There's this discussion going around in science circles about the question of, separate from ethics, eugenics would "work" in the sense of selecting for traits. I don't wanna even dip a pinky in this on twitter, but I do have a technical question:
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I see lots of claims saying that a trait can't be selected for if it's highly polygenic. I see why this might make it harder to select for and more likely to produce undesired knock-on effects, but I don't see why it'd pose a serious problem.
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Like, presumably lots of qualities of highly domesticated animals (hair length, tallness, docility) are polygenic, but it seems possible to select for them just fine. What am I missing?
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Replying to @ZachWeiner
In dogs some huge percentage of the variation in height is due to variations in a single gene, an artefact of artificial selection, no doubt.
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Replying to @jonathanberman @ZachWeiner
In humans, there are dozens of genes involved in height.
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Replying to @jonathanberman @ZachWeiner
Which is why China's effort at breeding Yao Ming by encouraging his exceptionally tall mother and father to get together didn't work.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @ZachWeiner
Wrong conclusion. Of course (with some regression to the mean) tall people are more likely to have tall kids. No one is questioning banal observations about hereditary.
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Heredity works but it's probabilistic so it doesn't work when you add more examples - this is due to the central limit theorem /sarc
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