Extra Crispr

Every few months we get a blazing headline about a breakthrough in genetics that will allegedly lead to super babies. This one from a few months ago is a good example of the genre. It makes for a catchy headline. Of course, the story is never as claimed, as we are not close to creating a race of mutant super babies. Instead, science is creeping up on the ability to do some very narrow gene editing to eliminate well known genetic defects. In fact, a lab has just successfully edited a viable embryo for the first time.

This is a huge step in science, but we are nowhere near close to creating the master race or even making small changes in real humans. The most recent research on human intelligence, for example, identifies 50 genes that correlate to IQ. That is a lot of combination to sort, assuming that is the whole set of genes related to IQ. There is also the possibility that other traits are indirectly related to those genes. Even something as simple as hair color can get wildly complex, so we will not be decanting babies anytime soon.

While we are nowhere near close to making super babies, this is one step down the road toward altering the foundations of human existence. The ability to inexpensively alter DNA, even in quite simple ways, will lead to better food and better medicine. Imagine a treatment that alters a pathogen such that it attacks cancer cells in the human body. It sounds outlandish, but that is essentially what your immune system does with disease. Of course, the ability to “correct” genetic defects will have an enormous impact on human health.

It is easy to fall into the science fiction fantasy stuff when thinking about these topics, but small things can have a huge impact on human behavior. Improvements in sanitation, food production and basic medicine greatly altered the human condition. Just look at the impact of life expectancy. If lifespans were still as they were a century ago, things like pension costs and health care would not be topics in politics. It is because we can live, and live vigorously, into our 70’s that these issues are now major topics.

That is why this gene editing technology is so important. Up until very recent, the consensus in science was that we were generations away from having the ability to edit human DNA. All of a sudden, the future is now and the rush is on to be the first to alter an actual human embryo and bring it to term. It also means that science will suddenly shift from the purely theoretical to the practical. The first guy to figure out how to fix defects in something as frivolous as purebred dogs will become rich and famous.

There is another aspect to this that is probably more important than the potential impact on human biology. What this technology is doing is bringing to center stage a truth about humanity that our betters have been trying to suppress for generations. That is, what we are is what we inherit from our parents. What they are is what they inherited from their parents. Each of us is the result of thousands of generations of breeding. Our physical and cognitive traits are the result of that long ad hoc experiment.

At a basic level, people know this. Anyone who is familiar with human children knows that they look and act like their parents from an early age. People do not think to hard about this stuff and our rulers work to keep us from thinking about how this scales up. If a white man is the result of thousands of generations of white people, that means the African is the result of his ancestors evolving in Africa. It is not a long walk from there to accepting that race is real. That is why this thinking is a mortal sin on our age.

This becomes increasingly difficult when it becomes more common for a doctor to use ideas and techniques from genetics to better serve his patients. The old gag about race is that race is a social construct until you need a bone marrow transplant. Not a lot of people have that talk with their doctor but imagine a world where everyone has a genetic realism talk with their dog breeder. When you know Rover had a known defect in his breed fixed by a vet at the canine gene clinic, talking about biological reality gets a lot easier.

As people come to accept the reality of gene editing, even if it is just to make better dog breeds, it is much more difficult to maintain the mythologies of the blank slate. Once people come to accept that things like IQ and personality traits are determined by our genes, the blank slate is finished. Even if people do not accept genetic determinism, they will accept testing for IQ and personality traits to fill engineering positions. In other words, strides in genetics will restore a more sober understanding of the human condition.

This is the negation of the core belief of our ruling elite, but it is telling that our rulers seem to be going in the opposite direction. As science makes clear the realities of human biology, our rulers scream ever louder to the contrary. Instead of simply ignoring the new information, they are waging pogroms too root out anyone not fully committed to their biological denialism. Every week were treated to some new scandal where a heretic is brought forth and punished for acknowledging reality.

It is common to compare our current age to the scientific revolution. Galileo is a compelling figure. That does work at some level, but what we are really experiencing is something like what happened in the Roman Empire, prior to Constantine. As the people began to embrace the new religion, the rulers tried to crack down on it. This only made the new religion more popular. The great insight of Constantine was to recognize the strategic advantage that was available to the first ruler who embraced the new religion.

That is probably what awaits us. Science is moving along faster than the current throne and altar cabal can follow. Some clever politician is going to embrace biological realism and ride it to victory over the prevailing orthodoxy. The first politician to say, “Of course men and women are different” and not get run out of town will be the snowflake that sets off the avalanche. Regardless, breakthroughs like CRISPR are about to shake the foundation of our culture. The blank slate’s days are numbered.

65 thoughts on “Extra Crispr

  1. So if I read this right
    Once the unwashed approve of their pets being fixed genetically we can get approval for gmo’so
    The future looks good

  2. Once we are able to manipulate our genetics with a view to eliminating “defects” our evolution will cease and we will stagnate and ultimately perish.
    Presuming, that is, that we do not become wise enough and knowledgeable enough to detect, identify and allow for every minutest alteration in our environment and select in favor of it, as “evolution unchained” seems to do.

  3. Another problem with bio-engineering is determining what sort of person(s) we actually need A world populated entirely by Mensa members may seem like a good bet – until you have attended a few Mensa meetings, that is. Any society or corporation needs a selection of both planners, managers, and workers, Indians as well as Chiefs.A friend in Moscow told me the trouble with the Soviet Union was too many rocket scientists and not enough plumbers.

  4. The banter from the LGBQTDIZUEIAWIOQF community will be interesting since they insist that being homosexual is not a choice, they are born that way. Watch the instant meltdown of the left when scientist say they’ve identified the gene that determines if the person will be homosexual. transexual, bisexual, bizzaresexual, etc. With a little alternation to that gene, no worries, that baby will now be a heterosexual.

    Watch you’ll see a 180 degree turn from the left why this type of science is dangerous and we should not be tampering with nature.

    • Sorry, that was yesterday’s Narrative. Today’s Narrative is that anyone can be whatever they want themselves to be.

  5. Crispr can’t be used in the US to fix domestic animals. The law made it impossible. No reason except they do not want to lose control so for now, there is only a few animals that can be sold as pets.

  6. There is just a minor problem or two of bio-engineering. The genes on both sets of chromosomes (for the most part) would have to be corrected _before the first embryonic cell divides_. Right now there is no obvious path to reliably correcting any selected gene on the same chromosome(s) in every cell in multicellular organisms, including a growing embryo. Plus all genetic testing is destructive.*

    There is speculation that some sort of virus could be developed or coopted for this task. Anyone who thinks that contriving a virus or whatever that can change *all* your chromosomes once you have started growing or even all your chromosomes in a certain type of cell is a good idea, even were it easy/possible, is borderline crazy. Such an agent would most likely be fatal in situations that are not *very* highly controlled and it *will* get loose.

    So, as matters stand, ‘genetic engineering’ would require in vitro fertilization plus implantation for an altered embryo to develop into a viable fetus. In vitro fertilization is very costly and difficult right now using uncorrected genes. To do so using a corrected gene yielding a viable offspring from in vitro fertilization, it would be necessary to halt the division of the just-fertilized ova in vitro without killing them for long enough to do non-destructive correction on *all* of them individually before they are implanted***: A tall order. So could ‘designer babies’ be mostly hype_?

    Well, remember the great embryonic stem cell hoopla_? Turns out that was mostly a scam to attack social conservatives, damage GWB and shake money out of Uncle Sugar so that Superman could walk again and Robin Williams’ Parkinson’s Disease would go away (yeah, the MSM actually said those things).

    The (should have been) obvious difficulty then was that, even if everything worked, embryonic stem cells would be foreign tissue, subject to rejection. That rejection would need to be immuno-suppressed leading to have to ‘live in a bubble’ to avoid fatal infection. That, and the precise micro-targeting of ever-moving stem cells’ descendants** that would be required, particularly in brain and nerve tissues, to avoid fatal complications requires a detailed knowledge of the exact mechanisms of cell line differentiation and migration in the developing embryo *and* how they would act in an adult. Those precise mechanisms largely remain a mystery even now.

    IOW, it is not enough to be able to describe a cellular level biological mechanism, one must be able to reliably direct it for there to be any actual ‘engineering’. This distinction is often confused, usually willfully.

    *You gotta open the cell up to get at the nucleus where the chromosomes reside. There is no good way to put it back together. An adult can easily spare some cells for destructive genetic testing. An embryo not so much. The cells removed might be the precursors of a vital organ, etc.
    **Daughter cell movement from stem cells is how you grow into the shape you are.
    ***Else there is the substantial risk that some of the embryos will be uncorrected and it would be difficult to tell which, should any actually develop in vivo once implanted: Bad for customer satisfaction.

    • There is speculation that some sort of virus could be developed or coopted for this task. Anyone who thinks that contriving a virus or whatever that can change *all* your chromosomes once you have started growing or even all your chromosomes in a certain type of cell is a good idea, even were it easy/possible, is borderline crazy. Such an agent would most likely be fatal in situations that are not *very* highly controlled and it *will* get loose.

      Fission reactions are one hell of a way to just boil water!!!!! A minor accident can easily be fatal or contaminate large regions. A large accident may not be possible to even remediate….. (fukashima). We still have lots of fission reactors running. The genetic engineering tools will be put to use regardless of how insane they may be.

  7. As Damore takes pains to point out, it is not about race or gender, it is about the individual. Under the current circumstances, this argument is revolutionary. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

    When you have built the entire social order upon the blank-slate attitude that ignores the individual, the social order is ripe for a takedown. The takedown appears imminent.

    • It is about both race & gender when you are making policies for large groups.
      https://saboteur365.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/iq-by-ethnicity-and-sweet-spot-of-crime.jpg

      The majority of blacks and hispanics cannot constructively function in a western or asian culture the do not have the personality traits or the intelligence levels needed.
      You must understand both scales, the population, and the individual. Doing so would tell you that most companies like google would realistically be white and asian males who are generally introverted. There would be nothing extraordinary or concerning about that any more so than having mostly 7 ft blacks in the NBA.

      • We’ve always had and always will have a place for people regardless of IQ. The problem is when you try to fit people into slots based on the percentage of their race in the population.

        There is nothing wrong with low IQ folks we just have to socialize them and make sure we don’t import competition for the left half of our bellcurve.

        • This conclusion doe not take into account AI and automation in our increasingly technological and high tech (read high IQ) society. There will be increasingly less and less room for the left side of the Bell Curve folk to flourish and prosper.

          • Of course I took automation and technology into account. I saw most of my neighbors put out of work due to a changing world.

            I am old enough to remember when a trip to the service station had three guys taking care of your car. We have been promised robots and automation since before I was born.

            Even if everything comes to pass as the futurists expect there will always be a left half of the bellcurve and with a little compassion and insight we can help them and us.

      • I question one detail of that bell. It is my incomplete understanding that East Asians, like women, are less prone to occupy both extremes of the curve. The average is higher but the extreme right end is crimped.

  8. Race certainly does exist, but one can make more from that fact than it really deserves. Race came about through separation, and guess what? That separation is shrinking, if not quite completely gone. What race is Obama?

    As to the opinions of the ruling class, they will evolve as society absorbs the new information about race. They don’t really care what the current racial orthodoxy demands; they only care about staying in power and maintaining their parasitic existence. If that means they may someday have to chuck their anti-racist point of view, it will be done without regret.

  9. Yes, a good no nonsense look at socio and bio genetics. Hard to believe the progressives are hanging on to the social construct theories.
    Q= What’s more regressive than a progressive?
    A= An unreconstructed progressive

  10. The first application of this technology will be to the minor variations in genes that are harmful in and of themselves but confer resistance to malaria. A couple dozen of them are know, the most famous is the mutation that causes sickle cell anemia.

    On the whole, one of my biology professors in college told the class “most people see the movie Gattaca as a dystopia, but I see it as a social paradigm.”

    • Personal anecdote on topic:

      This past winter my wife and I relocated to Arizona from the North West. The climate was of low humidity compared to ere we lived for 40 years. After a few months my wife developed weakness, mental slowing and confusion, and fell three times. I took her to an ER. She saw an ER physician who examined, took a history and ordered blood tests. She was admitted to the hospital and stayed for five days when she demanded to be discharged. While there she was under the care of a hospitalist, an internist, and was also evaluated by a renal specialist. They came up with a diagnosis of electrolyte imbalance supposedly from not drinking enough water and wanted to do further renal tests. The had given her around the clock IVs of electrolytes.

      The day after discharge I had her see an American trained internist, a guy in his 50s and a graduate from the University of Chicago School of Medicine. He took a history and said that he knew what actually caused the problem. My wife had been on a low dose diuretic for years and she was depleted of potassium and sodium. He stopped the diuretic and she got better immediately.

      The three specialists at the hospital who missed the true diagnosis were all polished South Asians who again prove that MDs are not fungible.

      Dan Kurt

  11. “The first politician to say “Of course men and women are different” and not get run out of town will be the snowflake that sets off the avalanche.”

    I think this trend is starting to break, especially after the recent Google engineer memo. His subsequent firing got some people saying out loud in the MSM, “Its ironic that Google wants diversity in everything but thought…”

  12. “This is the negation of the core belief of our ruling elite, but it is telling that our rulers seem to be going in the opposite direction. As science makes clear the realities of human biology, our rulers scream ever louder to the contrary. Instead of simply ignoring the new information, they are waging pogroms too root out anyone not fully committed to their biological denialism. Every week were treated to some new scandal where a heretic is brought forth and punished for acknowledging reality.”

    I don’t think this is what ((((our rulers)))) are doing. They do not believe in “biological denialism”. They are fully aware of genetic realities. Indeed, they finance much of the research. This is about maintaining power. By setting up opposing views and manipulating both, they can control the outcome. The real question that should be asked is “Are ((((our rulers)))) good or evil?”

    • Quite a few commenters here are coming to roughly the same conclusion from different directions. The powers that be know that most of them won their power and influence lottery by birth or circumstance, not by merit. They have set themselves to bringing the merit-based powerful ones into the fold. Setting people against other people, dumbing down the average person, and promoting the blank slate are all tools in their toolbox. Google appears to be the point where the powers that be collide with the smart merit-based people who are not buying what they are selling. Beer and popcorn at the ready.

    • Yes, but for so few to do so much!

      If Narrative is such a powerful tool, imagine what they’ll do with CRISPR.

      (As the ancient prophecy says- perfected bodies in a reborn world of beneficient hegemons: stern but just…)

  13. In the vein of race realism, we desperately need to realize that any form of welfare is functionally a breeding program regardless of whether or not that is the intent of such. Just look at modern welfare, it has functionally been a breeding program for the low IQ end of the population while the high IQ end is functionally penalized to fund the low IQ breeding program (welfare)
    if a society is going to have any control over its biological destiny welfare by be tied to reproductive rights, i.e. if you accept welfare you accept the requirement of statutory birth control implementation while on welfare.

  14. “Our rulers scream louder to the contrary” because deep down most of them know they are not worthy. Being born to the right family or being socially connected will no longer entitle them to be part of the elite.

  15. Long before the blueprint for a designer baby is completed, there will be a blueprint for a designer virus. At that point we get to learn whether intelligence is actually selected for. I have my doubts.

  16. The joke I tell my friends is that the number of Liberals who switch from pro-abortion to pro-life will shift dramatically if scientists ever discover a gay gene. Odds are, this won’t happen, as preferences aren’t the same thing as traits I don’t think. But, it’s still fun to contemplate the ramifications.

    The other problem, as long as we’re thinking futuristically, is “The Incredibles” problem. The great line from Syndrome in that movie is, “And when everyone is super. No one will be.”

    Then what?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I9pYCl9AQ

  17. Do we really want humans to have this capability and power? A slide toward delusion, fantasy and (socially-accepted) madness seems to be the standard of our betters, throughout human history. Absent strict, non-human-controlled forces to conform the construction of our minds, and our behavior, to some reality principle, the swirling hologram of our minds seems capable of being bent to any form and inclination. A generation back, who’d have thought our “best” would be protecting and celebrating soldiers who think they are the opposite sex … or some sex of their own construction. Both have become unmoored. So we put this geneting insight and control into the hands of a class that clearly embraces madness. Mark my words, they will capture and control for themselves this collective function, and use it to further their ends.

  18. The poor quality of our political and cultural leadership is a manifestation of anti-evolution. For most of our specie’s long history, we selected the best (smartest/strongest) among us to lead because that kept the tribe alive. We now select charlatans who lead us into being evermore stupid. You can pray for a messiah, but history suggests that this problem is usually solved by a population collapse.

  19. Never underestimate the capacity for mass self-delusion. Witness global warming, aka, climate change, aka climate variation. It’s undisputed that: 1) the Earth’s temperature is well within historical norms predating man-made production of atmospheric carbon through widespread burning of fossil fuels; 2) the Earth is cooler now than in numerous historical warm periods, including the medieval warm period; 3) only “adjusted” data indicate a current warming period–the raw data does not; and 4) fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature correlate nearly perfectly with solar activity cycles.

    Any rational person evaluating the data would conclude that even if atmospheric carbon is, in theory, a greenhouse gas it’s net effect on the Earth’s temperature is de minimus–a fart in the wind compared to the effect of solar activity. Yet here we are thirty years into the global warming hysteria and science! is still pushing its crackpot theories onto an idiotic and politically charged public.

    The blank slate is deeply embedded into the progressive psyche and the progressive political architecture of the United States. Its days may be numbered, but that number will be measured in decades.

  20. “This [realism] is the negation of the core belief of our ruling elite, ”

    The ruling elite are quite realistic. They do not believe in the blank slate for a second. They just want the rest of us to believe in it.

  21. More of the same on the current thread at VD’s blog,and where it stops,nobody knows…we do live in interesting times. I’m still surprised by the size and heft of the SJW movement.

    • re: “I’m still surprised by the size and heft of the SJW movement.” mark auld

      Did you go to college during the past 60 years? Did you watch TV and read the popular news magazines, e.g. Time & Newsweek, and read the “opinion magazines,” e.g. New Yorker, Atlantic, Scientific American, etc,, during those years? Did you attend church during those years? If you did, you shouldn’t be surprised.

      Dan Kurt

      • Yes to most all sir, but being a reality based organism, I assumed most people would know B.S. when they stepped in it…my bad.

      • I was an avid reader of Scientific American until it did a review of the Bell Curve. I was amazed. The review fastened on some minor point of the book and gave the authors holy hell for it at great length. Of course, the reason was the reviewer didn’t like the Realism in the book.

        That was when I started being less naive. It’s been a long journey.

  22. The first step in the journey of a thousand miles may be CRISPR. The second step may be a quantum leap. If genetic biologists manage to isolate and edit the charlatan gene, the swamp will drain itself.

  23. Yet the managerial class is utterly dependent upon intelligence and aptitude tests with names like SAT, GRE, LSAT, FSWE, etc. to replenish their ranks.

    What’s your take on the disconnect, Zman? I go back and forth between guilt (I won the lottery of life and the poor bastids I went to high school back in Possumtrot are still there either working their finger to the bone or committing suicide on the installment plan with drugs) or cognitive dissonance (they are so bought into the radical egalitarian ideology of their class that they have to proclaim their adherence of the same loudly and often to keep the truth at bay). Maybe its both.

    • Smart people are fully capable of believing cray ideas. J.B.S. Haldane was a communist, for example. He was sure communism was inevitable.

      I think the problem with American style managerialism is it is too democratic. A system that gives the microphone to a man convinced his penis is imaginary is not going to last long.

      • haha. Its good to have analogy or quips like the imaginery penis, which wrap the thing up. Nice one Z, I get to use that line.

  24. We might be seeing that snowflake right now with that guy at Google that dared all the other SJW snowflakes by addressing the truth. I’ve heard from the internet that the man is a genius. He’s a game theory expert and some are positing that he released that memo knowing full well in advance that he would get canned – and then be set up for a slam-dunk lawsuit with a tasty pay out and increased career options and potential.

    I think they may be right- people are getting fed up with the blank slate and the blank minds that embrace it.

      • James Damare is the self-immolating street vendor (re:Tunisia) that will set off a huge reaction. For a start, it exposes the big tech companies as hollow; they will not be producing Skynet.

      • Disappointing. Maybe Peterson will do better with him. Kudos to the kid for stepping up but I do not see that he understands what he has stepped into. He is convinced that there are two sides and that they need to talk to each other.

        • I agree with you. Have flagged the Peterson interview for later. Damore may be smart but he strikes me as being unschooled and struggling with developing a world view that is logical. He needs to do a lot of reading and thinking then start paring down his assumptions of givens. He will probably do just fine in the long run.

        • He’s walking the path. Have patience and let it play out.

          He just got a red pill. It’s not going to all happen in one day.

    • In my experience the people who are really smart – have a hard time with getting told that the guy they work directly with and know is a complete idiot – is as smart as them.

      Once a bunch of other idiots band together and start trying to beat down the smart guy – all hell usually breaks loose.

  25. Race realism is right there for anyone to see. It is reasonable to expect and hope that the scales will fall from the eyes of rose around us, but there is no guarantee that the scales will fall. Man has lived in denial of facts since the beginning of time. Are things going to change now? Simply because there are new facts?
    In the case of Constantine it is evident that he was not simply making a calculated political triangulation. Scholars have been trying to prove that for a long time and the evidence just isn’t compelling. Either he really had those dreams or he was acting on some gut instinct that worked out. Or maybe it was a poorly calculated triangulation that just happened to work. In any case he was certainly not following an inevitable trend. He changed the course of history.
    That said, there is no reason why some individual or group can’t come along and do something similar with race, sex and genetics. But it likely won’t be something we can foresee.

    • You are correct to have reservations Doc… but to me, the signs are everywhere. Donald Trump was elected despite the politically correct blank slate state that opposed him. Moldilocks got punched out. The New York Times can only sell newspapers to idiots and has had to downsize – and they aren’t finished with that yet.

      The wheels are coming off that short bus, and to me… it LOOKS like there’s a light at the end of this dark tunnel.

    • Up until very recent people were realistic about humanity. Biological denialism is a recent phenomenon, which is why I think it will be short lived. These people may have stopped believing in reality, but reality did not go away.

    • Google should invite Anders Breivik to the company picnic. He could cure what ails them, but fast.

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