Time is an unavoidable limiting factor. Even with strong control, selective breeding takes multiple generations to show substantial change. Any examples of successful selective breeding in organisms with generational spans as long as humans?
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Generational span (time to reproduction), not lifespan

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They call it breeding cycle. This stuff is pretty standard.pic.twitter.com/9FeLDCTX5L
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Worse than that. If that were remotely true (as it actually is for fertility!), IQ/EDU PGSes wouldn't work out of sample, wouldn't be usable or GWASable across so many cohorts/decades, genetic correlations would be zero, biological enrichments would make no sense, and so on.
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Someone needs to do an anonymous poll of geneticists about whether they really think biotech eugenics (embryo selection/genetic engineering) would work. Also ask them if they fear saying it would publicly. Just in general, do surveys of scientists to ask for suppressed beliefs.
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Need to be careful about defining expertise, though. I keep seeing these microbe/plant geneticists denying basic behav gen because they assume that humans must work like their wacky organisms with 60 decaploid chromosomes where everything is 5-way interactions and env-specific.
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Is that because sexual vs asexual reproduction?
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Good point! Sexual reproduction causes the shuffling around (recombination) which breaks the epistasis, but for asexual clonal reproduction, that actually would not happen. Never thought of that, but seems true.
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That's been mentioned in things I'm sure you've read, but it's hardly the only factor. I think a lot of it may be just that they are under enormously more selection and the simple additivity is gone. Hard to imagine stuff like, say, phages' "survival of the flattest" in humans.
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snakes?! really?
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Do they not expect any biology or physiological psychology courses anymore? I had both in undergrad...
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It involves thousands of interwoven genes — we have no idea how they are all connected. See
@razibkhan on the fatal conceit of would-be brain designers. - 1 more reply
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I did hear somebody tried this once. Didn’t end well I’m told
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We bred snakes?
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Why do you insist on conflating selection with engineering?
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