China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013) | Hacker News Reader

China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

vice.com

116 pointspcnonpc135 comments

Here's the primary piece:

> At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.

It's also interesting to note this was authored in 2013. I would be curious to know the kinds of things discovered in the ~4 year span.

From the piece, it shouldn't take very long to put it to use.

"When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale?

Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are."

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

No, but there is a strong correlation.

Not necessarily but I would argue that the chance of success is higher for a person with higher IQ.

It's not "enough", but it really helps. It's highly correlated with a whole host of different positive life outcomes.[1]

People argue over how important it is, and it's certainly not the only thing that matters, but yes, the general consensus is that IQ is meaningful and predictive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

I think you could form an entire HN thread just on what it means to be successful. For example is Reddit a success despite not having IPOed? Are you a success if you have as many kids as possible? (Genghis Khan is probably the most successful persons of all time judging by that)

> Are you a success if you have as many kids as possible?

That's the usual yardstick. Hence the expression, success breeds success.

Is it really that complicated? As I see it, success is achieving your goals. Set goals and achieve them and you've succeeded, whether that's family or money or building a hyperloop or grilling the tastiest grilled cheese known to man... whatever. Given enough time none of it will matter so just pick something and run with it. Don't bother with whether other people are successful by your criteria because they probably don't have the same goals as you (unless your goal is to somehow judge if other people are successful I guess, which sounds silly but I guess by my own rules I can't judge).

No. The most important factors, in diminishing order, are: Grit, intelligence, beauty, education.

But if you read the article, they're not really selecting for IQ itself, but academic success, so that covers all of the factors, just weighed.

Which include obedience if they are only measuring PhDs.

It depends on how you define intelligence. If you go broad, grit and such are part of it.

A broad definition is ability to solve problems. Beauty is outside it unless it really solves some problem... which it well might in some occupations.

It's not sufficient, but arguably necessary.

There are roughly three things that make you successful: 1. Being smart 2. Working hard 3. Opportunity

Everybody can do #2, but most won't. #1 is at least partially genetic. #3 is mostly luck, but is influenced by the other two. In fact all of the factors influence one another to a degree. Being born in an area with good schools and working hard can overcome somewhat deficient genetics for #1 for example. On the flipside, being born a genius in sub-Saharan Africa with no opportunities or even anything to work hard for makes success almost impossible.

You forgot the 2 that count the most luck and network.

I feel like opportunity covers that.

That's opportunity. The network is basically being born into the right circles, which is pretty much entirely luck. A few people do break in through sheer determination and/or a lucky break with some contacts.

#2 is also genetic. Stamina and attention span count for a lot.

Nature versus nurture either way it's all your parents fault...lol.

It's the same as the crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity.

Opportunity counts the most. You can't win if you never get the chance to play.

Motive is next, as you can't succeed unless you have the will to do whatever is necessary. At some level, sufficient motive can generate additional opportunities, but there is an upper limit on how much you can supplement the genuine opportunities arising from pure chance.

Method is least important. There are often many ways to accomplish the same results, ranging from dead simple to prohibitively complex. If you have simple goals, you can still achieve them simplemindedly.

. . . And I think I now have a hypothesis about why so many rich folks seem like crooks.

No, just like a healthy immune system doesn't mean success. I keep telling everyone that having a healthy immune system isn't everything.

It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate.

I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI's disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina's, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American & European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more.

In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution.

As far as embryo selection goes, '5-15 points' is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I've tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it's not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection (Which is why I'm more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)

Sounds like you're really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome?

Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

(Gattaca is a fictional movie, not a realistic outcome. What anyone thinks about it is irrelevant because it has not, will not, and could not happen, any more than Brave New World.) As far as making use of these techniques, certainly. Transhumanists, socialists, and 'liberal eugenicists' have always advocated 'seizing the means of reproduction', so to speak, but it's mostly been theoretical; modern behavioral genetics has fill in so many of the blanks that concrete discussions and analyses can be done, IVF embryo selection can be done right now, CRISPR can also be done now if you can find anything useful to do with it besides fixing rare genetic diseases, and IES and genome synthesis will be possible within the next 20 years.

Why do you say its unrealistic? Eugenics has been seriously considered in the past, and is likely to be seriously considered in the future.

If genetic modification and control becomes 'easy' and relatively safe I don't see why those in power wouldn't try to exercise control over that power. In that future its not hard to imagine lawmakers banning having children who would have inherited known genetic 'defects'.

Now imagine 'defects' are classified as having dark skin, or whats considered a 100 IQ today.

Gattaca is unrealistic because (aside from being intended as mass-market entertainment rather than a scientific extrapolation) it is simultaneously too aggressive and too conservative: it envisions a world in which instant genome sequencing can be done effectively for free on a global scale (which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are developed) while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably <100% for traits of interest like intelligence) and ignoring the overriding phenotypic information, but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable. If the Gattacaverse's scientific understanding and control of genetics were really as perfect as portrayed, none of the events would happen in the first place - it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example. Its poorly conceived world is mostly there as as simplistic grade-school-level allegory about 'how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover' with a genetics gloss. Which is fine as entertainment, but where we're going looks nothing like Gattaca.

>while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably <100% for traits of interest like intelligence) and ignoring the overriding phenotypic information,

Organizations cargo-cultishly over-emphasizing certain ability signals? Seems pretty realistic to me! "How many golf balls can fit in a bus..."

>but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable.

What? A key plot point was that parents go through a doctor to have kids, who then picks the genetically-best kid that the parents are capable producing. Those who don't (and have "god-children" or "de-gene-erates") end up with sicker, stunted kids.

Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.

>it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example.

Because they'd have automated it all? There will always be the 1% least-intelligent, who will take the roles that can't be automated. Perhaps it's unrealistic that someone would be mopping the floor, but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".

It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

> Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.

It's not, because you get literally the same consequence by not genetically testing sperm/eggs at all and simply screening by motility and donor health etc - people who don't do that have kids with more defects. And 'short of maximizing the potential' is exactly my point. A world with perfect genetic prediction and too-cheap-to-meter sequencing simply will not look like that. Some healthier kids are the least of the consequences of generations of society-wide embryo selection with perfect prediction and universal sequencing.

> Because they'd have automated it all?

Yes. Assuming it's still even an issue.

> but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".

A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

>It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

They did further testing in the movie too! Note the treadmill tests that the protagonist was cheating on too.

But in terms of a general, big-org failure to properly use heuristics? Probably the most realistic part of the movie!

>A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

And some things have to be understood metaphorically because it would be too cumbersome to have to present the full picture and bring the viewer up to speed. That's just how the medium works.

For the story, it suffices that there exist people who do more tedious jobs because smarter people get the better ones. To show a more realistic scenario (janitor checking rooms on a tv screen and pushing buttons rather than mopping), for every dimension that changes, would take away precious minutes from the runtime for little narrative benefit.

Gattica didn't have many large generations of engineered children. The movie happened during a transitionary period.

>which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are developed

It seems pretty much inevitable that genome sequencing will use non-chemical (non sequencing-by-synthesis) methods in the future (I've worked for two companies that have developed such techniques with varying degrees of success). In the far-ish future I think we'll see a human genome for 1 to 10USD with a turn-around time of maybe 10 to 20mins. That seems pretty achievable using a solid-state nanopore approach.

I think even novel labeled/SBS approaches might be able to do interesting things here.

When I watch Gattaca, to support my suspension of disbelief, I choose to retcon the sequencer technology a bit.

On the presumption that 99.9% of the people using the system are never going to act on information disclosed by the system in a manner that would not involve returning to the established system as a middleman, it simply cheats. Random samples of DNA are tested and sequenced, and a machine learning system leans heavily on databases of stored information to extrapolate findings that might be of interest to the customer.

Most people of Gattaca don't have a deep understanding of genetics. They just know what the computers tell them.

As such, pretending to be another person with donated biological samples is the low-budget option for evading the system. Those with enough power and resources pay to hack the system itself, such that the ubiquitous sequencers report more favorable results than they otherwise would.

This also means that a lot of the parents buying designer babies were getting placebo. If there was no obvious congenital defect, the docs just left the natural genome alone, and simply told the parents it was the best baby they could possibly have, while marking the genetic samples kept for reference as "valid". Yeah, that's right, I made the dystopia even worse in my own imagination. Not only is the society stratified by money, the foundation is 99% fraud.

Wait a sec. If this dystopic future you cite is able to genetically engineer embryos, then wouldn't everyone be able to reproduce? (Less-fit people would obviously pass on less of their genes.)

And while your complaint about skin color is certainly valid, why do you abhor making humanity smarter on average?

*IES being Iterated Embryo Selection - the concept of shortening generation times to months or less by producing gametes from selected embryos and crossing those until you have embryos with the genotypes you desire, so we could breed human strains on the same timescale as mice. An important caveat is that we wouldn't see the phenotypic outcomes (behavioural or physical) until we let a generation mature, so selection will be entirely on the basis of trusting the SNPs that large studies have implicated - who knows if all of these SNPs would function well in concert?

Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.

The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people. That problem was the only reason Gattaca was so dystopian. As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult, it should be possible to move forward with engineering humans in a productive way.

The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.

You're free to quit your job and go empty peoples' trash if you really find it so much more meaningful.

It's as meaningful as it's thankless.

His lack of nobility does not invalidate his argument. Arguably, many of the most despised jobs are most important. None of the elite would or could do them, and without society would fall apart. On the other hand, a very large percentage of elite jobs could be eliminated without ill effect.

Our role as the elite is to elevate and recognize their worth, and not sink them to our moral level.

Then this is a poor example. I can certainly empty my own trash - I do that at home. It's far more efficient to have one person with no education or special skills come around and collect everyone's trash into a big container once per day than to have hundreds of skilled, expensive employees empty their own trash when it gets full.

But you can empty the trash and they can't build your apps.

Also, when thinking about creating value, you need to think about scale. They change your trash and are limited by their physical ability and time. Let's say they saved you 4 minutes and changed 400 trashes, saving 399 other people 4 minutes. They've created ~24 hours of value.

If your app helps people save 30 seconds a day and did that for 100k people, then you created about 12 days more value.

Your argument can easily go the other way. What if your app wastes 30 seconds a day for 100k people? By, say, building addictive mobile games, or a social network dedicated to watching food pictures, or gambling websites, or, like the parent comment said, throwaway apps.

If an app provides entertainment then it wastes time?

What app does save people 30 seconds? Perhaps they didn't use the app before, and now it's wasting the time of thousands?

At the very least the lady emptying the trash keeps the place hygienic, reducing the spread of diseases.

If you're getting paid it means what you're doing means something to someone, even if it doesn't mean anything to you.

But wait. If all they do is empty your trash, and you do nothing worthy of merit, then by extension, that tangible thing they do to support your work is equally meaningless.

If the world economy could eliminate your job without missing it, then you are no longer generating trash to clean up, and that job goes away too. The person who cleans up after someone genuinely productive therefore contributes more than someone who cleans up after someone useless.

This is, no doubt why we pretend with all the might of imagination that certain jobs are critical and vital to the economy. The idea that double-digit percentages of the whole world economy could actually just be wasted on useless navel-gazing nonsense is just too horrible to consider. It may be true, but if we believe it is true, that just means we're all wasting our lives on pointless bullshit. I'd rather lie to myself and be happy, regarding this particular point.

>As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult

Keeping people from discrimination may be about as difficult as perfecting genetic engineering.

> Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.

If you are looking for bang for the buck in raising the average IQ across the whole population, then there are serious quick wins in eliminating things that drag it down. For instance, exposure to lead. And it's doable, hardly rocket science or genetic engineering.

If you're looking for a few very rich people to give their offspring another advantage over the rest, then genetic engineering becomes more pertinent.

why can't have both, "eliminating things that drag it down" + genetic engineering?

You can have the first if you have a government with sufficient sense and compassion, it's been that way for a long time - and to be fair a lot of issues have been reduced or eliminated over the decades. e.g. Leaded vehicle fuel is a thing of the past.

You can have the second at some time in the future if the research works out and you can afford it.

If we're going to act like we're a bunch of smarty-pants engineers here, it seems rational to start with the low hanging fruit: environmental toxins.

In addition to facing fewer ethical pitfalls, greatly reducing these environmental factors is well within our current means. It also universally beneficial, and not limited to those who can afford "Boutique" offspring.

Agreed. Wouldn't it be MUCH easier to, say, invest heavily in our early and middle education systems?

Much cheaper than eugenics.

http://abstrusegoose.com/502

>The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people.

You can't be naive enough to think that this problem wouldn't occur. On the contrary, if genetic engineering on such a level was realized (which would require a shift in our current biomedical ethics to begin with), discrimination against the less-optimized would be a foregone conclusion.

In such a scenario, we could only hope that everyone would be optimized equally and the suboptimal humans wouldn't be born into a world where they are second class citizens.

> In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society

Do you have any data to back this up? Do you have a reliable measure of "contribution to society"?

To flesh out a large range of implications will take at least an effort worthy of a PhD dissertation.

With successful embryo selection, at least we can keep up with the increasingly higher minimum IQ needed to function well in advanced society and avoid a large underclass of unemployable people.

Jordan Peterson - IQ and The Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

I find the underclass argument important and generally ignored. The whole drive for UBI is due in part to the fact that all but the most specialized human professions are being automated. Of course, specialization is not necessarily an indicator of intelligence, but I would guess that they are pretty correlated. Since intelligence is at least in part genetic (and the environmental portion seems to respond very poorly to poverty, which a UBI would likely put people in or close to), it is very likely that a society with UBI would have a very large generational underclass of those unable to sufficiently specialize enough for gainful employment.

If we can make more people capable of becoming specialized, everyone will benefit. Perhaps fields like medicine are limited in the number of people it would make sense to employ, but software engineering and scientific research pretty generally benefit the more people get involved (wrt software I am thinking more in terms of FOSS and startups, not huge teams for simple tasks). The barrier to participation in the future economy might end up essentially becoming IQ. It's important that we give people the tools to help their children be successful as the economy changes.

Any long term (5-10 years) stock market conclusions we can draw from this? I would love for there to be an all-country ETF focused on genetic engineering, but I haven't found one.

Hard to say. Within 10 years there can't be any immediate consequences simply because even super-prodigy kids won't make any real contributions to anything before age 15 or so, but the financial markets can still price in future returns. On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors, and they struggle to keep up with regular fertility demand just from the usual aging & demographic transition trends.

Genetics strikes me as probably going to follow Amara's law: everyone is overestimating the effect in the short run ('China is engineering genius babies right now! Panic!') and underestimating it in the long run (I don't know what 2050 looks like, but I have a hard time envisioning a world with access to 30 years of CRISPR and 20 years of genome synthesis which is still much like ours and where the biggest change is that your smartphone weighs a tenth as much and Siri doesn't make any funny mistakes...). For short-term 5-10 year bets, AI is probably more important.

>On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors

That's what I want to get in on. Whoever can offer genetical engineering to Chinese parents first is going to be the new Google.

Hopefully they won't be called VersaLife.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by we've confirmed dysgenics? Does that mean humans now are actually more disabled than a century ago?

Population genetics shows harmful mutations tend to accumulate much more than beneficial mutations, but not to a degree that reduces reproduction significantly. So the human genome is degenerating over time.

> but not to a degree that reduces reproduction significantly.

Then how can it be "harmful"?

Reproduction is the only thing that affects evolution, no?

Not quite. Environment and epigenetics are important too.

So it is safe to say the hype from people like Steve Hsu about BGI pioneering vast increases in human intelligence is mostly flash and no fire?

Well, it wasn't wrong, necessarily. A large project in 2013 to start uncovering the genetics of intelligence did in fact finally succeed and end the debate over the heritability of intelligence once and for all. It just wasn't BGI's project... Hsu has acknowledged that it didn't work out, but BGI's primarily organizational failure, and intelligence/genetics research since then IMO, doesn't undermine any of his broader claims as expressed in https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 but supports them - intelligence is definitely highly heritable and reasonably close to the classic twin estimates, mostly genetically correlated with good things so boosting it will have mostly unintended good consequences, mostly additive so the extrapolations will work out at least several SDs, etc, all of which implies that very large boosts in intelligence are possible. And if BGI had been able to merely 10x its sample size, it really would have managed to find interesting things due to the enrichment & better phenotyping than SSGAC; but it was too small then (the approach works better, just not better enough). The main implication of the BGI failure is mostly that selection has a bit more potential than thought (more small variants to gradually increase), and editing will be a bit harder than thought (no big rare variants to edit one by one).

A dictatorship that wants to shut down criticism but raise IQ ? That seems like contradiction 101.

Is disobedience correlated with intelligence? Especially when the superiors are not less intelligent than the one who is receiving orders?

Personally I tend to feel less respect for people who are noticeably dumber than I am. I think that's basic human nature, or at least my nature.

Tyrants know this. You see it when they feel threatened and start purging their subordinates. If they don't respect you they can fear you instead.

"That Cassius over there has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Men like him are dangerous." [1]

1: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.2.h...

So find the smartest person and make them the dictator. Problem solved.

We are talking about a population engineered to be more intelligent, so the assumption is that the rulers would also be more intelligent, so this gap would not exist

This project will produce a lot of fairly intelligent drones who will know to color inside the lines. I doubt that any Feynmans will emerge.

The "openness" trait from big five personality research (pretty legit) correlates with IQ. More open people are both more likely to question the status quo and are more likely to be more intelligent (in the strict sense of the word) than average. This suggests but doesn't necessarily mean that anything would come of it.

There's also the question of whether or not the genetic changes they attempt to make would increase intelligence independently of openness, which is likely possible, but that would require a deeper understanding and familiarity with the subject.

Not at all. Many of Hitler's associates were remarkably intelligent (IQ scores):

1 Hjalmar Schacht 143

2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141

3 Hermann Goering 138

4 Karl Doenitz 138

5 Franz von Papen 134

6 Eric Raeder 134

7 Dr. Hans Frank 130

8 Hans Fritsche 130

9 Baldur von Schirach 130

10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Intelligence_...

130 is about 1 in 50 people.

Which perhaps is still remarkable, but I think it is a much higher frequency than most people would intuit from the number.

this doesn't really mean anything? you would find similarly high iq people around anyone with the power and the money to acquire them.

It's no more contradictory than a dictator wanting to promote economic development, increase literacy and education, or a number of other things that often lead to democracy.

That's essentially how Dr. Mindbender created Serpentor.

To relate this to the news about CTE in American Football, I wonder how much American mental potential has been lost to CTE.

One thing for sure, very few East Asian and few Asian American parents who are aware of the news will allow their kids to play the sport. What about the reactions from other American parents?

"Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury."

There were about 1,100,000 million high school players in 2014. This is approximately 7% of US high school students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...

The world will soon be a much much miserable place.

I wonder how they define intelligence. I suspect the cognitive traits that will serve an economy best in 30-40 years, when these babies reach the top of their economic productivity, are not what one might expect today.

Not perfectly but being talented in one area tends to correlate with being talented in another area.

Considering that AI will likely take away most regular jobs that leaves... Entertainment. Will super smart brainiacs really have an edge in entertainment in 30 years?

So I was one of the volunteers for this study - they accepted people based on a threshold of an official IQ test, or SAT/ACT scores. I forget if it was 99th percentile or higher. I heard about it on LessWrong way back while they were soliciting volunteers, and signed up as a way to get a free genotyping since my SAT was high enough.

I lost the email thread, but I didn't get my genome data back for about 2 years (April 2015). The researcher I was talking to seemed frustrated at some pretty large delays in the project.

"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

...."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838

The flip side is most people smart/rich enough to get out of China, or get their family members out of China, usually do it

Essentially we would do what others do now in the west: Immigrate to China and do sucky work.

Or it could mean millions of high IQ Chinese people doing menial jobs while suffering feelings of existential dread at a higher rate than their lower IQ peers.

Or they could build billions of robots with thousands of variations to make everyone live like a king.

And they will have high enough IQ to maintain and improve them as they wish. Without say IQ of 100 or more maintenance of advanced robots could be problematic.

Yep, since the booming of Conficius, generations of Chinese has been wasting their IQ and suffering from rationality-reality inconsistence.

Increasing IQ without reforming the culture is just a mean to crush opponents in Chinese social darwin scheme.

I'm very interested by this. What is it about Chinese culture that is oppressive to people with high IQs?

Turn any rational debate into a moral debate [good people vs. bad people] and appeal to authority/majority [to get the good people tag].

That math seems off. The gain should average 2.5-7.5 points surely?

Source? or calculation? The guy giving the figure is an evolutionary psychologist.

If the difference between "best case" and "worst case" ranges from 5--15, then that's the average best-worst difference. So the range is (x-2.5, x+2.5) to (x-7.5, x+7.5). Given it's a "lottery," the average person would expect x and could improve to x+2.5--x+7.5.

But I'm certainly not a psychologist.

Calculation: Kids differ by 5 to 15 IQ points on average. Assuming a symmetric distribution, that means that the smartest kid would be 2.5 to 7.5 IQ points smarter than the average kid, while the dumbest would be the same amount dumber than the average.

Actually, I'm not sure whether "5 to 15" isn't meant to describe the standard deviation, in which case screening lots of embryos might even produce much higher gains.

" ... every Chinese family ..."

This is overstated. Plain IVF today in the US costs tens of thousands of dollars. As a result in 2014 it was around 1.5% of births. Some insurance will cover IVF but is more expensive and there are generally caps. Its only accessible to the relatively well off and that's unlikely to change in the short and medium term.

So even if development of embryo selection technology proceeds rapidly it would only be available to the super rich for quite some time.

If the expected benefits of the eugenic selection over the lifetime of the child are more than the cost of the medical procedure then we could expect bank/insurance/state to finance the operation.

Interesting idea. But it seems difficult in practice, mainly because it would be more than 20 years before there's any chance that the child could start paying the loan back. There are other issues, like, would it be fair to saddle an unborn child with debt who had no opportunity to choose?

Given the way genes work, which is that they operate in networks and rarely code for a single trait, what other phenotypes would be affected by selecting for such genes ?

I would expect attractiveness to take a dive.

I'm relatively sure the Soviets had a go and got nowhere. I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far.

Genetics has come a long way since the Soviet era. We are arguably at the cusp of a golden era of genetic engineering, assuming governments don't move quickly to ban the practice wholesale.

> I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far.

Why?

the Soviets were hampered in many ways. One of them was a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

And a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligence.

The USSR was run primarily by highly educated engineers. China has the same issue. Yet somehow the preference of large communist dictatorships for credentialed leaders does not correlate with actual success.

One problem is that 'intelligence' is a very tricky thing to define and isn't at all the same as IQ or academic achievement. The world is full of foolish academics. The first thing the nascent Soviet Union tried was putting a committee of academics in charge of setting every price in the USSR, over 21 million of them. The futility of this task was not apparent to any of the ideologically-soaked intellectuals that ran things until the economy collapsed, although I suspect many ordinary kulaks could spot the problem right away.

The reliance of measuring intelligence in only a handful of highly specific ways is a failing that is found across humanity.

Breeding humans takes time, especially if you have to wait for at least a decade between producing an embryo and finding out whether it's useful for further breeding and can't meaningfully preselect them. The Soviet Union probably didn't exist long enough.

Here's a newer article on the results: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/health/chinese-scientists...

The conclusion: technology is not ready for editing genes of human embryos yet.

The interview was mainly about embryo selection, not genetic engineering.

What hope do us simpletons have with this technology? Will we be able to edit our DNA to raise our IQ? Learn more efficiently? Better Memory? Etc...

That paper was obsolete when it was done, even more obsolete when it was published, and totally obsolete now when even on the front page of HN, right now (presumably prompting this submission), there is an article about US researchers successfully editing human embryos with few or no off-targets.

This article interviews Geoffrey Miller.

He wrote an article around the same time here: https://www.edge.org/responses/q2013

Here is a response to that article: https://eastasiastudent.net/china/edge-org-chinese-eugenics-...

TLDR; The view promoted by this article is probably only supported by a single person(Geoffrey Miller) and is highly speculative.

I know this enters the realm of character assassination, but, after reading the article I also was curious who Geoffrey Miller is. Found a wikipedia article which contains one of his twitter posts:

"Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth." [0]

I know that doesn't invalidate his arguments and you can't judge a whole person by something they posted on twitter, but man, I'm disappointed this is the kind of person whose genes are considered so valuable to replicate. In our efforts to optimize for intelligence we may leave so many other good traits behind.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/how-twi...

Totally 100% unrelated but on the line "China continues to buy up American debt", the United States could just as easily buy up Chinese debt. For some reason it just doesn't do this.

True. It's not considered as safe of an investment. A lot of times you can't even trust the numbers China publishes about their economy.

>> 'I don’t think they have any imperial ambitions to spread China’s borders—they’re not going to act like Nazi Germany or America in the 20th century'

Oh, wow, that's quite a serious yet subtly thrown-in burn...

I'm exaggerating a bit but basically:

- Primary source of the article says "It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes"

- Vice's marketing department: "Gina is engineering babies!!!@$@#%1111"

Dear HN - the world would not be a better place if everyone was more like you. It probably wouldn't even be better for you

Are they still carrying this out? I thought it stopped when the head of BGI bailed.

I guess the movie "Gattaca" just got the location wrong.

IQ is bullshit.

People are afraid of "super intelligent" AI that can make itself smarter taking over the world. Well they didn't count on people becoming "superintelligent", making themselves smarter :)

Not sure how well these Chinese experiments will work out though. For some reason I doubt it will have the amazing effects they intended, at least in the near term.

That anyone believes that this effort at extrapolation will produce anything but monstrosity is unbelievable

Care to elaborate?

China, with its totalitarian capitalism, scares the shit out of me. I truly believe this country poses the single biggest threat to human kind today.

Watch 'advchina' on YouTube, it will calm you down and you'll see they are just human too haha

How is the U.S. any better? (Assuming you're American, correct me if I'm wrong)

This article is a train wreck of nonsense, misunderstanding and predictions of the future. It is just talking about research of finding correlation in genomes and intelligence. Also Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, followed closely by china.

> Also Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, followed closely by china.

What's the point of that? 2017 is not 2013.

Was it different then and now?

The East Asian culture strongly values intelligence and education. The parents there WILL act on embryo selection and genetic engineering when it is available and safe.

The point is that the article is taking bits of research into simple correlation and extrapolating that into embryo selection, guesses about IQ points being raised and all sorts of other things. It shouldn't be taken seriously in any way.

> The parents there WILL act on embryo selection and genetic engineering when it is available and safe.

It seems a bit of a reach to be so adamantly sure of what other people will do in an already predicted future.

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