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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread for February 3 - 10 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's rather like a premise from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, which is not an argument against it, just a historical note.
The idea seems plausible enough to be worth testing in animals. I don't feel very sure about how much it would contribute to a positive Singularity, but it also doesn't sound like it would increase risk significantly.
Approximately how long do you think it will take for reducing mutational load to come into common use?
Yes, but we don't want to overshoot and get a Planet of the Apes situation, or even worse create smart, fast breeding creatures.
I think our ability to keep mice confined in labs is up to the challenge, even very healthy and relatively intelligent mice......um, except for the risk of lab staff taking the mice home for pets or to win mice shows or to sell to journalists or something.
Even if the mice get out due to the staff having excessive mutational loads, I think you'd get rapid reversion to the mean when the edited mice bred with wild mice.
Lab mice's brains are noticeably smaller than those of wild mice, primarily because they are horrifically inbred (and need to be for a lot of the genetic experiments to work properly).
There are similar issues with most of the lab organisms. My lab yeast that have been grown continuously in rich media with odd population structure (lots of bottlenecks) since the eighties have about a third the metabolic rate of wild isolates, and male nematodes of the common laboratory strains can hardly mate successfully without help.
So editing the genome for wild mice and lab mice would get very different results.
How do you help a nematode mate?
Actually you don't technically help them mate, you just make a strain that can't reproduce via hermaphrodites self-fertilizing. You keep the males from being out-bred that way.
C. elegans has male and hermaphrodite sexes, not male and female. The hermaphrodites self-fertilize slowly to produce a few hundred hermaphrodite offspring, while mating with a male gives them many times as many offspring with half being male. But the lab-bred males are so bad at mating that even if you have a population that's half male, they get massively outbred by the hermaphrodites selfing, and over a very few generations maleness just falls out of the population. You'll wind up with about 0.1% of the population being male in the equilibrium due to the occasional hermaphrodite egg dropping an X chromosome during development (no Y chromosomes in this species, males just have one X), but they are continually diluted out by the hermaphrodites.
What you do is breed in a genetic change that makes the hermaphrodite's sperm fail without affecting the male's sperm, preventing selfing from producing any offspring. The occasional successful male mating is productive enough that they can still on average replace themselves and their partner and then some, it just has a much longer doubling time and thus when in competition with selfing gets diluted out.
More recent wild isolates can still mate well (and also show a lot of interesting social behavior you don't see in the long-established lab strains) and their populations remain just under half male for a long time. Dunno what happens when you let the two populations mix.
EDIT: and just so you know, I upvoted 'very carefully'
Oh, that's what a "selfie" means... :-D
Very carefully. :)
More likely, if word gets out there may be a high demand for smarter transgenic mice as pets.
Hm, interestingly seems that something like this has been tried (see also here for a bit of a counterpoint).
Also: The intelligent mouse project
Excellent point.
You mean a Border Collie?
To date I think that is our highest achievement of selectively breeding for intelligence (with physical ability and minimum thresholds of obedience).
I looked for info on horse breeds that were breed for intelligence, Quarter Horse comes to mind, but turned up nothing in a two minute Google search.
Not a problem. Keep in mind that if you let creatures without mutational load breed naturally, the amount of mutational load will increase until it reaches equilibrium.