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Radford Neal's avatar

Going through multiple generations without development of a full organism, selecting only on what are thought to be good traits in the genotype, seems like it would be vulnerable to mutations (or just combinations of existing alleles) that make the full organism non-viable, or weak.

For "lower" organisms, I guess one could try it and see how much of a problem this is, but for humans it seems like this is an ethical problem with this technique (hardly the only one, of course).

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Tony's avatar

Very interesting. If I understand correctly, you select for the desired trait based on some PGIs. The math of population genetics etc. tells us that this can lead to considerable gains even with very small values/effect sizes etc. (as I read in Gwern's comments). OK, there are still open questions about imprinting and a few other minor details, but as a layperson I fear that after multiple selections of this kind a non-viable or at least sick organism will develop, since there was never any evolutionary pressure and thus no selection. Or am I wrong?

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