Baby girl born from record-setting 27-year-old embryo
bbc.com
bbc.com
Statements like these only make sense in a narrow context. Unless you're suggesting a dog raised like a human would act more like a human than a dog.
Some of these stories are doubtful and obviously none of them are all that scientific… for one thing why are all the reports from Russia?
> According to Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, Victor was a normal child at birth[citation needed] but was neglected by his alcoholic parents from an early age.
Hmm. Did they know about fetal alcohol syndrome then? It's suggested he was autistic, which would've been true at birth.
I think FASD is a good guess.
As long as whether you can survive and make children is independent from your gene, Evolution never occurs.
So selection is still around, but nowadays we select for different things than nature used to when medicine wasn't as well developed as it is today.
Note that this selection alone won't cause any genetic change faster than what existed in the past. What really accelerates changes in the gene pool is us deliberately doing them. We'll start with eliminating hereditary diseases, but I don't think we'll stop there. We'll likely study which genetic variants give rise to desirable traits and then make those mutations to upcoming children of interested individuals.
The desperate poor aren’t going anywhere.
Desperate poverty is rapidly disappearing across the world. Look it up!
I doubt we'll figure out how to do genetic reprogramming on people. It seems like patching a few SNPs isn't going to do much.
Our own evolution is slow, but because of our numbers and tech, we're modifying everything around us at an unbelievable pace.
And yes, medieval people were as intelligent as modern people. Many of the smartest minds of humanity haven't lived today but hundreds or thousands of years ago. I'd put all behaviorally modern humans are into the same category.
The flynn effect has slowed down in the western world. This highly suggests not genetic changes but genetic potential being fulfilled thanks to environmental improvements.
This indicates insufficient nutrition for most of the population. Famines were common approx. 5-7 years, so if you were one of the small folk, you experienced two to three of them as a juvenile.
And bad nutrition has some effect on brain, too, after all it is part of the body. I do not want to claim that medieval people would be unable to learn calculus, but those with worst food security might struggle.
Sort of like Lost meets Lord of the Flies.
The TV Show Raised by Wolves is essentially this too.
E: Of course by the time I typed this, there were several other people already commenting the same thing. We’re all unique snowflakes!
Except that there was no crash landing - it was an intentional method to colonise other planets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization
It may be at the morula stage of embryonic development.
Where it gets interesting is what happens when we start manipulating and improving DNA digitally before we implant it. Basically things like Crispr are stepping stones towards getting there. But we could be digitally creating and evaluating combinations of genes and genomes from very large databases of historical archives of individuals.
The philosophical and ethical questions around this are largely centered on boys of brazil type scenarios. Most of that stuff is driven by popular fiction rather than reality. Another factor is religion and religious objections against stuff like this happening or even acknowledging that this is possible.
But the reality is we already have celebrities ordering clones of their deceased pets. From there to designer babies is not such a huge technical leap. Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc. Now imagine dog breeders going digital and creating new dog breeds digitally before planting an embryo. Not possible today but also not that far off probably. If that bothers you ethically, think designer grains or rice from digitally crafted DNA. GMO foods have been a thing for decades. That stuff going digital would be about as controversial. When that happens it won't stop there.
Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges such as the low success rate of implanting embryos, the high error rates of dna modifications, the correspondingly high number of abortions needed because of failures, availability of stem cell material (until recently this required embryos), etc. This is not a problem for chihuahuas but kind of a show stopper when it concerns our own genetic offspring. Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely. We're kind of ethically flexible.
There's a good chance that this already is happening and that we simply don't get to learn about it for a while because it is kind of illegal and the people involved are not likely to want to be exposed. But the combination of billionaires, fertility issues, and technical capability makes this more a question of when than if, I would say. Supply and demand are not going to be the issue.
"The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes."
If you store more than one genome, any additional genome is only 4MB because human genomes are 99% identical.
So you could store the genomes of an entire city on your hard drive.
So does this count as a form of intelligent design and would a hypothetical alien race be able to detect this kind of intervention by examining future species?
No, because the resulting organisms are still very much evolved rather than designed. They still have masses of junk DNA and stupid path-dependencies like the appendix and the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
> would a hypothetical alien race be able to detect this kind of intervention by examining future species?
Yes; we've been able to tell from its genome that brewers' yeast is an ancient deliberate hybridisation of two wild yeast strains, so future aliens could presumably do the same.
Recent research has shown that the appendix isn't as useless as it was long thought - there are strong suggestions that it acts as a "safe heaven" for the gut flora: https://time.com/4631305/appendicitis-appendix-gut-bacteria/
> Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc.
The Catholic Church does indeed oppose genetic engineering human beings and the like for very well-developed ethical reasons. However, I'm not sure where you get the idea that "religious people" find it offensive _that_ human beings can be cloned. Which "religious people"? Certainly, many people find the act of human cloning, among others, offensive, but _that_ a human beings can be cloned? FWIW, the term "religious people" is rather meaningless. It's not a meaningful category in the way it is used here and just used as a vague insinuation that people of a certain stripe (typically Christians) are superstitious people with arbitrary hangups and irrational beliefs (your choice of words says as much: nativity "myths", souls). Religion is just what someone holds to be ultimate reality, the highest good, and aim of life. In that sense, everyone is religious, so it's not a question of _whether_ you're religious, but how, and whether your religion is correct (I know, an unpopular thing to say today, but that's just a feature of tacit modern liberal sentiments and not the product of reason).
> Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges [...] Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely.
Why do you think that is? Why do we think that euthanizing non-human animals is morally licit while doing that to a human being isn't? I leave that as an exercise.
> We're kind of ethically flexible.
Either actions are morally licit or they aren't. To say you're flexible is to say that either you're an immoral person to the degree that you depart from the licit, or that there's no ethical fact of the matter. If there's no ethical fact of the matter, then ethical concerns are pure fiction. You can't have it both ways. Either something is licit or it isn't. It may be determined by circumstance (killing in self-defense), or it may be an absolute (murdering an innocent person), but each concrete action is as such either licit, illicit, or there is no fact of the matter because it is a meaningless category.
>Religion is just what someone holds to be ultimate reality, the highest good, and aim of life. In that sense, everyone is religious, so it's not a question of _whether_ you're religious, but how, and whether your religion is correct
Why would everyone be religious? Religious people act on beliefs. Non-religious people act on evidence.
Some people act out the rituals to avoid upsetting their relationships, but revert to evidence based decision making for important choices.
Replicating the actual implantation process, where the embryo gets nutrients from the uterus itself, we haven't made substantial progress towards AFAIK.
2020: This baby is a millenial.
But some parts of the article are obvious fluff and seemingly lies, not science. From the fine article:
> Ms Gibson has loved seeing the similarities between
> her girls, including a tiny wrinkle between their
> eyebrows when they're mad or upset.
She's 27 years + 2 months; imagine all the bottled up anger after all those years as an embryo /s
You could also see some actors taking up the offer multiple times, putting up the children for adoption immediately after birthing.
It went as well as you can imagine (lots of poor women having more children then they could support), followed by some lawsuits to make sure the "correct" women won the prize (e.g. not immigrants or people having children out of wedlock).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby
It is also discussed in Act 2 of this episode of "This American Life": https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/the-long-fuse
IMO there should be a personal gene bank for men and women on the Moon or the Antarctic, so they can save on cryogenic costs, it's tricky as it is the success rates are really slim, 'A New hope' or 'The last Jedi' scenario awaits
I doubt today's people are sufficiently genetically different from those who lived 500 years ago for it to make a difference in most areas. Disease resistance maybe, but modern medicine and sanitation makes that much less significant for survival than it used to be.
The psychological and cognitive demands of modern lifestyles can be quite different from those of previous centuries, but a lot of people aren't genetically well-suited to the modern lifestyles they are nonetheless expected to live – they end up being diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD, when quite possibly if they'd lived 500 years earlier those same traits might have been much more adaptive.
In some ways modern society is hard for people with ADHD: more jobs demand skills that can be hard to aquire for people who have a hard time sitting in a classroom.
In certain (but certainly not all IMO) other ways we are more tolerant towards especially kids these days: I never experienced it, but I still heard about[0] kids being punished with stick/cane in school, or even one particular headmaster who would use electrical shocks on kids.
These days are long gone now both here and were I grew up.
[0]: Skits, cartoons in magazines as well as stories.
For one example, my biggest impairments are definitely to a) general motivation, including non-work/school activities like reading a book I'm interested in (well-treated by medicine); general impulsivity, including emotional impulsivity and stimulation seeking behaviors (well-treated by medicine); and significant impairments to working memory (unfortunately not well-treated by medicine). The working memory is the real PITA. Studies show people with ADHD lack a specialized area of their brains for handling working memory, unlike non-ADHD people. This means that for me, my brain handles working memory tasks analogously to how blind people can learn to "see" with their tongues -- I have to marshal unrelated brain areas to try to make up the difference. (For an example of what this is like in practice, walking into a room and forgetting why I am there occurs at least a dozen times per day.) Another huge area of impact is to sleep; the vast majority (almost 90%) of adults with ADHD also qualify for a sleep disorder, usually delayed sleep phase.
As for jobs, actually one big risk tends to be having an emotional outburst at your boss or colleagues. Adults with undiagnosed ADHD usually end up developing a reputation for anger problems, as they have big difficulties controlling primal emotional responses. Another major area of challenge comes from our tendency towards substance abuse problems; many undiagnosed adults end up self-medicating via alcohol or street stimulants.
Anyways, I know this is kind of a big tangent from the OP, but I just wanted to throw that out there. I didn't get diagnosed until I was nearly 30 mainly because I was, in fact, able to sit in classrooms. I have an inattentive subtype, meaning it doesn't materialize as visible restlessness and hyperactivity as much as it does in others. Because I wasn't running around classrooms and acting out, I had to suffer in ignorance for decades.
Quite possibly because the distinction between ADHD and ASD (among other disorders) is biologically dubious. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0631-2
> meaning that people with ADHD qualify as neurodiverse
Now this is a really big tangent, but the term "neurodiverse" annoys me. One of the reasons is, there is actually a great deal of genuine neural diversity among so-called "neurotypical" people. For example, while most right-handed people activate left hemisphere perisylvian regions in language processing, a small minority of right-handed people activate right hemisphere perisylvian regions instead. So that small minority are "neurodiverse" in a genuine physical sense, yet absent some clinically significant dysfunction (and this example of neurodiversity has no known clinical significance), nobody will call them that. (I owe this example to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28130875/ who in turn cite it to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10611122/ )
In reality, "neurotypical"-vs-"neurodiverse" is a clinical distinction, not a neuroscience one. People with (certain kinds of) clinically significant dysfunctions get the second label, people without those dysfunctions get the first. Very rarely does anyone actually look at what is going on in the brain (eg via MRI) before applying these labels. (There are studies claiming to find differences in the brain between the "neurotypical" group and various subsets of the "neurodiverse" group, but those studies tend to contradict each other, have problems with reproducibility, and only claim to find group differences not individual ones – there may be a statistically significant difference between the mean of some property in two groups, but the ranges of that property in the two groups will be overlapping.)
I don't qualify as ADHD, but I've found that I do the same, substituting my auditory memory for working memory. Apparently it's much easier for me to keep a train of thought on the rails if I use my language processor for additional short-term storage. I didn't even realize I did this, until people started telling me that I shouldn't talk out loud during written exams.
This may be miles off from your experience, it just lit a spark of recognition.
You can do it sub vocally without making sound.
Don't underestimate my knowledge about ADHD ;-)
Also, much (most? all?) of what you write is correct but I don't feel it detracts from my point.
not with its surface temperature exceeding 120°C