You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Douglas_Knight comments on How to win the World Food Prize - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Clarity 31 July 2015 11:12AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (30)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AndreInfante 31 July 2015 10:07:44PM *  0 points [-]

The issue is that crashing the mosquito population doesn't work if even a few of them survive to repopulate - the plan needs indefinite maintenance, and the mosquitoes will eventually evolve to avoid our lab-bred dud males.

I wonder if you could breed a version of the mosquito that's healthy but has an aversion to humans, make your genetic change dominant, and then release a bunch of THOSE mosquitoes. There'd be less of a fitness gap between the modified mosquitoes and the original species, so if we just kept dumping modified males every year for a decade or two, we might be able to completely drive the original human-seeking genes out of the ecosystem.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 31 July 2015 11:30:20PM *  0 points [-]

The proposal is not releasing dud males. The proposal is to use genetic drive, and the post included a link for people who have never heard of it.

Most mosquito populations are very specific in what hosts they parasitize, so removing humans from the list is not an option. Humans might be the only host!