Pay Pariah Cults? - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

When genetic engineering becomes popular, parents are likely to make convergent choices of DNA for their kids. Both by deleting mutations, and by using shared quality DNA estimates. This should increase the DNA adaptiveness of each kid, but lower the variance of DNA in the population. And that should cut the rate at which natural selection of DNA can improve that population or adapt it to changing conditions. This might not matter much if humans take full effective control over human DNA adaption, displacing prior natural selection. But most seem wary to do this, and there may long remain many things about DNA adaptiveness that we don’t understand. To promote human DNA evolution, maybe we should thus subsidize DNA variance, at least along dimensions that we don’t well understand. A similar effect is likely already also causing problems with cultural evolution. On average, the members of a culture tend to get more adaptive as that culture moves more toward the average of all world cultu

When genetic engineering becomes popular, parents are likely to make convergent choices of DNA for their kids. Both by deleting mutations, and by using shared quality DNA estimates. This should increase the DNA adaptiveness of each kid, but lower the variance of DNA in the population. And that should cut the rate at which natural selection of DNA can improve that population or adapt it to changing conditions. This might not matter much if humans take full effective control over human DNA adaption, displacing prior natural selection. But most seem wary to do this, and there may long remain many