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Comment by cafebeen | Hacker News Reader

The bigger issue seems to be determining what "best" means. While there are a handful of diseases associated with specific genetic variants that could obviously be cured, the traits people would likely try to optimize (e.g. intelligence) seem to involve a complex combination of genes and environment, and an attempt to select for such genes could incur some potentially negative side-effects.

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It seems like your two sentences don't really fit together.

"Best" pretty clearly means higher IQ in this context.

The fact that the practical engineering required to accomplish that will involve setbacks, failures, costs, and suffering doesn't mean that we can't define the goal.

Agreed that intelligence is a good thing, but the question is about whether there is a set of genes that are “best” for producing it. At the moment it’s unclear which genes those are, and even if we found some genes related to intelligence, they may have other negative consequences that make the idea of a “best” set of genes questionable

Well, to add some data:

Intelligence genes discovered by scientists The Telegraph, Dec 21 2015 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/120617...

Many similar articles, not all about the same discovery, at this DDG search:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=genes+for+intelligence+found&t=ffa...

Yes, there is surely evidence that intelligence is heritable, but it's worth giving the research on this a close reading. Current approaches can only explain 10% of the variance in intelligence (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104), plus the effects from the environment. My main issue with the article though was the assumption that a "best" set of genes exists without futher discussion (in addition to obvious ethical concerns)

I was just responding to this: "intelligence is a good thing, but the question is about whether there is a set of genes that are “best” for producing it. At the moment it’s unclear which genes those are"

Basically just noting that we now know at least some of those genes.

Many more will be found. Some will have other deleterious effects, and we'll figure that out too. The cause-and-effect of genotype and phenotype will be slowly decoded. It's just a matter of time; there's nothing unsurmountable here at all.

If there are 200 mind trait affecting genes you are saying a 2^200 search is fine.

That's... Not how any of this works.

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