Do you think embryo selection / genetic engineering for polygenic human traits would work? I.e. if someone were to spend a few years perfecting the technology for this, it would work.
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Motivation: this geneticist says it wouldn't work, and it's a bizarrely common claim by academics who should know better.https://twitter.com/drderringer/status/1099321810468986883 …
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..so why worry?
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Embryo selection should work see: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/embryo.pdf … and https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection … Genetic engineering has some challenges and the experiment using CRISPR on babies had some flaws: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/crispr-scientists-slam-methods-used-on-gene-edited-babies--65167 … but it should be possible to overcome them.
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How many embryos do we have to select from? Traditional IVF numbers, maybe not, but if harvesting and selecting from several hundred each time, odds go way up that we can find one that improves on many (most?) known alleles. Brute force eugenics.
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As for engineering, maybe someday, but from a practical perspective the reaction to Chinese scientists doing this even "accidentally" tells me that it will receive significant pushback and possibly research bans in many nations.
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Not a geneticist, just a science fiction author.
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Maybe they know better than you, did you consider that?
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Sure, but I doubt it because I read stuff this intensively, and so do other people, e.g. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection …
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"unknowably culture bound" lol
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