If there were good reason to believe the gene modification were safe and the increase in mental abilities would transfer to humans: would you let your next child be modified as an experiment?
The amazing thing is the human population is so large these days that if you look hard enough you can find people with mutant versions of any non-lethal gene. Pharmaceutical companies are just starting to make use of this to develop new drugs although it won’t really take off until everyones genome is sequenced.
1. http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/naam/abs/npp2015240a....
Still, I'd do it. Homo sapiens sapiens will evolve. My child is almost 3 yrs old.
I owe it to my child not put them through that because I alone have the desire to make them relatively more intelligent.
There is also evidence that stimulants can aid in concentration and learning, but I wouldn't force that on a child that didn't want to deal with the side effects.
We shouldn't have submissions like this to Hacker News. Hacker News should be reserved for articles that have survived peer review (and preferably for independent journalism that comments on published, peer-reviewed articles based on interviews with scientists who didn't do the publication), and we shouldn't be discussing press releases here except to decry them.
EDIT: Its also a great time to dump karma. But I really do think that the idea of creating superhumans, in relation to other humans, is a worthy goal indeed.
While it was coopted by the Nazis, the meaning as conveyed by Nazis was very different from how Nietzsche used it.
The Nazis felt that they were the Übermensch. It wasn't something to achieve or become. They also thought of it in racial terms, whereas Nietzsche's formulation couldn't be further from something as shallow as race.
Nietzsche was also a staunch and very vocal critic of National Socialism and anti-semitism.
To be critical of the OP, though, he does seem to refer to the concept of Übermensch as meaning "superior man" which is closer to the shallow interpretation of the Nazis rather than the way that Nietzsche used it. He clearly intended it as meaning "intensely human" or "over man" where 'over' is a spacial pun on life's position with reference to death. And presented it as a contrast to Christians who are obsessed with what happens after we stop being human in the after life.
Anyway, as an admirer of Nietzsche's writings I felt compelled to add context as Übermensch is not Nazi terminology and I would hope that's not how he intended its use.
http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/fear-fearless-bra... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201012/the...
While on the one hand, there may be cases where a lack of fear may be beneficial (and for some people, fear may be debilitating--for example, for those suffering from PTSD)--it can often act as a useful check on dangerous impulses. So, while I'm excited by the positive potentials here, I think that one has to be aware of the potential downsides.
A sentence like this:
> For example, the “brainy mice” showed a better ability than ordinary mice to recognise another mouse that they had been introduced to the day before.
Who is the brainy mouse? Why is he meeting this other mouse? Are they meeting in a bar? At Dolores Park? Are they fighting? Are they being given a standardized state administered quiz? Can I see a picture of this Morris maze?
How am I even supposed to unpack this and why would I even care? Science communication is supposed to be a two-way street, not an unexpectant ejaculation of "data" for someone else to "comprehend", "digest", "understand". Show me what's cool about this. Show the process, the failures, the papertrail, that would be cool. The prestige of the journal, the authors multitude of titles or affiliations, and some generic stock imagery is not cool.
And for god sake, at least make the primary source accessible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model#Defi...
[2] I'm intimate to this problem because we've created a robotic press release generator for Experiment's users. PRs serve a purpose, which is not public outreach, it's a journalist to journalist protocol.
[3] trying to solve this problem of science communication for funders - http://experiment.com/vanek
The "brainy mice" are pretty clearly the ones with the inhibited PDE4B enzyme. What is it you're mocking here, the use of the buzzwordy phrase?
> at least make the primary source available.
They give the contact information of the researcher and cite the paper, mentioning that it is available upon request. How does its open availability fall under the responsibility of the journalist?
Sure, PDE4B-inhibited mice might be less scared than cats, and sure, even if it's p-hacking I'll let that statement fly. But you know what other ways you can get mice to be less scared of cats? Brain parasites. Sleep deprivation. Probably meth or something like that. Or, I'm sure there's other genes that knock out fear. But they probably also knock out teeth.
The point is that if the goal of the outreach is understanding, it doesn't provide the tools for the context of that understanding. A link to the paper is one such tool. Infographics, video interviews, lab protocols, primary observations, and source code are all valuable tools that help achieve this goal.
Meanwhile, human investigations of identical twins brought up in separate households, including a striking recent case in Colombia of two pairs of twins in which one twin from each pair ended up with the other twin's family to be brought up,[1] continue to show that identical (monozygotic) twins tend to resemble each other more than siblings typically do, even if raised apart, but also can differ from each other in a variety of ways, including in IQ, and especially in IQ if they are not brought up in the same household. Environment always matters in human development, for every trait. That's called the Third Law of Behavior Genetics.[2]
After edit: Here is a link[3] to a description of the Morris Water Maze test, which this press release says was used in the study trumpeted to the press here. I'd like to see how the variance in performance of their study mice compares to mice used in previous studies with the water maze as a criterion variable of mouse intelligence, as there have been many, many studies like that.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/the-mixed-up-brot...
[2] http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/9/5/160.abstract
Unfortunately, the PDE4 inhibitor that they used in all the mice studies, Rolipram, causes vomiting in people in very low doses. Thus, there has been a lot of research around trying to find one that works just as well without causing vomiting. These gene tweaking studies just further confirm that these are good drug targets worth spending the lab time on to develop.
