From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Nov 29 2002 - 07:41:34 MST
In my mailer subject lines seemed to have become deleted on this topic
so I'm creating a new thread. This derives from comments by Ramez
Naam on "Redesigning Humans".
On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, Ramez Naam, wrote:
> > Bill Gates, for all his wealth, can not engineer his next child to
> > have a higher IQ. But someday middle class americans will be able to.
> > Depending on the speed of advancement of technology, the real
> > stratification may be between generations, not between socio-economic
> > classes.
What Greg Stock does not address is whether the technology will advance
fast enough to enable self-modification within a generation. If so, then
all living humans (subject to cost constraints) will be able to self-evolve.
The limits to this are much lower than one would believe from listening
to or reading Greg Stock's position. (Greg and I have an open debate
on this topic and only time will tell who is right.)
The "cost constraints" issue would appear to be related to a
"popularity" criteria. The more popular a self-evolution vector
is the cheaper it should become. Since IQ increases should be
a very popular vector, it should be very inexpensive.
On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Emlyn O'regan wrote:
> If you are talking about generational effects, I think your timeline is long
> enough that they will be a transient phenomenon at best. How long after
> getting germline engineering of this magnitude will we be able to modify
> adult phenotypes to the same effect? An entire generation? Probably not.
Emlyn sees the critical point. Will it take 20 years to go from being
able to add a chromosome to a cell from an embryo to being able to
being able to add sophisticated patches to adult genomes? Go back
20 years to 1982 -- we couldn't sequence DNA or proteins, there were
no gene therapy trials, etc.
If there are hundreds of gene therapy trials in progress now, how many
more will there be a decade from now? I would assert that biotechnology
is already advancing faster than "generational timeframes".
Robert
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