the proto-Indo-European root *ǵʰeh₁, meaning "leave behind". In Latin this became a word ("heres") referring to someone's heir; in Greek the cognate word is chera, meaning "widow".
Hera, on the other hand, is the name of a god and has no certain etymology. (Burkert's 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘙𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘯: "The name of Hera, the queen of the gods, admits a variety of mutually exclusive etymologies.") But there isn't even a theory that it is related to chera. (That would be very odd indeed, since Zeus isn't dead!) Wiktionary lists three ideas, that it derives from heros ("hero") or hora ("season"), or that it comes from the language spoken in Greece before the Greeks arrived. Burkert (a much older work) seems to prefer hora, since that's the only theory he actually mentions.
We are cooked 🍚
One issue is that people using embryo selection and gene editing will probably wish to select only for physical traits and intelligence (can you imagine parents selecting for greater humility or compassion?). We might end up with intelligent people who do not have the prosocial traits usually correlated with high intelligence. What could be more dangerous than that?
Also, selfish take warning: We regular humans are going to eventually end up in the dust, lol.
It is sort of lame too, in a life fulfillment kind of sense. If you are a couple that knows about these developments, for example, you might just delay having kids until way later, just to wait for better technology that can give you way smarter kids or something.
10 euploid embryos is definitely not "typical" for a couple, that's very optimistic. Of course there's individual variation and high responders but the average for a 30-35 year old woman is 2-5 per cycle and it gets worse with age. That will definitely attenuate the results to some degree.
I've read somewhere else that increasing the number of embryos doesn't result in a higher IQ child due to diminishing returns. Is this true?
Not neccarily it depends on how many embryos and the predictive power of the polygenic score
Did it have to slant rhyme with 'heresy'?
I don't get this firm's estimate that if the parents average 115 IQ, then the embryos average 115 IQ as well, which seems high. Your calculation takes into account regression toward the mean, but their widget doesn't seem to.
What am I overlooking?
This was a deliberate simplification for the purposes of this display: https://x.com/alextisyoung/status/1950607326060429517?s=61
Thanks.
"The mean IQ you put in is actually the genotypic mean IQ of the parents (as we state) as we didn't want to get into the complexities of modeling regression to the mean in this widget, although we do of course model regression to the mean in our customer reports."
Okay, but leaving "the complexities of modeling regression to the mean" to the casual user of the widget to deal with seems guaranteed to mislead a lot of people.
Right, and this was a potential worry in deciding to display the IQ gains as we have. However, this approach precludes the needs to specify the heritability controlling the degree of regression, which is still a point of particular controversy among skeptical statistical geneticists in this area.
I was going to post a screenshot of the IQ widget as the most broadly interesting aspect, but then I realized I can't because of their failure to deal with regression toward to the mean.
The current work focuses on the broad improvements we've made to PGSs for disease and highlights the substantial risk reductions achievable through their application in embryo screening. Surely that is exciting enough as it is!
We've done the same for our IQ PGS and will shortly release its validation paper containing several screenshot-able figures.
OK, but why not incorporate regression toward the mean?
It is. Look at the tool tip.
Prestigious 🥰