“In my opinion, Crispr could in principle be used to boost the expected intelligence of an embryo by a considerable amount,” said James J. Lee a researcher at University of Minnesota…“But “in principle” does a lot of work here. One practical obstacle is that we still do not have a reliable means of determining the causal site(s) responsible” for the association…
But, whatever changes we code into our genomes will end up getting thrown up against different genetic backgrounds in future generations, due to random rearrangements in chromosomes, so it’s unlikely to fix any permanent relations…
In fact, there are no superior genes, only genes that provide advantages with a tradeoff for other disadvantages. For instance, the COMT gene…People with two copies of a mutation have a fourfold increase…while if you have less you may have better concentration, but also be more jittery. In 1995, Arnold Ludwig reported a 77 percent rate of psychiatric disorders in eminent fiction writers. Jonathan Gottschall noted that writers are 10 times, and poets 40 times, more likely to be bipolar than the general population.
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