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Comment by cannonpr | Hacker News Reader

I often find my self conflicted over Gattaca, because I much prefer Ian banks vision of the future, “beauty and intelligence should be a basic human right through technology” yet Gattacas dystopian vision is much more likely what we are going to get thanks to capitalism. Also with imperfect technology, options like these will also do a lot of damage to human genetic variability, till some fun pathogen comes and has words with us over the matter.

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Humanity is getting better at combating pathogens to the point we wouldn't have to rely on genetic diversity for resilience, additionally such treatments could be given to those already born.

It's not like human variability would be lost forever, we can make and keep copies.

Gattaca's core message is that there is no gene for the human spirit, but in reality there probably is, behavior is highly genetic. Also consider that Vincent could have had a heart attack during the mission, that would put his actions into a rather selfish light.

My optimistic view is that an improved understanding of the mechanisms would lead to direct medical interventions, in such a world Vincent would have been able to have his heart properly treated.

I have ME/CFS from a genetic condition and I treat it by suppressing IL-1B cytokines with diet and medication. I was lucky enough to be able to figure this out and I would like more people to have this knowledge.

I don’t disagree, and I also have some unique genetic conditions that I won’t get into, they are depressing. However I will say that humanity is peppered with radical choices that did a lot of damage because we “thought” we understood, and we are barely scratching the surface of how life really works, epigenetics alone is barely explored. There likely is no gene for the human soul, there likely is an incredibly complex systemic interaction…

Think of how complex LLMs are and yet their emergent behavior is based on a few very simple rules and an easy to understand loss function. Due to the emergent behavior things can have the appearance of being far more complicated than they actually are. It is hyper-dimensional and granted humans are not good at that but computers are and some humans are capable of using computers as a tool in that way.

  >> The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics, as proposed by Chabris, Turkheimer, and others, states that a typical human behavioral trait is associated with many genetic variants, each accounting for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.

I think a big part of this assumption is the use of Linear Regression in GWAS studies, the problem is that SNPs have a multicollinearity problem where the inputs are not independent from each other. That the results of these studies reflect that assumption should be of no surprise. I think using better math this stuff is more easy to detect.

So… I hope your version of trying to understand life is a fruitful path, however my understanding of the underlying biomechanics, messy, deeply “physics” based and 3d, leaves me with confused more often than not. The behaviour is emergent but not out of simplicity.

Biomolecular condensates: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9974629/

In a similar analog to machine learning there are fundamentalists approaches and there are empiricists approaches. Most medical researchers need to be able to defend their work and it’s easier to defend fundamentalist ideas - but they spend so much time arguing over minutia that they often miss the forest from the trees. Not to say that such work is unimportant but the academic environment is rather suboptimal in driving research direction. It’s hard to navigate uncertainty when deviations from what is formally known are heavily punished.

Take for example that we can read DNA and therefore have a list of every bioactive peptide that the body produces, we also have WGS so we can identify people with changes to these peptides. By using algorithms on these populations we can understand quite a lot about what these peptides do without understanding the mechanism by which they do it.

I'm thinking it will be a vaguely more Hyperion vision with different groups and different strategies. After a few centuries some humans which are barely recognizable and some humans who are highly conservative and probably a lot in between.

Basically I think humans taking our genetic code into our own hands intentionally is inevitable and the question shouldn't be whether it should be allowed or not but instead how do we do this wisely and when are we ready for which steps.

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