This is a good tech to have, with applications both in IVF and in research.
Currently, egg retrieval is a significant part of the IVF process - one that's notoriously taxing on the women. Once this gets refined enough for clinical uses, it can become as simple as "take a blood sample once, produce as many eggs as you need". With an added benefit of being able to get eggs when traditional retrieval fails.
That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.
Can you point me to anything about mitochondrial transplants? I'd love to see bat mitochondria transplanted into other mammals. They must have really superior ones given the energy expenditures needed to support flight and their long lifespans.
It's not so much a mitochondrial transplant, as it is fertilized egg nucleus transplant. Not just mitochondria are used from the third donor but their whole egg (sans nucleus). So unless a human might develop from a bat egg just from swapping out nucleus, which I'm sure it's not the case, super-powered batman must remain a fantasy.
there are many reasons for this chimera not to be viable,
mitochondria co-evolves with the nuclear DNA, you can't just take a mitochondria from a totally different species
Bats are kinda close though. Maybe it would require just a handfuls specific adjustments to nuclear DNA, at most. Worth a shot if it could give us for example 2x multiplier for a healthy lifespan. Even getting 10 year old mice would be very cool.
If this ever becomes a pressing issue, you can do cell selection and mitochondrial transplants.
As long as mitochondrial damage is not uniform, you can sample for cells with low mtDNA damage and no known-harmful mutations, and base your eggs on those cell lines. Do "in vitro" what natural selection would have done "in vivo", reduce damage accumulation that way - potentially to zero.
And if you really want to, you can make eggs off a "known good mtDNA" cell line, then swap a new nucleus into them (cloning-like process), and get a cell line with target nuclear DNA and known good mtDNA. Mitochondrial replacement therapy. Then make eggs off that hybrid line.
Involved lab work, but, perfectly doable, and rides the same stack you already use for IVF. Mitochondrial replacement is already a known tech, but only worthwhile for cases of known harmful mtDNA anomalies currently. "Good mtDNA" eggs are sourced from donors instead of produced from cell lines currently, but this tech might change that too.
Instead of just dismissing this and saying this can't possibly work, it would be better to ask: how do they get around problems of mitochondrial damage, or have they not tackled that yet?
Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company.
Or we could ask "what the hell are they talking about" and "can they cite even one single bit of useful peer reviewed evidence about this?"
Coz really that seems like the foundational problem here: claiming something rather crazy with obvious problems, like multigenerational mitochondrial damage in an organism which replicates literally billions of them just to be born.
Life wouldn’t be here if mitochondria only accumulated damage. We can do in the lab what biology does in the wild - introduce selection pressures. Either by sequencing iPSC clones and picking the best, somehow inducing the natural purifying selection, or simply using a donor mitochondria.
I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria.
When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging.
Why is it a designer's dream to hijack and control my scrolling experience? The scroll they've implemented is slow to respond, and has a weirdly low capped max speed. I don't understand why that's what a designer dreams of doing to me. I like my scroll (and other computer interactions for that matter) to be responsive and fast. You know, the kind of thing that puts me in control, not the designer.
That being said, the scroll was as smooth as regular webpage scrolls. Usually these JS scrolls aren't able to avoid dropping frames or otherwise introducing judder, but this one does appear to run at a consistent and high framerate, which is technically impressive.
Guess the japanese excel at micromanaging. Although one could
say that the research here in the article is more epic than
Shinya's discovery, but I remember having watched one of his
presentation and it convinced me of pure epicness, if you
understand how his team found the "Yamanaka factors". That
was by human (work) consistency. About as epic as
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her mutant screens, that also
involved tons of micro-experiments.
That is a good question. Excepting the sexual ones, all the cells in an organism are diploid¹, including the ones found in blood (excluding erythrocytes, since those do not have a nucleus, therefore -- do not have chromosomes). Yet in natural development of the organism, a bunch of stem cells, which are of regular (diploid set of chromosomes) type, are evolving to form the ovaries, containing from very beginning all the ova (egg cells) that the female may have in her life. Ovum does only have a haploid¹ chromosomes set, until fertilization.
In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source.
What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view.
> Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen
Probably nothing special except some inbreeding with the loss of 25% of genetic material of the donor individual (each gamete containing a random 50% of the donor's genetic material). Not sure how fast this level of inbreeding would be deleterious.
That's some Cleopatra-level inbreeding. The child's - or should we say the victim's - DNA would have longer runs of homozygosity than a child of incest.
I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.
The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
And if those effects are bypassed with artificial conception, we might end up with humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.
The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness - or perhaps a lack of gain of fitness that would have otherwise occurred.
Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.
Is there a reason you expect IQ to be unbounded? Feels like there are physical constraints, at which point you're sampling from a truncated normal distribution (or similar).
This line of reasoning leads to “some people are weak and unworthy of life because they are impure.” I don’t think rolling back our work to end infant mortality to prevent weak people from living is the right answer.
It doesn't "lead to". Supporting a wrong conclusion even with a valid argument is as old as time. Fans of eugenics don't need an excuse to go down that path.
Our natural and artificial environments shape us for better or worse. We're bigger and more intelligent as a direct outcome of better nutrition. But we also have far more people with deadly allergies because we're so good at managing them now.
Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times
I don't think it's a grenade unless you are implicitly trying to mean it that life begins before birth, which ultimately is a definition game since it's actually quite hard to define life, hard enough that calling it "life" is a matter of personal worldview. I personally think it's quite reasonable to exclude pre-birth "deaths" from life expectancy, or event infant deaths sometimes, depending on what you are trying to measure.
In any case I didn't know this number and it's quite relevant to the discussion of how much we got rid of natural selection.
We have, we just have much, much better conditions for food, hygiene, personnal safety and medicine.
But have worse hormonal health (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063751/), and are less fit (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4033061/). The flynn effect also seems to decline in some parts of the world: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301679
It just doesn't compensate the immense gains tech created.
Turns out it's ok to be weaker if you don't have to worry about dying of parasites, malnutrition, cold.
Which, you could conclude, means the individual is weaker, but the species is stronger.
I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks.
The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote:
> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.
I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result.
> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests
What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
>What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:
1. This kid isn't intelligent.
2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.
What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.
This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."
In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?
IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.
The reversal of the Flynn effect is more likely explained by other factors such as the explosion of social media, endless addictive entertainment, and all the attention manipulation that comes with it. Conception didn’t change that much at a large enough scale during this short time period to explain it.
We haven't created humans from scratch using genetic engineering yet, why would you think our current state has anything to do with the comment you are replying to?
When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.
Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust.
Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.
In my example, I cited microfractures and weak steel. These are not normal "deteriorate by default" methods of bridge deterioration, and have absolutely nothing to do with proper bridge construction.
They are flaws. Flaws which should never happen, separate from normal environmental degradation.
You may debate the point, but that is irrelevant, for I am referring to abnormal issues with bridges. Flaws in construction. Taking this parallel to humanity, or any evolved species, what "forges" a strong species is constantly being tempered by their environment.
Predation. Disease. Parasites. Even lack of proper nutrition. Environmental adversity, eg exposure to heat, wind, sun, etc. Reproductive errors. Reproduction issues. Etc and so forth. We've eliminated almost all of this, which means that standard methods of evolutionary pressure are almost all removed.
Species do deteriorate by default, if they remain static. Or additionally, if they allow genetic errors (which happens every generation, yes every) to seep into the gene pool without being winnowed back out by the stresses above.
These days, we save babies which are born early. Ones which have a dozen birth defects. Ones which have 100 other issues. Adults (before breeding age) with issues. Note that I am not saying we should not do these things! Only, that there is a price. A long term price.
Now... that being said, I think this is the best part of genetic engineering. It allows us to fix issues like this in the womb, and to get rid of these sorts of errors whilst still helping the current generation live, and have good lives.
But to pretend that evolutionary pressure doesn't exist, is weird. And everything we have which is an enhancement to our survival capabilities, is evolutionarily pressure based.
So back to the start? Those microfractures and weaknesses in steel are not noticeable when the bridge is deployed, as the steel's production is actually the problem. It's years later, with bridge inspections (if done! and they should be!) that these issues are discovered.
But much like global warming, or said steel, you don't want be be performing corrective action. And you can't see it before the issue becomes apparent. People didn't notice the Earth getting warmer when they were burning coal in year 1000 or some such.
We barely see the evidence of global warming now. And it's already too late to arrest some change.
Is that what you'd prefer for humanity? Wait until genetic defects are so rampant that it is "in your face" apparent?
Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?
You’re layering
several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though
I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong.
It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway".
I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
"I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode."
We actually have and is called RISK.
RISK = Probability * Damage.
Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents.
Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario.
We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.
Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.
I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.
But outside the bible, who says we must be more and above replacement rates? Is such a tragedy for humanity if there are only 4 billion humans in 100 years? 4 happier billions? It doesn't HAVE to go up all the time, and between extinction (zero humans) and overcrowding (X billions) there are many unknown ways to go.
Unfortunately most of society and the economy is built on the foundational assumption of a growing (or at least stable) population. There will be some extremely tough challenges to solve with an actively declining population.
A lot of these issues have more to do with how we’ve constructed our society than with some loss of purity. If you want people to have more sex, make cities and towns more livable, get people out of cars, give them living wages so they have free time, create societal supports for childcare, make giving birth and pediatric care completely free, and support people forming associations outside of work. These are all barriers that have appeared basically my lifetime and it’s way more likely that people are making informed choices than that there’s some horrible transformation we’re all undergoing.
This framework would be hard to apply to unknown unknowns. That's why in software engineering you'd apply canarying. Then the longer timeframe for potential negative effects, the slower the adoption of a new process should be.
The history of humanity, I say of hominids even, was defined by humans playing it unsafe - migrating, sailing, inventing bombs, you name it. We played god before even we invented gods, and reached this point in time. Should we say "this is best we can do, let's stop everything"? Nah, not likely.
"To play God" isn't just to do something spectacular which wasn't possible before. It's to use other people - to put yourself on a higher teleological level than other people, declaring their purpose (whatever it is) as fully subordinate to your purpose (whatever it is).
As if they were a tool you created. Obviously, if I carve a piece of wood into a spoon, it's I who get to say that what used to be a piece of wood now has a purpose of moving soup to mouths. The carved piece of wood now has a purpose, but it's wholly subordinate to my purpose (whatever it is).
You don't have to actually design people to play God - you can subordinate others to your purpose without doing that, that's what various God-kings in history did. But it certainly gives you a head start if you make them.
You can make something and don't subordinate it to your purpose. In our culture, we see children that way. We claim, basically, that we didn't deliberately design a child, we only obeyed our own natures without really having much choice in the matter, and thus we and our child is on the same teleological level.
This is not a cultural universal. In many cultures, parents (in particular fathers) would say basically "I made you, so you must do as I please, you have no reason for existing except for my purposes". It was a hard won battle for our culture to assert that children matter for their own sake and not just for their parent's.
Many things in this thread makes me want to say "Y'all MFs need Jesus". I won't say that, but I will say that you should stop and think about why it is that the Catholic church is so difficult about contraception, why Christians in general have historically made such a big deal of the difference "born of God" vs "Created by God" (arianism, etc.), and what that story of Abraham and Isaac was really about. Whether you agree or not, there's much about other people you will never understand if you don't think about teleological levels.
Thanks, that's an interesting analysis. I'm not a Christian, but I definitely get the sense that we're playing with an extreme danger here, and that we're not being sufficiently humble / cautious / in awe of the sacred -- and that such hubris might literally lead to human extinction, or close to it.
But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.
But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.
This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases.
Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society.
Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective.
Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
Natural reproduction already has a lot of randomness and failure built into it. It's not like egg/sperm selection is a perfect quality-control system. IVF has also been around for decades, and while it definitely needs monitoring, we haven't seen some obvious collapse in health from it
Nobody HAS to do that. If people WANT to have children they should give them the best chances they can. If science proves IVF is the best, every parent must do it, if it's risk freedom has not been proved yet, no person that has other options available should do it. Chances are they would be ruining their children's life by expecting and comparing them to the best, so they can at least not give them handicap from birth. The world is now much more competetive and unfair to our children than it was in our time. My mother has told me countless times that childbirth is one of easier parts of motherhood.
What? IVF doesn’t mean that the human is gestated in a glass tube like some 80s sci-fi, the pregnancy and birth still have to occur, carried out by a human.
There is nothing such as riskless technology, but you can't escape some risk anyway.
Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös.
Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years.
For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.
I think it’s important to remember that the process of selection acts directly on human traits. For example being exposed to high summer heat temperatures may eliminate some people who have unproductive sweat glands, or needing to run down your food may eliminate people who have a muscles that easily tire. Selection (largely) does not act on far removed traits like egg cell characteristics as a proxy of human traits like muscle performance because the genes that are used by egg cells are quite different than those used by muscle cells. So if you worry about some kind of human trait decline you should be much more worried that people have access to air conditioning and grocery stores.
> A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies.
> meaningful loss of fitness
What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already?
150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter...
Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?
It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive."
Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent.
It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.
Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different.
So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria.
> It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia.
That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can literally SEE how a change of fitness function affects the phenotype.
> You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection.
There are many studies which describe genetic changes within latest 10,000 years or less. E.g. paper "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe": "We identified 25 genetic loci with rapid changes
21 in frequency during these periods". You can find many similar papers if you do a search
One of studies identified changes in loci associated with Y. pestis immunity during the Black Death (i.e. something like a century). Black Death mortality is similar in scale to early childhood mortality 150 years ago.
I suppose that must depend on one's definition of "substantially". Human's haven't changed "substantially", and neither do new breeds of dogs and cats.
Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.
People in the past could survive and procreate without modern medicine (basically without any medicine at all as doctors could do very little 200 years ago) with ~50% success rate. I'd suspect this rate is already lower now, and it might matter in multiple ways
“survival of the fittest” was actually coined by a political economist, Herbert Spencer, to explain how lassiez-faire economics produces better companies. Darwin didn’t extrapolate to that in his theories and the quote is often applied to explain how evolution works, but that may not be the case. We can say that evolution results in change but that there are no guarantees that those changes result in fitness of the organism. We can only say that sometimes they obviously do and in other cases we can make up “just-so” stories to explain stuff in terms of fitness.
By contrast, we could also end up with humans that are stronger, smarter, or are better adapted to a changing environment.
In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm.
The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?
As I understand it, that they've gone back to the point of making the ovary and the egg itself is going through Meiosis helps here, because it's got the randomness of picking genes between the pair of chromosomes in the source. So it's not just a clone; it's a little more natural than if they tried to produce the egg directly.
Several of your claims are unsubstantiated. Sure, species co-evolve together, environment shapes evolution.
But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing?
Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.
>The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...
> I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
Anti-intellectuallism is everywhere, especially amongst the intellectuals. The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
AI writing is anti-intellectual. It demands the time of thousands of people to read when they could be reading something with actual meaning. You're demanding scholars to read comic books all day in case they have content worth engaging with (spoiler: they don't).
> The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly:
> Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind.
To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history.
Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells".
> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness
Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.
I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?
Imagine guys like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Thiel cloning themselves. That's 100% dystopian. We would never be able to get rid of madmen! Power corrupts and makes the powerful just weird and unable to make rational decisions. That's why people in power need to be replaced regularly to have a stable society.
I agree with the second part, but I’m not convinced cloning those people would lead to other copies of them (not that I’m advocating for it, either). Your environment/upbringing/opportunities shape a lot of who you become. Musk famously has kids who find him abhorrent, I see no reason to believe that he’d be a competent father even to himself. Especially since the kid would have siblings who could open his eyes to the shit his father does, and if there’s one thing Musk is known for is gullibility to accept anything fitting his world view. I don’t think being a greedy unhappy (by his own admission) asshole is genetic.
It doesn't need to make clones into absolute copies of them to be problematic. It's just an obfuscation of a very old idea, the divine right of kings.
It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.
Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.
I'd be very curious how they even define "safe enough" for this. With most therapies, the risk is mostly to the patient. Here the risk could be passed on to a future person who never consented to the experiment.
I get where you're coming from, but this seems no different from the risks associated with having a baby. Pushed further, babies never consent to any of the traits they inherit from their parents.
The origins of stem cells for use in the biosciences and in cosmetics are extremely brutal and should be illegal. Sandra Bullock explains it better than I could:
https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g
Can we not devolve into "think of the poor stem cells" bullshit at least on HN?
Especially given that the link in question describes this as the source of stem cells:
> After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs.
That stupid controversy set the field back a decade, and that was a decade too much. People who get their science news from celeb gossip are a blight.
This is a good tech to have, with applications both in IVF and in research.
Currently, egg retrieval is a significant part of the IVF process - one that's notoriously taxing on the women. Once this gets refined enough for clinical uses, it can become as simple as "take a blood sample once, produce as many eggs as you need". With an added benefit of being able to get eggs when traditional retrieval fails.
Related (2021) Turning stem cells into human eggs (97 points, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040823
That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.
Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures
Can you point me to anything about mitochondrial transplants? I'd love to see bat mitochondria transplanted into other mammals. They must have really superior ones given the energy expenditures needed to support flight and their long lifespans.
I will let the experts continue from here :) This review is from 2020, i bet things have progressed since then
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7169912/
It's not so much a mitochondrial transplant, as it is fertilized egg nucleus transplant. Not just mitochondria are used from the third donor but their whole egg (sans nucleus). So unless a human might develop from a bat egg just from swapping out nucleus, which I'm sure it's not the case, super-powered batman must remain a fantasy.
Oh, so that's what you were aiming for, LOL
there are many reasons for this chimera not to be viable, mitochondria co-evolves with the nuclear DNA, you can't just take a mitochondria from a totally different species
Bats are kinda close though. Maybe it would require just a handfuls specific adjustments to nuclear DNA, at most. Worth a shot if it could give us for example 2x multiplier for a healthy lifespan. Even getting 10 year old mice would be very cool.
I don't, isn't this the recipe to get IRL Morbius?
Or Man-Bat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Bat
Batboy, real at last
If this ever becomes a pressing issue, you can do cell selection and mitochondrial transplants.
As long as mitochondrial damage is not uniform, you can sample for cells with low mtDNA damage and no known-harmful mutations, and base your eggs on those cell lines. Do "in vitro" what natural selection would have done "in vivo", reduce damage accumulation that way - potentially to zero.
And if you really want to, you can make eggs off a "known good mtDNA" cell line, then swap a new nucleus into them (cloning-like process), and get a cell line with target nuclear DNA and known good mtDNA. Mitochondrial replacement therapy. Then make eggs off that hybrid line.
Involved lab work, but, perfectly doable, and rides the same stack you already use for IVF. Mitochondrial replacement is already a known tech, but only worthwhile for cases of known harmful mtDNA anomalies currently. "Good mtDNA" eggs are sourced from donors instead of produced from cell lines currently, but this tech might change that too.
Instead of just dismissing this and saying this can't possibly work, it would be better to ask: how do they get around problems of mitochondrial damage, or have they not tackled that yet?
Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company.
Or we could ask "what the hell are they talking about" and "can they cite even one single bit of useful peer reviewed evidence about this?"
Coz really that seems like the foundational problem here: claiming something rather crazy with obvious problems, like multigenerational mitochondrial damage in an organism which replicates literally billions of them just to be born.
I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.
Reverse Cremaster cycle?
Life wouldn’t be here if mitochondria only accumulated damage. We can do in the lab what biology does in the wild - introduce selection pressures. Either by sequencing iPSC clones and picking the best, somehow inducing the natural purifying selection, or simply using a donor mitochondria.
genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?
I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria.
When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging.
And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection.
Really interesting point if true. Makes sense to me, and I’m sure the team is trying to solve it
How hard you have to work to break scroll on web page? Nice article, but going through it was a technical nightmare.
Can we stop adding unnecessary JS to website to stop global warming by calculating AND ALTERING SCROLL?
Odd. It was a designers dream (and a readability nightmare) but I didn't have an issue with scroll.
Firefox on Samsung S23, not exactly a new or a powerful phone but rendered it fine.
Why is it a designer's dream to hijack and control my scrolling experience? The scroll they've implemented is slow to respond, and has a weirdly low capped max speed. I don't understand why that's what a designer dreams of doing to me. I like my scroll (and other computer interactions for that matter) to be responsive and fast. You know, the kind of thing that puts me in control, not the designer.
That being said, the scroll was as smooth as regular webpage scrolls. Usually these JS scrolls aren't able to avoid dropping frames or otherwise introducing judder, but this one does appear to run at a consistent and high framerate, which is technically impressive.
Designers dream to have that shitty glass look, straight from Vista.
Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.
What exactly is the good idea? It's ignoring my accessibility options. I'm getting motion sickness.
If you have motion sickness and have a macbook, use the motion sickness dots.
A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka).
Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka
Guess the japanese excel at micromanaging. Although one could say that the research here in the article is more epic than Shinya's discovery, but I remember having watched one of his presentation and it convinced me of pure epicness, if you understand how his team found the "Yamanaka factors". That was by human (work) consistency. About as epic as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her mutant screens, that also involved tons of micro-experiments.
This is how the clone wars began
To confirm, we get a clone of the blood donor right, whether man or woman?
No, we get an egg (i.e. the part usually provided by the female), which must then be fertilized by sperm.
I don't know enough to say if that allows extracting eggs from males. Could two males have a child together using this technique?
That is a good question. Excepting the sexual ones, all the cells in an organism are diploid¹, including the ones found in blood (excluding erythrocytes, since those do not have a nucleus, therefore -- do not have chromosomes). Yet in natural development of the organism, a bunch of stem cells, which are of regular (diploid set of chromosomes) type, are evolving to form the ovaries, containing from very beginning all the ova (egg cells) that the female may have in her life. Ovum does only have a haploid¹ chromosomes set, until fertilization.
In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source.
What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
No, I don’t think so, because the egg still needs to be fertilized by a sperm cell to develop into an embryo.
Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen
> Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen
Probably nothing special except some inbreeding with the loss of 25% of genetic material of the donor individual (each gamete containing a random 50% of the donor's genetic material). Not sure how fast this level of inbreeding would be deleterious.
That's some Cleopatra-level inbreeding. The child's - or should we say the victim's - DNA would have longer runs of homozygosity than a child of incest.
I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.
The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
And if those effects are bypassed with artificial conception, we might end up with humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.
The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness - or perhaps a lack of gain of fitness that would have otherwise occurred.
25% of humans died before reaching 5 in 1800s US, today it is <1%. Its been at least 5 generations since this value dropped dramatically.
We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
> We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
Haven't we?
Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.
If continuously sample range [0..inf), then average will grow with time.
Is there a reason you expect IQ to be unbounded? Feels like there are physical constraints, at which point you're sampling from a truncated normal distribution (or similar).
So it depends on how you want to measure it.
How would you measure it?
I would not use individual IQs. Instead I would look at how smart/dumb the general population behaves.
This line of reasoning leads to “some people are weak and unworthy of life because they are impure.” I don’t think rolling back our work to end infant mortality to prevent weak people from living is the right answer.
> This line of reasoning leads to
It doesn't "lead to". Supporting a wrong conclusion even with a valid argument is as old as time. Fans of eugenics don't need an excuse to go down that path.
Our natural and artificial environments shape us for better or worse. We're bigger and more intelligent as a direct outcome of better nutrition. But we also have far more people with deadly allergies because we're so good at managing them now.
Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times
Child mortality rates are rapidly dropping globally as well
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
https://ourworldindata.org/children-saved-global-health
I don't think it's a grenade unless you are implicitly trying to mean it that life begins before birth, which ultimately is a definition game since it's actually quite hard to define life, hard enough that calling it "life" is a matter of personal worldview. I personally think it's quite reasonable to exclude pre-birth "deaths" from life expectancy, or event infant deaths sometimes, depending on what you are trying to measure.
In any case I didn't know this number and it's quite relevant to the discussion of how much we got rid of natural selection.
For those who believe in God, she performs way more abortions than humans do.
We have, we just have much, much better conditions for food, hygiene, personnal safety and medicine.
But have worse hormonal health (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063751/), and are less fit (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4033061/). The flynn effect also seems to decline in some parts of the world: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301679
It just doesn't compensate the immense gains tech created.
Turns out it's ok to be weaker if you don't have to worry about dying of parasites, malnutrition, cold.
Which, you could conclude, means the individual is weaker, but the species is stronger.
I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.
The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote:
> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.
I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result.
> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests
What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
>What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:
1. This kid isn't intelligent. 2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.
What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.
This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."
In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?
IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.
The reversal of the Flynn effect is more likely explained by other factors such as the explosion of social media, endless addictive entertainment, and all the attention manipulation that comes with it. Conception didn’t change that much at a large enough scale during this short time period to explain it.
We haven't created humans from scratch using genetic engineering yet, why would you think our current state has anything to do with the comment you are replying to?
How would you know?
When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.
Which is the outrageous claim? We normally require new medical treatments to be proved safe, rather than assume they are safe until proved dangerous.
This feels hand wavy.
I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures.
Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal?
Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.
Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust.
Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.
In my example, I cited microfractures and weak steel. These are not normal "deteriorate by default" methods of bridge deterioration, and have absolutely nothing to do with proper bridge construction.
They are flaws. Flaws which should never happen, separate from normal environmental degradation.
You may debate the point, but that is irrelevant, for I am referring to abnormal issues with bridges. Flaws in construction. Taking this parallel to humanity, or any evolved species, what "forges" a strong species is constantly being tempered by their environment.
Predation. Disease. Parasites. Even lack of proper nutrition. Environmental adversity, eg exposure to heat, wind, sun, etc. Reproductive errors. Reproduction issues. Etc and so forth. We've eliminated almost all of this, which means that standard methods of evolutionary pressure are almost all removed.
Species do deteriorate by default, if they remain static. Or additionally, if they allow genetic errors (which happens every generation, yes every) to seep into the gene pool without being winnowed back out by the stresses above.
These days, we save babies which are born early. Ones which have a dozen birth defects. Ones which have 100 other issues. Adults (before breeding age) with issues. Note that I am not saying we should not do these things! Only, that there is a price. A long term price.
Now... that being said, I think this is the best part of genetic engineering. It allows us to fix issues like this in the womb, and to get rid of these sorts of errors whilst still helping the current generation live, and have good lives.
But to pretend that evolutionary pressure doesn't exist, is weird. And everything we have which is an enhancement to our survival capabilities, is evolutionarily pressure based.
So back to the start? Those microfractures and weaknesses in steel are not noticeable when the bridge is deployed, as the steel's production is actually the problem. It's years later, with bridge inspections (if done! and they should be!) that these issues are discovered.
But much like global warming, or said steel, you don't want be be performing corrective action. And you can't see it before the issue becomes apparent. People didn't notice the Earth getting warmer when they were burning coal in year 1000 or some such.
We barely see the evidence of global warming now. And it's already too late to arrest some change.
Is that what you'd prefer for humanity? Wait until genetic defects are so rampant that it is "in your face" apparent?
Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?
You’re layering several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though
I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong.
It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway".
I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
"I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode."
We actually have and is called RISK.
RISK = Probability * Damage.
Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents.
Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario.
We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.
Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.
I don't know man, people basically aren't having sex already. The fertility rate is way below replacement in all modernized countries, half of gen Z has never had sex at all, contraception is free, people struggle to get pregnant the more chronically ill the population gets, and the people who actively do want to get pregnant are going to want to use whatever technology there is to improve things.
But outside the bible, who says we must be more and above replacement rates? Is such a tragedy for humanity if there are only 4 billion humans in 100 years? 4 happier billions? It doesn't HAVE to go up all the time, and between extinction (zero humans) and overcrowding (X billions) there are many unknown ways to go.
Unfortunately most of society and the economy is built on the foundational assumption of a growing (or at least stable) population. There will be some extremely tough challenges to solve with an actively declining population.
A lot of these issues have more to do with how we’ve constructed our society than with some loss of purity. If you want people to have more sex, make cities and towns more livable, get people out of cars, give them living wages so they have free time, create societal supports for childcare, make giving birth and pediatric care completely free, and support people forming associations outside of work. These are all barriers that have appeared basically my lifetime and it’s way more likely that people are making informed choices than that there’s some horrible transformation we’re all undergoing.
This framework would be hard to apply to unknown unknowns. That's why in software engineering you'd apply canarying. Then the longer timeframe for potential negative effects, the slower the adoption of a new process should be.
The history of humanity, I say of hominids even, was defined by humans playing it unsafe - migrating, sailing, inventing bombs, you name it. We played god before even we invented gods, and reached this point in time. Should we say "this is best we can do, let's stop everything"? Nah, not likely.
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"To play God" isn't just to do something spectacular which wasn't possible before. It's to use other people - to put yourself on a higher teleological level than other people, declaring their purpose (whatever it is) as fully subordinate to your purpose (whatever it is).
As if they were a tool you created. Obviously, if I carve a piece of wood into a spoon, it's I who get to say that what used to be a piece of wood now has a purpose of moving soup to mouths. The carved piece of wood now has a purpose, but it's wholly subordinate to my purpose (whatever it is).
You don't have to actually design people to play God - you can subordinate others to your purpose without doing that, that's what various God-kings in history did. But it certainly gives you a head start if you make them.
You can make something and don't subordinate it to your purpose. In our culture, we see children that way. We claim, basically, that we didn't deliberately design a child, we only obeyed our own natures without really having much choice in the matter, and thus we and our child is on the same teleological level.
This is not a cultural universal. In many cultures, parents (in particular fathers) would say basically "I made you, so you must do as I please, you have no reason for existing except for my purposes". It was a hard won battle for our culture to assert that children matter for their own sake and not just for their parent's.
Many things in this thread makes me want to say "Y'all MFs need Jesus". I won't say that, but I will say that you should stop and think about why it is that the Catholic church is so difficult about contraception, why Christians in general have historically made such a big deal of the difference "born of God" vs "Created by God" (arianism, etc.), and what that story of Abraham and Isaac was really about. Whether you agree or not, there's much about other people you will never understand if you don't think about teleological levels.
Thanks, that's an interesting analysis. I'm not a Christian, but I definitely get the sense that we're playing with an extreme danger here, and that we're not being sufficiently humble / cautious / in awe of the sacred -- and that such hubris might literally lead to human extinction, or close to it.
But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.
But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.
This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases.
Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society.
Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
Well, something could be successful, in the biological survival sense anyway. Not sure it'd be right to call it human at that point.
That's happening now, more or less, across the entire developed world. Not sure about the "successful" part though.
If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective.
Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
Natural reproduction already has a lot of randomness and failure built into it. It's not like egg/sperm selection is a perfect quality-control system. IVF has also been around for decades, and while it definitely needs monitoring, we haven't seen some obvious collapse in health from it
>I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.
You'd have a rather different opinion if you had to squeeze out a water melon out of your genitals.
Nobody HAS to do that. If people WANT to have children they should give them the best chances they can. If science proves IVF is the best, every parent must do it, if it's risk freedom has not been proved yet, no person that has other options available should do it. Chances are they would be ruining their children's life by expecting and comparing them to the best, so they can at least not give them handicap from birth. The world is now much more competetive and unfair to our children than it was in our time. My mother has told me countless times that childbirth is one of easier parts of motherhood.
Taking advice for raising children from the childless is like asking virgins for advice on sex.
Now that's a very high ratio of personal beliefs to character ratio. I'd be delighted to see some evidence behind your opinions.
What? IVF doesn’t mean that the human is gestated in a glass tube like some 80s sci-fi, the pregnancy and birth still have to occur, carried out by a human.
> What? IVF
>>, etc.
What?
> humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.
But can they pay and vote? If yes, that is good enough for the people calling the shots.
That's a lot of words to act like a total tool towards people born from IVF and their parents.
There is nothing such as riskless technology, but you can't escape some risk anyway.
Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös.
Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years.
For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.
I think it’s important to remember that the process of selection acts directly on human traits. For example being exposed to high summer heat temperatures may eliminate some people who have unproductive sweat glands, or needing to run down your food may eliminate people who have a muscles that easily tire. Selection (largely) does not act on far removed traits like egg cell characteristics as a proxy of human traits like muscle performance because the genes that are used by egg cells are quite different than those used by muscle cells. So if you worry about some kind of human trait decline you should be much more worried that people have access to air conditioning and grocery stores.
> A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies.
> meaningful loss of fitness
What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already?
150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter...
Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?
It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive."
Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent.
It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.
Well, modern medicine + economy + social pressure resulted in RADICAL change in fitness function for human population. It's very, very different.
So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria.
> It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia.
That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can literally SEE how a change of fitness function affects the phenotype.
> You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection.
There are many studies which describe genetic changes within latest 10,000 years or less. E.g. paper "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe": "We identified 25 genetic loci with rapid changes 21 in frequency during these periods". You can find many similar papers if you do a search
One of studies identified changes in loci associated with Y. pestis immunity during the Black Death (i.e. something like a century). Black Death mortality is similar in scale to early childhood mortality 150 years ago.
I suppose that must depend on one's definition of "substantially". Human's haven't changed "substantially", and neither do new breeds of dogs and cats.
Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.
People in the past could survive and procreate without modern medicine (basically without any medicine at all as doctors could do very little 200 years ago) with ~50% success rate. I'd suspect this rate is already lower now, and it might matter in multiple ways
“survival of the fittest” was actually coined by a political economist, Herbert Spencer, to explain how lassiez-faire economics produces better companies. Darwin didn’t extrapolate to that in his theories and the quote is often applied to explain how evolution works, but that may not be the case. We can say that evolution results in change but that there are no guarantees that those changes result in fitness of the organism. We can only say that sometimes they obviously do and in other cases we can make up “just-so” stories to explain stuff in terms of fitness.
By contrast, we could also end up with humans that are stronger, smarter, or are better adapted to a changing environment.
In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm.
The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?
no natural selection as a filter though
>The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception
How do you know it? Sci-fi tropes are not a good argument.
Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?
I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...
Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy
Great share! Thanks.
As I understand it, that they've gone back to the point of making the ovary and the egg itself is going through Meiosis helps here, because it's got the randomness of picking genes between the pair of chromosomes in the source. So it's not just a clone; it's a little more natural than if they tried to produce the egg directly.
Several of your claims are unsubstantiated. Sure, species co-evolve together, environment shapes evolution.
But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing?
Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.
>The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...
Have you read the next paragraph?
> I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
I can't see where it mentions "creationism".
How is that creationism? Saying that we don't have a good answer is not the same as suggestion one particular hypothesis.
To me suggesting that sounds pretty anti-intellectual!
Anti-intellectuallism is everywhere, especially amongst the intellectuals. The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
AI writing is anti-intellectual. It demands the time of thousands of people to read when they could be reading something with actual meaning. You're demanding scholars to read comic books all day in case they have content worth engaging with (spoiler: they don't).
> The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.
Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly:
> Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind.
To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history.
Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798
> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness
Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.
I'm far more worried about the long term impact of letting evolution exert its pressure on humankind unchecked.
I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?
https://www.smbc-wiki.com/index.php/Royalty
Very impressive work!
(Hmm, I wonder if this can be done for chicken eggs)
How can I compete with a 60B$ supercomputer(AI) AND with DNA modified superhumans from rich families?
We are DOOMED.
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Imagine guys like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Thiel cloning themselves. That's 100% dystopian. We would never be able to get rid of madmen! Power corrupts and makes the powerful just weird and unable to make rational decisions. That's why people in power need to be replaced regularly to have a stable society.
I agree with the second part, but I’m not convinced cloning those people would lead to other copies of them (not that I’m advocating for it, either). Your environment/upbringing/opportunities shape a lot of who you become. Musk famously has kids who find him abhorrent, I see no reason to believe that he’d be a competent father even to himself. Especially since the kid would have siblings who could open his eyes to the shit his father does, and if there’s one thing Musk is known for is gullibility to accept anything fitting his world view. I don’t think being a greedy unhappy (by his own admission) asshole is genetic.
It doesn't need to make clones into absolute copies of them to be problematic. It's just an obfuscation of a very old idea, the divine right of kings.
It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/
Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.
We need less people not more.
"Fewer."
-Stannis Baratheon
I'd be very curious how they even define "safe enough" for this. With most therapies, the risk is mostly to the patient. Here the risk could be passed on to a future person who never consented to the experiment.
I get where you're coming from, but this seems no different from the risks associated with having a baby. Pushed further, babies never consent to any of the traits they inherit from their parents.
Same as the rest of the IVF-associated assisted reproductive technology stack. Tampering with the reproductive process is not exactly new.
The origins of stem cells for use in the biosciences and in cosmetics are extremely brutal and should be illegal. Sandra Bullock explains it better than I could: https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g
Can we not devolve into "think of the poor stem cells" bullshit at least on HN?
Especially given that the link in question describes this as the source of stem cells:
> After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs.
That stupid controversy set the field back a decade, and that was a decade too much. People who get their science news from celeb gossip are a blight.