Height, for example. You have gene variants that would tend to make you have a certain height in a particular environment: but also, height is influenced by essentially random factors. Maybe development noise. maybe muons.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
Your kids get a random sample of your genes and a random sample of your wife's: on average, their genetic inheritance is the same as the average of pop and mom.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
But your kid's random noise is not linked to that of the parents: it is as if the dice are rolled again. I'm sure we could easily up with an exact D&D model for this.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
If you are very tall, you most likely have goof height genes _and_ some developmental luck. You kid will get a sample of your genes, but he doesn't inherit your developmental luck.
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Replying to @der_iidiot @jaydotchan and
One last key point: if you pick a bunch of extra-tall parents and stick their kids somewhere where they'll end up marrying each other, say on an island - regression does not continue. Dice have been re-rolled. You'll have a tall population. So natural selection is possible.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
Which means that fairly significant eugenics is trivial. This subject comes up indirectly in science fiction: often space colonization is imagined to occur with a picked group, healthier and smarter than average. The ensuing population would be different from us.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
Was thinking, how science fiction authors actually understood this? Not many that I can think of. Heinlein, certainly. Harry Turtledove understands it - but then, he did flunk out of Cal Tech, which is, I think, more of an honor than graduating from Harvard.
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Replying to @gcochran99 @der_iidiot and
Any series with a galaxy spanning human civilization that's lasted for millennia that doesn't have major biological differences between the human populations of different planets implicitly fails to understand this.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @der_iidiot and
Well, if they had super-easy transportation, say faster-than-light teleportation, you might get leveling gene flow. But that's what it would take. Or, deliberate forced genetic standardization.
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Would take something like FTL teleportation that also could be run by people of close to average ability and with low energy expenditure - otherwise it would be something that only the top of the top engaged in.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @der_iidiot and
There is a sub-sub-sub genre about Galactic civilizations in which FTL teleportation has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
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