I thought it was relatively easy to keep zygotes dormant for arbitrary lengths of time, but embryos are more developed and this definitely raises philosophical questions regarding cryogenics. "How big can we go beyond the embryo, and for how long?"
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.
It may be at the morula stage of embryonic development.
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
Replicating the actual implantation process, where the embryo gets nutrients from the uterus itself, we haven't made substantial progress towards AFAIK.