Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

polymathwannabe

Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 — LessWrong

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We could double humanity's genetic "shuffle rate" by allowing couples to have one child naturally but requiring men to donate their sperm to a central bank, and women to carry and give birth to "randomly-fathered" children.

Obviously the institutional and logistical (not to mention ethical) challenges make this impossible in any present society. But for a planned community of fixed size (e.g. a small colony of humans attempting to rapidly populate a planet, or a starship designed to support the minimum possible human population with the highest possible genetic diversity), such measures may be a practical necessity.

I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.

spriteless11y00

I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.

Anne McCaffery's Nimisha's Ship mentions it as a duty of the first colonists of a planet. Important families from colonized worlds still check for any harmful combinations of recessive genes before siring a child. The book is more about the politics and cool space ships though.

0ChristianKl11y

Why would we want a higher "shuffle rate"?

7fubarobfusco11y

I seem to vaguely recall a novel in which a world government had declared that in order to promote hybrid vigor and resistance to disease, same-race marriages and matings should be considered equivalent to incest. People who were not already mixed-race were permitted to marry or have children only with a partner of a different racial background. The slightly-secret reason for this was to prevent future outbreaks of racial violence by blending the races. Although everyone in the story's present day was opposed to racism, it might come back in the future. (I'm guessing the novel was written in the '60s or '70s.) And the real reason for it was to reduce population, since most people were still System-1 racist even though they were System-2 anti-racist. Making the only socially acceptable partners be ones of other races meant that people were overall less likely to find partners and have children.

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Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

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Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

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