News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
We absolutely do not - geneticist who has worked on neurodevelopment projects
We don’t even know why Turner Syndrome - a disorder of X chromosomes - often leads to neurodevelopment delays. We have hypotheses that still aren’t tested, so anyone claiming to know the genetics of neurodevelopment is grifting you.
We don't have sufficient information to reliably predict IQ, but we do know hundreds of genetic loci associated with intelligence. The overall contribution of these loci is significant.
Source. (A review of the subject.)
It's true that the polygenic scores cannot reliably predict that one person will have a higher IQ than another, but that doesn't mean that polygenic screening is useless as a tool for increasing the expected intelligence of one's offspring. People who effectively screen their embryos will, on average, have slightly but significantly smarter children than people who don't. In this way, screening is not qualitatively different from many other parental interventions.
I would use this sort of screening if there was an opportunity to do so. (I don't think it currently justifies resorting to IVF if that is otherwise not necessary, although it would if the effect was larger.)
PRS are useful but not definitive when it comes to phenotype development, as you’ve hinted at, but I take issue with using them for eugenics purposes with the main reason being we do not know the underlying causal mechanism. It is too early to use them with confidence for something like this IMO.
I work with PRS and I am not confident in using them for IVF purposes (that may change when we understand what’s actually going on the proteomics level). I would equate it to something along the line of sports betting with the consequences being eugenics in nature.
I would be worried about causal mechanisms if we were discussing artificially introduced mutations. However, these are naturally present alleles and they would be considered only for the purpose of selecting among otherwise equally viable embryos. In such circumstances, I think that the risk of proceeding without knowing the casual mechanisms is minimal.
IIRC a CCR5 deletion leads to HIV resistance, but the homozygous allele also leads to immune transcription disruptions. I believe there was a Chinese geneticist that deleted CCR5 from twin embryos and got “disappeared” for it, but it remains to be seen what the consequences of that change are (I don’t remember if those embryos were implanted).
I’m of the opinion that we should approach this topic with caution until we know exactly what’s going on and the consequences of said alleles. Hypothetically speaking, imagine being born and chosen by this IQ method only to realize some horrible consequence later like asthma susceptibility in a world with decreasing air quality.
I’d be extremely pissed lmao. I could still find happiness even if I was less intelligent.
There’s another discussion about genetic homogenization that I don’t care to go into atm too.